The following guest editorial was written shortly before the second Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty held in Geneva, Switzerland, August 14-September 5. It makes clear why the nuclear arms race should, but will not, be the most urgent issue of the upcoming presidential campaigns.
Robert C. Johansen was president of the Institute for World Order and author of The National Interest and the Human Interest: An Analysis of U.S. Foreign Policy (Princeton, 1980) when this article appeared. --The Editors
Of one thing I am certain--the hour is too late for business as usual, for politics as usual, or for diplomacy as usual. An alliance for survival is needed-transcending regions and ideologies--if we are to assure mankind a safe passage to the twenty-first century." In these words Jimmy Carter warned in 1976 about the danger of nuclear weapons spreading to more countries. Four years and one Carter administration later, we still have business, politics, and diplomacy as usual.
No task is more urgent than to liberate all people from the specter of nuclear war and the harmful consequences of unnecessary radiation. The planned expansion of U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals, already capable of destroying all of the world's cities seven times over, casts doubt on the rationality and spiritual sanity of present political leaders and those who support them. The proliferation of weapons-usable nuclear materials and know-how puts a growing number of countries within a few months of possessing weapons, should policymakers decide to manufacture them.
If it is not already too late to avert a chain of political and technological events leading inexorably to the employment of nuclear weapons in combat, it soon will be.
The policy of nuclear deterrence may appear to be stable in the short run because it presumably has helped postpone major war. But in the long run, it is inherently unstable. For deterrence to succeed there must be a positive probability of its failure. Otherwise the threat to use nuclear weapons would not be credible.
How does the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970 fit into efforts to reverse the nuclear arms buildup? The articulated purpose of the treaty of 1970 is fourfold. It seeks 1) to prohibit countries which do not possess nuclear weapons from acquiring them and 2) to establish effective international inspection through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to insure that fissionable materials in reactors are not secretly diverted to weapons use.
In return for these restrictions on the non-nuclear weapon states, the nuclear-weapon states agree 3) to transfer civilian nuclear technology, equipment, and fuel to other signers of the treaty who desire them and 4) to make serious efforts to halt the nuclear arms buildup as a first step toward general and complete disarmament.
In practice, fulfillment of the first and second purposes has been severely limited because the treaty bans nuclear weapons only in countries which already have no intention of getting them. Governments not bound by the treaty include: Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Egypt, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Spain.
Pursuit of the third goal has produced even more dubious results. The advocates of the treaty miscalculated the consequences of transferring "peaceful" nuclear technology. The establishment of every peaceful nuclear installation moves its owner--despite IAEA inspection--a giant step closer to the development of nuclear weapons. The presence of a nuclear reactor provides its owner with fissionable materials that can, if reprocessed, be made into nuclear explosives. Should purchasers of nuclear technology ever decide to do so, there is no means to prevent them from openly building their own enrichment or reprocessing facilities, using fuel from their reactors supplied under guidelines specified in the treaty, and making bombs.
In addition, some parts of the treaty contradict its basic professed purpose. The United States and Soviet Union, as well as the other signatories, surprisingly overlooked the fact that every civilian nuclear power plant is itself a nuclear weapons arsenal. Reactor fuel, spent fuel, and radioactive wastes of reactors can be directly used as lethal weapons, capable of inflicting widespread death and injury, even without fabricating them into a weapon capable of a nuclear explosion. A little plutonium properly distributed, for example, could make Manhattan uninhabitable for generations.
In the name of stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the U.S. and other nuclear suppliers have placed weapons suitable for nuclear blackmail in the hands of every country now operating a reactor. Proliferation is not on the distant horizon; it is well under way.
The nuclear-weapon states have deliberately made no progress in realizing the fourth professed goal: to reverse the nuclear arms buildup as a step toward general and complete disarmament. At the time the treaty was signed in 1968, the United States and Soviet Union possessed a total of 5,550 strategic nuclear bombs and warheads. By the date of the second review conference in 1980, they had almost tripled the number to 14,500.
