ABSTRACT
Over the past 70 years that nuclear weapons have been around, we have grown so attached to the ‘balance of terror’ and the ‘stability’ they are supposed to generate that we have actually become apprehensive of liberating ourselves. We believe that there is an inherent sense of stability in a nuclear dyad where two adversarial sides are facing the prospect not of the victory of one side or domination, but of mutual defeat and destruction. We even derive comfort from this belief. This is reminiscent of the mind-set that existed at the time of slavery. When demands for the abolition of slavery were first made, there were those who argued that the economic and social system would not be able to survive the drastic change and would collapse. A similar nuclear dogma today appears to constrain us with the belief that the existing stability would be endangered in the absence of nuclear weapons. As with the situation nearly two centuries ago, we fear collapse – this time of the political and security system that has been built with much intellectual effort in the past half-century to ensure the ‘stability’ of a nuclear-deterrence world (Schelling 2009, 124-129). Some even question whether the current state of the world, where the numbers of nuclear weapons in the superpower arsenals have been substantially reduced and there is a sense of ‘nuclear quiescence’, is not an attractive enough oasis. Why strive for a different kind of a world, which might not prove as ‘stable’ and comfortable as this one with our now seven-decades-old understanding of nuclear deterrence and strategic stability? What is there to guarantee that, having gone non-nuclear, countries capable of building nuclear weapons will not scurry back into the comfort of national nuclear arsenals at the slightest whiff of a crisis? Such questions, which raise doubts about the stability of a nuclear-weaponsfree world (NWFW), obviously cast a shadow on its desirability as well. Universal nuclear disarmament can be considered an attractive investment only if it can bring wholesome returns for the security of nations. As Thomas Schelling argues in his seminal article A World Without Nuclear Weapons?, ‘it ought to be worthwhile to examine contingencies in a nuclear-free world to verify that it is superior to a world with (some) nuclear weapons’ (ibid., 125). If, instead, the result is going to be more unstable interstate relations, then it might be better to remain where we are. If stability at zero is going to be elusive, then why venture into such a situation at all?
