Nuclear Weapons and International Relations Since the End of the Cold War

David Holloway

Introduction

Nuclear weapons were woven into the fabric of the Cold War from its begin-ning to its end. By the mid-1980s there were about 70,000 nuclear warheads in the world, and over 95 per cent of them were owned by the United States and the Soviet Union. Each side worked out elaborate doctrines for using these weapons in war, and each side sought ways of using nuclear threats for political purposes. Both sides were conscious of the devastating consequences that nuclear war would have for the human race, and they developed theories of deterrence and strategic stability to help them conduct their rivalry without precipitating nuclear war. Mutual understanding of the consequences of nuclear war, of the dangers of crises, and of the relationship between offensive strategic systems and missile defenses provided the basis for the Cold War nuclear order. That order was far from perfect. There were several crises in which the danger of nuclear war seemed very close, but the Cold War ended without such a war.

It was not nuclear weapons that brought the Cold War to an end: they did not cause the revolutions in Eastern Europe or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor did nuclear weapons give rise to our current international order, however we might characterize it—in terms of globalization, for example, or the clash of civilizations, the rise of China, the decline of the West. Neverthe-less, nuclear weapons continue to play an important role in today’s world.

A new nuclear order has been emerging, though whether it will prove to be stable is not yet clear. This chapter will trace the emergence of that order and try to analyze how it will develop in the future.

The Cold War legacy

Although widely regarded at the time as a failure, the Reykjavik summit meeting between Gorbachev and Reagan in October 1986 was a turning point on the path to ending the Cold War. The nuclear arms race had entered a phase of great intensity in the previous decade, with the deployment by the United States and the Soviet Union of new, more accurate intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) armed with multiple warheads. Arms control negotiations had resumed in 1985, after a hiatus of almost two years, following NATO’s deployment of ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) and Pershing II missiles in Europe.

Gorbachev was impatient with the progress being made and requested the meeting in Reykjavik in order to give a new impetus to the negotiations. He brought with him proposals that contained signiﬁcant concessions by the Soviet side. He and Reagan discussed deep cuts in their nuclear forces, even going so far as to talk about the elimination of nuclear weapons. The negoti-ations were intense, but the meeting ended in frustration and disappoint-ment. The two sides were unable to agree on limits on the US Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which Reagan had launched in March 1983 when he called on the scientiﬁc community to develop a ballistic missile defense that would render nuclear weapons“impotent and obsolete.”¹

The Soviet Union subsequently decoupled reductions in offensive forces from limits on SDI. That made it possible to incorporate proposals discussed at Reykjavik into arms control treaties. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) Treaty, which eliminated the two countries’ shorter- and inter-mediate-range (500–5,500 km) missiles, was signed in December 1987. The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which capped the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads on each side at 6,000, was signed in July 1991. In September 1991, George H. W. Bush took the imaginative step of announcing the destruction of all US ground-launched short-range nuclear weapons, as well as the withdrawal to the United States of tactical nuclear weapons deployed on surface ships, attack submarines, and land-based naval aircraft. Eight days later Gorbachev reciprocated by announcing similar uni-lateral measures by the Soviet Union. Thus, in theﬁnal years of the Cold War (1986–91), the two sides made signiﬁcant moves to bring the nuclear arms race to an end and to reduce their nuclear stockpiles.

In spite of these successes, the Cold War left a difﬁcult legacy. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, ICBMs remained on the territory of Belarus,

1George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), chapter 36, and A. S. Cherniaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym (Moscow:

Progress, 1993), chapter 3.

Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, raising the prospect that three new nuclear weapon states would be created at a stroke. It was not immediately obvious that the three new countries would hand these missiles and their nuclear warheads over to Russia; active and creative diplomacy was required on the part of Washington and Moscow, as well as the governments of the three new states, to ensure that those three countries signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) as non-nuclear weapon states in 1993 and 1994.

A second, more lasting consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union was the threat that this posed to the security of the Soviet nuclear weapons complex. That complex had been embedded in the internal security structure of the Soviet state, and as the Soviet state collapsed, the fear arose that nuclear scientists, nuclear materials, or even nuclear weapons might ﬁnd their way from Russia to other states, or into the hands of terrorist groups. This danger was a matter of great concern to the international community, as well as to the new Russian government. The United States, in cooperation with Russia, came up with creative approaches that enabled Washington (as well as the Euro-pean Union and Japan) to fund programs—known as the Cooperative Threat Reduction programs—that would dispose of surplus nuclear materials, enhance the security of the Russian nuclear complex, and provide alternative research opportunities for scientists who had been involved in weapons development.²

The third element in the Cold War legacy consists of the large nuclear forces still held by the United States and Russia. Progress in reducing these forces has been disappointing when set against the political transformations of the last twenty-ﬁve years. In January 1993, the two countries signed the START II Treaty, which would have capped strategic nuclear forces at 3,000–3,500 deployed strategic nuclear warheads apiece. This treaty did not enter into force, however, because of disagreements over missile defense. In 1997, Clin-ton and Yeltsin agreed on the parameters for a START III Treaty with a limit of 2,000–2,500 deployed strategic warheads on each side, but no agreement was ever reached. The 2002 Moscow Treaty limited deployed strategic warheads to 1,700–2,200 on each side. The New START Treaty, which entered into force in 2011, commits the two sides to reduce the number of deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 over a period of seven years. In 2011, the total number of nuclear warheads in the world (including non-strategic and non-deployed warheads) was about 20,000, over 90 per cent of which belonged to the United States and Russia.

