Last Monday night, the UN Security Council held a private meeting on nuclear non-proliferation. The French presidency warned that efforts to limit the spread of nuclear weapons are “facing increasingly serious challenges”.
The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obliges nuclear states not to transfer nuclear weapons to other states, and commits others to not acquiring them. It is arguably Ireland’s most important diplomatic achievement, coming into force 55 years ago after a four-year campaign by late former tánaiste Frank Aiken and the passing of his “Irish resolution”.
Only five states – the US, the Soviet Union, China, Britain and France – were recognised then as having nuclear weapons. Four more – India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea – have since acquired the bomb. Others are lining up.
Aiken saw non-proliferation as an essential complement to the stalled disarmament process – as he put it in a speech to the UN, “to preserve a Pax Atomica while we build a Pax Mundi”. The NPT, he argued, would bridge the gap between states opposed to nuclear weapons and those who saw them as essential to deterrence, including Nato members.
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His advocacy of annual “non-dissemination” resolutions, UCC academic Morgan O’Driscoll writes, was inspired by a pragmatic belief that incremental, concrete steps would ease international tensions. Stopping the spread of nukes could help to prevent a runaway arms race.
[ Era of nuclear disarmament may be coming to an endOpens in new window ]
As a footnote, it is worth recalling that Aiken had many critics at home, notably Fine Gael, which maintained that “a tiny country” with limited interests had no right to pontificate on global matters more appropriately dealt with by the “great powers”. His campaign would create enemies worldwide, it was said, most notably in the US.
The preoccupations evident at the recent UN meeting were the “ongoing proliferation crises” over North Korea, whose nuclear weapons programme, UN inspectors say, has grown “exponentially”, and Iran, which is in talks with the US on restoring the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action treaty (JCPOA) restricting its nuclear programme, which US president Donald Trump scuppered at the end of his first term.
Notwithstanding these concerns, there is a broader context to the discussion – a growing fear that multilaterally driven disarmament, specifically non-proliferation, is moving rapidly backwards, dangerously undoing decades of important, albeit slow, progress. Trump has a lot to do with it.
“The Trump phenomenon,” says Ankit Panda, author of The New Nuclear Age, “has provided a powerful accelerant for voices in US-allied states who now see nuclear weapons in their own hands as fundamentally solving the problem posed by American unreliability.”
Trust in allies’ promises has been the key cornerstone of the acceptance of non-proliferation commitments
The new era has seen the rise of China, the threatened US disengagement from European security, an increasingly aggressive, unconstrained Russia – and what many see as the significant lowering of the threshold for use of tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. The threat of a nuclear exchange is more real than at any time since the second World War – American military planners believe that in the autumn of 2022, Russia came close to using tactical nukes to counter a successful Ukrainian offensive.
The promises of mutual support underpinning the constraints of the NPT on acquiring nuclear weapons are seen increasingly as inadequate. Now, states want their own.
Germany and Poland are publicly talking of needing nuclear options, at least by sharing French or UK nuclear deterrents. Support is growing in South Korea, and the long-taboo debate is surfacing even in Japan. In the Middle East, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have signalled they would want to match Iranian capabilities if Tehran obtained a bomb.
Trust in allies’ promises has been the key cornerstone of the acceptance of non-proliferation commitments. After the Cuban missile crisis, Washington assured European and Asian allies that they could rely on the US for their nuclear security. Only after they were convinced of the credibility of guarantees did Germany and Japan forego a national nuclear option to join the new NPT.
French determination in the 1960s to build its own nuclear deterrence, against the wishes of Washington, was born out of Charles de Gaulle’s conviction that Washington‘s promises were unreliable. Would the US really risk a nuclear attack on Washington if Paris was hit?
And China, in a similar calculation regarding Moscow, followed suit after its split with the USSR in the 1960s.
Trump’s unwillingness to unequivocally endorse Nato‘s Article 5 mutual defence pledge has profoundly undermined trust at the core of the alliance, just as his reluctance to do the same in respect of Ukraine has led Kyiv to discuss nuclear rearmament.
Ukraine, Poland and South Korea are all believed to possess the technology to build nuclear weapons. Japan, the only state to have suffered a nuclear attack, and whose population remains deeply opposed to nuclear weapons, was an early signatory to the NPT, but as North Korea became a nuclear power, and China more militarily assertive, what was seen as impossible is being discussed.
Aiken‘s vision and passionate diplomacy are once more desperately needed to save the NPT and the parlous multilateral disarmament process from its continuing downward spiral. That should be the central focus of Ireland’s diplomacy.
