Roadmaps to Disarmament: A Strategy for the Second Nuclear Era

A Strategy for the Second Nuclear Era

Wade L. Huntley

The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NTP) Review Conference in May 2005 ended in utter stalemate, producing no new ideas or proposals for strengthening the NPT regime or for confronting the crucial challenges of expanding nuclear dangers that the world today faces. The failure of the existing nuclear states to move genuinely toward their NPT nuclear disarmament commitments, combined with problematic compliance with NPT safeguards among many key non-nuclear states, have placed the NPT regime under unprecedented pressure. This paralysis highlights the present stagnation of global efforts to move meaningfully toward comprehensive nuclear disarmament.

Roadmaps to Disarmament

This paper outlines a new citizen-based initiative to rekindle nuclear disarmament by compelling all governments with extant or latent nuclear weapons capabilities to generate and publish “roadmaps” delineating how they would achieve disarmament. These roadmaps would then become the basis for transnational debate aimed at constituting a single public global roadmap. Roadmaps would overcome four principal obstacles to current disarmament efforts:

A New Nuclear Disarmament Strategy

Many governments today – both with and without nuclear weapons – are seduced by misplaced faith in the power and prestige of nuclear capabilities. Such governments have become increasingly ambivalent about the goal of nuclear disarmament.

Hence, nuclear disarmament cannot be achieved solely through inter-governmental mechanisms such as the NPT. Nuclear disarmament is now also very much about superceding the prerogatives of governments. This suggests the need to conceptualize the challenge of nuclear disarmament as a global public policy issue related to human security. It also suggests that a new disarmament initiative cannot be expected from governments – it must come from the people.

A new strategy to press governments to respond to the conditions of this new nuclear era must begin by reviving the global public’s sense of the urgency to meet the considerable nuclear dangers the world still faces. Because governments have become so quiescent, this strategy would aim to mobilize popular power to compel governments to act meaningfully to achieve nuclear disarmament.

The United States bears a particular responsibility for leadership. Given today’s global political realities, real progress toward nuclear disarmament requires the United States to take a leading role. Yet its government is among the most recalcitrant.

Therefore it is in the United States that popular power most requires mobilizing. Although opinion polls in the United States as much as elsewhere show broad public support for a world without nuclear weapons, few Americans consider nuclear abolition possible or realistic – the nuclear “status quo” has become an increasingly entrenched way of thinking. Hence, the US public must be the primary focus of a new strategy to compel governments to action.

Drawing National Roadmaps

The central feature of this new disarmament process would be to compel all governments with extant or latent nuclear weapons capabilities to generate and publish roadmaps delineating how they would achieve nuclear disarmament.

Developing a national roadmap would not oblige any state initially to dismantle a single nuclear weapon. This is an advantage, because governments could not logically resist undertaking this small disarmament measure on grounds of national security, as happens with efforts to obtain other measures dealing with capabilities directly (such as de-alerting). The call to develop nothing more than a plan for disarmament would be non-threatening in the short term to even the most ardent defender of nuclear weapons.

At the same time, disarmament roadmaps would act powerfully to reverse popular perceptions that nuclear disarmament, if desirable, is implausible or utopian. Nuclear arms advocates feed this perception by blithely dismissing nuclear disarmament as “unrealistic” in a dangerous world. Roadmaps, embodying a finite set of criteria and steps to achieve disarmament, would by their nature clear away the fog obscuring the path from today to a nuclear weapons-free world. Thus, demanding nuclear roadmaps would reinvigorate the idea of nuclear abolition in the public discourse. It would democratize the nuclear debate again, as was done during the nuclear freeze campaign of the 1980s – except now focusing on eliminating nuclear weapons rather than merely halting their buildup. Generating the roadmaps would begin the necessary process of national and international planning for nuclear disarmament, and create official government documents spelling out how to proceed.

Because the roadmaps would be compelled not just from the nine nuclear-armed states but also from states with latent nuclear capabilities, all countries would bear an equal responsibility to the obligation. In the United States, where the popular movement to compel these roadmaps should begin, the objective would be to achieve federal legislation requiring the US government to prepare a disarmament roadmap and specifying the detailed criteria that roadmap would meet.

Roadmap Terms

Each state producing a roadmap would specify its material and political prerequisites for disarmament, and detail specific plans for verifiably eliminating all elements of its nuclear capabilities. This would include the irreversible dismantling of existing nuclear arms and verifiable restriction of all nuclear weapons development capacities of peaceful nuclear facilities.[1]

For states with nuclear weapons, issues to be addressed would include:

For both states with nuclear weapons and other states possessing latent nuclear weapons capabilities, issues to be addressed would include:

Publication of these national reports would create a matrix of conditions for global nuclear disarmament. The cumulative list would no doubt be daunting. But the existence of these national roadmaps would initiate global dialog and debate toward combining them into a single roadmap to disarmament.

