Challenges to International Nuclear Arms Control

Ye Ru'an

Sixty years ago the world witnessed the enormous destructive power of atomic bombing and the dire consequences it brought to the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Ten years later, shortly after the first test of the American hydrogen bomb, eleven most eminent scientists of the time issued a statement, referred to as the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, warning governments and people throughout the world that “a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race.” Although their apprehension did not come true, the remarks of these eminent scientists are still very much relevant today. It is true that due to the universal opposition to the nuclear arms race and prevention of nuclear war, the world has so far averted the nuclear peril. With the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the superpowers’ global rivalry, and normalization and improvement of relations among the major powers that possess nuclear weapons, the danger of a nuclear war breaking out between them has reduced to the lowest level in the post-Cold War time. However, one should by no means be complacent. Despite the conclusion of several treaties and agreements between the two nuclear giants on the limitation and reduction of strategic nuclear weapons, the entire process of nuclear disarmament over the past decades is by and large a disappointing record. Genuine, irreversible, deep nuclear disarmament will remain a mirage in the foreseeable future, not to mention complete prohibition and thorough destruction of all nuclear weapons on earth.
I wish to highlight some of the major challenges to the current international nuclear arms control in this short presentation. These include, inter alia, the following:
This is a paper (revised) presented at the 55th Pugwash Conference held in Hiroshima, Japan, July 22-27, 2005.
1. The danger of nuclear war still exists. As a legacy of the superpowers’ nuclear arms race in the past decades, today the US and Russia still maintain huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons that are far more destructive than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite universal efforts over the past half-century to reduce and eliminate nuclear weapons, today the world’s total stockpiles of nuclear weapons remain huge, with assessments ranging from 27,000 [1] to 36,500 [2], or even as many as 42,000 [3], of which the two nuclear superpowers continue to possess more than 95 per cent of the total. Compared with the highest ceiling of the nuclear inventory during the Cold War in the decade of 1975-84, it is a massive reduction of one-third of the total in number, but the more powerful and more sophisticated nuclear arsenals that exist today contain no less, if not more, destructive power. It makes little difference in destroying the world 10 times or 3 times. Therefore, the nuclear sword of Damocles is still hanging over the human race. And despite transformation of US-Russian relationship from foe to partner, as thousands of nuclear weapons of the US and Russia remain on hair-trigger alert, unauthorized and accidental launches are still possible. This presents a serious challenge to international nuclear arms control.
2. The US policy has become the greatest obstacle to promoting progress in nuclear disarmament and arms control. In the past five years, the Bush Administration has drastically changed the US traditional nuclear deterrence policy and given up a more proactive nuclear arms control policy pursued between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s. In 1999, the US Senate rejected the ratification of the CTBT Treaty submitted to it by the Clinton Administration. Now both Congress and the White House have turned down the treaty. In the same year, Congress pressed President Clinton to sign the National Missile Defense Act. Ballistic missile defense programs would not only drive the offense-defense spiral in a nuclear arms race, but lead to the weaponization of outer space and the deployment of nuclear weapons in space. As a consequence, in 2002 the United States unilaterally scrapped the ABM Treaty that had served to maintain global strategic stability. In early 2002, the US DoD released the new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) in which it laid out a more threatening strategic posture based on the “New Triad”. The NPR indicates that nuclear weapons will continue to play a vital (enhanced rather than reduced) role in the US security strategy. Shortly afterwards, Congress lifted the ban on research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons with which to strike deeply buried non-nuclear targets. That would lower the threshold of using nuclear weapons in a regional conflict. In order to “seek and field new generations of nuclear weapons”, the US Government decided to reduce the time necessary for resumption of nuclear tests from 36 to 18 months. This means that by now the Department of Energy and the national labs have got everything ready to resume nuclear tests any time in future.
