Trump tears up nuclear treaties that maintained a fragile peace for decades
• The world is heading for a nuclear free-for-all and US is shedding allies
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it has been 50 years since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) set out to halt the spread of the deadliest weapon mankind has devised. The anniversaries might have been a moment to take some comfort that the horror of August 1945 has never been repeated. Instead, the pillars of restraint are crumbling. We are heading for a nuclear free-for-all.
The fading of memories has had the perilous effect of making the nuclear threat seem almost fanciful. Forget weapons of mass destruction — the future of conflict, strategic fashion now has it, lies in weapons of mass disruption in the realms of cyberspace and artificial intelligence. Arms control pacts belong to the cobwebbed cupboards of the Cold War.
Donald Trump says that the US will never permit Iran to acquire the bomb. Even as the US president threatens the Tehran regime, his administration is dismantling the international architecture that has kept the nuclear peace.
Washington’s repudiation of the great power deal to halt Iran’s nuclear programme, the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, has been followed by its withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear
Forces Treaty, which for three decades barred the US and Russia from deploying shortand intermediate-range missiles. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, limiting strategic nuclear forces, expires in 2021. Trump has told Russia President Vladimir Putin he has no interest in replacing it.
In 1963, US president John F Kennedy predicted that within a decade or so some 30 states could have nuclear weapons, compared with the five that then had or were close to acquiring a capacity to use them. His list included allies as well as adversaries — Japan, Sweden, and West Germany, as well as East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia.
In the event, there are now nine nuclear states: the original five plus Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
Kennedy and his successors in the White House immediately set about confounding his prediction. Months before his assassination, he agreed with Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev the partial nuclear test ban treaty. Halting nuclear proliferation, and later agreeing limits with Moscow on the production and deployment of nuclear missiles and bombs, were henceforth at the core of America’s defence strategy.
The 1970 NPT was followed by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and then by the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty. Salt, as the latter was known, would later become Start — imposing cuts in, rather than limits on, the number of weapons.
By the mid-1990s, Kennedy’s initial deal with Khrushchev had become the multilateral Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, now signed by more than 180 states.
Washington paid attention to the concerns of allies. If US presidents worried about the then West Germany acquiring the bomb — and they worried about it a lot — the answer was to offer a nuclear guarantee.
NUCLEAR UMBRELLA
“Extended deterrence” gave members of the Atlantic alliance a place under the American nuclear umbrella. The same assurances were given to Japan and the Republic of Korea through bilateral defence treaties.
None of these arrangements were perfect — witness the defiance of India, Pakistan, Israel and most recently North Korea. Some of the agreements were corrupted by sustained cheating by the Russian side for which it has not properly been held to account. But the essential architecture delivered both a measure of strategic stability and predictability in relations between the superpowers and a disincentive for anyone who might want to join the club. This was the framework under which SA, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus willingly dismantled their nuclear arsenals during the early 1990s.
Trump says that his administration does not believe in multilateralism. His America First policy does not allow for treaties that constrain US national power. Nor, for that matter, is he ready to offer solid guarantees to allies.
So the forces that contained, if not prevented, proliferation are dissipating. The signatories to the NPT have scheduled a review to mark its 50th anniversary. The idea was to strengthen its provisions.
In the absence of American engagement, the effort is doomed. Instead, both the US and Russia are modernising their arsenals. China has been given a get-out-of-jail card to remain entirely opaque about its nuclear forces and to reject any limits on their expansion.
CHANNELS OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN THE US AND RUSSIA TO AVOID ACCIDENTS OR MISCALCULATIONS HAVE BEEN CLOSED
IRAN IS ENRICHING MORE URANIUM AND WILL SOON BE WITHIN TOUCHING DISTANCE OF A USABLE NUCLEAR BOMB
Channels of communication between the US and Russia to avoid accidents or miscalculations have been closed. Pakistan is adding to its nuclear stockpile and North Korea may well resume missile testing. Iran is enriching more uranium and will soon be within touching distance of a usable nuclear bomb.
America’s friends are making their own calculations about whether extended deterrence any longer has real meaning. There is no reason to expect a great rush to the nuclear labs, but think five or 10 years ahead. When French President Emmanuel Macron talks about a “European” deterrent, independent of the US, he is playing to the private fears of many US allies. Japan or
South Korea may need less than a year to build a bomb.
The sheer craziness in all this is that, as Kennedy well understood, no-one has more than the US to lose from a nuclear free-for-all. /©