Posted by Martin Senn on January 14th, 2011
Yesterday I was taking a late train back home after a screening and discussion of “Countdown to Zero” (preview) with students and colleagues at my department, when I received the Foreign Affairs tweet showing the publication of a new article by Josef Joffe and James W. Davis on Global Zero, or more precisely “The Bursting of the Disarmament Bubble”. It was great to see some elements of our discussion about the film and global disarmament featured in the article – nevertheless, I do think that Joffe’s and Davis’ argument on the regional dimension of global nuclear disarmament misses the point. They state that:
The main focus of all proliferators since China, in short, has been regional. As the Duelfer report, based on the debriefing of captured Iraqi officials following the Iraq war by the Iraq Survey Group, revealed, Saddam had not armed against Israel, let alone against any of the official nuclear powers: “Saddam’s rationale for the possession of [weapons of mass destruction] derived from a need for survival and domination . . . particularly regarding Iran.”
The idea that nonnuclear powers arm because the existing nuclear powers do not disarm is contradicted by the actual history of the superpower arms competition. If there is any correlation between the behavior of the haves and that of the have-nots, it is in the reverse direction. By a rough count, including both deployed and undeployed warheads, the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has dropped from a peak of well over 30,000 warheads in the mid-1960s to about 10,000 today. Russia’s arsenal has climbed down even faster, from about 45,000 in 1990 to about 14,000 today.
If the “good example” theory were correct, such massive cuts — about 70 percent of the total number of warheads — should have started turning Iran and North Korea into nuclear pacifists, which they have not. Libya did have a change of heart at the end of 2003. It was not because of great-power disarmament but rather the reverse: fear of a United States emboldened by easy victory against Saddam. The same apprehension led Iran to suspend weaponization in 2003, according to the United States’ fabled 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. Iran’s nuclear weapons program then appears to have resumed as the Bush administration began to slide the military option off the table, while also constraining Israel’s options by denying it the United States’ biggest bunker busters, and then accelerated as the Obama administration practically cleared the table while failing to corral Russia and China into serious sanctions.
In contrast to Joffe’s and Davis’ claim, proponents of global zero do recognize that existing hard cases like Iran or North Korea require regional (AND global) solutions. Take, for example, George Perkovich’s and James Acton’s Adelphi Paper, which features the following argument:
The eight nuclear-armed states will not be able to collectively envisage a prohibition of nuclear weapons until conflicts centring on Taiwan, Kashmir, Palestine and (perhaps) the Russian periphery are resolved, or at least durably stabilised. These are questions of unsettled sovereignty involving states that regard them as essentially internal disputes and which retain nuclear weapons, at least in part, to prevent them from being settled by force against their interests. China insists that Taiwan is an internal affair. India does not accept that Kashmir is a matter for international resolution. Russia’s periphery contains pockets of separatism that could produce conflict between Russia and other states that Russia would insist, rightly or wrongly, should not be considered matters of international peace and security. Israel — in common with rejectionist Arab states, Iran and, indeed, the wider international community — has not yet recognised Palestine as a separate state.
If these sovereignty disputes are resolved, it will be by those directly involved, not by outside actors. Nuclear weapons help to ensure that this is the case, by enabling their possessors to deter others from imposing unacceptable outcomes. Once any resolution were achieved, states would want to mobilise outside power, perhaps through the UN Security Council, to help maintain an agreed status quo and restore it if it were broken.
[...]
There is significant interaction between these regional dynamics, the wider global order and prospects for advancing towards nuclear abolition. (p. 33-35)
This passage does not really correspond with the picture of an utopian vision that Joffe and Davis are drawing, right? Regional problems require regional solutions – that is why we have NWFZ. Countries in proliferation hotspots like the Middle East will not disarm in view of the good example provided by the US, Russia, or China, but only if they manage to resolve disputes and accept the premise that security/stability can be maintained by cooperative arms control measures. Assessing the prospects of a project like a WMD-free zone in the Middle East is, of course, a different issue.
What proponents of global zero do claim, however, is that once nuclear disarmament is achieved, it will make future cases of nuclear proliferation less likely as the world will no longer be divided into a group of haves and have-nots, the possession of nuclear weapons will (therefore) have lost its prestige, and resistance to rule-breaking behavior will be much stronger. This rather a “no-bad-example” theory, not a good example theory as argued by Joffe and Davis.
P.S. In a next post I will share my views on “Countdown to Zero” with you.