Moreover, the Bush Administration has made it clear that the United States is no longer interested in treaty-based nuclear disarmament negotiations. For nuclear (and other WMDs) nonproliferation, the United States is now relying more on counter-proliferation measures taken by US-led “coalitions of the willing”, such as the Proliferation Security Initiative, and less on the NPT/IAEA mechanisms or multilateral export control regimes such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group or the Australian Group. The Administration takes a unilateralist and selective approach to the existing international arms control agreements and regimes, by which the US wants to retain and strengthen those that are still useful to control other countries while ignoring or evading its commitments to those that constrain its freedom of unilateral actions. The new US-Russian Moscow Treaty (SORT) concluded in May 2002 is a legal instrument in form with little binding force. Rather, it is a bilateral political declaration. It sets a lower numerical ceiling on the number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads while placing thousands of such warheads into responsive force and active and non-active stockpiles. As each side can “determine for itself the composition and structure of its strategic offensive arms,” thousands of US and Russian strategic warheads would move into various unaccountable categories of reserve weapons [4], and within ten years, only 660 US strategic nuclear warheads would be reduced from its huge stockpile. [5]
3. In the past decade and more, international efforts for the nuclear arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation have been losing steam. As nuclear weapons pose a grave danger to the world and human survival, nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation are the common concern and responsibility of the entire international community. The ultimate goal of eliminating nuclear weapons can only be achieved through broadest international cooperation. The United Nations, being the most authoritative and most broadly represented intergovernmental body in the world, should and must play the leadership role, and it did at one time or another in the past, but is now losing its clout and being marginalized. The IAEA has accomplished a great deal in its missions under the auspices of the UN. The United Nations convened three special sessions on disarmament (SSOD) in 1978, 1982 and 1988. However, UN resolutions in the past decade on convening SSOD-VI were repeatedly rejected by the United States and its Western allies despite support by an overwhelming majority of member states. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan noted, “in Geneva, the Conference on Disarmament has been unable to agree on a program of work for eight years. … the UN Disarmament Commission has become increasingly marginal, producing no real agreement since 2000,” … the month-long 7th NPT Review Conference in May “could not furnish the world with any solutions to the grave nuclear threat we all face, ...and the intergovernmental bodies designed to address these challenges are paralyzed.”[6] With the world so deeply divided on nuclear issues, people are more pessimistic about the prospects of nuclear arms control than ever before.
4. Incentives for the nuclear proliferation still persist. As far as nuclear nonproliferation is concerned, one the one hand, the existing nonproliferation regimes, including NPT, IAEA Safeguard agreements and the Additional Protocol, and various multilateral export control regimes, have played a significant role in preventing more states from acquiring nuclear weapons or weapons capabilities over the past 35 years. As a result, the number of nuclear weapons states has not increased to 25 or more as was predicted at the time of the NPT conclusion. Yet on the other hand, as there are perceived loopholes and deficiencies as well as double standards inherent in these regimes, they are not as effective as have been expected. Today, in addition to the five original universally recognized nuclear weapons states, while a number of countries, such as South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and, more recently, Libya, have given up their nuclear weapon programs, there are a few de-facto nuclear weapons states, namely India, Pakistan and Israel plus a couple of threshold states like the DPRK and Iran whose nuclear status remains dubious. There are a wide range of complex reasons and motives for states to seek or not to seek nuclear weapons. But suffice to say that there are two underlying geopolitical driving forces for the nuclear proliferation: One is enduring regional confrontation in the Middle East/Gulf region, on the Indian Sub-Continent, and on the Korean Peninsula; the other is the prolonged adversarial relationship between the United States and a few US-categorized “rogue states.”
5. Growing proliferation activities of non-state actors have become a new dangerous factor for the nuclear proliferation in the future. Companies, institutions, and individual brokers, etc. are engaged in illicit deals of WMD-related items. They try to find every possible means to evade national and multinational export control regulations. Economic and trade globalization provides them with new opportunities to set up regional or international networks for transnational movement of nuclear materials, designs, equipment (such as uranium enrichment centrifuges) and know-how. The revelation of the A.Q. Khan nuclear black market network that involved many companies and individuals from a dozen countries is an alarming case which shows that it is extremely worrisome that nuclear components designed in one country could be manufactured in another, shipped through a third, assembled in a fourth and designed for eventual turnkey use in a fifth. Such proliferation challenges were not contemplated when the NPT Treaty was concluded. .
