Ban the bomb?

Dictionary definitions of "radical" include "advocating extreme measures to retain… a political state of affairs." This definition nicely describes the behavior of nuclear-armed nations. These countries depend on their nuclear capability as the linchpin of their strategic positioning and practice nuclear radicalism to ensure their continued reliance on nuclear weapons. Nuclear idealists, on the other hand—idealists include many, though not all, of the states without nuclear weapons—view disarmament as an urgent security imperative and an important moral priority. The radicals and the idealists remain permanently at odds, and achieving the disarmament objectives of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has come to seem a distant dream.

The two camps, despite their built-in tensions, have cooperated to develop political and technical mechanisms to control and manage nuclear technology. This global architecture has achieved a lot in nonproliferation, in nuclear safety and security, and even in reducing weapons stockpiles—but it has fallen far short of achieving complete disarmament. Even worse, perhaps, it has severely limited the role that non-nuclear states can play in the "nuclear realpolitik" of negotiations toward general disarmament. Relations between nuclear states and non-nuclear states have long been, and continue to be, completely asymmetrical.

The non-nuclear weapon states may have lost their best chance to redress this asymmetry in 1995. That was the year when the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) came up for indefinite extension—indeed, the extension was the single most important element of the negotiations that surrounded the 1995 NPT Review Conference. The non-nuclear states had leverage, and they might have used it to compel improvements to the treaty's Article VI, which requires states to pursue negotiations toward disarmament in good faith and at an early date. But Article VI remained unaltered—as flawed as ever. Ever since, countries without nuclear weapons have had cause to look back on 1995 with regret.

Having failed to utilize their leverage then, can non-nuclear states ever play a serious role in disarmament? Can they meaningfully push the nuclear-armed states to disarm—or even force them to do so?

One thing is certain: Non-nuclear states seem to be running out of patience with the established channels of disarmament. An example is the lawsuit that the Marshall Islands filed this year against the nuclear-armed nations, over their failure to disarm, at the International Court of Justice. The problem with the suit is that even if the court rules in favor of the Marshall Islands, it will have no means of enforcing its ruling. And even if sanctions of some sort were imposed on the nuclear radicals, they would probably treat the sanctions as irrelevant to the disarmament process.

What's needed isn't legal action, but rather political action. Only through politics can non-nuclear nations hope to redress the asymmetry that characterizes their relations with nuclear-armed countries.

One way to attack the asymmetry might be to establish a global nuclear-weapon-free zone. Large swaths of the world—Africa, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Mongolia, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific—are already covered by nuclear-weapon-free zones. If these zones banded together, and encouraged the creation of new zones elsewhere, the result would be a new, very large political bloc that, even if it couldn't force the nuclear-armed states to dispense with their weapons, could at least engage in dialogue with them on a much more equal basis. Likewise, non-nuclear nations could initiate a process to amend Article VI of the NPT to make it tougher and more specific. The new language might require that "Twenty-five years after the date of the treaty's indefinite extension, a conference shall be convened to establish a clear process for total nuclear disarmament on a defined schedule."

But when all is said and done, how likely are non-nuclear states to gain control of the disarmament process? How likely are they to compel nuclear-armed states to eliminate their arsenals? In truth, odds are low in both instances. Because nuclear-armed nations enjoy an asymmetry of power over other countries, altering their behavior will be very, very difficult.

Nearly 300 years ago, in his Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift satirized the intellectuals, scientists, technicians, and tinkerers of his era, along with their obscure, esoteric interests. At the fantastical Academy of Lagado, Swift’s Gulliver discovered a place where eminences sought to distill sunbeams from cucumbers, to breed lambs that would produce no wool, and to sow the land with chaff rather than grain. Gulliver also found an architect who endeavored to build houses "beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation." The architect’s endeavor bears real similarities to today’s efforts by non-nuclear weapon states to establish a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

All six of the leading nuclear-armed states—the United States, Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and India—rank among the world’s top 10 in gross domestic product. Together, these nations account for about 45 percent of global economic activity. Is one to believe that the world’s six most muscular states, from an economic and military perspective—nations that command the direst kind of coercive power—would be troubled if countries without much global clout entered into a treaty declaring nuclear weapons illegal? Especially when North Korea and Pakistan—the most unpredictable, socially fragile, and politically unstable of the nuclear-armed nations—provide compelling reasons for the six to retain, augment, and modernize their nuclear forces?

