Today, all members of the Alliance share the conviction that the pro-liferation of WMD (in particular nuclear weapons) is a major threat to international security. This has not always been the case; in the past, non-proliferation issues were very controversial within the Alliance.
During the 1960s and 1970s there were severe political crises within NATO over issues relating to nuclear non-proliferation, in particular be-tween the US, on the one hand, and the Federal Republic of Germany, on the other. France, too, had major misgivings about the very notion of nuclear non-proliferation: it took 20 years after the implementation of the NPT for France to accede to it. These debates are now over. What has caused this change within the Atlantic Alliance? The following points rep-resent the strategic logic of the current non-proliferation policy within the Alliance and will serve as a starting point for further reflection.
1. Although NATO is an Alliance which made extensive use of nuclear deterrence during the Cold War, there is no need today to base a strategy for avoiding or deterring war on nuclear deterrence.
Ar-guments over the usefulness of nuclear weapons on the battlefield are re-dundant, as are the discussions about “prevailing” in a strategic nuclear exchange between Russia and the US.3 Current debate has returned to fundamental issues, such as the role of nuclear weapons as a guarantor against existential threats, and the potential danger of nuclear weapons in the hands of extremist actors.4 The toolbox of instruments, which modern civilized nations (and not only the Western Alliance) can resort to in order to prevent or deter wars, has become bigger and more varied than ever before. In retrospect, the Cold War was rather the exception than the rule. It was a conflict based on an uneven balance of forces in a limited, but strategically highly relevant region (Central Europe), and based on a global strategic balance of terror which led both superpow-ers to sometimes play a zero-sum game with high stakes.5 The current strategic community wisdom is to broadly agree that this situation is unlikely to repeat itself, even if relations between major powers were to deteriorate. In the strategy of all Western nuclear weapon states, the role of nuclear deterrence is reduced to keeping or deterring others from existential threats (i.e. the use of nuclear weapons) against themselves or their allies. Even Russia, which has upgraded the role of nuclear weap-ons in its strategic concept, has made it clear that nuclear weapweap-ons are a means of existential deterrence. They would be used only if the very existence of Russia came under threat (i.e. meaning the threat of nuclear weapons), for example, if NATO were planning a major land offensive, which is not on the cards. Since existential threats to national security
3 For an overview of strategic debates during the Cold War, see: Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, London, St. Martin’s Press, 1981 and 1997; see also Lawrence Freedman, “The first two generations of nuclear weapons strategists,” in Makers of Modern Strategy, edited by Peter Paret, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 735-778; Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, Strategic Nuclear Target-ing, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1986.
4 Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon. Atomic Power and the World Order, New York, Harcourt, Brace
& Co., 1946; T.V. Paul, Richard J. Harknett and James J. Wirtz (eds.), The Absolute Weapon Revisited. Nuclear Arms and the Emerging International Order, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 2000; see also Joachim Krause, “Nach Hiroshima. Die Entwicklung der Theorie des Nuklearkriegs,” in Handbuch Kriegstheo-rien, edited by Thomas Jäger and Rasmus Beckmann, Wiesbaden, VS Publ., 2011, pp. 413-426.
5 See: T.V. Paul, “Power, influence, and nuclear weapons: a reassessment,” in The Absolute Weapon Revisited.
Nuclear Arms and the Emerging International Order, pp. 19-45.
today emanate mostly from the threat of other states using a nuclear weapon, the idea of removing such threats by abolishing nuclear weap-ons is a logical step, as suggested by US President Barack Obama in his Prague speech in April 2009. It is an idea that is very much under discussion within the strategic community.6
2. By the same token, the technical and political risks associ-ated with the production, possession, storage, handling and stationing of nuclear weapons are viewed today within the Western world with much more scrutiny – and scepticism – than ever before.7 With the end of military competition with the Soviet Union (or Russia), the bal-ance between the risks and benefits of nuclear deterrence has been re-drawn. This was, in part, the result of research done on Cold War his-tory, which uncovered incidents involving nuclear weapons, including cases in which nuclear explosions might have occurred, or where the inadvertent launch of nuclear weapons due to technical malfunction was a real possibility.8
3. The expectation that nuclear weapons would enhance their possessors’ prestige, technology and economic power belongs to the past. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, this was a widely shared con-viction, which led many governments to consider a full-scale nuclear option (civilian plus military). Today, nuclear technology is no long-er cutting-edge. It has been dislodged by information, nano and bio-technologies. More importantly, nuclear technology has not lived up to expectations, particularly in terms of fast-breeder technology, heralded at the time as the promise of an almost inexhaustible supply of energy.
With this promise unfulfilled, the share of nuclear energy within overall
6 Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal, “The Logic of Zero. Toward a World Without Nuclear Weapons,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2008; Georg Perkovich and James Acton (eds.) Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, London, Routledge; IISS Adelphi paper, 2008; Sverre Lodgaard, Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation:
Towards a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World?, London, Routledge, 2012.
7 Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, Washington DC, Brookings Institution, 1993.
