Tag Archive for: nuclear disarmament

Editors’ picks for 2018: ‘Australia and nuclear strategy: the empty middle ground?’

Originally published 28 February 2018.

Some years ago, Christine Leah and I published an article that explored Australian thinking about nuclear weapons and strategy. We argued that for more than six decades Australians had essentially espoused ‘three visions of the bomb’.

Those visions—which we labelled Menzian, Gortonian and disarmer—competed on four grounds: the role that nuclear weapons play in international order; the doctrine of deterrence; the importance of arms control; and the relevance of nuclear weapons to Australia’s specific needs.

It’s important to have a sense of each of the visions. Menzians believed that nuclear weapons made a positive contribution to global order provided that they were held by responsible, self-deterred great powers. Deterrence played a central role in that contribution because the primary role of nuclear weapons was to deter great-power war, not to fight it.

Extended deterrence allowed great powers’ allies to benefit from the security offered by nuclear weapons without needing to build their own. Arms control agreements were important in stabilising international competition and minimising the risk of nuclear proliferation.

And Australian security was maximised by constraining nuclear weapons to their broader, indirect, systemic role; it would be damaged by the wider spread of such weapons.

Gortonians believed that nuclear weapons, over time, would proliferate beyond the small group of great powers. But they also believed that great powers were, like other states, self-centred, and that nuclear weapons would only ever be used to defend key interests. Since interests usually attenuated with distance, it would always be difficult for a great power to extend deterrence to its distant allies; deterrence was, by its nature, a ‘local’ phenomenon.

Arms control wasn’t central to the Gortonian world view: this was the group that opposed Australian signature of the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, fearing it would tie our hands in relation to future options. And, of course, the Gortonians believed that an indigenous nuclear arsenal was necessary to safeguard properly Australia’s key strategic interests—including defence of the continent itself.

Disarmers saw nuclear weapons as order-destroyers rather than order-builders. They denied that great powers were responsible custodians of nuclear arsenals and believed that such states were even more self-interested than smaller states. They declared nuclear deterrence—and extended nuclear deterrence—a myth, and pointed to both the continuation of conventional war and the potentially high cost of system failures as reasons to seek a better path to security.

The disarmers were arms controllers on steroids: they sought grand outcomes, and pursued an absolutist version of nuclear disarmament. And, of course, they saw no value in nuclear weapons for Australian security—whether of the indirect contribution championed by the Menzians or the direct contribution sought by the Gortonians. They wanted Australia to disengage from the nuclear world—spurning the notion of extended nuclear deterrence, closing the joint facilities and forgoing sales of its own uranium.

The three visions advertised radically different futures. The Menzians had a plan for Australia to live in a world where nuclear weapons were held by a small number of great powers. The Gortonians had a plan for Australia to live in a more highly proliferated world. The disarmers had a plan for Australia to live in a world without nuclear weapons.

Each of the visions boasted a long lineage, but it would be wrong to imagine that they were equally influential in shaping Australian nuclear policy. In brief, the Menzians were the dominant vision in every decade; the Gortonians were the nuclear mavericks of the right, and the disarmers the nuclear mavericks of the left. Across both major political parties, Labor and the Coalition, a bipartisan commitment to the Menzian vision prevailed.

And so we come to 2018.

An age of nuclear revival is upon us. The great powers are modernising their nuclear arsenals. North Korea has shown that it can design and test not merely simple fission devices, but thermonuclear ones. Our major ally, the United States, has published a Nuclear Posture Review that’s distinctly more muscular than the one it published in 2010—despite the key elements of continuity that the latest document contains.

A small debate has begun to unfold about whether Australia should be reconsidering its own indigenous nuclear arsenal—a debate containing many resonances from the Gortonian vision. Separately, the disarmer vision has begun to reclaim its ground, championing the nuclear ban treaty as the way forward, and urging Australian signature and ratification.

But what’s striking about the recent national conversation on nuclear weapons has been the relative absence of the Menzian voice. Governments have traditionally been key supporters of that vision because it articulates a centrist, moderate view of nuclear order, and because it allows Australia to benefit from nuclear deterrence while bearing few of the costs. Moreover, it adds meaning and purpose to Australia’s long-running efforts to strengthen global and regional non-proliferation regimes.

