Nuclear Proliferation and International Security

Sverre Lodgaard, Bremer Maerli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134110001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has long been key in non-proliferation and disarmament activities. The Treaty is the major international legal obstacle for states seeking nuclear weapon capabilities.

In retrospect, and despite setbacks, the overall impact of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has been significant and gratifying. Its continued success is by no means guaranteed. As old nuclear dangers persist and new ones evolve, policies to halt nuclear proliferation are more disparate than at any other time. Nuclear weapons remain an essential part of the security policies of leading states and many developmental states maintain strong nuclear weapon ambitions, while terrorists have actively been seeking nuclear capabilities.

In search of an overarching strategy that recognizes both the flaws of the existing non-proliferation regime, and the value of some of the corrections proposed by regime critics, this volume assesses contemporary efforts to stem nuclear proliferation. In doing so, Nuclear Proliferation and International Security examines a number of cases with a view to recommending better non-proliferation tools and strategies. The contributors comprise renowned international scholars, who have been selected to obtain the best possible analyses of critically important issues related to international non-proliferation dynamics and the future integrity of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

1
Introduction

Morten Bremer Mærli and Sverre Lodgaard

On the night of 27 February 1943, in a valley some 170 km west of Oslo, nine Norwegian commandos climbed down a steep gorge and across an ice-choked river. On the top of the other side, a railway track led straight to the Vemork hydrogen-electrolysis plant at Rjukan – then the world’s only producer of heavy water. The plant, controlled by Germans in Nazi-occupied Norway, had become an essential element of Hitler’s nuclear programme. The saboteurs cut open the railway gate, entered the plant and mounted two explosive charges. Vital parts of the plant were destroyed, together with weeks of heavy water production.

The Vemork raid was one of the most heroic sabotage acts of the Second World War, daring and spectacular in every way. It was, moreover, the first act of counter-proliferation, albeit a defensive act in a war of aggression launched by Germany. After a follow-up bombing raid by the Allies in November 1943, the Germans abandoned the heavy water production altogether. A second attack by Norwegian commandos, sinking a local ferry, ensured that not even semi-finished products from the plant would arrive at Nazi research facilities. Then, like now, the exceptional power of nuclear weapons called for exceptional actions.

Nuclear weapons were soon to transform international affairs in the most fundamental of ways. As the Cold War unfolded, they spread through their own chain reaction. In 1945, only the United States possessed the ability to rein and release the destructive inner forces of the atom. The two Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated, demonstrating the unparalleled destructivity of such weapons.

By 1964, four other states had tested and hence crossed the nuclear threshold: the former Soviet Union in 1949, the United Kingdom in 1952, France in 1960 and China in 1964. In 1968, the P-5 – the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – became the five nuclear-weapon states recognized by the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT). The treaty invited all other states to forgo such weapons.

That call was not heeded by everybody. India performed a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ in 1974 – but did not confirm its membership in the nuclear club until 1998, when, in the course of a few hectic days in May that year, it performed a series of weapon tests. Pakistan followed suit a couple of weeks later. Israel has never admitted to having nuclear weapons, yet its policy of opacity is not quite opaque: the first couple of bombs were assembled already in 1967, in a crash effort immediately before the Six Day War (Cohen 1998).

In 1981, Israeli fighter planes attacked Osirak, an Iraqi nuclear reactor complex under development. The mission was supposed to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing a nuclear-weapon capability. The strike was hailed as a counter-proliferation success, the second of its kind after the Vemork action in wartime Norway.

However, when the full story of Iraq’s nuclear programme got known after the Gulf war of 1991, this turned out to be a myth: it was only after the bombing that Saddam was able to muster human and material resources in pursuit of nuclear arms. Still, the use of force to destroy the programmes of states of particular proliferation concern – North Korea and Iran in particular – remains an option in US foreign policy.

Four states have willingly renounced their nuclear weapons. When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Ukraine became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, but chose to accede to the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state (NNWS) together with Belarus and Kazakhstan.

In March 1993, two years after it had signed the NPT as a NNWS, President de Klerk declared that South Africa had produced, and then dismantled, six gun-type nuclear explosives. An international verification mission, who got full access to all relevant information, confirmed it. The turnaround was the fruit of regime change, as majority rule was about to replace the apartheid system.

Many other states have discontinued their attempts to acquire nuclear capabilities. One of them, Libya, abandoned its nuclear programme in 2003, due to a unique combination of international pressure and domestic developments.

Whereas the first half of the 1990s saw substantial nuclear arms reductions, a boost in the number of NPT members, and a gradual strengthening of the non-proliferation regime, trends have turned since then. In many ways, the prominence of nuclear weapons is on the rise in military planning and world politics. Some forty nations have the technical infrastructure to pursue nuclear-weapon programmes; the political incentives to acquire them have grown stronger in some of the most conflict-ridden regions of the world; and the integrity of the international non-proliferation regime – the main barrier against proliferation – can no longer be taken for granted.

Non-proliferation dilemmas

The end of the Cold War and the break-up of the Soviet Union created new and immediate proliferation challenges. Gone was the bipolar stability, and gone was the totalitarian control of the world’s largest nuclear complex, housing weapons in the tens of thousands and hundreds of tons of fissile material. The vast potential accessibility of nuclear material and technology might ease the acquisition efforts of any nuclear aspirant. At the same time, a new breed of non-state actors operating outside the sphere of traditional deterrence, and escaping international export controls, had entered the scene.

