When limits on nuclear weapons get public attention nowadays, the discussion generally focuses on the disintegration of this or that arms control agreement, and whether its diminishment or disappearance should or shouldn’t be lamented. So far, the Trump administration has lamented little, as many arms control and disarmament experts expressed alarm.
The United States’ withdrawal from the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, its backing away from the Iran nuclear deal, and the impending lapse of New START – the treaty that limits US and Russian deployed strategic nuclear weapons – would indeed be worrisome enough, even considered in isolation from one another. Taken together, this broad erosion of the world’s infrastructure for controlling nuclear weapons arsenals is part of what the Bulletin Science and Security Board recently called “a new willingness of political leaders to reject the negotiations and institutions that can protect civilization over the long term.” In fact, this erosion was a major factor in the board’s decision to move the hands of the Doomsday Clock just 100 seconds from midnight – closer to the apocalypse than they have ever been.
In this issue, we focus on another endangered pillar of the world’s nuclear threat management regime, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT. Global in nature – it has 190 members – the NPT has arguably been the most effective of the various treaties and agreements meant to control the nuclear threat. Before the NPT entered into force in 1970, the world was facing the possibility of perhaps dozens of countries acquiring nuclear weapons. Then-President Kennedy described such an unfortunate world this way in July 1963: “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world. There would be no rest for anyone then, no stability, no real security, and no chance of effective disarmament. There would only be the increased chance of accidental war, and an increased necessity for the great powers to involve themselves in what otherwise would be local conflicts.”
Today, in large part because of the NPT, just nine countries have nuclear weapons. The overwhelming majority of the world’s nations have chosen to remain non-nuclear, as part of the grand bargain contained within the NPT: The five countries acknowledged to have nuclear weapons in 1967 could keep them, but only if they agreed to help other countries have access to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, and only if the nuclear weapons states agreed “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.”
In this issue of the Bulletin, nonproliferation expert Henry Sokolski details three reasons why, at age 50, there is reason to believe that the NPT’s effectiveness is on the wane, and that, absent international action, nuclear proliferation is apt to increase over the next decade. As Sokolski notes, the trends toward a wider spread of nuclear weapons have not yet produced serial proliferation. But as area experts Oliver Meier and Duyeon Kim write, both Germany and South Korea – longtime bulwarks in support of nonproliferation – have seen serious debates about the possibility of acquiring their own nuclear deterrents. Meier and Kim make clear that, as of now, neither Germany nor South Korea seems intent on stepping away from the US extended deterrent umbrella and acquiring nuclear weapons of their own.
But absent an international effort aimed at reinvigorating nonproliferation efforts, a wide array of countries – particularly in the Middle East – could and likely will be tempted to begin nuclear weapons programs. A renewed nonproliferation effort absolutely requires that the countries with most of the world’s nuclear weapons reengage in the arms control and disarmament process promised by the NPT. Without such an effort, as Sokolski rightly notes, “the NPT will simply be pushed to the margins of history, along with the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which famously banned war just a decade before the globe was engulfed in the most destructive war in recorded history.”
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