6. Rapid technological advances and increasing technology transfers constitute another major driver for proliferation, as they have made the divide more blurring between military and civilian sectors and between military and civilian products. Updating control lists, and even catch-all lists, can hardly keep pace with cropping up of more and newer dual-use items. When the NPT was formulated in the late 1960s, it was extremely difficult for a non-nuclear weapon state to be able to produce weapons-grade fissile materials and more so to make the bomb without receiving outside help. As dual-use technologies, materials and equipment are now more easily accessible, it is relatively easier to do so through indigenous efforts if only a state has political will and makes sustained efforts. It is a daunting challenge for the international community, and the IAEA in particular, to find out clandestine activities for a weapon program under the cover of “peaceful-purpose development of nuclear energy”.
7. No less challenging is the fact that the NPT has no penalty provisions for non-compliance and violations and that a State Party has the right to withdraw from the treaty with a three-month advance notification. Who has the authority to determine and make the final verdict on acts of non-compliance and violation? States Parties would be locked in open-ended debates over disputes and divisions. If the United Nations or its Security Council has the mandate to hold a State Party accountable and penalize it for violations committed even before its withdrawal, then what would you do with the de-facto nuclear states which have remained outside NPT, and the international community seems to have no binding force on them once they crossed the nuclear threshold.
How to meet such challenges described above and break the nuclear deadlock that has endured for a decade so as to promote genuine nuclear disarmament and arms control and effectively prevent nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism? At every NPT review conference in the past 35 years, non-nuclear states have strongly urged nuclear weapons states to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” However, until today there has been no such nuclear disarmament under international control”, not to mention “with strict and effective verification.” The UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution No. 1540, calling on member states and the international community to take “additional effective measures” for the prevention of WMD proliferation.
To meet all these challenges, a multitude of proposals and suggestions have been put forth with a view to strengthening the existing nonproliferation and export control regimes. Under the current international circumstances, it is absolutely necessary to take all possible measures to promote nuclear disarmament and make greater efforts to enhance international, regional and national cooperation. No single country, however powerful it is, can accomplish this gigantic global task. Individual, specific measures may be successful in one way or another, but to achieve genuine and meaningful nuclear disarmament and arms control and more effectively prevent nuclear proliferation, there is need to address the following fundamental issues:
First and foremost, the United States, being the strongest country in the world and the principal driving force in international nuclear arms control, should cast away the Cold War mentality and neo-conservative views in its nuclear strategy and policies.
Secondly, as the United States and Russia assume special responsibilities for nuclear disarmament, they should take the lead in reducing their nuclear stockpiles to the reasonable minimum level by irreversibly destroying most of their nuclear warheads “under strict and effective international control”, so as to create conditions for the other nuclear weapons states to join in the global nuclear disarmament process.
Thirdly, all-out efforts should be made to seek fundamental solutions to the world’s most enduring regional tensions and conflicts in the Middle, in South Asia and on the Korean Peninsula. These three regions happen to be places of gravest (WMD) proliferation concern.
Last but not the least, both the United States and the countries that regard each other as enemies should have some new thinking on finding ways to put an end to their hostilities and normalize their relationship with international help at an early date.

Notes:
[1] “Kofi A. Annan: Break the nuclear deadlock”, International Herald Tribune, May 30, 2005.
[2] SIPRI Yearbook 2003, Oxford University Press, p. 610.
[3] Drell, Sidney D and Goodby, James E: “What Are Nuclear Weapons For?,” an Arms Control Association Report, April, 2005.
[4] SIPRI Yearbook 2003, p. 610.
[5] Natural Resources Defense Council, “Faking Nuclear Restraint: the Bush Administration’s Secret Plan for Strengthening U.S. Nuclear Forces”, February 2002.
[6] “Kofi A. Annan: Break the nuclear deadlock”, International Heral Tribune, May 30, 2005.