A.Q. Kahn, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, was the spider in an extensive illicit network in nuclear technologies, with states operating on the fringes of the non-proliferation regime on the customer list. Highly profiled terrorist networks like al-Qaeda and the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo were developing their own nuclear agendas.

Today, what is left of the nuclear arms control architecture to meet such challenges is basically the NPT and associated non-proliferation instruments – an accord geared at controlling the nuclear activities of states and preventing interstate proliferation. Disarmament structures have crumbled and verified nuclear disarmament has come to a standstill. For the NPT this is untenable, for non-proliferation and disarmament are inextricably linked: without progress on nuclear disarmament there cannot be much progress on non-proliferation, and in the absence of an efficient regime to curb the spread of nuclear arms it may be impossible to revive nuclear disarmament. Predicated on this relationship, the treaty is under serious strain. Also, in the face of recent cases of non-compliance, its enforcement mechanisms are obviously too weak. The total failure of the 2005 NPT Review Conference as well as the 2005 UN Millennium Summit to substantially address contemporary nuclear threats testify to the crisis in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

Current US policies against proliferation may be seen as a much-needed response to these new challenges and treaty deficiencies (Ellis 2003:116). The Bush administration has engaged actively in improving nuclear export controls and in strengthening the firewall between civilian and military nuclear activities. It has proposed mechanisms for reliable fuel supplies, worked to repatriate and secure proliferation-attractive and vulnerable nuclear fuel, and enhanced international capabilities to interdict illicit shipments of nuclear material, equipment and technology through the Proliferation Security Initiative.

In April 2004, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1540 from a draft text submitted by the US delegation. The resolution identifies important measures to strengthen international non-proliferation through strengthened regulatory order. UNSC Resolution 1540 reverts to the common diplomatic language of non-proliferation, multilateralism and cooperation (Walker 2004:75). It aims at filling a gap in the international non-proliferation regime – proper responses against non-state entities.

These initiatives may be obscured, however, by Washington’s own policies of nuclear exceptionalism. In an à la carte approach to nuclear arms control, the US openly dismisses some treaties as irrelevant, anachronistic or dangerously unreliable while taking a selective view of the NPT, and stresses the obligations of NNWSs while belittling its own commitment to disarm under Article VI of the treaty.

Furthermore, the jury is still out when it comes to the merits of US and NATO plans for deploying defensive systems to counter emerging ballistic missile capabilities. The systems proposed, planned and put in place may upset strategic stability and spur renewed arms build-up. The new Topol M generation of Russian nuclear missiles is the first such step since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia seems determined not to be intimidated by the new missile defence systems.¹

China, which has only a few tens of intercontinental strategic missiles, appears bent on expanding its force to maintain a deterrence capability vis-à-vis the United States. The United States, on its part, never resolved to base this relationship on mutual deterrence. It deems a combination of offensive and defensive capabilities to be essential in meeting the security requirements of the twenty-first century. Counter-proliferation may be understood as the ‘full range of military preparations and activities to reduce, and protect against, the threat posed by nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and their associated delivery means’ (US Department of Defense 2001:78). It may operate as a stand-alone policy. However, it may also be used as a means of regime change – an externally initiated overthrow of a government considered illegitimate or threatening.

The currency of arms control and disarmament has been capabilities – a question of limiting the number of nuclear bombs, warheads and delivery systems along with changes in the doctrines guiding their use. The Bush administration turned its attention to the owners – making regime change a central tenet in US foreign and security policy – and trying to control nuclear intentions by carrots and sticks.² In rudimentary terms, nuclear weapons come in two categories: the stabilizing and ‘good nukes’ of the United States and its allies and the ‘bad nukes’ of rogue, proliferating states. A logical concomitant of this shift is diminished interest in nuclear verification. Intentions cannot be verified, only confirmed or disproved through deeds.

About the book

According to the NPT, nuclear weapons are temporarily legal in five countries (the five that had tested prior to 1 January 1967), not illegal in three others (Israel, India and Pakistan, which never joined the NPT)³ and forbidden everywhere else (Perkovich 2003). Due to the non-proliferation norm established by the NPT, the long-term efforts of the United States and others to gain acceptance for it, and the international inspection regime developed under the NPT, the world now has nine nuclear-weapon states. Without the treaty, this figure could have been much higher (Bunn 2003).

The vast majority of states share the overarching goal of nuclear non-proliferation. Further spread of nuclear explosives is simply not deemed acceptable. However, while the norm of nuclear non-proliferation has been widely recognized, the preferred means to uphold it differ strongly. US policies not only go beyond the confines of the international non-proliferation regime: in important respects, they run counter to basic regime characteristics.

This volume discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the nuclear non-proliferation regime as well as the functional and dysfunctional aspects of US and other major power policies. It examines proliferation pressures from above (the failure to disarm), from within (Iran, North Korea), from outside (India, Israel, Pakistan), as well as pressures from below the regime (in the non-state paradigm). Cognizant of the loss of common ground, and of the limits on common policies imposed by divergent threat perceptions and current nuclear ...

Table of contents

• Routledge global security studies
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Growing pressures, fragile policies
• Part II Encountering proliferators, real or potential
• Part III Building restraint, reducing risks
• Part IV Assessments and recommendations
• References
• Index