Source: Abolition Debate Series

Outlaw Use of Nuclear Weapons?Several commentaries on Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (2008) criticize the inattention to the prospect of outlawing the use of nuclear weapons as a precursor to the more difficult and time-consuming process of actually eliminating the last weapons. The argument for outlawing use is informed by the view that nuclear weapons are immoral, as articulated by Zia Mian and Jonathan Schell (although neither explicitly urges a ban on the use of nuclear weapons). Mian writes that “[a]part from their intrinsic merit, arguments for abolition that are normative, moral, and legal have the added benefit of being available equally to all states: They are universal in application and can be used consistently both at home and abroad.”

V. R. Raghavan presents a recent Indian government proposal to move in stages to outlaw nuclear weapon use, but he does not provide a rationale. Pan Zhenqiang goes even further and advocates outlawing nuclear weapons themselves, even before the details of abolition have been worked out. He writes that “[c]ountries without legal and moral pressure would always be able, one way or the other, to find excuses to keep a nuclear option.” “[P]erhaps nuclear weapons should be outlawed first in a form of a world convention, just as chemical and biological weapons were banned, so that a powerful legal and moral framework is created in which all the other measures on the path to zero are to be taken.” Sameh Aboul-Enein takes a similar view.

The potential benefits of outlawing the use of nuclear weapons deserve more analysis and international debate.

These arguments and the potential benefits of outlawing the use of nuclear weapons deserve more analysis and international debate. In Abolishing Nuclear Weapons we were deflected from this in part by space constraints, but more by the reality that global conventions historically have not succeeded in preventing the use or development of banned weapons. In spite of a global injunction against the use of chemical weapons, for instance, Iraq used them against Iran in the early 1980s. The major powers singly and through the United Nations Security Council did practically nothing to stop it or to punish Iraq. This inaction helped motivate Iran to start its clandestine efforts to acquire the capability to produce nuclear weapons. The same sorts of enforcement challenges we address in Abolishing Nuclear Weapons in regard to abolishing nuclear weapons would also determine the feasibility of any attempt to ban their use. For banning possession or use of nuclear weapons to be a realistic proposition, then, much greater effort must be dedicated to matters of enforcement, with the related challenges we have identified.

Prohibitions on the use of nuclear weapons could be an alternative way of effecting no-first-use declarations. This logic is implicit in the Indian government proposals described by V. R. Raghavan and could find receptivity in China, as indicated by Pan Zhenqiang. That is, as long as some states possess nuclear weapons, a prohibition on their use would in fact, if not explicitly in “law,” amount to a no-first-use commitment. This is so because the first use of nuclear weapons presumably would release others to retaliate in kind to punish and limit the gains of the nuclear aggressor.

Prohibitions on the use of nuclear weapons could be an alternative way of effecting no-first-use declarations.

In such a debate it is easy to predict that governments and experts who focus on continued political-security competition among nuclear-armed states would find little value in commitments to ban nuclear weapon use. As indicated in the comments of Frank Miller, Brad Roberts, Bruno Tertrais, and Harald Müller, declaring the use of nuclear weapons illegal while some states continued to possess them could invite destabilizing crises. If leaders of one or more states hinted at nuclear options, or took hedging steps to increase the readiness of nuclear forces in a crisis, the potential for escalation would grow. A regulatory regime to prevent or manage such moves would need to be built. The challenges of doing so would, in some respects, be similar to the difficulties of abolishing nuclear weapons entirely.