Of the world’s nine states with nuclear weapons, two – Russia and Israel – are now fighting high intensity wars. Another three of the nuclear nine – the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – are deeply invested in both wars, supplying weapons and expecting to influence outcomes. The other four nuclear powers – China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan – are building up their arsenals, hoping to gain strategic advantage in their respective zones of chronic tension.
The close proximity of nuclear weapons to war and regions of international tension is real, dangerous, and predictable. Nuclear weapons were born in war and found their first use in war. Nuclear attacks are inevitably threatened in the context of war, overtly or just by their presence, casting ominous shadows over some of the planet’s most entrenched conflicts.
No wonder UN Secretary-General António Guterres repeatedly warns that “the risk of nuclear catastrophe is now at its highest level since the Cold War.” It is also no wonder that Russia’s nuclear threats, linked to its war on Ukraine, have elicited widespread condemnation and reignited fears of devastation.
It is a surprise, however, that states with their own threatening nuclear arsenals have been prominent in their denunciations of nuclear use threats:
- A month before Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the five primary nuclear weapon states – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States – revived their earlier declaration that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought.
- All seven members of the G7 either possess nuclear weapons, host American nuclear weapons on their soil, or seek refuge under the American nuclear “umbrella,” but their 2023 communique (para 1) gave a nod to the goal of “a world without nuclear weapons” and, in a separate Hiroshima vision statement, called the use or threatened use of nuclear weapons in the context of Ukraine “inadmissible.”
- The New Delhi G20 Declaration (September 2023, para 8), endorsed by five states with nuclear arsenals (India, China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States), said simply: “The use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible.”
- Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg of NATO, a nuclear alliance, called Russia’s nuclear use threats “dangerous and irresponsible.”
- President Joe Biden’s view was perhaps the most arresting: “I don’t think there’s any such thing as the ability to easily [use] a tactical nuclear weapon and not end up with Armageddon.”
No wonder UN Secretary-General António Guterres repeatedly warns that “the risk of nuclear catastrophe is now at its highest level since the Cold War.”
When the guardians of nuclear arsenals themselves declare nuclear use or threatened nuclear use inadmissible, dangerous, and a sure path to Armageddon, one might be forgiven for indulging thoughts of a turning point for nuclear disarmament.
But at their Orwellian best, nuclear weapon powers still insist it is the assured capacity and demonstrated willingness to launch nuclear attack, to trigger Armageddon, that avoids nuclear disaster. A world without nuclear weapons remains the formal, always distant, objective, but in the meantime the deterrence formula prevails: that the most reliable way to prevent nuclear weapons use is to convincingly threaten their use. In addition to that upside down logic of deterrence, it ignores the fact that deliberate choice is only one of several “pathways” to nuclear use. Human error, technical failures, miscalculation, cyber sabotage, false warnings – all portend nuclear attack and deterrence holds no sway against any of them.
All the statements about the inadmissibility of nuclear weapons use are certainly welcome – with a caveat. In his recent CIPS lecture (jointly sponsored with Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention), Tariq Rauf, the former head of Nuclear Verification and Security Policy at the International Atomic Energy Agency, made the essential point that declarations against use are merely “vacuous statements” if they are not accompanied by “measures or steps to reduce or eliminate nuclear threats or nuclear weapons.”
Secretary-General Guterres is thus right to say that the only reliable way to prevent nuclear weapons use is to eliminate them, and until that is accomplished there is an imperative to reduce the risks of nuclear use now. A group of four Canadian disarmament NGOs, recently meeting in an Ottawa roundtable session, concluded that the risk of nuclear use could be significantly reduced if the US and Russia implemented two prominently advocated proposals: to take all their nuclear weapons off high alert, and for all states with nuclear weapons to pledge never to be the first to use them. Since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki there have been no nuclear attacks, and that amounts to a gradually entrenching norm against use – in effect a nuclear taboo. It is a taboo to be encouraged and reinforced with promises of severe military and economic sanctions against any state that violates it.
But risk reduction measures are not disarmament. Advancing the latter requires political pressure on the US and Russia (together possessing 90 percent of all nuclear warheads) to return to direct negotiations to extend the New START Treaty beyond its February 2026 expiry date. All states are obliged to implement the disarmament agenda painstakingly compiled over the decades and codified in two universally agreed documents – the outcome statements of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) review conferences of 2000 (see in particular Part I, Article VI, para 15) and 2010 (programme of action). Prominent elements on that agenda include entry into force of the comprehensive test ban treaty, negotiations toward a treaty to control fissile materials and ban their production for weapons purposes, and verification and transparency measures to build confidence in compliance claims.
The disarmament challenge calls out for energetic leadership – although, even sustained political attention would be an improvement for Canada. Canadian officials work diligently on the file, but without discernable interest, never mind direction, from their political masters. Neither the current Prime Minister nor the previous one managed to make a single speech focused on the nuclear crisis and setting out Canadian policy and objectives in response. Political neglect of the existential nuclear crisis is not benign – it is dangerous and irresponsible, and it should be regarded as inadmissible.
