In a time of turbulence in world politics, more than one observer will question the usefulness of an edited book volume that starts with the assumption that a world without nuclear weapons is desirable, not just as a long-term ideal, but as a politicalâalbeit ambitiousâgoal. On the other hand, the enhanced nuclear rhetoric by Russia and to a lesser extent the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the uncertain future of the Iran deal and the end of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, as well as the North Korean nuclear threat also show that nuclear inertia may be a recipe for disaster.
The nuclear era not only gave birth to extremely powerful atomic (and later on even more destructive H-) bombs, but also marks the start of an ongoing discussion about the morality of the useâand threat of useâof these weapons. Nuclear pacifists categorically reject nuclear weapons on ethical grounds, or believe that the dangers that go along with these weapons outweigh their potential stabilizing effects. This volume aims to prolong the ideas behind this particular tradition of thought that we would like to brandish as non-nuclear peace. During the âLong Peaceâ after the Second World War (Gaddis 1989), the world came close to nuclear disaster, in particular during the Cuban missile crisis and also later on in the beginning of the 1980s. The main objective of non-nuclear peace is preventing nuclear war. Just as negative peace means the absence of war, non-nuclear peace corresponds to the absence of the fear of nuclear war, something which can in all likelihood only be realized by eliminating nuclear weapons. We therefore define non-nuclear peace as a concept of peace that takes issue with the logic of nuclear deterrence and that envisions a peace order attuned to the exigencies of a post-nuclear world.
Throughout the nuclear era skeptics have come to believe that a world without nuclear weapons is a pipe dream (Payne 1998; Quinlan 2007â2008; Tertrais 2010; Waltz 1981). According to them, a nuclear weapons-free world is not only not feasible, it is also not desirable. They base their perspective on the idea that a strong deterrent is very useful (or even necessary) in an anarchic world in which the state units have to ensure their own survival, since no world government exists that might be relied upon in times of danger. Skeptics further point to the practice of international politics since the beginning of the Cold War, which seems to prove the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence . No major warâlet alone a world warâhas been started since the end of the Second World War, which not by chance (the advocates of nuclear weapons argue) corresponds with the birth of the nuclear era. Nuclear hawks admit that a world without nuclear weapons would be ideal, but that it would be irresponsible to even try to make that happen. A non-nuclear peace, according to them, would be unstable and therefore dangerous. Certainly today, when US hegemony is being questioned due to the upcoming power of China, the growing assertiveness of Russia, and the worldwide rise of nationalism and populism, they argue that the international order should not be further destabilized by eradicating one of the main pillars of stability, namely nuclear weapons.
1 Changing Context, New Debate
That said, we believe that there is nevertheless reason to try to give a new impulse to the intellectual debate because of other changed international circumstances. This time not for the bad, but for the good (in the eyes of the nuclear pacifists), more in particular the negotiation and conclusion of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (âBan Treatyâ) in 2017. While the latter, including the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICANâs) Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, did not receive much attention from mainstream media, the Ban Treaty can be regarded as revolutionary insofar as it for the first time forbids the development, production, stockpiling, transfer, testing, use and threat of use of nuclear weapons. Once the Ban Treaty enters into force, which will probably occur in 2021 at the latest, the existence of nuclear weapons will not only be regarded as inhumane, and therefore immoral and illegitimate, but also illegal, not only by those who are already convinced, but in all likelihood also by more and more people and states that belong to the âsilent majorityâ, even inside the nuclear armed states and their allies. Or that is at least the hope of the advocates of the Treaty (Sauer and Reveraert 2018).
The fact is that due to the aforementioned turbulence in world politics, numerous âclassicâ nuclear arms control treaties have not yet entered into force (the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty) (CTBT) or have been entirely unilaterally abandoned by the US (the Anti-Ballistic missile Treaty, the Iran deal, INF). Since the future of New Strategic Arms Reduction Talks Treaty (START) and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is also at stake, the possibility exists that the Ban Treaty will be the only nuclear disarmament treaty left (together with the regional nuclear weapon free zones treaties).
