Asia back on nuclear centre stage
Hiroshima at 75: The nuclearisation of US-China rivalry has serious implications for regional security.
SEVENTY-FIVE years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, Asia is coming back to the centre stage of global nuclear politics as the tensions between the United States and China acquire an atomic dimension.
An incipient arms race in Asia in strategic weapons promises to destabilise the security order in the region.
For Asia, that is a double tragedy. Meeting for the first time in 1946, at the dawn of the atomic age, the General Assembly of the newly founded United Nations in its very first resolution had called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass destruction.
Since then, despite repeated diplomatic efforts, treaty commitments, major political moments like the end of the Cold War, mass protests, international court judgments that they are illegal and religious dicta on their immorality, there has been no consensus among the great powers on whether and how to eliminate nuclear weapons.
Second, Asia is no longer marginal to the nuclear dynamics among the major powers.
Asia had no choice but to contemplate the economic and political consequences of the unfolding contest between the US and China.
But the region is yet to consider the implications of the nuclearisation of the Sino-US conflict.
The 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan is a good moment to begin that reflection.
The Manhattan Project
That Japan was the first and only target of nuclear weapons was perhaps entirely incidental. The race to develop nuclear weapons began a few years before 1945 amid concerns that Nazi Germany was developing nuclear weapons.
As leading scientists, including Albert Einstein, drew attention to the emerging atomic threat in 1939, the Roosevelt administration embarked on the Manhattan Project to develop atomic weapons.
The first test of an atomic bomb took place on July 16, 1945, by which time Hitler’s armies in Europe had been defeated.
The US began to consider using the new weapon against Imperial Japan.
The principal justification for the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the claim that it was necessary to bring the war in Asia to an early close and save the valuable lives of American soldiers.
But many revisionist historians question that claim. Although Japan was the victim of the atomic bombing, they argue, the real political target was the Soviet Union.
China and nuclear treaties
The concerns of the great powers were about preventing the losers of World War II – Germany and Japan – from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The US and Russia devised the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) in the late 1960s to codify this prohibition.
The NPT, which came into force in 1970, also became an instrument to limit the spread of nuclear weapons to the developing world.
The normalisation of Sino-US relations since the 1970s significantly reduced American concerns about the dangers of Chinese nuclear weapons. China, too, sensibly chose not to imitate the US and Russia in building a large nuclear arsenal. It was happy to focus on a small arsenal that was enough to deter attacks from the nuclear superpowers – America and Russia.
Given its marginality to the great power nuclear dynamic, China was left out of the agreements that sought to regulate the arms race between the US and USSR.
The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) set caps on longrange nuclear-armed missiles of Washington and Moscow and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty eliminated the US and Russian medium-range missiles in Europe.
China, of course, was part of multilateral nuclear arrangements like the NPT. The end of the Cold War saw renewed attention to the problem of proliferation and provided a basis for collaboration between China and the US on limiting the nuclear dangers in the Middle East, South Asia and the Korean peninsula.
The unravelling
This reasonably stable nuclear framework has now begun to unravel amidst the breakdown of the nearly four-decades-old US-China partnership.
This is tied inextricably to China’s rise and the growing American concerns about it. Consider two recent developments.
Last year, the US withdrew from the INF treaty. Washington argues that China’s absence from the treaty had allowed it to develop an arsenal of medium-range missiles that now threaten US military primacy in Asia.
This year, amid a debate on the future of the START process with Moscow, the Trump administration called for Chinese participation in the talks on nuclear force reduction. Beijing, of course, made it quite clear that it has no desire to join the nuclear talks until Washington and Moscow bring down their arsenals to its level.
China’s long-range nuclear force of about 300 weapons is barely onefifth of the permitted deployment of about 1,550 warheads each for the US and Russia.
But the Trump administration argues that China’s expanding nuclear forces are undermining the bilateral process between Washington and Moscow.
The size of China’s nuclear arsenal is not the only issue bothering the US security establishment as it embarks on an expansive military contest with China in Asia.
As the People’s Liberation Army becomes a powerful military force, there is growing concern about the credibility of the US’ “extended deterrence” to its allies in Asia.
Extended deterrence refers to the “nuclear umbrella” that the US offered to its Asian allies during the Cold War.
The promise of the US use of nuclear weapons in the event of a Soviet attack, America’s Asian allies believed, would deter Soviet aggression. This framework has begun to weaken amid the relative decline of Russia and the rapid rise of China as a great military and economic power.
As the Asian nations question the reliability of the US’ security guarantees and worry about China’s muscular regional policies, there is a growing sense that they might have to beef up their own military capabilities in this uncertain security environment.
Might this mean reconsidering the nuclear weapon option that Japan, South Korea and Taiwan had considered in the past?
Although the nuclear option is tempting, few of them are expected to go down that route.
But many East Asian nations are looking to develop or acquire strategic weapons systems, including long-range missiles.
New nuclear dangers
That brings us to the larger question of technological change that continually tested the stability of the nuclear balance in Europe and between the US and Russia.
Asia is now likely to face a similar challenge as new technologies begin to stoke the rivalry between the US and China, as well as the long-term planning of Beijing’s Asian neighbours.
New developments in lethal non-nuclear explosives, space weapons, missile defences, underwater drones, cyber warfare and hypersonic weapons that travel at five times the speed of sound are breaking down the firewall between conventional and nuclear weapons.
In the past, military technological advances travelled from the West to the East at a leisurely pace.
Today, China is at the forefront of the development of some of these technologies and in some areas, the US is trying to catch up.
That China is a key actor in the current nuclear power play and Asia is the main theatre of great power jousting should wake up the region to think through the consequences.
Until now, Asia’s nuclear worries were limited to atomic proliferation and its impact on sub-regional conflicts in the Middle East, the subcontinent and the Korean peninsula.
Like Europe in the Cold War, Asia must now engage with the consequences of a great power nuclear arms race centred on itself.