Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Author: Gareth Evans

  • Nuclear Disarmament’s Midnight Hour

    This article was published by Project Syndicate.


    Gareth EvansLast month, the Doomsday Clock’s hands were moved a minute closer to midnight by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the respected global organization that for decades has tracked the risk of a nuclear-weapons catastrophe, whether caused by accident or design, state or terrorist, fission bomb or dirty radiological bomb.


    Few around the world seemed to be listening. The story – as others like it since the end of the Cold War ­– came and went within a half-day’s news cycle. But the Scientists’ argument was sobering, and demands attention. Progress since 2007 – when the Clock’s hands were last set at five minutes to midnight – has stalled, and political leadership has gone missing on all of the critical issues: disarmament, non-proliferation, and key building blocks needed for both.


    On disarmament, the balloon has well and truly deflated. The New START treaty, signed by the United States and Russia in 2010, reduced the number of deployed strategic weapons, but left both sides’ actual stockpiles intact, their high-alert status undisturbed,  weapons-modernization programs in place, disagreements about missile defense and conventional-arms imbalances unresolved – and talks on further draw-downs going nowhere.


    With no further movement by the US and Russia, which together hold 95% of the world’s total of more than 20,000 nuclear weapons, no other nuclear-armed state has felt pressure to reduce its own stocks significantly, and some – China, India, and Pakistan – have been increasing them.


    The 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference was a modest success, mainly because it did not collapse in disarray, as had the previous one in 2005. But it could not agree on measures to strengthen the regime; its push for talks on a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East has so far gathered no momentum; North Korea is no closer to being put back in its NPT box; and Iran is closer than ever to jumping out of it, with consequences that would ricochet around the region – and the global economy – if it makes that decision.


    Despite President Barack Obama’s good intentions, the US Senate is no closer to ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, while China, India, and Pakistan, among others, take shelter behind that inaction, with a fragile voluntary moratorium the only obstacle to resumed testing. And negotiations on another crucial building block for both disarmament and non-proliferation – a treaty to ban further production of weapons-grade fissile material – remain at an impasse.


    The only half-way good news is that progress continues on a third building block: ensuring that weapons-usable materials, and weapons themselves, currently stored in multiple locations in 32 countries, do not fall into the hands of rogue states or terrorists. At the end of March, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak will host a follow-up meeting to Obama’s successful Nuclear Security Summit in 2010, which brought together 47 government leaders to agree on a comprehensive program aimed at securing all such materials within four years. High on the agenda will be the security implications of nuclear safety: the Fukushima catastrophe showed that nuclear-power plants may be vulnerable not only to natural disaster, but also to terrorist sabotage.


    But nuclear security is only one small part of what must be done to eliminate nuclear threats once and for all, and summit fatigue will make it difficult to sustain key world leaders’ commitment to meeting for so narrow a purpose. New thinking is urgently needed on how to recover the momentum of just two years ago.


    To achieve that requires meeting three conditions. First, political leaders and civil-society leaders must restate, ad nauseam if necessary, the case for “global zero” – a world without nuclear weapons – and map a credible step-by-step path for getting there.


    Second, new mechanisms are needed to energize policymakers and publics. One is to develop and promote a draft Nuclear Weapons Convention as a framework for action. Another is a “State of Play” report card that pulls no punches in assessing which states are meeting their disarmament and non-proliferation commitments, and which are not (the Nuclear Materials Security Index, just published by Senator Sam Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative, is one example). Advocacy-focused leadership networks, such as those now operating in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, comprising well-known former leaders and other senior figures, could also help.


    Third, sustaining high-level policy attention to the entire nuclear agenda requires an institutional setting. The Nuclear Security Summit’s focus is too narrow for this role; the International Atomic Energy Agency’s formal mandate is too restricted; the NPT Review Conference meets too irregularly; and the United Nations Security Council’s membership is too limited. The best forum for norm-building may prove to be the G-20, whose members embrace both North and South, account for most of the world’s population, GDP, and all but a handful of its nuclear weapons, and whose heads of government meet regularly.


    With its foreign ministers meeting in Mexico this month to discuss broader global governance issues, the G-20 is beginning to move beyond a narrow economic focus. That is to be welcomed. Economic destruction causes immense and intolerable human misery. But there are only two global threats that, if mishandled, can destroy life on this planet as we know it. And nuclear weapons can kill us a lot faster than CO2 can.

  • Our Salvation Requires that We Grasp the Danger of Nuclear Weapons

    This article was originally published by Project Syndicate.


