Abstract
The nuclear powers preach nonproliferation but practice nuclear deterrence. This is a reality of life in the Nuclear Age. Not a single country that had nuclear weapons when the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (npt) was signed in 1968 has given them up.
Instead, there are exhortations. The president of the United States—whose country has conducted by far the world's greatest number of nuclear tests—says (in reference to the 1998 tests by India and Pakistan) that a nuclear weapon capability “is not necessary to peace, to security, to prosperity, to national greatness or personal fulfillment.”
The stockpiles of the five declared nuclear weapon states—the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China—exist in defiance of a World Court advisory opinion that says they have a legal obligation to “bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament.”
That is not likely. While they justify their own nuclear weapons as necessary to national security, they seek to deny such weapons to anyone else. The United States has historically taken the lead in that nonproliferation effort
But after the Cold War ended, threats to the United States became modest and uncertain and the link between national security and nuclear weapons became even more tenuous. Yet Washington, with the world's most powerful conventional military arsenal, continues to insist on the right to deal with these diffuse and uncertain post-Cold War threats by retaining its ultimate trump card, the nuclear stockpile.
There has been good news, of course. By pursuing a degree of genuine nuclear disarmament beginning in the late 1980s, the United States and Russia reversed decades of confrontation. Post-Cold War tensions were further relaxed as Russia became more introspective and concentrated on rebuilding a shattered economy. By any measure, nuclear weapons now play a lesser role in shaping relations between Moscow and Washington than at any time since World War II.
But as the century unfolds, the nuclear disarmament process could be easily reversed. Relations between Russia and the United States, which are rapidly worsening, could deteriorate into a new Cold War. Meanwhile, U.S. threatmongers suggest that China could become the next great adversary.
Treaties already negotiated and signed could unravel through non-ratification or breakouts. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, although made permanent in 1995, is permanently fragile. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is in jeopardy. And fallout from the October rejection by the U.S. Senate of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is likely to compromise the viability of the ctbt.
Beyond that, the United States has been inclined to let mission creep take over its nuclear weapons policies. The half-century taboo against nuclear weapons use is so strong that it is difficult to imagine their use other than against enemy nuclear weapons.
But the United States has been redefining—al-beit ambiguously—the mission of nuclear weapons to counter all weapons of mass destruction. That lumps together biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in one conceptually fuzzy category—and it weakens the nuclear taboo.
If nuclear weapons come to be accepted as having a role in countering biological-chemical warfare, then by what logic can the United States deny a nuclear weapons capability to a country like Iran, which has actually suffered chemical weapons attacks within recent memory?
The clandestine nature of all biological-chemical weapons programs suggest that, unlike nuclear weapons, no prestige value attaches to them. They have been so stigmatized that they are not a source of national pride.
This should not lead the United States to legitimize a new role for nuclear weapons—combating the scourge of biological and chemical weapons. Rather, the United States should more reasonably ask: If the world has conventions prohibiting biological and chemical weapons, why not a nuclear convention?
The lack of a global convention prohibiting the most dangerous weapons of mass destruction is an anomaly and a clear and present danger to the world. The United States is the only nation that could successfully lobby for such a convention. It has fought the idea in past years. Will it have the vision and the courage to accept it in the new millennium?