ASIAN AFFAIRS ISSUE 24
THE DEMISE OF THE GLOBAL ARMS CONTROL REGIME
A ROLE FOR INDIA
The last few months have been particularly difficult for the global non-proliferation and arms control regime. From Iran to North Korea, from the nuclear black-market of A.Q. Khan to Brazil, new challenges are emerging virtually every other day and threaten to undermine the global arms control architecture. Forced by India's open challenge to the global arms control and disarmament framework in May 1998, major powers in the international system seem to be re-evaluating their orientation towards global arms control and non-proliferation. Consequently, international arms control today seems to be heading for a slow but long overdue and inevitable demise.
The origins of this shake-up of the global security environment can be traced to the Indian challenge to the global nuclear status quo in May 1998. Indian nuclear tests altered the contours of the security architecture constructed during the cold war. No doubt, with the end of the cold war, this security environment was under stress, but Indian nuclear tests were the first open challenge, by a "responsible" as opposed to a "rogue" member of international community, to this system. Some might argue that surreptitious Chinese nuclear and missile proliferation and clandestine nuclear programs of states such as India, Pakistan, and Israel had begun to undercut the arms control regime long before the 1998 Indian nuclear tests. But India's open defiance of the global nuclear order marked the real beginning of the end of the non-proliferation regime, the bedrock of cold war international security and the consequences for global security have been nothing less than revolutionary.
The first major blow came in the form of the rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by the US Senate in 1999. Then came the US decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty of 1972. The US has argued that the new kinds of threats in the post-Cold war period, especially the ballistic missile threats from the "rogue" states and terrorist groups, made this treaty irrelevant to changed security needs of the US. It should be noted that the ABM treaty has long been seen as a high point of arms-control success in maintaining international stability during the cold war. The withdrawal of the US from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty paved the way for the US pursuit of its ballistic missile defense (BMD) program without any formal restrictions. The US has ordered the deployment of six interceptors for Fort Greely in Alaska, and four for Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as part of the first phase of its missile defense system for the 2004 fiscal year. The 2005 budget allows for ten more interceptors in Alaska. Shortly afterwards, the US will deploy a sea-based anti-missile system capable of protecting allies and American troop deployments abroad. Negotiations are currently underway about radar sites and possible defense missile defense emplacements with several European countries.
India and Pakistan continue with their nuclear weapons program, without adhering to a restrictive global agreement. The Clinton Administration tried to bring both countries into the fold of the non-proliferation regime. The recently published memoirs of Strobe Talbott, Clinton Administration representative in the arms control negotiations, clearly reveal that the US failed to achieve any of its non-proliferation and arms control objectives vis-à-vis India.
Moreover, the Bush Administration has not been interested in maintaining the Cold War arms control framework and not looked at South Asia from the old lens of non-proliferation. Instead, it has cultivated both India and Pakistan because of new global realities. India and the US have signed the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership" agreement that paves the way for cooperation in areas of civilian nuclear activities, civilian space programs and high-technology trade as well as a dialogue on missile defense. The US, recently, enhanced its nuclear cooperation with India by lifting sanctions against Indian Space Research Organization, thereby modifying its export licensing policies for a non-NPT signatory like India.
All this occurred even as compliance with the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) by all its members remains questionable. The Wassenaar agreement that succeeded the earlier Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls Agreement, directed at depriving Communist countries of Western military technology, has proven more difficult to enforce. It is aimed not only at the former Soviet states but also at states about whose threatening nature the industrialized signatories of Wassenaar disagree with.
China, an emerging military power, is a participant in few arms control agreements and its record of adhering to promises in the realm of arms control is not terribly impressive.
Significant new challenges also have emerged in recent months. Iran seems to be within reach of mastering nuclear weapons production technology. While the US tackled fictitious weapons of mass destruction of Iraq, Iran moved ahead with its secret nuclear program under the guise of electricity production. It rejected a call by the IAEA to freeze all its uranium enrichment programs and threatened to drop out of the NPT if the case was taken to the UN Security Council.
