Why nuclear disarmament is not enough to abolish nuclear danger

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has announced the formation of an international commission on the abolition of nuclear weapons. Essentially, this commission will revive the work of the "Canberra Commission" on nuclear disarmament set up by former Prime Minister Paul Keating.

It was fitting that the Prime Minister should have chosen Hiroshima as the place to make his announcement both because of the devastation that the use of the bomb had on that city and the mythology that has surrounded its use. To achieve nuclear disarmament it will require us to understand, and come to terms with, the mythology.

The setting up of the commission follows a number of high level calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons, for instance by Henry Kissinger and others. Kevin Rudd’s international commission will add further momentum to the global push for nuclear disarmament.

Of course, if the preferences of the public had any role on the structure of world order then nuclear disarmament would be non-problematical. Opinion polls demonstrate that large majorities throughout the world, including in the nuclear weapon states, favour the abolition of nuclear weapons and the wider demilitarisation of world order.

The high level calls by existing and former officials for nuclear disarmament subtly differ from public opinion. There is a very good reason for this and it is intimately tied to the mythology on the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. This is important because, more likely than not, the Rudd commission will be dominated by former senior state officials.

In the 1960s the revisionist US historian, Gar Alperovitz, published an important and careful study based on the then declassified record that tended to demonstrate that the use of the bomb during World War II was not primarily concerned with ending the war. Rather, the bomb was used to impress Stalin in order to buttress the US negotiating position on the terms of a reconstructed global order.

Recently, there has been a revival of historical scholarship on Hiroshima and the evidence strongly supports the Alperovitz thesis, which would not surprise those versed in the realist "power politics" conception of international relations. This scholarship has even appeared in leading US journals such as International Security.

Essentially, nuclear weapons served as a "shield" behind which the US was able to reconstitute a liberal internationalist world order based on US preponderant power. Hence usage of the phrase "atomic diplomacy".

One important function that the "shield" provided was the casting of a "shadow" of power behind which the US was able to employ conventional firepower for military interventions. Despite the end of the Cold War this function continues as stated in the Clinton era Strategic Command study known as Essentials of Post Cold War Deterrence.

But the development of precision guided munitions and network-centric warfare, alters this equation for some. One very important reason why former senior officials such as Henry Kissinger support the abolition of nuclear weapons is because they perceive that the employment of US firepower would be easier in a world free of nuclear weapons because this would enhance the leverage gained by conventional superiority. It was on these grounds that the leading theorist of the technology driven "revolution in military affairs", Colonel Andrew Krepinevich, stated that for the US nuclear weapons are obsolete.

There exist good grounds to infer that the role played by military power in US foreign policy will remain high. One of the most important features of contemporary international relations is decoupling. That is, there exists no strong correlation between the US business cycle and global economic growth as previously. The developing economies increasingly are the dynamos of the global economy and for the most part domestic consumption and emerging economy trade integration are driving aggregate demand.

US economic power is in decline because the world is no longer dependent upon the US economy (95 per cent of Chinese economic growth is due to domestic consumption for example) and this means that, given the bi-partisan consensus on the maintenance of US global power, Washington will increasingly shift the burden of statecraft toward the threat and use of military power. However, the prospect of US military intervention serves as a very important motivating factor behind the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

There should be little doubt that for North Korea nuclear weapons are meant to provide a deterrent against US conventional military superiority.

To the extent that Iran had a coherent state sanctioned nuclear weapons program then surely this would reflect a concern to deter the US. Should the US successfully strong arm Baghdad to dilute the sovereignty of Iraq through a colonial era "unequal treaty", that provides for the establishment of numerous permanent US military bases, then this will be a permanent structural incentive for Iranian nuclear weapons proliferation.

By the same token both Moscow and Beijing are concerned at the proposed use of strategic missile systems armed with conventional warheads known as "prompt global strike." Russia is attempting to include this, without success, in strategic arms control talks. Prompt highly accurate strategic platforms raise the prospect of "conventional counterforce" and in a world free of nuclear weapons highly accurate conventional munitions would make Moscow and Beijing more susceptible to US coercion.

In other words, official calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons are flawed because they are not couched within an overall framework that would ameliorate the security dilemma and lower the role of military firepower in international relations, especially conventional firepower. It would be highly unlikely that Kevin Rudd's new commission will emphasize this link and to the extent that it would then it will be ignored in Washington.

The link with structural incentives for nuclear proliferation is important because of the developing renaissance in nuclear energy. Imagine if nuclear weapons were abolished but the current structure of world order was to endure. The prospect of proliferating civil nuclear fuel cycle technologies means that many states, especially in the emerging economies, will have a latent capability to develop nuclear weapons.  Given the structural incentive for nuclear proliferation, due to the imbalance in conventional firepower, it would be expected that with nuclear weapons we will just end up where we started.

A nuclear weapons convention, such as the chemical and biological weapons conventions, is not enough. What is needed is a revival of the "new thinking" that arose out of the work of an earlier commission, the Palme Commission. The Palme Commission, which was formed in the context of the Reagan strategic buildup and widespread concern at the prospect of nuclear war (that saw Peter Garrett make his first run for Parliament), introduced the concept of "common security".

The Palme Commission argued that the development of nuclear weapons changed forever the way humanity should conceive of security. In the nuclear age it would not be possible for a state to buy security at the expense of another state's insecurity. Rather, security should be conceived of as a common resource or, better still, a global public good. This sentiment was neatly captured by Denzel Washington's character in Crimson Tide when he stated that "in the nuclear age, the true enemy can't be beaten … the true enemy is war itself".

Many of the staples of common security endure in such important notions as "sustainable security" due to the Oxford Research Group and the broader "human security". It is the bringing into the global security policy process of concepts such as common and sustainable security that will truly demilitarise the world order and thereby provide the structural environment for sustainable nuclear disarmament.

At the turn of the last century a number of discoveries in the physical sciences including the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics led to a scientific revolution whose consequences continue to rock the foundations of our understanding of nature. It was precisely this scientific revolution that opened up the prospect of nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare.

More than a century later we still do not seem to understand that this revolution should also rock the foundations of our understanding of the social order. Einstein remarked of nuclear weapons that "they have changed everything except the way we think".

To abolish nuclear danger will require more than the eradication of nuclear weapons.