Envisioning a Post-Nuclear World
Life’s been a bit busy, so I accidentally wound up neglecting the fact that in a big speech in Prague, Barack Obama wound up endorsing one of my pet causes—recommitting the United States to the eventual total elimination of nuclear weapons. This was a policy the United States committed ourselves to when we signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, and it was a policy that Ronald Reagan consistently embraced during his presidency, but it’s fallen by the wayside in recent years.
I’ve seen some wiseasses on the right observing that just making this pledge hardly eliminates any nukes. This, however, misses the significance of the pledge to shorter-term non-proliferation goals. Simply put, if the world’s major powers really intend to keep large nuclear arsenals forever then that implies continues proliferation over the long run. The whole bargain of the multilateral non-proliferation regime was that the majority of countries would agree to eschew nuclear weapons in part because the existing nuclear powers were committing themselves to working toward disarmament. Non-proliferation facilitates disarmament, and disarmament facilities non-proliferation.
The hard part, of course, is how to get from here to there. And it really is hard. But it’s actually pretty easy to see what the first steps are. We need to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (which Obama supports), we need to follow through on the Obama-Medvedev commitment to steep bilateral nuclear arms reduction (very good progress has already been made), and we need to get China, France, and the U.K. to avoid building-up their stockpiles as the US and Russian arsenals move down toward their level. Getting all the way to global zero would presumably take decades, but making progress toward that goal is one of the very most important things we can do.
33 Responses to “Envisioning a Post-Nuclear World”
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April 8th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
I think there’s a lot of stuff in between where we are and total disarmament, including reductions in the excess weapons (that are currently inviting terrorism when they can’t be secured properly) and better protocols for avoiding accidental launches. And that’s before we start talking about proliferation.
Making this commitment may not get us to disarmament — I’m not even sure that’s feasible anymore — but at least we’ll be moving in a healthy direction.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Liberty dies in the presence of WMD, and there’s not much we can do about it going forward except to promote ways of life supportive of liberty and against authoritarianism.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Now will the ObaLiar do this before or after he cures cancer?
Seriously MattY, what are you smoking?
The US could begin keeping its broken nuclear promises tomorrow, unilaterally and without precondition.
Instead the ObaFraud hasn’t even moved to end research on next generation nukes.
This is just more cynical pr bs out of our Community Organizer in Chief.
Oh and now he’ll say “See, we are talking about a nuke free world so that’s more reason to bully Iran!”
Meanwhile he remains strangely silent about Israeli nukes now doesn’t he?
April 8th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I was never a big fan of Reagan, but I always admired his stance on nuclear weapons. When he died, I was in Vietnam, so I ended up talking to a lot Vietnamese people about Reagan. Much to my surprise, most people liked him. And the usual reason was his stance on nuclear weapons. That said, I’m really not sure how we get to a world free of nuclear weapons. Consider Israel: they won’t even admit they have nuclear weapons, and we don’t really know how many they have. So how do you get them to give them all up? How much is ‘all’? And I don’t think India will cooperate either. This is a worthy goal, but we should only expect to get close to it. We will never get to complete elimination.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Naturally, that is hardly what the right is actually saying. Misrepresenting what the right is saying without any evidence completely undercuts the rest of the argument.
Bull. Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a push at disarmament by the major powers, only to see Pakistan, India, North Korea, and Iran develop nuclear weapons technology over the last 15-20 years. Part of the problem is that the left not only doesn’t want the U.S. to have nuclear weapons, they don’t want to do anything to stop regimes like North Korea and Iran from getting them, or punishing the governments of those countries for their illegal (in the case of Iran) actions. They keep putting out rubbish like this which is nothing more than the same dreck we’ve been hearing from the left for decades.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
This is driving the right crazy. I give you the Wall Street Journal:
Emphasis was added: Note the editorial writer’s slap in the face to the nonproliferation movement.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
“they don’t want to do anything to stop regimes like North Korea and Iran from getting them,”
That’s bure bullshit. Let’s look at the scorecard on North Korea:
Warheads produced during Clinton: 0
Warheads produced during Bush: 6
So who wants to stop North Korea from getting weapons? And who has actually achieved the goal of prevention?
And let’s look at Iran. They have no weapons, so we have to look at centrifuges instead:
Centrifuges during Clinton: 0
Centrifuges during Bush: 6000
Now tell me how conservatives have done anything to keep these countries from getting nuclear technology. Quite frankly, Bush’s record sucks on this issue.
April 8th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Is China ever going to go along with the “de-nuclearized world”? No. Well, that’s the end of that, then.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
You’d probably be surprised what China would do if approached in the right (respectful) fashion…
April 8th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Why? What exactly is the driving motivation in disarmament? Is Iran going to be less afraid of American power if we disarm–no, nukes are important to deter an American conventional attack. Nukes are a relatively cheap means of national defense and they discourage aggressive action between the big powers. So, why?
April 8th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I am going to venture a guess and say that ridding the world from nuclear weapons is not hard, it’s impossible.