2Because Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar played a key role in devising these programs and getting the necessary legislation enacted, they are often informally referred to as the“Nunn–

Lugar program.”

The United States and Russia devoted considerable efforts to dealing with the Cold War legacy. The removal of strategic weapons from Belarus, Kazak-stan, and Ukraine was an unequivocal success from the point of view of nonproliferation. The Cooperative Threat Reduction programs appear to have been successful too, though assessment is more difficult because it is not easy to judge exactly how serious the danger was in thefirst place, and how significantly foreign aid helped in dealing with it.³ Nevertheless, the goals of the overall effort appear to have been achieved, in the sense that there is no persuasive public evidence that nuclear scientists, nuclear weapons, or significant quantities of fissile material have passed from the Russian nuclear weapons complex into the hands of undesirable states or terrorist groups.

Redeﬁning the nuclear danger

The danger of a general nuclear war receded with the ending of the Cold War.

It became even harder than during the Cold War to imagine the circumstances under which the United States or Russia would intentionally launch a nuclear attack on the other. The military confrontation in Central Europe disappeared in the early 1990s when Russia withdrew its armed forces and nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe and the newly independent states. The United States too, greatly reduced—but did not eliminate—its forces and nuclear weapons in Europe. There were several hundred nuclear warheads in Europe (excluding Russia) in 2011, compared with about 10,000 in the mid-1980s (excluding Soviet territory).

Perceptions of the nuclear danger have changed since the end of the Cold War, though not in the same way in every country. The effect was greatest in the United States. Washington quickly shifted its attention from its rivalry with the Soviet Union to the potential threat from rogue states and terrorists.⁴ This shift was already implicit in the Cooperative Threat Reduction programs, which deﬁned the threat from the Soviet Union/Russia not in terms of the number of nuclear warheads it possessed, but of the potential for leakage of knowledge, materials, and people. US Secretary of Defense Les Aspin put the issue succinctly when he introduced the Defense Counterproliferation Initia-tive in December 1993:

3But see Mark Gorwitz, “Vyacheslav Danilenko—Background, Research, and Proliferation Concerns,” ISIS Report (Washington, DC: Institute for Science and International Security, 2011), 1–3.4For a skeptical look see Michael Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws: America’s Search for a New Foreign Policy (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995).

The old nuclear danger we faced was thousands of warheads in the Soviet Union.

The new nuclear danger we face is perhaps a handful of nuclear devices in the hands of rogue states or even terrorist groups. The engine of this new danger is proliferation.⁵

A new discourse emerged embracing prevention of the spread of nuclear weapons, not only by political means (nonproliferation), but also by the use of military force (counterproliferation).

For Russia, the end of the Cold War had different consequences. The top priority was keeping the nuclear weapons complex secure and intact in con-ditions of economic and political collapse. The second priority was maintain-ing strategic stability (deﬁned as a secure retaliatory capability) with the United States through arms control negotiations if possible, but by new weapons programs if necessary. With the Russian army in disarray, nuclear weapons provided compensation for the weakness of its conventional forces.

The government felt it was vital for political as well as military reasons not to lose the strategic parity the Soviet Union had struggled so hard to attain.

Nuclear nonproliferation remained an important priority, but a lower one for Russia than for the United States.

For the other nuclear weapon states the end of the Cold War was less important, in part because their nuclear forces were so much smaller than those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Britain and France have reduced their nuclear forces, treating them largely as insurance in an unpre-dictable world. China has retained its policy of minimum nuclear deterrence and is now modernizing its small nuclear force. The threat that Israeli nuclear weapons are designed to meet has not disappeared. The nuclear dimension of the confrontation between India and Pakistan emerged into the open only in the 1990s. The main exception was South Africa, which decided to destroy its small nuclear stockpile at least partly in response to the decisive change in its strategic environment caused by the end of the Cold War.

The United States had sought from the beginning of the nuclear age to prevent other states, especially hostile ones, from acquiring nuclear weapons.

It developed a common interest with the Soviet Union in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, and this led to the signing of the NPT in 1968, and to the strengthening and creation of institutions to support the nonproliferation regime.⁶The Gulf War of 1990–1 added greatly to the concern about prolifer-ation. After the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, the UN Security Council

5Les Aspin,“The Defense Department’s New Nuclear Counterproliferation Initiative” (address to the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC, December 7, 1993).

6George Bunn,“The Nuclear Nonproliferation Regime and its History,” in George Bunn and Christopher F. Chyba (eds.), US Nuclear Weapons Policy: Confronting Today’s Threats (Washingon, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), 75–125.

adopted a resolution prohibiting Iraq from acquiring or developing nuclear weapons and requiring it to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about all the activities it had engaged in related to the development of nuclear weapons.⁷ IAEA inspectors soon discovered that Iraq had organized extensive clandestine programs for uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons design. This was especially troubling because Iraq was a party to the NPT and had been subject to IAEA safeguards.