Despite a variety of contexts for discussing arms reductions, including more than a decade of bilateral strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) and the negotiation of two SALT treaties, the arms competition not only continues unabated, but also actually now approaches an unprecedentedly dangerous phase.
The next generation of weapons, which the SALT treaties were carefully tailored to allow, will make each side less secure, because these weapons are designed not to deter but instead to fight war and to initiate the use of nuclear weapons during a conventional war. Arms control negotiations, even if the SALT II treaty had been ratified, would not have stopped the development of a single weapons system wanted by U.S. and, presumably, Soviet military officials.
All the deficiencies of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, including its theoretical inconsistency and its practical ineffectiveness, spring from a single source: the intention to create a global regime based on inequity. The treaty does not establish a moral climate for generally delegitimizing all nuclear warheads. It establishes a structure for some states to possess such weapons and others never to obtain them.
If U.S. architects of the treaty intended to delegitimize nuclear weapons in general, they would have focused their energy and the treaty's most demanding provisions on those who have weapons--not those who have none. In practice, the treaty establishes a climate for the hegemony of the superpowers, and secondarily, of the other nuclear-weapon states.
The SALT II treaty--now being observed by both Washington and Moscow despite the failure of the U.S. Senate to ratify it--is an integral part of this superpower design. The treaty mainly formalizes a ceiling on the number of single warhead, stationary, land-based missiles. Deploying more of these would not increase Moscow's and Washington's advantages over other countries nearly as much as concentrating their money on more sophisticated technology beyond the reach of the rest of nations (more precise guidance systems; larger, MIRVed, mobile missiles), and on conventional intervention-ary forces to use in Third World contexts.
Similarly, the willingness of the technologically advanced nations to transfer civilian nuclear technology has been, from the outset, part of a strategy to buy off less industrialized nations and encourage them to accept the prevailing international hierarchy. In other words, the nuclear "haves" may own and stockpile nuclear arms, while the "have-nots" accept limitations on their sovereignty in the form of IAEA inspection. The nuclear-weapon states are not even required to submit their civilian nuclear facilities to the same inspection required for non-nuclear-weapon states. In states where uranium is used to make explosive weapons, no international monitors observe the quantities used. In states where uranium generates only electricity, international inspection is required.
Those states which have not ratified the treaty and are on the threshold of developing nuclear weapons have no incentive to join the treaty because the nuclear-weapon states continue to legitimize nuclear weapons and use them diplomatically. If it is as important as U.S. officials claim, for example, that the United States retain the strongest nuclear force in the world, then states that are economically and politically less well off might feel that they too could derive some benefits from having their own nuclear weapons capability.
To halt proliferation requires giving up the U.S.-Soviet effort to establish an inequitable nuclear regime which reinforces other economic and political inequities. To end these most troublesome inequities requires nuclear-weapon states to freeze and then dismantle their own nuclear arsenals. As Carter himself solemnly declared, "We have little right to ask others to deny themselves such weapons for the indefinite future unless we demonstrate meaningful progress toward the goal of control, then reduction, and ultimately, elimination of nuclear arsenals."
During the four years since that statement, the Carter administration has made no "meaningful progress." Some initiatives could have been taken by the United States alone as part of an invitation to the Soviet Union to reciprocate within a reasonable period of time. These include a moratorium on underground nuclear tests or on flight tests of nuclear delivery vehicles. Soviet compliance with both of these steps could be adequately monitored with existing national means of verification.
But these steps were not taken because of military objections from the Joint Chiefs and diplomatic opposition from Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Carter administration also could have supported rather than opposed the French proposal at the U.N. for establishing an international satellite monitoring agency as a step toward global monitoring and community-building which must accompany substantial arms reductions.
The superpowers and their citizens are primarily responsible for the blind march toward the militarization of our planet. The effort in the Non-Proliferation Treaty to close the door on the nuclear club after it has six, 10, or 15 members is a diversion from the most important task: to bring pressure to bear, through all possible nonviolent means, on officials in Moscow and Washington who can, if they will, reverse the arms buildup.