Unenforcability + prisoner’s dilemma+ IR anarchy are impossible to overcome.
Now if this is the case and most actors know this – and I think they do- and we add the fact that nuclear weapon acquisition by states like Iran and South Korea has very little to do with how many nukes the USA and Russia have in their arsenals but by their regional security concerns ,how on earth is this supposed to have anything but infinitesimally mild positive effect on stopping proliferation?
It’s a nice harmless move, but nothing more.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
You’d probably be surprised what China would do if approached in the right (respectful) fashion…
I see. So the only reason China has shown zero interest in nuclear disarmament is that we haven’t asked nicely enough.
There is definitely a school of thought out there that thinks that all our differences with China could be solved if we asked them more nicely to do the things we want. So you’re not alone in your thinking.
But you are absurdly wrong.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Unenforcability + prisoner’s dilemma+ IR anarchy are impossible to overcome.
Yup. Exactly.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
SteveIL @ 6:
Naturally, that is hardly what the right is actually saying. Misrepresenting what the right is saying without any evidence completely undercuts the rest of the argument.
Three sentences later, SteveIL@ 6:
Part of the problem is that the left not only doesn’t want the U.S. to have nuclear weapons, they don’t want to do anything to stop regimes like North Korea and Iran from getting them
Comedy gold.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
I see. So the only reason China has shown zero interest in nuclear disarmament is that we haven’t asked nicely enough.
Your logic is stunning, I need a few days to grok it.
April 8th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I think you could get agreement for some large reductions in nuclear arsenals, but the only way we get to zero from there is by using them all up. As long as war is a feasibility, there will be countries retaining nuclear weapons. War, however, does not need to be feasible forever.
April 8th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
So I’ve thought a little more about this and decided that a we really should try to achieve a goal of a certain limit on the total destructive capacity of the world’s weapons. For the sake putting a number to that, let’s say 200 megatons. Our current arsenal is enough that if we fired half of it at once, we’d create a global climate catastrophe. There would be no agricultural production for a year or two, and that would be a big problem for everyone. But if we shot off 200 megatons, we’d probably be okay (except for the millions of people that would be killed by the weapons). So if we limited the total number of nuclear weapons in the world to 200 megatons, it would mean that we wouldn’t be able to trigger a global catastrophe. We’d only kill the millions of people we intended to kill. We could still be able to kill lots of people, but we wouldn’t be able to bring down the entire planet in the process.
And before you attack me on the 200 megaton number, remember it’s just a guess. We should have our scientists determine what that number really should be. Obviously, every scientist would want it to be zero, but that won’t happen. But I’m guessing the real number is something we can achieve. And we can divide up those megatons on a three tier basis. The top tier would be the US, Russia, China, and India. They get an equal number of megatons, and enough to cause some serious damage. The second tier would include Pakistan, Israel, France, England, Japan, Brazil, and a few other countries I can’t think of right now. They’d get a much small number of megatons, but still enough to kick their neighbors ass. The third tier is everyone else, and they get nothing. And Iran and North Korea are certainly in that third tier.
April 8th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Never mind that at the time Israel hit Osirak they were the biggest example of non-proliferation failure in the world.
April 8th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
@fostert: Aside from the little problem of enforcement, there’s only one reason to put Israel above the far larger, more populous Iran in your scheme: blatant favoritism. Which undermines the credibility of your whole enterprise.
Global arms limitation has many of the same problems as global complete disarmament (*especially* if you try to selectively completely disarm certain victims, er, countries): concealed arsenals, mutual mistrust, accusations unsupported by evidence, demands to prove a negative, etc.
April 8th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
“Never mind that at the time Israel hit Osirak they were the biggest example of non-proliferation failure in the world.”
That may or may not be true. India and Pakistan were very big failures as well. What’s really scary is that we can’t answer the question of who has more weapons. Obviously, India has more than Pakistan. But where does Israel fall? We really don’t know. Imagine if Israel, India, and Pakistan gave up ‘all’ of their weapons. How could we possibly know if it was really all of them? We don’t know what ‘all’ is.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Unenforcability + prisoner’s dilemma+ IR anarchy are impossible to overcome.
Nuclear weapons are expensive and difficult enough to make that it’s not very hard for a country to verify it’s non-possession of nuclear weapons to the rest of the world, should it be interested in doing so. So long as we’re willing to work at this, verifiability is sufficient to overcome the PD problems. Of course, if their major rivals have nukes, then the last thing in the world they’d want to do is verify the absence of their own nukes.
Now when we start talking about biological weapons, your logic starts to make sense. They could become cheap enough and destructive enough for their absence to be unverifiable and their use to be undeterable.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:05 pm
“there’s only one reason to put Israel above the far larger, more populous Iran in your scheme: blatant favoritism.”
Not true. I’m not really a fan of Israel. In fact, most people on this thread think I’m an anti-Semite. The reason was that they already have nuclear weapons and aren’t going to give them up. So I included Israel for purely practical reasons.