The nuclear nonproliferation regime

In 1986 the ﬁve recognized nuclear weapon states (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China) had nuclear weapons; so too did Israel and South Africa. India had tested a nuclear device in 1974, but the decision to develop a nuclear arsenal came later, perhaps in 1988–90. Pakistan appears to have had a workable device at some point in the mid-1980s. In 1986 there were seven nuclear weapon states, plus two on the brink of pos-sessing nuclear weapons. Today there are nine nuclear weapon states, if one counts North Korea. Over the last twenty-ﬁve years three states have ended their nuclear weapon programs or have had them ended by others. South Africa destroyed its nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War; Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was dismantled by the IAEA in the early 1990s; and Libya gave up its nuclear weapon program in 2003.

The great strength of the NPT lies in the almost universal acceptance of the norm of nonproliferation: the vast majority of the states in the world do not want to see nuclear weapons spread. The treaty entered into force in 1970, once 40 states, in addition to the three depository states, had signed it. By 1991, 145 states had signed the treaty. China and France signed in 1992, helping to move the norm of nuclear nonproliferation closer to universal acceptance. The prospects for strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation regime appeared to be good in the early 1990s. After vigorous diplomacy by a number of governments, including the Clinton administration, the NPT was extended indeﬁnitely at the Extension and Review conference in 1995.

The NPT can be viewed as a set of bargains. Theﬁrst is among the non-nuclear weapon states: they will forgo non-nuclear weapons as long as others refrain from acquiring them. The second is between the non-nuclear weapon states and those states that have nuclear technology: the former agree to forgo the development of nuclear weapons in return for help in developing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The third is between the states that have nuclear

7 UNSC 687, April 3, 1991.

weapons and those that do not: the latter agree to forgo nuclear weapons as long as the former work for disarmament. The ﬁrst and second of these bargains were crucial in inducing non-nuclear weapon states to sign the Treaty, but the signiﬁcance of the third bargain has increased over time.

In 1968, when the United States and the Soviet Union signed the treaty, strategic arms control talks were only about to begin, and disarmament seemed a very distant prospect. In 1995 the Cold War was over, and the non-nuclear weapon states were less willing to look charitably on the failure of the nuclear weapon states to disarm. Alongside the decision to extend the NPT indeﬁnitely, the 1995 Extension and Review Conference adopted a set of principles and objectives that emphasized the importance of disarmament. It stressed early completion of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), an early agreement on a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), and strenuous efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally, with the ultimate goal of disarmament.⁸

Progress toward these goals has been halting. The CTBT was signed in 1996, but it has not yet entered into force; the US Senate voted against ratiﬁcation in 1999. Since 1996, however, the only nuclear tests have been the ﬁve con-ducted by India in May 1998, and the six Pakistani tests in the same month, as well as the two North Korean tests in 2006 and 2009. On the FMCT there have been no substantive negotiations. The Conference on Disarmament, where this treaty is supposed to be negotiated, works by consensus, and so far no consensus has been found to start negotiations. Efforts to reduce nuclear weapons globally have proceeded slowly. One consequence is that the bargain between the non-nuclear weapon states and the nuclear weapon states has become both more contentious and more salient.

One hundred and ninety states have signed the NPT, giving it almost universal adherence. But the NPT has two serious weaknesses. The ﬁrst is that there are three states that have not signed the treaty and possess nuclear weapons: Israel, India, and Pakistan. The second is that some states that have signed the NPT have organized clandestine nuclear weapon programs.

States outside the NPT

Israel was thefirst state apart from the five recognized nuclear states to make a nuclear bomb: it probably reached that point in 1967. It has pursued a policy of “nuclear opacity” ever since, neither confirming nor denying that it has

8Jayantha Dhanapala with Randy Rydell, Multilateral Diplomacy and the NPT: An Insider’s Account (Geneva: UNIDIR, 2005), 165–75.

nuclear weapons.⁹ It has pledged that it will “not be the ﬁrst to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”¹⁰ A similar policy was followed by other states in the 1970s and 1980s: Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, India, and Pakistan. Today all of these states have clariﬁed their policy: India and Paki-stan by conducting nuclear tests; the others by renouncing nuclear weapons.

Israel, however, still maintains its policy of opacity, though nobody doubts that it has the bomb.

The policy of opacity is intended to be less provocative than a declared policy of nuclear deterrence. For four decades there has been no nuclear response to Israel from other Middle Eastern countries, but Israel nowﬁnds itself in an increasingly exposed position. The Iranian nuclear program has not only raised fears in Israel, but also stimulated interest in nuclear research in other countries in the region. The 1995 Extension and Review conference called for a nuclear weapon-free zone in the Middle East. The 2010 Review Conference reiterated that call and backed the convening of a conference in 2012, to be attended by all states of the Middle East, on the establishment of a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and all other weapons of mass

In document International Relations Since the End of the Cold War New and Old Dimensions (Page 164-182)