Nuclear weapons are going the way of the dreadnoughts and becoming an expensive irrelevance, writes TONY KINSELLA
OUR WORLD became a little safer and a touch more mature yesterday when presidents Obama and Medvedev signed a deal to cut their nuclear arsenals by about 30 per cent to 1,550 warheads each. As the US and Soviet arsenals amounted to some 21,000 warheads 20 years ago, the continuing decrease is welcome news.
Leaders from 46 countries will meet in Washington next week for a nuclear security summit, and the review meeting of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will follow shortly afterwards. The planet’s other nuclear powers – China, France, India, Israel, Pakistan, North Korea and Britain with their 1,300 warheads – now face markedly greater pressure to cut their arsenals.
Many dismissed the historic call for a world free of nuclear weapons Obama made in Prague last April. Careful reflection and constructive negotiations have now brought the achievement of such a world that little bit closer.
The new US nuclear posture also takes a considerable step towards “no first use” in that Washington undertakes not to use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against non-nuclear powers who are in accordance with their non-proliferation obligations. While this undertaking excludes Iran and North Korea, it represents progress towards an acceptance of the exclusively strategic, or political, role of nuclear weapons today.
There was a brief window in the late 1940s when the US was the world’s only nuclear power. Washington could then employ nuclear weapons in the pursuit of tactical military objectives, as it did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Once the USSR became a nuclear power, we entered the era of nuclear deterrence.
This potentially suicidal stalemate was managed according to the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction, or Mad for short. Under the Mad theory nuclear warheads became lethal totems which nobody could actually use as any such use invited retaliation and annihilation. With the end of the cold war nuclear weapons mutated into national status symbols. Status symbols that their owners can no longer afford ethically or financially.
US budget difficulties would considerably ease if elements of defence spending could be diverted to other priorities. Moscow struggles to maintain the increasingly creaky forces it inherited from the Soviet Union.
London and Paris are beginning to dance around the financially attractive but politically fraught question of whether they might not be better served by a joint submarine-based nuclear deterrent. Neither country can realistically afford to maintain its four missile-launching nuclear submarines, and four is the minimum required to ensure that one is on patrol at all times.
While we have made extraordinary strides in our abilities to devise and manufacture artefacts, including thermonuclear warheads, neither human nature nor our systems of governance have kept pace. This leaves us in the uncomfortable situation where we depend on obsolete concepts and structures to manage the use of weapons capable of destroying humanity.
There is a systemic conflict between the development of ever more expensive and ever more deadly weapons and humanity’s ability to manage and eventually eliminate those weapons.
When the UK launched HMS Dreadnought in 1906 the world’s navies were rendered obsolete. Some traditional naval powers such as Denmark or Spain were obliged to recognise that they could no longer afford to participate in this new arms race. Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Russia, the US and others invested heavily to build their own dreadnought-class vessels.
These battleships only ever fought one inconclusive battle when the British and German fleets clashed at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The design reached its peak with the Japanese battleship Yamato, which was sunk by US aircraft in 1945.
Naval powers invested enormous amounts in these prestigious but militarily useless weapons for almost four decades. The 40km range of their guns which had once seemed so intimidating was first outclassed by aircraft which could strike hundreds of kilometres from their bases, and then by missiles.
As the US Senate gears up to discuss the new treaty much will be written about different missile systems, verification arrangements and a host of other technical matters. All this will be of, at best, limited relevance.
The more revolutionary challenge is one of humanity coming to terms with the novel reality that our 192 nation states no longer threaten each other militarily and that the era of inter-state wars is most probably behind us.
Eliminating warheads while we struggle with that concept is a useful, even a necessary step but the real challenge remains one of political maturity and leadership.
There’s still a way to go.
Orna Mulcahy is on leave