Since any government with nuclear technology unavoidably threatens the human rights--including the right to life itself--of millions of people outside its borders, there is a growing need for a global coalition of enlightened governments; sympathetic persons in religious, professional, and scientific communities; and peoples' movements to press for a demilitarized world.
All non-nuclear-weapon states should ask the Soviet Union and the United States to stop the nuclear arms race by adopting an immediate freeze on all further testing and deployment of nuclear weapons and of new missiles and aircraft designed primarily to deliver nuclear weapons. While no panacea, this is a reasonable place to begin, so that reductions may soon follow.
A second measure, equally important, can begin to delegitimize all nuclear weapons--instead of merely delegitimizing them for states who do not yet possess them, which is what the treaty now does. The nuclear-weapon countries should commit themselves never to use nuclear weapons against states not possessing them and never to use them first in combat against any opponent.
This step, which all U.S. administrations have rejected, could also be taken immediately and without simultaneous promises from other nuclear powers. Indeed, either the United States or the Soviet Union could take these initiatives by itself to demonstrate its good faith and to invite reciprocation by the other.
If a freeze and no-first-use pledge are not initiated, those countries favoring these steps should consider the following incentives:
• deny the non-cooperating superpower(s) overflight privileges for military aircraft within the airspace of all countries favoring the proposed steps;
• deny the non-cooperating superpower(s) the right to use the airports and seaports of all countries favoring the proposed steps;
• deny the non-cooperating superpower(s) the right to sail nuclear submarines and all other military vessels through the territorial waters of countries favoring the proposed steps, including important international straits; and
• constrict the flow of strategic raw materials and petroleum to the non-cooperating superpower(s).
In addition, a timetable and strategy should be developed:
• to extend to the nuclear-weapon states the same limitation on sovereignty that the non-nuclear-weapon states have accepted in agreeing to IAEA inspection of all their nuclear facilities;
• to persuade one member of NATO and the Warsaw Pact to become a nuclear-free zone, and periodically to expand this zone; and
• to press industrialized governments to provide more financial and research support for using renewable sources of energy.
Nuclear weapons hold such profoundly negative consequences for the citizens of every country that people should also take a variety of actions individually and collectively. We need to join hands across national boundaries to strengthen political leverage against all governments that develop, produce, or continue to possess nuclear weapons.
Scientists and engineers should, insofar as possible, refuse to work on weapons-related projects. Educators should teach from an orientation designed to gain understanding about what it means to think, feel, and act like a responsible global citizen. Individuals should consider refusing to pay war taxes and refusing to volunteer, to register, or to appear if conscripted for the armed forces. In some contexts citizens should selectively boycott a leading producer of weapons of mass destruction, such as Westinghouse. Religious authorities and institutions should offer spiritual counsel, political leadership, and financial support toward these ends.
Civil disobedience understandably will not be attractive or possible for many citizens. Yet for those who feel called to such acts, the justification is clear. If now in retrospect it seems justifiable for Mahatma Gandhi to have committed civil disobedience to protest imperialism expressed in a British tax on salt in India in 1930, or if Henry David Thoreau willingly faced imprisonment because he sought to abolish slavery, then similar acts may be called for to liberate ourselves--all nuclear hostages--from the species-endangering consequences of present diplomatic drift and deliberate preparations to fight nuclear war.
In normal times, it is more pleasant and personally less costly to acquiesce to, rather than stand against, the policies of decision-makers perpetuating military competition and a war system. But these are not normal times. In seeking to abolish nuclear weapons, and eventually the institution of war itself, the challenge we confront and the opportunities we can seize are at least as profound as those faced by our ancestors who, against great odds, worked to abolish long-accepted institutions of monarchy, slavery, imperialism, and patriarchy.
Today's challenge, we hope, will not be our last. But at this moment in history, none is more important to all our futures. If we cannot meet this test, which requires little more than subordinating unneccessary national advantages to serving the common interest in survival, success in meeting other challenges does not matter.
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