The Ban Treaty shows the impatience by the majority of states in the world with respect to the implementation of the legal promise of getting rid of nuclear weapons, made by the five formal nuclear weapon states in the NPT. The tables seem to be turning: for the first time ever, the non-nuclear weapon states are in the driving seat, while the nuclear armed states and their allies are a minority. This may result in them feeling stigmatized, but whether this situation will be sufficient to give a boost to nuclear disarmament remains to be seen. Advocates of nuclear weapons certainly do not like the Ban Treaty (Roberts 2018), but it is not always clear whether that is because they believe the Treaty wonât have any effect or whether it will (and therefore bring us closer to abolition).
Regardless of the exact impact of the Ban Treaty, it is useful to start thinking about the next phase, namely how to imagine non-nuclear peace in light of contemporary and future global political and cultural conditions. This is therefore not another edited volume in which proponents and opponents of nuclear elimination repeat their well-rehearsed arguments. The objective here is to leave the trenches and to make another constructive step forward in the thinking on how to reach and sustain a peaceful order without nuclear weapons.
2 Non-Nuclear Peace and Scholarly Responsibility
If there is one scholar without whom nuclear weapons would probably never have been invented, it is Albert Einstein. We refer of course to his scientific inventions that led to the splitting of the atom, but even more to the letter that he and his Hungarian colleague Leo Szilard wrote to US President Roosevelt in 1939. In their letter they warned that German scientists under Hitler were making progress in developing a superweapon. That letter helped convince Roosevelt to set up the gigantic and secret Manhattan Project that led to the development of the first atomic bombs ever produced by humankind, which in turn destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki within a few months. Einstein later admitted that writing that letter was his biggest mistake ever. Einstein was a pacifist right from the beginning. He publicly spoke out against a letter in which the German authorities minimalized the atrocities that happened in the first weeks of the First World War in Belgium. In the 1930s, he had to flee his country to reach the US by boat via Antwerp. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he became an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons. His last public action, right before he died in 1955, was the signing of the so-called Russell-Einstein manifesto, of which the best-known sentence is: âRemember your humanity and forget the restâ. It was a warning against the nuclear arms race, signed by different scientists and intellectuals of that time. One of them was Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, pacifist, and socialist. He had actively resisted the UKâs participation in the First World War, for which he was jailed for six months. Russell was also an outspoken critic of atomic weapons: in 1959, he published the essay (in the form of a book) âCommon sense and nuclear warfareâ. Later on, he founded the International War Crime Tribunal on Vietnam. One of the other members of this Tribunal was the German philosopher Gunter Anders, born Gunther Stern, cousin of Walter Benjamin, and Ph.D. student of Edmund Husserl. Anders was shocked by what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later became known in Germany as the âAtom philosopherâ. In his book The Obsolescence of Humankind in 1956, Anders warned of our inability to imagine the destruction that nuclear weapons could provoke. Gunther Anders was first married to Hannah Arendt, who already as a child had read Emmanuel Kant. Before becoming a famous philosopher and political scientist, Arendt studied under Heidegger, had a brief affair with him, and moved to the US because of Nazism, just like Einstein and Anders. Arendt criticized our reliance on nuclear weapons in her book On violence, published in 1972. Last but not least, there is Hans Morgenthau, one of the founding fathers of the study domain of International Relations and known as a quintessential Realist. Nevertheless, just like Anders and Russell, he was against the Vietnam War and against nuclear weapons, and for that reason, championed a world government.
What is remarkable is that these five scholars, who acted not as a group but as individual scholars, all lived through two world wars in the pre-nuclear era, and later on did not embrace nuclear deterrence as a panacea for world peace (see also the chapter by Sylvest in this volume). On the contrary, they strongly believed that the development of nuclear weapons would lead to their use, and in all likelihood, to the end of humankind. They acted as public intellectualsâor norms entrepreneurs as they would be called today (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998)âby writing and speaking out against nuclear weapons. Nowadays, one is surprisingly hard-pressed to find any so-called Realist who op...