It's Nuclear Fear Again

“We are optimistic”, or at least that is what we are being told by politicians for over 50 years. Attempts to get rid of nuclear weapons are always on the table, yet, now they seem more urgent as their threat to peace is more evident than ever. The Obama administration has called for a called for a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons. The ultimate goal, they wrote in the Wall Street Journal, should be to remove the threat such weapons pose completely. This almost Utopian view of the world has generated a swift response by academics, non-profit organizations and politicians to develop a nuclear policy line. A pressure group, , Global Zero, was set up to campaign for complete nuclear disarmament. Its aims were endorsed by scores of government leaders, present and past, and hundreds of thousands of citizens.

Worldwide, every nuclear power is spending a lavish amount of money to increase their atomic arsenal. Russia’s defence budget has grown by over 50% since 2007. China, long a nuclear minnow, is adding to its stocks and investing heavily in submarines and mobile missile batteries. Pakistan is amassing dozens of battlefield nukes to make up for its inferiority to India in conventional forces. North Korea is thought to be capable of adding a warhead a year. Even in the US, the Nobel peace laureate in the White House has asked Congress for almost $350 billion to undertake a decade-long program of modernization of America’s arsenal.

The worst of all in this situation is volatility of countries with nuclear power. Throughout the Cold War the two superpowers to avoid an end of the world scenario, or Armageddon, tolerated the status quo. Nowadays, instead, there is no certainty of the countries’ intentions. Some countries demand nuclear power to guard themselves from the bordering states. Pakistan reassures that the weapons are safe, still we fear that these weapons could fall into the wrong hands, lets say ISIS or Al-Qaeda. As long as great-power relations remain unstable, regional rivalries linger unresolved and rogue states continue to see nuclear weapons as a way of intimidating purportedly powerful adversaries, the incentive to hang on to nuclear weapons will outweigh other considerations.

The most important thing to do might seem to revitalize nuclear diplomacy. Hence, it will mean defending the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which stalls the spread of weapons and reassures neighboring countries. The danger remains as countries as Iran will enable signatories to enrich and reprocess the preparation for a bomb of their own—escalating the whole preparation for nuclear weapons. Then, what we can achieve now is to find ways to enact an effective deterrence, bear down on proliferation and re-start arms-control negotiations between the main nuclear powers.