But in recent years, public defence of nuclear deterrence has been confined to a few references in defence white papers. Ministers and departmental heads, for whom the complexities of nuclear order were once the grist of daily debate, have moved on to other priorities, as though the big nuclear questions have all been settled.

That’s wrong. Nuclear issues are returning rapidly to the international agenda. Menzians need to find their voice—and soon. If they don’t, the other two visions will begin to compete over the empty middle ground. And Australians would find that competition bitter and divisive.

ICAN and the search for the fortunate islands

This year’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has stirred mixed reactions. The Norwegian Nobel Committee states that the organisation received the prize ‘for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons’. Some commentators have seen the award as rewarding a new, more activist, civil-society-based approach to peace, bypassing the old institutionalised, state-centred model. Others are less charitable (see here and here, for example).

Certainly the award maintains the committee’s reputation for surprising choices. Its reasoning’s arguable too. For one thing, I wouldn’t have thought the humanitarian consequences of direct use of nuclear weapons were in need of much publicity. They’ve been well known since the bombing of Hiroshima. For those of a more scientific mind, Samuel Glasstone and Philip Dolan’s 1977 text, The effects of nuclear weapons, covers the ground. And as for the nuclear ban treaty, it’s primarily a diplomatic symbol of disarmament—a norm-setter—rather than a practical instrument.

More ominously, though, the award can be seen as reinforcing the judgement that the tide’s going out on nuclear disarmament, not coming in. Several years back, one international security analyst drily observed that any year in which the international community had time to focus on the problem of small arms (like AK-47s) was actually a good year in international security. A similar observation might be made here: with all due respect to ICAN, any year in which the most notable achievement in the disarmament field is a civil society group’s advocacy of disarmament is actually an awful year for the broader objective.

Some will think those judgements too harsh, and I suppose much depends on how one sees ICAN’s signal achievement during the year—namely, its advocacy of the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Fans say the treaty’s unique and special—the first time the international community has outlawed nuclear weapons. Others hold a bleaker view. I must confess my sympathies lie with that second group. The ban treaty was adopted in July at the United Nations by 122 nations that gave up exactly nothing. None of the 122 actually deploys nuclear weapons or benefits from an extended nuclear guarantee from a nuclear-weapon state. And all of them have already previously undertaken, in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, not to build nuclear weapons.

Still, the treaty’s a worrying sign: as the requirements of nuclear arms control are becoming more demanding, large segments of the world appear to have been lulled into the false security of believing that the best approach to nuclear weapons is just to ban them. That’s a dopey idea. So far, it has taken the combined efforts of many players, over decades, to define a global nuclear order that—in William Walker’s words—turns on two linked systems: a managed system of deterrence and a managed system of abstinence. At a single stroke, the ban treaty delegitimises the first and defines an alternative vision of the second.

In their efforts to insist that nuclear weapons are just like long-lived anti-personnel landmines—marginal to international security—ban advocates risk pulling down the long pole in the tent of the current global order. By making the perfect the enemy of the good—after all, its signatories don’t believe any nuclear weapons are ‘good’—the ban treaty will probably make great-power nuclear arms control harder, not easier. Gradual, verifiable reductions in nuclear arsenals, which have seen US and Russian warhead numbers fall by tens of thousands and increased strategic stability between the superpowers, are, in any event, becoming more difficult to negotiate now that the ceilings are dropping to levels more commensurate with anticipated missions and relations between the great powers are souring. But having the ban enthusiasts shout unhelpfully from the sidelines that the real number should be zero warheads, not 1,550, or 1,000, or 300, is just going to make the process even more constipated.

Nuclear-weapon states that sign the ban treaty—and none look likely to do so—would (under Article 4) receive a period of grace within which to rid themselves of their satanic burdens. But no such period of grace would extend to signatories—like Australia—that currently shelter under another state’s nuclear umbrella. Under the subclauses of Article 1, they’re obliged to renounce their own nuclear umbrella and denounce the broader existence of nuclear umbrellas in the modern world.

