The Global Nuclear Future

Note

This article is based on a lecture given by the author at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences's induction ceremony in the autumn of 2005.

The Academy and its Committee on International Security Studies (CISS) have a long-standing commitment to addressing various issues relating to the development and control of nuclear weapons. Much of the truly formative work on both the theory and practice of arms control was sponsored by the
Academy in the late 1950s and early 1960s. CISS continued that tradition with projects on strategic arms control and missile defense. In recent years, it
has also broadened its mandate to include other threats to international security. In the 1990s, Carl Kaysen (MIT) and others examined how justifications for armed intervention by the international community have changed over time and how emerging norms of third-party interventions can be strengthened in circumstances ranging from acts of aggression to civil strife, environmental disasters, and violations of basic human rights. Robert Legvold (Columbia University) and his collaborators recently completed a multivolume study of international security concerns in the post–Soviet region—an area that encompasses much of northern Eurasia but has now splintered into fifteen different states. John Steinbruner (University of Maryland), Neal Lane (Rice University), and others are currently undertaking a study of competing scientific, commercial, and military interests in space.

Looking ahead, CISS is in the early stage of pursuing a broad assessment of where we are and where we may be headed in terms of the global nuclear order. We emerged from the Cold War in the early 1990s with a familiar nuclear reality that combined the established practices of the existing nuclear powers with a new set of methods, processes, procedures, rules, regulations, and institutions intended to govern the nuclear capabilities of the various nuclear-weapons states. With the end of the Cold War, there was a deep expectation that we would build on this order in ways that would minimize the role of nuclear weapons and maximize the role of  restraint and regulation. There was also widespread hope that a much more ambitious regulatory infrastructure would emerge to tame the nuclear danger and increase the legal, social, and political barriers against nuclear use and nuclear accident.

Yet looking back on it fifteen years later, we see that instead of taking the inherited infrastructure and building on it in desirable ways, we have experienced a very significant erosion of the global nuclear order. The number of nuclear weapons is still in the tens of thousands in the bilateral Russian-American context, within which most of the nuclear weapons on this planet
exist. For the first time in half a century, we do not have an ongoing strategic nuclear arms control process nor are there plans to have any such negotiation. We have seen the dismantlement of a large part of the arms control inheritance left over from the Cold War. The strategic arms reduction process embodied in the Start II treaty has been renounced, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty has been formally repudiated. Remarkably, to my mind, the foundational arms control agreement that provides the basis for regulation of twenty or thirty thousand nuclear weapons on this planet is the Start I agreement. This agreement originated in the early 1980s during the first term of the Reagan administration and, in fact, arose out of a period that historians call the New Cold War. How can we imagine that this could be an appropriate instrument for governing today’s nuclear postures in a world that was unimaginable twenty-five years ago?

In addition, in the nonproliferation realm, three states over the last half-dozen years—India, Pakistan, and North Korea—have either openly demonstrated or proclaimed that they are now nuclear-weapons states. A large number of states from a variety of different perspectives, including prominently the United States, openly, actively, vigorously, and loudly question both the utility and effectiveness of the nonproliferation regime. In the summer of 2005, we witnessed a substantial failure of the latest nonproliferation—treaty review conference—a very acrimonious confrontation between the nuclear haves and the nuclear have-nots—with substantial differences of perception about what the treaty means, what it permits, and what kind of nuclear future lies ahead. As a parallel to all this, we have a complete paralysis of the accompanying multilateral arms control process that has been attempting to govern the world’s nuclear affairs for many years. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) is dead. The Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT), aimed at restricting the planet’s ability to produce the material needed to build nuclear weapons, was stillborn, smothered by the combined opposition of the nuclear-weapons states that want to retain the option of acquiring new nuclear weapons.

In short, the existing regulatory regime we call arms control is under significant pressure: the inherited legal regime governing nuclear weapons has deteriorated, even as the number of nuclear-weapons states has spread
and even as the existing nuclear powers, or at least Russia and the United States, have with great enthusiasm proclaimed their recommitment to nuclear
weapons in the post–Cold War environment. For the moment, I think one can safely say that arms control is dead.

Even if things didn’t appear quite so dismal, we would need to question the role of arms control in the aftermath of the Cold War. How can we manage these terrible instruments of violence in prudent and sensible ways that enhance our security and reduce the exposure of the human race to truly cataclysmic outcomes? I think one can reasonably anticipate that if we stay on our present path, the world, ten or fifteen years from now, will have more nuclear weapons, more reliance on nuclear weapons, more nuclear-weapons states, more risk of purposeful or inadvertent use of nuclear weapons, more risk of access to and use by substate actors, and fewer regulations and institutions available to restrain the nuclear-arms policies and postures of the existing nuclear-weapons states.

We cannot deal with this issue by trying to solve small pieces of the nuclear picture—the problems in North Korea and Iran or the “loose nukes” in Russia each require urgent attention, but dealing with these important but discreet pieces does not necessarily give insight into the larger changes in the global nuclear order. At the Academy, we are planning to convene a group of people who, over recent decades, have thought imaginatively about how to control nuclear weapons. Our objective is to step back from the immediate crises and examine where we are headed, what is in our interest, and what other alternative futures we can define that would be preferable to the road we are now on. The Academy did seminal work on these issues at a similarly consequential juncture in the late 1950s. Today, these issues once again deserve—indeed, require—the mobilization of the intellectual resources the Academy can offer. The stakes are high, the risks are great, and the impact on the future of international security will be enormous. Few issues on the global agenda are more consequential.