ABSTRACT
When Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev discussed the elimination of nuclear weapons in Reykjavik, they seemed to take the consent of the other NWS for granted. Or they assumed that any objections would be overruled: others simply had to follow the lead of the two big ones. No reference is made to other NWS in the US and Soviet memoranda of conversation, or in the accounts of the discussions by Reagan, Shultz, Gorbachev and Dobrynin. This speaks to a fundamental feature of the Cold War: without a shred of doubt, the superpowers were dominant, certainly in their own eyes and most probably also in those of others. The other NWS were mere appendices to the bilateral dimension of the world order. At the time, there were six NWS – the five veto powers of the UN Security Council plus Israel. Today, nine states possess nuclear weapons. A multicentric world has replaced the bipolar order, complicating the task of nuclear abolition. No longer can the others be subordinated to the two, and the strategic logic is not the same in all dyads. Non-governmental networks may also get hold of nuclear materials, and seizure of ready-made bombs cannot be excluded. When – 20 years after Reykjavik – the four US statesmen (Shultz, Nunn, Kissinger, Perry) revived the vision of a nuclear-weapon-free world (NWFW), they worried that the world of nuclear weapons had become too dangerous. In Asia, furthermore, there is the view that nuclear weapons can be potent equalizers between a strong state and a much weaker one. With the Russian annexation of Crimea came similar claims: if Ukraine had kept the nuclear weapons that were on its soil when the Soviet Union broke down, Russia would have been deterred. As tensions between Russia and the West intensified, the Kremlin, too, accentuated that logic. Confronted with a conventionally superior NATO on its borders, Russia found nuclear weapons useful both domestically and internationally: domestically to mark strength in a nationalistic political setting; internationally to underline vital national interests. However ill-founded such arguments can be – the first use of nuclear weapons can bring terrible punishment at the hand of stronger opponents; Ukrainians never broke the Soviet
codes – they can translate into realities, for security policies are based on perceptions and perceptions are fuelled by cultural codes, historical circumstances, national sentiments and personal preferences. There is much more to the matter than rational actor models can explain. Today, the USA and Russia are modernizing their arsenals while the Asian NWS are expanding theirs. Since the conclusion of New START in 2010, there have been no disarmament negotiations. The international arms control regime, which has limited existing nuclear arsenals and the proliferation of nuclear arms, is under pressure. Thomas Schelling, one of the founders of arms control and a leading analyst of international security for more than half a century, nevertheless characterizes contemporary security affairs as a state of ‘nuclear quiet’.2 Compared with the frantic arms-racing of the Cold War, when East-West relations sometimes boiled down to little more than nuclear-weapon accountancy and related policy debates, this is understandable. Equally understandable are Manpreet Sethi’s concerns about the ongoing build-up and instabilities in Asia, where the trend is moving from worrisome to worse. The Asian NWS are geographically close, even bordering each other, whereas the USA and the Soviet Union were 5,000 km apart; China, India and Pakistan have territorial conflicts, while the USA and the Soviet Union had none (they fought wars in other parts of the world, but by proxy); in none of the Asian dyads has there been a consistent, long-term interest in arms control; North Korea and Pakistan are shifting back and forth between stability pursuits and brinkmanship; and there are lingering concerns about the security of Pakistani weapons because of the fragility of the regime and of terrorist activities in and around Pakistan. To Sethi, Asia is all but ‘quiet’.