In short, we’d confront a world of unreality if we headed down the path that the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize propose. Putting things in their proper perspective, the pursuit of nuclear disarmament is the geopolitical equivalent of poet Ernest Dowson’s search for the fortunate islands. Dowson’s hero, of course, was doomed to a protracted and potentially fruitless search ‘in the seas of no discovery’. ICAN’s approach is much more direct: it proposes finding the fortunate islands by banning the unfortunate ones.

Australia and nuclear weapons

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In late October, Christine Leah and Crispin Rovere published a provocative piece on the War is Boring blog. Titled ‘Australia needs nukes’—and the Twitter accounts of the authors suggest it wasn’t their title—the piece argued not merely that Australia would benefit from having its own nuclear deterrent but, more audaciously, that Australia might properly be seen as a legitimate nuclear weapon state under the NPT. That second claim’s a bridge too far for me, and a rebuttal published on Arms Control Wonk suggests it was a bridge too far for others as well. Notwithstanding the rebuttal, the National Interest Buzz subsequently republished the original Leah-Rovere piece, from where it was picked up and republished by the Asia Times.

Since the piece refuses to die—despite Dr Leah’s acceptance of the criticisms on Arms Control Wonk—I want to offer a brief commentary here on the original argument. To get the specific out of the way of the general, let me say that I don’t believe the Australian government ever gave much consideration to the option of seeking nuclear-weapon-state status under the NPT. We know for a fact that some officials considered the option. But I’m not aware of ministerial weight ever being put behind the idea. And, as Hassan Elbahtimy and Matthew Harries argue in their rebuttal, it would involve some heavy-duty lifting to make the claim now, 45 years after Australia signed the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state.

Let’s start with some basic facts. First, Australia is a signatory of the NPT and it’s not a repentant state. It doesn’t regret the choice of nuclear identity it made by its signature. That choice wasn’t made on a sudden whim. Australian thinking about nuclear weapons, since at least 1957, has been dominated by a ‘Menzian’ vision—that such weapons could make a positive contribution to global security as long as they are held by responsible great powers sufficiently aware of the awful consequences of use as to be self-deterred. The two competing visions of nuclear weapons—Gortonians who wanted Australia to have its own arsenal, and disarmers who favoured universal disarmament—represented distinct minorities on the Australian strategic spectrum, albeit long-lived ones. True, the Gortonians enjoyed their best years in the late 1950s and through the 1960s. But it would be wrong to think that by 1970 Australia stood committed to a nuclear weapons program abruptly and reluctantly terminated by signature of the NPT.

Still, that doesn’t mean the Menzian vision is destined to rule forever. The vision turns upon two assumptions: that nuclear weapons remain confined to responsible great powers, and that the Asian strategic environment doesn’t slide towards a darker future. Both of those assumptions are eroding—although we might argue amongst ourselves about how much and how quickly. Nuclear weapons are gradually spreading to states that we wouldn’t usually think of as responsible great powers. And the pace of proliferation would quicken sharply if status quo powers—like Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey—were to withdraw from the NPT and begin manufacture and deployment of their own arsenals.

The darker future in the Asian strategic environment has two, possibly related, forms. The first form would involve loss of credibility in the US’s extended nuclear assurances to its regional allies. That might seem unlikely, but it certainly isn’t impossible. As the region becomes more multipolar, relative US strategic weight is going down—meaning the credibility of US assurances faces a more challenging structural environment. Moreover, if credibility breaks at one point a ripple effect could easily ensue.

The second form of the darker future would involve the return of revisionist powers in Asia. In a regional strategic environment where coercive powers enjoyed greater freedom to coerce, other states would start looking for game-changers of their own. Part of that search might well involve the re-consideration of serious options set aside in more benign times. The notion that deterrence should become a national enterprise rather than an international one—a core tenet of the Gortonian vision, but one disabled by signature of the NPT—might well grow a new set of legs in such circumstances.

Where does all that leave us? Australia isn’t a nuclear weapon state under the NPT. And its dominant view of nuclear weapons is one under which Australia doesn’t need an arsenal of its own. Australia’s strategic preference would be for that status, and the permissive conditions which enable it, to continue. We just can’t be sure they will.