8 See the Wikipedia entry: “List of Military Nuclear Accidents.”
energy consumption will remain limited. Nuclear energy will probably not solve the energy problems of the future. In global comparison, it still ranks far behind natural gas, petroleum and coal, and its place is being increasingly challenged by renewable energies. The huge prob-lems involved in the final stages of nuclear energy (i.e. radioactive waste, separated plutonium) are far from being solved in all countries engaged in the civilian use of nuclear energy. The nuclear powers of the world are not necessarily the leading powers in terms of technology and influ-ence. This is quite evident in Europe, where the main technological and economic impulse comes from Germany and the Scandinavian states and not from the nuclear-weapon states (France and Great Britain) ‒ or at least not from their respective nuclear sectors.
4. Equally important is that nuclear weapons have turned out to be much more expensive than expected. The notion that nuclear weapons would result in “more bang for the buck” has never been true for the United States,9 or any other nuclear weapon state. The Soviet Union, for instance, had to shoulder an enormous economic burden for its nuclear arms programme. The collapse of the Soviet Union was – among other factors – caused by its oversized military effort, of which the strategic nuclear competition with the US absorbed a major share.
Russia, which has considerably downsized its former nuclear complex as well as its arsenal of nuclear weapons, still has huge problems in main-taining a far too costly nuclear posture and infrastructure. Pakistan suf-fers from unstable conditions because it has invested so much in its nuclear armaments. Some states – such as Switzerland and Sweden – are known to have abandoned the nuclear option, for financial and other reasons.
5. The relatively well-functioning international nuclear order has been successful in developing norms, principles and other
institu-9 Stephen Schwartz, Atomic Audit. The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons since 1940, Wash-ington, DC, Brookings, 1998.
tions and has been comparatively effective in their enforcement. The current international order is build around the NPT and consists of a number of regulations, including export control regimes such as the Zangger Group, Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and Missile Technol-ogy Control Regime (MTCR); specific regimes such as the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and the Container Security Initiative (CSI);
and initiatives like the G8 Global Pact, intended to secure material that could be used by irregular forces to build nuclear or radiological weap-ons. Given the distinction made in the NPT between nuclear-weapon states (NWS) and non-nuclear-weapon states (NNWS), this order is often criticized as unjust, unfair and imbalanced. In spite of this (or perhaps for this very reason), the order has been surprisingly resilient.
But understanding the real nature of the international order requiresone to disregard the mistaken notion that the NPT was negotiated as a dis-armament treaty between NWS on the one side and NNWS on the other.10 This contention is not borne out by the study of the relevant documents.11 The Non-Aligned states ‒ neutral Sweden in particular
‒ wanted this, but did not succeed. In her statement to the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee on 8 February 1968, the Swedish Minister for Disarmament, Alva Myrdal, conceded that it had become impossible to arrive at legally binding obligations requiring the NWS to eliminate their nuclear weapons and she called upon the Non-Aligned states not to sign the treaty because it did not contain the necessary
10 A typical example of this kind was the so-called Blix Report in 2006, which stated: “…the original ‘bar-gain’ of the treaty is generally understood to be the elimination of nuclear weapons through the commitment by non-nuclear weapon states not to acquire nuclear weapons and the commitment by five nuclear weapon states to pursue nuclear disarmament.” See: The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (chairman: Hans Blix), Weapons of terror: freeing the world of nuclear, biological and chemical arms, Stockholm, Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, 2006, p. 62.
11 The negotiations and their results are analysed by William Epstein, The last chance: nuclear proliferation and arms control, London, Collier Macmillan, 1976. There is a detailed documentary analysis of the negotia-tions from a Non-Aligned perspective in Mohamed Shaker, The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty: origin, and implementation, 1959–1979, New York, Oceana, 1980, esp. ch. 9, pp. 555–648; another detailed analysis of the ENDC (Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee) negotiations can be found in Erhard Forndran, Probleme der internationalen Abrüstung. Die Bemühungen um Abrüstung und kooperative Rüstungssteuerung 1962–1968, Frankfurt, Metzner, 1970.
provisions regarding nuclear abolition.12 But most Non-Aligned states signed, and felt very comfortable with the treaty. This indicates that there was – and still is – a different “bargain” which keeps the NPT together, as a coalition between the United States (later joined by other NWS) and the silent majority of states which were happy to see a freeze put on nuclear proliferation. That silent majority comprises all those states which, for different reasons (often related to their limited human, economic and technological resources), could not even consider nuclear weapon options of their own, or which simply found nuclear weapons to be abhorrent for reasons of principle. They represent the majority among the international community of states. Their main interest was, and still is: (1) to have security guarantees against the threat from an established NWS; (2) to seek assurance that their neighbours (with the capability to build nuclear weapons) would not acquire them; (3) to en-sure that the big nuclear powers would not engage in a nuclear arms race which might draw in others. For most of these states, the international nuclear order is primarily a guarantee against the nuclear ambitions of neighbouring medium-sized states or nuclear-weapon-capable states.
The bargain between the United States and the weaker states still pre-vails as the basis of international actions isolating and punishing states which try to circumvent the restrictions of the non-proliferation system.
If any state today attempts to obtain nuclear weapons, it will have to pay a high price in terms of economic sanctions and the loss of opportuni-ties in trade and development.