The existence of the concrete roadmaps would also curb extremes of the current debate over the prospect of global nuclear disarmament. Nuclear arms advocates, faced with a finite set of criteria for disarmament, would no longer be able to blithely dismiss nuclear disarmament as a utopian aspiration without real meaning in the practical world. At the same time, proponents of disarmament would face directly the difficult technical and political security challenges that would have to be overcome to achieve nuclear abolition.

After a suitable period of dialog, an international conference would be convened to knit together the roadmaps into a single global plan for nuclear disarmament capable of receiving universal support. This conference would be convened under the authority of the UN Security Council, either under the auspices of the UN Conference on Disarmament, the IAEA, or as an independent process. The conference would meet without an expiration date until the global roadmap is achieved.

Alternatively, the roadmap plans could be framed in the context of existing international responsibilities, such as the disarmament obligations of all NPT members under Article VI of that treaty[2] and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that there exists a duty to pursue and conclusively achieve nuclear disarmament. The roadmap plans could also be implemented as a series of reciprocal independent initiatives, following the model of the 1991 U.S.-Soviet reductions; such initiatives could complement more multilateral processes by sustaining momentum of practical disarmament steps.

The resulting roadmap will be complex, and its timeline for achievement would likely be extended. Implementation of the roadmap would be fraught with challenges as international conditions continue to evolve in unpredictable ways. But with a roadmap in hand specifying reciprocal steps by all states, progress could be carefully metered and monitored, and accountability for setbacks fairly allocated.

A Civil Society Strategy

Building momentum for nuclear roadmaps would require a vast and sustained commitment of citizen involvement. Civil society mobilization should begin in the United States, but would ultimately be initiated in all countries with existing or latent nuclear weapons capabilities. In the United States, the strategy would focus on insisting that the US government develop a disarmament roadmap. The ultimate aim would be to have a Congressional mandate requiring the government to produce a detailed roadmap according to a fixed timeline (perhaps attached as a binding amendment to defense authorization legislation).

The civil society strategy could follow two simultaneous tracks.

This activity would serve several purposes:

Questions and Challenges

Several questions and challenges remain to be addressed.

It is quite conceivable that the U.S. government and other nuclear weapons states will simply refuse to develop the required nuclear roadmaps, or will produce documents asserting that disarmament is impossible. These governments are, after all, more ambivalent about disarmament than ever before.

The campaign can anticipate this resistance by assuring that the requirement to develop roadmaps is established in binding law, and that the requirements for the roadmaps are highly specific. More importantly, the campaign must develop sufficiently strong levels of political support to mobilize pressure for the government to fulfill its obligation to plan for disarmament. This depth of support may require years to generate, and the campaign should attempt to require a legally binding disarmament roadmap from Congress only after it has already developed a very broad base of public support.

The next challenge would be to insure that governments producing roadmaps actually implement them. There are many progressive plans that are never implemented because of political resistance from entrenched vested interests.

The response to this resistance would be to refocus the campaign on the new goal to “start the plan” by focusing on implementation of the first steps provided in the plan, whatever they may be. At this stage the campaign would direct its momentum toward ensuring that elected officials remain accountable for seeing that implementation of the roadmap is fulfilled.

It is important to remember that the very process of building the campaign for nuclear roadmaps will change the public debate and prompt a range of responses from political adversaries and third parties. Typically, as such campaigns generate momentum, efforts emerge to undercut them through compromise. During the nuclear freeze campaign, for example, congressional moderates responded by generating pressure on the Reagan administration to adopt a more flexible arms control negotiating policy toward the Soviet Union. A disarmament roadmaps campaign must be prepared for similar responses.

An intricate problem will emerge if a transformation of the US position is achieved, but governments of other nuclear-armed or nuclear-capable states fail to reciprocate. Each state’s roadmap, including that of the United States, will likely be tied to conditions requiring other states to act as well. No state will be able to fully implement its roadmap without reciprocity.

This problem is the reason for international coordination of the roadmaps, either through an international conference or other means, to link the roadmaps to one another, spelling out the sequencing of reciprocal implementation. The integrated global plan will in itself provide a powerful political instrument to pressure governments to follow through with commitments, because each stage of implementation of the global plan would be universally known and the state(s) responsible for the next steps evident to all. No state could deny, as they can today, that it is “their turn” to act.

But the United States, as the world’s preeminent power, has an assurance of security exceeding all other states. This provides it with latitude of action enabling it to “go first.” Moreover, US preeminence today sets the tone for global politics. Current policies entrenching US commitment to retaining its nuclear capabilities endorse and embolden proliferation ambitions worldwide. A reversed US posture firmly forswearing any reliance on nuclear threats would dramatically deflate the image of nuclear weapons as a useful currency of world power. Increased US support for existing international institutions aiming to curb nuclear proliferation would further impinge the abilities of smaller countries to resist global pressures to adopt and follow their own disarmament roadmaps.

Ultimately, if other states fail to reciprocate, the disarmament process will stall. But if the United States is fulfilling a genuine leadership role, mobilizing global civil society to begin pressuring other states to follow through will be a much more achievable objective than at present.

