OVER THE next decade the world’s nine nuclear-armed powers – the US, Russia, China, the UK, France, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea – are set to spend $1,000 billion on the procurement and modernisation of atomic weapons programmes. And, despite the signing last April of the missile-reducing New Start Treaty by Russia and the US, home to 95 per cent of the world’s 20,500 nuclear weapons, such spending will rise year on year.
“Spending will increase because of decisions by both nations to upgrade and replace,” Bruce Blair, a founder of anti-proliferation group Global Zero says. “Modernisation is progressing at such a pace we are seeing more spending on nuclear weapons than at any time since the Cold War.”
All in the name of deterrence, of course, of preventing war, though the world most definitely does not feel safer for this great accumulation of the means of death. But, as Global Zero articulates, there has also been a recent qualitative shift in the nature of the disarmament debate that has brought support to the group from the most unlikely sources, not least former leading advocates of nuclear weapons such as Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Colin Powell and Sam Nunn. The new disarmers argue that the ostensible benefits of their massive arsenals to the major powers are now – a tipping-point moment – for the first time outweighed by the growing dangers of proliferation to rogue states or to terrorists.
Global Zero, founded only four years ago, holds its fourth “summit” in London this week to build support for its pragmatic, multilateral action plan for reaching zero nukes by 2030. It has attracted an impressive range of backers from around the world, including Barack Obama and leading Russian and Indian politicians, and well beyond what the Economist unkindly refers to as the traditional anti-nuke “wearers of anoraks and thick jumpers, camping out in yurts”.
The intractability of such long-running conflicts as the Indo-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir and the perception by Israel that it is under existential threat make a difficult context for advancing the disarmament case, and many question whether the zero target is utopian. But dramatic advances in the technology and practice of verification, key to persuading states that regard themselves as threatened to relinquish weapons, and the possibility of extending international security guarantees to the vulnerable, can lay the basis for incremental steps towards a safer world.