    Gareth EvansOne of the most dispiriting features of today’s international debates is that the threat to humanity posed by the world’s 23,000 nuclear weapons – and by those who would build more of them, or be only too willing to use them – has been consigned to the margin of politics.


    U.S. President Barack Obama did capture global attention with his Prague speech in 2009, which made a compelling case for a nuclear weapon-free world. And he did deliver on a major new arms-reduction treaty with Russia, and hosted a summit aimed at reducing the vulnerability of nuclear weapons and materials to theft or diversion.


    But nuclear issues still struggle for public resonance and political traction. It would take a brave gambler to bet on ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty by the U.S. Senate any time soon.


    The film “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Academy Award, led to a Nobel Prize for Al Gore, and attracted huge international attention to the disastrous impact of climate change. But “Countdown to Zero,” an equally compelling documentary, made by the same production team and making shockingly clear how close and how often the world has come to nuclear catastrophe, has come and gone almost without trace.


    Complacency trumps anxiety almost everywhere. Japan’s Fukushima disaster has generated a massive debate about the safety of nuclear power, but not about nuclear weapons. Fear of a nuclear holocaust seems to have ended with the Cold War.


    Indeed, Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem an eternity ago; new nuclear-weapons states have emerged without the world ending; no terrorist nuclear device has threatened a major city; and possession of nuclear weapons, for the states that have them, seems to be a source of comfort and pride rather than concern or embarrassment. With only a handful of exceptions, the current generation of political leaders shows little interest in disarmament, and not much more in non-proliferation. And their publics are not pressuring them to behave otherwise.


    Few have worked harder to shake the world out of its complacency than four of the hardest-nosed realists ever to hold public office: former U.S. Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn. In a series of opinion articles over the last five years, they have repeatedly sounded the alarm that the risks of nuclear weapons outweigh any possible usefulness in today’s security environment. Moreover, they have called for a complete rethinking of deterrence strategy, in order to minimize, and ultimately eliminate, reliance on the most indiscriminately destructive weapons ever invented.


    Last week in London, the “gang of four” convened a private meeting with leading think-tank researchers and a worldwide cast of some 30 former foreign and defense ministers, generals, and ambassadors who share their concern and commitment. But our average age was over 65, and the limits of our effectiveness were neatly described by former British Defense Minister Des Browne: “People who used to be something really want to tackle this issue. The trouble is that those who are something don’t.”


    No quick fix will turn all this around. Getting the kind of messages that emerged from the London meeting embedded in public and political consciousness is going to be slow boring through hard boards. But the messages demand attention, and we simply have to keep drilling.


    The first message is that the threat of a nuclear weapons catastrophe remains alarmingly real. Existing global stockpiles have a destructive capacity equal to 150,000 Hiroshima bombs, and in handling them there is an omnipresent potential for human error, system error, or misjudgment under stress.


    Pakistan versus India is a devastating conflict-in-waiting, and North Korea and Iran remain volatile sources of concern. We know that terrorist groups have the capacity to engineer nuclear devices and would explode them anywhere they could; we simply cannot be confident that we can forever deny them access to the fissile material they need to fuel them.


    The second message is that Cold War nuclear-deterrence doctrine is irrelevant to today’s world. So long as nuclear weapons remain, states can justify maintaining a minimum nuclear-deterrent capability. But that can be done without weapons on high alert, and with drastically reduced arsenals in the case of the U.S. and Russia, and, at worst, at current levels for the other nuclear-armed states.


    The third message is that if the existing nuclear powers sincerely want to prevent others from joining their club, they cannot keep justifying the possession of nuclear weapons as a means of protection for themselves or their allies against other weapons of mass destruction, especially biological weapons, or conventional weapons. Indeed, the single most difficult issue inhibiting serious movement toward disarmament – certainly in the case of Pakistan versus India, and Russia and China versus the United States – are conventional arms imbalances, and ways of addressing them must rise to the top of the policy agenda.


    The final message is that neither piecemeal change nor sloganeering will do the job. Nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation, counter-terrorism, and civil nuclear-energy risk reduction are inextricably connected, and they call for sustained commitment around a comprehensive agenda, and detailed argument. Sound bites and tweets are an unlikely route to nuclear salvation.


    Kissinger is no idealist icon. But he’s always worth listening to, and never more so than with respect to the question that he has been asking for years: When the next nuclear-weapons catastrophe happens, as it surely will, the world will have to respond dramatically. Why can’t we start right now?