Why nuclear disarmament is not enough to abolish nuclear danger

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.