In an age rife with uncertainty, disarmament initiatives tend to make little impression. The Second Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons, held in Mexico in February, was but a blip in the news. The Marshall Islands’ lawsuit against nuclear-armed nations at the International Court of Justice seems a mere curiosity, something of interest only to experts in disarmament and nonproliferation. Any treaty banning nuclear weapons would be similarly ignored. It would run against the grain of the international system—a system based on power politics, one in which economic heft and military might indeed make right.

Moreover, many nations that might favor a treaty banning nuclear weapons, including Scandinavian countries and some of East and Southeast Asia’s "dragons," rely for their overarching security on the very US nuclear deterrent that a treaty would seek to eliminate. These nations therefore enjoy little credibility when it comes to establishing a treaty—but at the same time, if these prosperous countries were excluded from a treaty initiative, the initiative would matter even less than it already does.

Threats of economic and technological sanctions, not moral arguments, induce nations to accept nonproliferation and disarmament norms. Therefore it is the most powerful nations—the countries recognized as nuclear weapon states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—that have primarily enforced the treaty’s strictures. Iran has been forced to compromise on its nuclear program, to stop short of the weapons threshold, because powerful countries such as the United States have implemented sanctions and exercised levers available under the global nonproliferation regime. (It is also pertinent that Iran, unlike Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, wants to be part of the international mainstream.)

If a treaty were established that banned nuclear weapons, what could compel the compliance of the nuclear-armed nations? Only moral suasion. This may have counted for something in the early years of the Cold War, as when Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru cleverly used the disarmament issue to put the superpowers on the moral defensive and as political cover for his "Janus-faced" nuclear ambitions. But moral arguments don’t matter much today. Thus we see Japan, long at the forefront of disarmament, reinterpreting its "peace constitution" so its military can play an expanded role. Depending on Tokyo’s strategic calculus and the actions of rival China, Japan may even decide to acquire nuclear weapons. So nations’ strategic calculations are shaped to only a limited extent by notions of the universal good.

A better idea. The foundation for achieving "global zero" will be laid, and the pillars for structured disarmament will be erected, only when the United States and Russia, under an internationally verifiable regime, cull nuclear weapons from their inventories at a much faster rate than they do  now. But there is something else that nuclear-armed nations can do right now to inch closer to the starting line of disarmament: establish a convention, as advocated by India, barring the first use of nuclear weapons. Most nuclear-armed states would lose nothing by agreeing to such a convention—they already claim to be rational and reasonable and either disavow first use of nuclear weapons entirely or disavow it outside of extreme contingencies.

Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine contains no provision against first use of nuclear weapons. And North Korea, though it has enacted a law containing language that approximates a no-first-use policy, engages in behavior and rhetoric that tend to undercut any no-first-use assurance. But even nations that espouse a first-use philosophy in order to frighten countries supposedly threatening their existence could be expected to sign a no-first-use convention—as long as the six primary nuclear powers got on board first.

Establishing such a convention would help build confidence in the viability of efforts to achieve complete disarmament. Then again, the history of armaments suggests that nations will rid themselves of nuclear weapons only when more lethal armaments are available to replace them. In the meantime, though, a treaty banning nuclear weapons would amount to empty symbolism—a hollow exercise performed by lesser states that seek, perhaps, to even the world’s strategic playing field. It would be a prick to the conscience—little more.

In these early years of the 21st century, the international system seems increasingly unstable. Relations between Moscow and Washington exhibit renewed tensions. The Middle East seems to be developing into one big conflict zone. Some areas of the world, including my own region, Latin America and the Caribbean, are experiencing widespread violence outside the context of conventional armed conflict, partly due to transnational organized crime and the prevalence of small arms and light weapons. Meanwhile, global income inequality stands at very high levels. In a world such as this, it simply isn’t safe to maintain arsenals of nuclear weapons.

Over the last several decades, the movement against nuclear weapons has registered some successes—but has also suffered some failures. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has checked the spread of weapons technology (even if North Korea joined the nuclear club in recent years) but has not achieved as much in disarmament. Hopes for establishing a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East are slipping away. The Conference on Disarmament has done virtually nothing since the 1990s. All in all, existing disarmament mechanisms have not lived up to the principles expressed in the UN Charter—for example, the responsibility to prevent war and to uphold fundamental human rights.

