War poised to shape world’s arsenals
Vulnerable countries look to lessons from Ukraine, experts say
The headlines on the newsstands in Seoul blared fresh warnings of a possible nuclear test by North Korea.
Lee Jae Sang, a 28-yearold office worker, already had an opinion about how to respond to North Korea’s fast-growing capacity to lob nuclear bombs across borders and oceans.
“Our country should also develop a nuclear program. And prepare for a possible nuclear war,” said Lee, voicing a desire that a February poll showed was shared by 3 out of 4 South Koreans.
It’s a point that people and politicians of non-nuclear powers globally are raising more often, at what has become a destabilizing moment in more than 50 years of global nuclear nonproliferation efforts, one aggravated by the daily example of nuclear Russia tearing apart non-nuclear Ukraine.
That reconsideration by non-nuclear states is playing out in Asia. The region is home to an ever-more assertive North Korea, China, Russia and Iran — three nuclear powers and one near-nuclear power — but is unprotected by the kind of nuclear umbrella and broad defense alliance that for decades has shielded NATO countries.
Vulnerable countries will look to the lessons from Ukraine — especially whether Russia succeeds in swallowing big pieces of the country while brandishing its nuclear arsenal to hold other nations at bay — as they consider keeping or pursuing nuclear weapons, security experts say.
As important, they say, is how well the U.S. and its
allies are persuading other partners in Europe, the Persian Gulf and Asia to trust in the shield of U.S.-led nuclear and conventional arsenals and not pursue their own nuclear bombs.
For leaders worried about unfriendly, nuclear-armed neighbors, “they will say to their domestic audiences, ‘Please support our nuclear armament because look what happened to Ukraine,’ right?” said Mariana Budjeryn, a researcher with the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
As a schoolgirl in 1980s Soviet-era Ukraine, Budjeryn drilled on how to dress radiation burns and other potential injuries of nuclear war, at a time that country housed some 5,000 of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons. Her country
renounced nuclear weapons development after the Soviet Union shattered, opting for economic assistance and integration with the West and security assurances.
“Ultimately, I think a lot is riding on the outcome of this war in terms of how we understand the value of nuclear weapons,” Budjeryn said.
Around the world, the U.S. military is reassuring strategic partners who are facing nuclear-backed rivals.
Near the North Korea border this month, ballistic missiles arched through the night sky as the U.S. joined South Korea in their first joint ballistic test launches in five years. It was a pointed response to North Korea’s launch of at least 18 ballistic missiles this year.
In Europe and in the Persian Gulf, President
Joe Biden and U.S. generals, diplomats and troops are shuttling to countries neighboring Russia and to oil-producing countries neighboring Iran. Biden and his top lieutenants pledge the U.S. is committed to blocking nuclear threats from Iran, North Korea and others. In China, President Xi Jinping is matching an aggressive foreign policy with one of his country’s biggest pushes on nuclear arms.
Some top former Asian officials have cited Ukraine in saying it’s time for more non-nuclear countries to think about getting nuclear weapons, or hosting U.S. ones.
“I don’t think either Japan or South Korea are eager to become nuclear weapon states. It will be immensely politically painful and internally divisive. But what are
the alternatives?” Bilahari Kausikan, the former foreign minister of Singapore, told the audience at a March defense forum.
The Soviet Union’s collapse left Ukraine with the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal. But Ukraine didn’t have operational control. That left it with a weak hand in the 1990s when it negotiated with the U.S., Russia and others on its place in the post-Soviet world, and the fate of the Soviet arsenal. Ukraine got assurances but no guarantees regarding its security, Budjeryn said.
“A piece of paper,” is how Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy referred to one such assurance, signed in 1994.
The U.S. itself has given nuclear and nuclear-curious countries plenty of reasons to worry about forgoing the world’s deadliest weapons.
The West compelled Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi to give up his country’s rudimentary nuclear weapons program in 2003. A couple of years later, Gadhafi’s son Saif al-Islam shared with researcher Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer his father’s biggest worry about that — that Western nations would support an uprising against him.
“And lo and behold, a few years later, get to 2011, you saw what happened,” said Braut-Hegghammer, now a University of Oslo nuclear and security strategy professor.
What happened was that NATO, at U.S. urging, intervened in a 2011 internal uprising against Gadhafi. A NATO warplane bombed his convoy. Rebels captured the Libyan leader, tortured him and killed him.
In Iraq, the U.S. played a central role in forcing Saddam Hussein to give up his nuclear development program. Then the U.S. overthrew Saddam in 2003 on a spurious claim he was reassembling a nuclear weapons effort. Three years later, with Iraq still under U.S. occupation, Saddam plunged through a gallows.
The Middle East leaders’ fall and brutal deaths have clouded denuclearization efforts with North Korea. Rare U.S.-North Korea talks in 2018 collapsed after the Trump administration repeatedly raised the “Libya model” and Vice President Mike Pence threatened Kim Jong Un with Gadhafi’s fate. “Ignorant and stupid,” North Korea’s government responded.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine now “only highlights to some countries, at least, that if you have a nuclear weapons program, and you’re sort of far along with that, giving it up is a terrible idea,” Braut-Hegghammer said.