Source: Abolition Debate Series

Is Exploring Abolition a Distraction or a NecessitIn Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (2008), our focus on the challenges of the steps immediately before and after the abolition of nuclear weapons elicits protests in some quarters and applause in others.

Some believe the focus on such a distant prospect distracts official and unofficial expert communities from the more practical moves that can and should be taken to prevent the acquisition and use of nuclear weapons by terrorists and additional states, and to reduce risks of use by states that now possess these weapons. Ian Hore-Lacy, Frank Miller, James Doyle, and Scott Sagan say this most clearly, though Doyle and Sagan do find that addressing abolition can help motivate progress on near-term steps.

Others argue that the focus on abolition is imperative. Jonathan Schell insists that without the clear goal of abolition, the world will not muster sufficient political will, moral drive, and power to push states beyond half-measures of arms control that leave too many nuclear dangers unmitigated. However, along with Zia Mian and Pan Zhenqiang, he takes us to task for focusing on security challenges that sap the power of the abolition vision.

Without the clear goal of abolition, the world will not muster sufficient political will, moral drive, and power to push states beyond half-measures of arms control that leave too many nuclear dangers unmitigated.

Other commentators, such as Brad Roberts and Lawrence Freedman, even if they do not agree with all of our analysis about those security challenges, believe that it is worthwhile to explore, in detail, the challenges of the final abolition of nuclear weapons. For example, Roberts offers a synthesis that can take us beyond this stalemate. He is “skeptical that the conditions that would make abolition feasible are in any way proximate” because of the role he ascribes to nuclear deterrence today. But, he goes on to write that “[t]his is not to argue that we should not work to bring them into being. After all, we want to live in a world in which most of the conflicts have been eliminated, or at least stabilized, and where major powers act in concert to maintain the peace.” For Roberts, therefore, disarmament could be a good organizing principle for interstate relations, which is a core point of our work. Lawrence Freedman, Bruno Tertrais, Ernesto Zedillo, and Patricia Lewis would probably concur, even if they do not stake out their position on this point as explicitly as Roberts.

Harald Müller advances this synthesis. He notes that consideration of abolition is necessarily highly speculative, not least because the processes of working toward disarmament change the conditions in which successive steps are taken. “As conditions change, so do the structures of opportunity,” he writes. “New options, unthinkable at the beginning, become a serious possibility.” Müller reminds that “[w]hen the Soviet Union admitted observers to its military maneuvers in a politically binding way for the first time in the Stockholm Document of 1986 … none predicted, at the time, that it would end in German unification. Yet the process that followed created, step by step in the interplay between political and arms control changes, the conditions in which unification became not only a real opportunity, but also the right thing to do and, eventually, a necessity.” He advocates that those who think about the long-term challenges of abolition be flexible and adapt their ideas to changing realities.

To be sure, incremental steps can achieve much good even if they are not informed by the distant destination of nuclear abolition, and they can be taken without having such a destination in mind. But it is important to keep abolition in mind as the goal helps more than it hurts. This is a core argument of the 2010 report of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament.

Incremental steps can achieve much good even if they are not informed by the distant destination of nuclear abolition.

Ultimately, the value in a conversation about the abolition of nuclear weapons probably depends on the way it is conducted. Explorations of the challenges of abolition must take place in parallel with practical near-term steps (lest they be nothing more than empty rhetoric). They are useful to the extent that all parties—nuclear-armed and non–nuclear-weapon states—explore the challenges in good faith for the purpose of finding solutions. Discussions of abolition would become counterproductive if, as Achilles Zaluar warns, nuclear-armed states used them as a way of dismissing non–nuclear-weapon states with a barrage of technical objections they were unwilling to explain because of classification rules. The same liability arises when non–nuclear-weapon states use discussions of abolition as a platform to posture. The test in such deliberations would be intellectual, political, and technical honesty. To evaluate fulfillment of this criterion requires that the analytical assumptions and arguments that shape governments’ positions be made publicly available so that experts from around the world could evaluate and contest them. Where nuclear-armed states feel that security interests require withholding data and analyses, they should provide explanations sufficient to give experts without security clearances some basis for accepting the secrecy.