And I agree with you on the problems of limitation. I don’t really think my plan would work, either. It was more of a thought experiment. And without much thought, I’d add.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
That’s why I added the ‘at the time’. Right now though, I’d consider the India and Pakistan situation to be much worse since it’s much more likely that their weapons might be used.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
“Now when we start talking about biological weapons, your logic starts to make sense.”
Umm, no. Despite the wonderful fantasies of our science fiction writers, biological weapons don’t really work well. And I doubt they ever will. You can spend $20K putting anthrax into an envelope and mailing it. But you could also spend $200 on a pawn shop handgun and just shoot the guy. I can only think of one case where biological warfare ever worked. It was Haiti against the French. The Haitians were immune to Scarlet Fever and the French weren’t. They bred mosquitoes to make the French soldiers sick. But it only worked because the French reinforcements were killed at sea in a massive storm. It’s possibly that biological warfare combined with dumb luck might work, but I wouldn’t count on it.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
“Right now though, I’d consider the India and Pakistan situation to be much worse since it’s much more likely that their weapons might be used.”
You are right about that. But it might not be such a bad thing. Both of those countries need some population reduction. That’s obviously not a good way to do it. But it must be done some way. And there really isn’t a pretty way to do population reduction. China’s approach is probably the best, and it’s pretty damn appalling.
April 8th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Has Obama’s Columbia senior paper on nuclear policy ever been released?
April 8th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Meanwhile, the world’s most conspicuous antiproliferation victories in recent decades were the Israeli strike against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear plant at Osirak…
No, the records they dug out of Hussein’s government tell an entirely different story. There wasn’t an Iraqi nuclear program until Osirak. Osirak convinced them that trying to develop peaceful nuclear technology was pointless and that they needed a deterent.
April 8th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Bottom line, Obama made a balls to the wall speech. There was no holding back. He laid it out clear and plain. No one is safe, your city or mine can be vaporized at any time for no good reason. Let’s get to work and try, try, to end this madness.
It was also a great speech, in my opinion. It reads as smooth as butter. If he wrote it, and I have my suspicions he wrote it all, I will vote for him as long as I live.
Signed, ObaDroid for you Jt
April 8th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Isn’t 0 nuclear weapons an unsustainable equilibrium? Wouldnt it create a huge incentive for one country to gain a nuclear weapon, thus become the world’s only nuclear power, and restarting the arms race? Seems very unsustainable in the most basic game theory sense.
I know there must be a good counter-argument to this- would love to hear it.
April 8th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
@ 30
There may be no counter-argument, unfortunately. One guy with a suitcase nuke could take over a small country, or hold a large nation hostage. Nation-states with ICBM capabilities complicates matters exponentially.
I think the idea is to reach an acceptable minimum. Something along the lines of fostert’s budding thesis at @ 18.
The only No Nuke game-theory scenario I can think of is to gather up and destroy all the world’s known fissionable material.
Again, though, you are right back to square one, one smart-ass country tucks away some U-235 and voila, those dirty cheaters become the world’s sole superpower.
April 9th, 2009 at 6:03 am
Not necessarily. One nuclear weapon really doesn’t do you much good, if you’re a nation state. You need an entire arsenal – enough and well enough dispersed and protected that you can make it clear that you can counter any attack on your nukes by a nuclear counterstrike.
Otherwise, you’re just setting yourself up as a target for annihilation after you’ve expended your one or two nukes.
Remember, nukes are not “ultimate weapons”. They can take out one relatively small area, depending on yield. Once that’s done, how do you deal with the rest of the country that’s now determined to destroy you? If your conventional military is not up to snuff, your ass is now grass.
And using nukes in a first strike is considered a major no-no by just about everybody (except George Bush and his ilk). So if you do that, you have much of the whole world down on your ass.
We don’t need “no nukes”, we just need nukes to be rendered more or less useless except as a last ditch means of preventing arbitrary “regime change”.
In other words, if Israel had one nukes and Iran had one nuke, and there was no way to prevent those nukes from being delivered in a counterstrike, neither one would be talking regime change.
And if Israel has 250, and Iran has one, but Iran can actually deliver that one, Israel has a problem contemplating regime change in Iran because Israel is too small to absorb a first strike, even though they have second strike potential. Whereas Iran can absorb an Israeli first strike, assuming it doesn’t involve enough of the Israeli arsenal to essentially destroy Iran’s entire infrastructure.
This is why Israel is opposed to Iran having a nuke (even though Iran IS NOT trying to have a nuke) – because it removes regime change from the equation, since Iran would be willing to use a nuke on Israel if regime change were inevitable. But Iran would never first strike Israel is regime change were off the table. So eliminating regime change as an option is the ONLY reason Iran would even consider having a nuke.
Whereas Israel, by building up one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world, clearly has more than defensive use in mind. They want a first strike capability.
April 9th, 2009 at 9:30 am
If we dismantle all the nukes, what will Zefram Cochrane use to build his warp ship in 2063?! Nuclear disarmament is obviously a Borg conspiracy.