Since the end of the East-West conflict and the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race has ended, even if nuclear
competi-12 See: ENDC/PV/363 (8 Feb. 1968); for a more detailed analysis see Joachim Krause, “Enlightenment and Nuclear Order,” International Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 3, May 2007, pp. 483-499.
tion between Russia and the US has not ceased to exist.13 Nuclear arsenals have been considerably reduced over the past 30 years. The reappraisal of nuclear weapons that has set in during the past two decades in the West-ern world is creating the opportunity for further progress towards nuclear reductions and might eventually lead to Global Zero. At least the US is ready to move towards Global Zero, since it needs nuclear weapons only for protection against existential threats (i.e. the nuclear weapons of others) and hence could afford to give them up within the framework of an agreed (and verified) ban on their possession and production.14 However, whether or not the concept of Global Zero ever materializes depends on a number of conditions. Among these are some which will pose almost insurmount-able problems:
• The United Kingdom and France must be involved, which seems to be feasible if other conditions are met.15
• The strategic nuclear stand-off between Russia and the US must come to an end and some kind of minimal deterrence status has to be found; this is extremely difficult.
• The emerging strategic competition between the US and China has to be contained in such a way that no strategic nuclear stand-off ensues. While there is no such strategic competition between both states so far, the possibility cannot be ruled out.
• Iran and North Korea must be brought back to NNWS status and kept under close surveillance; the chances of both states foregoing their nuclear weapon programmes under peaceful conditions are ex-tremely slim.
13 In this article, the term “arms race” is used to describe a dynamic adversarial relationship in which each side tries to outflank the other, in terms of military options, by establishing qualitative or quantitative supe-riority. An “armaments competition” is a situation in which two sides consider themselves to be competitors, but where the armaments relationship is not necessarily characterized by a dynamic pattern. The concept
“nuclear stand-off” is used to describe the fact that the American and Russian strategic arsenals are still di-rected against each other, but that there is no arms race involved, since relations are rather stable.
14 See: Joachim Krause/Benjamin Schreer, “Salvaging Global Zero. Diplomacy in the Second Nuclear Age,”
RUSI Journal 155, No. 3, June/July 2010, pp. 48-52.
15 See for instance: Prime Minister’s Office, United Kingdom: The Road to 2010. Addressing the nuclear ques-tion in the twenty-first century, London, Her Majesty’s Government, 2009.
• India must join any cooperative process for denuclearization ‒ which, for the time being, is quite improbable.
• Pakistan must join too; Pakistan has to control its own nuclear com-plex and prevent any leakage of nuclear material and technology.
Given the current record of Pakistan’s nuclear policy, this is far from realistic.
• Israel too must adhere to any process of denuclearization decided by the established NWS. Given Israel’s aggravated security situation (the nuclear threat from Iran, and the rise of fundamentalist Sunni forces in their neighbourhood), this is a highly unlikely scenario as well.
• All nuclear-capable NNWS have to accept tighter International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. This is not easy to achieve, but there is at least a good chance of making progress.
• Sensitive nuclear activities (enrichment, plutonium separation, natu-ral uranium reactors, reactors fuelled with highly enriched uranium, etc.) must either be put under special monitoring regimes or op-erated by multilateral/supranational entities. While there has been progress in many areas, it is still difficult to determine whether it might be feasible to arrive at a situation of total control of all relevant nuclear weapon materials during the coming decades.
These preconditions will be hard to fulfil in the years ahead. While it is understandable to demand Global Zero as an overall concept that could eventually solve almost everything, putting all the eggs into the basket of full-scale nuclear abolition might be problematic. Nuclear abolition will not occur within the next decade or two. Instead of deploring the cur-rent state of nuclear disarmament (like many international documents and NGOs), the more important task is to look at the existing international nu-clear order and ask what can be done to stabilize it, to address urgent chal-lenges and to envisage how the international nuclear order can be adapted to new circumstances. This order is more resilient than often assumed. It is, however, subject to many challenges which jeopardize it. Those who argue
that this order was “for muddling through” ‒ if not clearly heading towards
“Global Zero” ‒ ignore the fact that stabilizing or even restoring this order was the most important condition for making any success towards Global Zero. We have to pay more attention to the existing international nuclear order ‒ its strengths as well as its weaknesses. Otherwise, the danger is that, with constant talk about Global Zero and nuclear disarmament, we will end up in a situation similar to the late 1950s, where the superpow-ers presented the UN General Assembly with wonderful draft conventions for nuclear and general disarmament. The real problem at that time – the emergence of the threat of first strike between the US and the Soviet Un-ion – was flatly ignored by this lofty diplomacy. Fortunately, there were some intellectual experts at the time within the RAND Corporation, who discussed real strategic challenges and who came to the conclusion that more pragmatic problem-solving would make a real difference – the dif-ference between war and peace. It is precisely this pragmatic approach to problem-solving which is more important today than devising new sweep-ing and unrealistic concepts for the fastest track towards nuclear abolition.
The alternative is the risk of ending up with neither the abolition of nuclear weapons nor their regulation through an international order ‒ which, al-though relatively “unjust and unfair,” is much more acceptable than any kind of nuclear anarchy.