Perhaps the most important challenge will be sustaining the required level of citizen commitment and involvement over the several years that will be necessary to achieve the objective of an integrated global roadmap. This problem cannot be “solved” but it can be managed by establishing a series of achievable interim goals and objectives that will give citizens a sense of empowerment to continue the campaign toward the longer range objective. Gaining approval for roadmap resolutions will provide opportunities for achieving interim objectives. Each church body or professional organization that adopts the civil society resolution will provide a victory for those who organize for it. Winning voter referendum campaigns on behalf of the resolution will provide an even greater sense of empowerment. These victories will build upon one another as the campaign gradually acquires momentum for the challenge of pressuring Congress and the federal government.

Interim victories also can be achieved by linking the long-range effort to short-term campaigns against, for example, the development of new nuclear weapons. The recent effort to block the bunker buster (successful for the moment) advances the longer range goal. The campaign will also address other interim challenges and opportunities as they arise, constantly linking short-term efforts to the long range objectives. This linkage, in turn, will help cement the shorter-term gains. By combining short and long term efforts in this manner, the campaign can empower its supporters with interim successes while building momentum over the long term to abolish nuclear weapons.

Conclusion

Nuclear disarmament has always been not only an ultimate goal, but also a vision with practical consequences for nearer-term arms control and nonproliferation practices. The vision reminds us that arms control and nonproliferation are means to a greater end, not simply instruments to curb the greatest dangers of a nuclear status quo. Sustaining global nuclear disarmament as the ultimate objective is a prerequisite for any arms control and nonproliferation achievements to be sustainable. In other words, to be realistic, solutions even to immediate nuclear challenges must aim to advance nuclear disarmament.

But today, we face a cruel paradox: success in mitigating the greatest nuclear dangers of the Cold War era has made it easier for governments to disassociate the nearer-term means from the ultimate end. Some nuclear dangers of the emerging second nuclear era are more potent than those of the first. But these nuclear dangers are also different in kind, and not strictly comparable. Now more than ever, these dangers are tied to threats to use nuclear weapons to instill fear and seek gain in specific social and political contexts.

Here emerges a second paradox: although the responsibility of states to pursue disarmament is broader, the diminution of the prospect of massive nuclear war has made the world appear to be “safer” for governments to embrace nuclear capabilities (extant or latent) as currencies of power and prestige. Governments of states possessing nuclear weapons increasingly regard arms control not as a means to disarmament but as an instrument only to curb the greatest dangers of a nuclear status quo. Governments of incipient nuclear weapons states increasingly regard nonproliferation not as a means to disarmament but as an instrument only to prevent new entrants into the nuclear “club.” Both sets of governments, grasping the short-term “fix” nuclear weapons seem to offer, have abandoned the long-term imperative of nuclear disarmament.

For this reason, civil society efforts to rekindle a global movement toward nuclear disarmament are as vital as ever. More than before, such efforts must now also recognize the depths to which nuclear weapons and nuclear threat-making are enmeshed in global security structures, and must therefore also offer progressive new forms of global governance that create security structures sustainable in a non-nuclear world. The imperative of nuclear disarmament is today inseparable from the need to establish new forms of global governance independent of the sovereign state system and based on principles of law and democratic accountability.[3]

Realizing practical progress toward nuclear disarmament, however incremental, sustains the viability of this vision. Such progress further constitutes that vision by adding depth and substance to it, and transmits to future generations the requisite knowledge and skills, and imagination, to carry forth that imperative.

We know that, with wisdom and conviction, real near-term progress can be made. The experiences of the early 1990s, among others, have proven that. We also know that the ultimate goals, if distant, are not utopian. In the words of William Arthur Ward, “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.”[4]

This essay reflects substantial contributions by David Cortright, Fourth Freedom Forum.

  1.   Some of the subsequent criteria are drawn from George Perkovich, et. al., Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security, Report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2005, pp.145-57. The present proposal broadens the disarmament concept of Universal Compliance by calling for participation by all countries with potential nuclear weapons capabilities, not just with fissile material stocks, and by including in the roadmaps each country’s security and political as well as material prerequisites.
  2.   Note that the non-universality and discriminatory basis of NPT membership may limit its applicability as a legal framework to which roadmap-based disarmament obligations could be attached.
  3.   States are unlikely to go away any time soon, and will remain the loci of decisions to develop nuclear weapons and utilize nuclear threats. But globalization is already producing new forms of transnational non-governmental communication and action that impinges state sovereignty and constitutes incipient alternative global governance mechanisms. These mechanisms can be nurtured and grown to supplement domestic efforts and effectively increase all states’ accountability for nuclear weapons decision-making.
  4.   Thoughts of a Christian optimist, vol. II: The words of William Arthur Ward.

This article is an abridged version of a paper the author presented at the 2006 International Law Symposium, „At the Nuclear Precipice. Nuclear Weapons and the Abandonment of International Law“ held by the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation on February 23-25, 2006. The complete text is available at www.wagingpeace.org/ menu/programs/international-law/ annual-symposium/2006_papers/ huntley-wade_napf-2006-­international-law-symposium.pdf.