Why can’t world leaders agree that a nuclear war should never be fought?
Meeting last week, the US and Russian presidents issued a joint statement declaring: “a nuclear war should never be fought and could never be won”. This consciously echoes what Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev said in a landmark summit in 1985, when the US and USSR started to step up nuclear arms control, and gradually reduced the world’s fear of nuclear catastrophe.
Many reports of the Biden-Putin summit have not even mentioned this joint statement, because it sounds like simple common sense. Who wants a nuclear war?
Yet getting these words into a joint US-Russia statement has been surprisingly controversial and complicated.
Experts who work on arms control, along with former world leaders, have been advocating for years for the “P5” – the five states that are legally recognised as nuclear powers, and who also wield vetoes on the UN security council – to reaffirm what Reagan and Gorbachev agreed during the cold war.
For some years the US has been saying no – and so have the leaders of the UK and France. Even last week, British and French diplomats were privately briefing nuclear security experts that it wasn’t the right time for leaders to state that a nuclear war is unwinnable and should never happen. Their positions have turned out to be out of step with the new White House.
More than that, though, governments’ resistance to even saying that a nuclear war is unwinnable and should not be fought illustrates the big gap between nuclear weapons policy and public awareness of that policy. The dominant concepts about nuclear weapons are the notions of deterrence and “mutually assured destruction”.
These concepts suggest that everyone understands a nuclear war would have no winners – and that no leader would actually go as far as to use their nuclear weapons. They represent a balance of threats, a “too bad to use” equivalent of “too big to fail”, a last-resort insurance policy only there to cancel out your enemy’s nuclear option.
But government policy is more complicated than that, and more dangerous. Of the nine states with nuclear weapons, only China and India are willing to say that, in a conflict, they will not be the first country to use them: a policy known as “no first use”.
The US stated in its most recent nuclear policy review, in 2018, that its nuclear weapons are not in fact only there to deter nuclear attacks by others, but to deter non-nuclear aggression on either the US or its key allies. That could be a conventional military attack on the US or its allies, or potentially a major hi-tech threat, such as a massive cyberattack.
It is possible that President Biden will change US policy and state that nuclear weapons should only be used to deter – or retaliate against – another nuclear attack (a position called “sole purpose”). He has suggested as much on the campaign trail.
Yet President Obama, who supported gradual nuclear disarmament, never even got as far as “sole purpose”. He was blocked by arguments that some US allies, from South Korea to Latvia, rely for their own security on the idea that the US could use a nuclear weapon against another country that attacked or invaded them, be it North Korea or perhaps even Russia.
It is questionable whether such a scenario would materialise, but nuclear policy involves a – perhaps surprisingly large – element of assumptions and guesswork.
Meanwhile, the UK also made a shift in policy in its recent integrated review. As well as announcing a planned increase in the number of warheads, the review said that its current policy is not to use, or threaten to use, nuclear weapons against countries that don’t have their own nuclear weapons. But it said the UK might review this position in the light of future threats from new technologies that might have a “comparable impact”. As yet, no one knows what a “comparable impact” might mean.
The added complexity of linking nuclear weapons policy to possible non-nuclear hi-tech threats is largely unknown territory, rife with risks. We know which states have nuclear wea
pons. But many more states – plus terrorists and hackers – have cyber capabilities and there are much higher risks of disinformation, misattribution and deniability.
In this context, the Biden-Putin statement is significant as a step towards reinforcing the taboo on nuclear weapons and reducing the risks of creeping entanglement between nuclear weapons and newer weapons, in a world where tensions between major states are rising.
It is a starting point for muchneeded work: Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin promised that their staffs would start to talk about the groundwork for future arms control and risk-reduction measures, which will need to include the next extension of New Start – a treaty that limits the number of nuclear warheads each country deploys, and could also cover long-range missiles, space and cyberwarfare, and crisis communications.
But it is nothing like enough to address wider concerns about nuclear risks, the trend towards nuclear rearmament, or the growing objections of many non-nuclear states to the existence of these weapons at all: 86 states have now signed an international treaty calling for the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
This year was meant to see a global summit to discuss progress in implementing the older and more established international treaty that governs nuclear weapons: the non-proliferation treaty. But the nuclear states are not making progress on their commitments under the treaty to disarm. Instead, most are doing the opposite. The conference to discuss this has been postponed – for the second year in a row – because of concerns about Covid.
In this context, leaders from rich countries, who are privileged enough to be meeting in person while so many others cannot, have a responsibility to work to reduce the risks of nuclear escalation, and ensure that a nuclear war – the unwinnable war – is never fought.
Reagan and Gorbachev faced similar issues: no trust, opposition from key allies, powerful advisers with fantasies of nuclear victory. Yet together, they reduced nuclear stockpiles massively. Thanks to their efforts, the fear of nuclear catastrophe has receded. Let’s keep it that way: Biden and Putin should direct their efforts to reducing nuclear arms across the board.
Jane Kinninmont is director of impact at the European Leadership Network