A promising way forward is "the humanitarian initiative," a new disarmament effort centered around a series of conferences on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons. (Norway hosted the first conference, in 2013; Mexico the second, in February; and Austria will host a third in December.) The initiative seeks to place two facts front and center: that the mere existence of nuclear weapons threatens the security of nations and peoples the world over, and that no country is prepared to respond to the humanitarian crisis that a nuclear detonation would create (even if the detonation occurred in a limited, regional conflict). The initiative also attempts to cut through the clutter that surrounds nuclear disarmament—all the talk about reducing stockpiles gradually, or addressing shortcomings in existing treaties, or gaining assurances from nuclear-armed countries that they will not be the first to use nuclear weapons. The humanitarian initiative generates well-founded hope that a treaty will be established that bans nuclear weapons outright.

The initiative incorporates actors, approaches, and ideas from earlier, and largely successful, efforts to eliminate antipersonnel land mines and cluster munitions—two classes of weapons that unnecessarily take lives and cost people their livelihoods. The 1997 Mine Ban Treaty and the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions may not have achieved universal membership yet—the United States, Russia, and China, among other countries, remain outside these instruments—but antipersonnel landmines have been stigmatized and the same is increasingly true of cluster munitions. International trade for these weapons has virtually collapsed, and a virtual prohibition on their use is in place. These arms eradication efforts built on earlier work in nuclear arms control, which curbed proliferation, banned nuclear weapons from several regions, and stopped nuclear tests almost entirely. Now, however, the mainstream nuclear disarmament movement has lost momentum, so the humanitarian initiative is attempting to reinvigorate the process—taking as immediate precedents the Ottawa and Oslo processes regarding antipersonnel land mines and cluster munitions. In terms of foreign policy principles, practice, and accumulated experience, the various disarmament processes are closely intertwined.

Many states have thrown their support behind the humanitarian initiative, as have numerous intergovernmental agencies and civil society organizations. But will the initiative actually lead to a formal diplomatic process? Will it culminate in a treaty that stretches disarmament past its current limits—a treaty perhaps that bans nuclear weapons outright? These are tricky questions.

Nations’ positions on banning nuclear weapons will not be unrelated to their wider foreign policy principles and priorities. Hence, not all states seeking a legally binding instrument banning nuclear weapons will have the same margin for maneuver. Honduras, for example, is part of the nuclear-weapon-free zone for Latin America and the Caribbean. It subscribes to the declaration on disarmament issued in 2013 by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. It is participating in the humanitarian initiative. But it is also a country that the UN Development Programme ranks 120th out of 186 countries in its human development index. Honduras’s largest trading partner, meanwhile, is the United States, a nation that holds "an estimated 4,650 nuclear warheads available for delivery by more than 800 ballistic missiles and aircraft." How will Honduras’s economic reliance on the United States influence its behavior in a diplomatic process to ban nuclear weapons?

The humanitarian initiative will succeed only if the countries that support it present a united front. This means that nations in the initiative’s vanguard should establish themselves as a core group of "champions," as it were. The group should include representatives from a variety of regions, but at the same time the group must remain compact enough to allow for like-mindedness in strategy formulation. Such a group would allow the establishment of regional positions on a ban treaty—with the idea that, as one region after another threw its support behind prohibition, pressure would mount on nuclear-armed nations to participate in a treaty process. (The Non-Aligned Movement, which contains a majority of the member states of the United Nations, could play a key role in this.)

The process will not be isolated from other activities in disarmament and international security, or from foreign policy in general, so progress will not be simple or linear. This means that patience and a historical perspective will be indispensable. But when the moment is ripe, the humanitarian initiative can evolve into a major debate within established political forums—hopefully leading to a formal diplomatic process toward establishing a ban treaty.

In any event, before such a process is even begun, enforcement mechanisms must be analyzed and debated. Mechanisms must include common, measurable standards regarding what prohibition and disarmament entail; structures for international cooperation and assistance; a timetable and a budget; and a supervisory body endowed with appropriate powers. A strong institutional foundation is required if banned weapons are to be eliminated—and prevented from reemerging in decades to come.

If such mechanisms are not properly addressed before a diplomatic process is launched, nuclear-armed nations might "capture" any treaty that results. If nations come to the negotiating table bearing only generalities and promises, some states will inevitably block progress toward a strong, meaningful, and long-lasting international treaty, or water down any instrument that emerges. An amorphous debate will only favor the guardians of the status quo. It will only produce a token treaty.

From East and South Asia to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, existing geopolitical tensions could escalate at any time into large-scale armed conflict involving nuclear-armed nations. Under such circumstances, can human beings afford not to establish a solid, enforceable treaty that bans nuclear weapons outright?