It was not newsworthy at all in the US, I learned about it from a British newspaper --
One week ago, the
Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons came into force. This treaty has been ratified by 52 countries, which means in these countries it now has the force of law. These countries have agreed to
ban nuclear weapons within their territories, not to develop nuclear weapons, and not to help anybody else develop or deploy nuclear weapons.
Of course, the US is
not a party to this treaty -- and I hadn't even heard of it before yesterday. At last count, the US held more than 6,000 nuclear warheads, most of which are ready to launch at the order of the President in his role as Commander in Chief. This is a big reduction from the US peak in the 1960s, when we held more than 30,000 nukes. During the intervening decades we've negotiated reductions in our nuclear arsenal with the Soviet Union/Russia.
Two parties to the treaty that used to hold nukes have given them up: South Africa and Kazakhstan. So it is possible to give up nukes and then continue existing as an independent country. Unfortunately the world does not have a perfect record on this point -- Ukraine also gave up its nukes, but now finds itself being slowly chewed up by nuclear-armed Russia.
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I've had mixed feelings about the existence and proliferation of nuclear weapons. It seems to me the existence of nuclear weapons has so far avoided the eruption of another "world war", via a "balance of terror" between the major world powers. But there have been incidents over the decades that arguably
could have resulted in nuclear war between nuclear-armed countries. Have we been lucky, or do nuclear weapons provide a real deterrent to violence? And as nuclear weapons proliferate to additional countries, will the chance of nuclear war increase until it becomes inevitable?
The nuclear standoff has not ended war entirely of course, we continue to have armed conflicts within & between many countries; often these conflicts are "proxy wars" funded by the nuclear powers as a way to push against each others' spheres of influence without provoking a direct war between them. Of course, you don't have to be a nuclear power to fund proxy wars -- Saudi Arabia and Iran are
skirmishing by proxy in a dozen countries.
Syria has brought US and Russian armed forces into what I'd call
Proxy Plus -- both countries have based troops in Syria, requiring a set of negotiated rules between them to avoid direct confrontation. The Russians are there to assist the Syrian government, the Americans are there to assist the independent Kurds and to fight ISIS.
WASHINGTON — A small number of U.S. troops were injured this week during a skirmish with Russian forces in northeastern Syria, American officials said on Wednesday, underscoring the risk of simmering tensions between the two rival powers in a hotly contested part of the country. (August 26, 2020 --
NYT).
If the US and Russia didn't both have nukes, would we be fighting each other directly in Syria and other locations?
But I do think it is hypocritical and immoral for the US to deny other countries the ability to build their own nukes. If we think Iran shouldn't have nukes, for example, then we should first get rid of our own.
It's a tough issue. Like global warming, nuclear proliferation is not something that one country can solve all by itself. I'd like to see a steady ratcheting down of nuclear weapons by the countries that have them, until one day no nuclear warheads exist. But we cannot delete the knowledge of how to build them. Could this knowledge serve as a deterrent without having to stockpile actual nuclear weapons? Don't get into a war with Russia because then they could build nukes and blow us up?
I wonder to what extent this "knowledge-based deterrence" already exists in the world. I think both Iran and Saudi Arabia have the capability to build nukes, is this what keeps them fighting at the proxy level instead of directly? Japan and South Korea definitely have the
capacity to build nukes, so China & Russia pretty much leave them alone.
Yeah, I'd try to create an international regime in which there's a steadily declining cap on how many nukes a particular country may have, along with trade incentives for remaining free of nukes -- perhaps a 25% international tariff on the goods of any country that does hold nukes, with the proceeds divided among the nuke-free countries as a peace dividend. Heh, dream on, Bug.
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The existence of nukes hasn't helped the countries that do
not have them. These countries have continued to fall prey to major-power imperialism, civil war, and violent neighbors. But that doesn't mean I would hand over nukes to every country on the planet. How do we build a world without imperialism, without civil war, without violent aggression?
I'd create a World Parliament, elected by global proportional representation, as a replacement or reform of the United Nations. I'm not sure exactly what powers to give this World Parliament. But the original idea of the post-WW1 League of Nations was to create a global force for peace that would intervene to prevent wars from spiraling out of control. Ironically, nuclear weapons have done a better job at keeping international peace than either the League of Nations of the United Nations ever did.
Maybe we
need a nuclear Balance of Terror to keep us from having massive armies of tens of millions of soldiers battling back and forth across the major land masses, throwing millions of civilians into concentration camps as they advance. I don't know. I wish we could instead find a way to share resources peacefully across what we now consider national borders -- these imaginary and arbitrary lines that we use to divide humans into nationalisms. A World Parliament of the Human Race, that erases national borders, taxes global capital, regulates global natural resources, limits global pollution, and provides a basic income to everybody while administering education, health care, infrastructure, criminal justice.
Dream on, Bug, somebody's got to ;-)
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