Iran argued that the NPT gives it a right to develop peaceful nuclear programs and that it is exactly what it is doing. Despite a recent nuclear accord between the Europeans and Iran in which Iran agreed to voluntarily suspend its uranium enrichment activities, the US remains highly suspicious of Iranian motives. Actually, Iran has confirmed that it initially developed its nuclear program in secret by resorting to the black market as it was denied access to advanced civilian nuclear technology by the West.
Brazil has also upped its nuclear ante. It is believed to be enriching uranium by using centrifuge cascades and this might be the beginning of the end of the 1967 Tlatelolco treaty that made South America a nuclear free zone. The Brazilian government blocked portions of the requisite IAEA inspections of a uranium enrichment plant in Resende, generating a lot of international concern. There is also a fear that Brazil's intransigence might be followed by Argentina which has much more indigenous nuclear technology than any rogue state in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, after continuing with the façade of negotiations to buy time to reprocess its plutonium into several nuclear bombs, North Korea pompously declared that it has nuclear weapons and was pulling out of the six-party negotiations involving Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the US. In a surprising development, South Korea acknowledged that its scientists had secretly enriched uranium and extracted a small amount of plutonium during a 1982 research experiment. Uranium was also secretly enriched in 2000 to nearly bomb grade levels and the other experiment was optimized to produce bomb-grade plutonium.
Even as the international community tries to come to terms with these developments, the US conducts research on more usable nuclear weapons and Russia declared its intention of conducting more nuclear tests to strengthen its deterrent. The non-state actors further muddy the nuclear waters as chillingly demonstrated by the discovery of the worldwide nuclear black-market run by A.Q. Khan. The global arms control regime has so far been a rather impotent observer of these developments with no significant influence on the course of events.
Is the failure of the arms control regime surprising? On the other hand, is it that all arms control must fail? If arms control is needed in a strategic relationship because the states in question might go to war, then it will be impractical for that very reason of need. However, if arms control should prove to be available, it will be irrelevant. This has been called the arms control paradox. The record of the Cold War shows that the US and the former Soviet Union respectively, have been more or less equally responsible for reneging on their arms control promises. Not only both of them attempted to gain nuclear superiority during the cold war, despite a plethora of arms control agreements, but were also equally responsible for encouraging proliferation. As the great powers try to maximize their share of world power, their interests inevitably come into conflict with the arms control agreements, making arms control agreements unravel.
Disenchantment with arms control has been growing since 1980s. After a brief period of détente in 1970s, the two superpowers resumed their antagonism. This affected all the arms control measures agreed to during détente. The signing of a plethora of arms control agreements during détente was seen as the success of arms control rather than a reflection of the relaxation of tensions.
While one can give some credit to arms control for maintaining strategic stability and creating norms of behavior, the fact remains that even one of the most in-depth agreements in terms of details of provisions, verification measures, the CTBT, was rejected by the US even though it faced no great power as a rival in the near term. This is significant because if even one of the strongest of arms control measures is not deemed worthy of acceptance, then there is some problem with the very idea of arms control rather than its specific provisions.
In the post-Cold War, this tendency has been more prominent. There have been numerous proposals for universal disarmament without any real evaluation of the impact on international security. There are significant strategic, political and technical obstacles to nuclear disarmament. Countries facing formidable national security obstacles will be disinclined to give up their nuclear weapons so long as the international system retains its anarchic nature.
In addition, there is a perception in some countries that nuclear weapons enhance their status in the international system. While this might not be the case but so long as the nuclear weapon states cling to obscenely huge nuclear arsenals, it would be difficult to convince those countries otherwise. Furthermore, how to convince states that the huge amounts of weapons-grade fissile material in the world since 1945 would not be used by any state if and when disarmament takes place remains an open question that no one wants to address. An international agency cannot make countries hedge their bets against future uncertainty in international politics.
Even if these obstacles can be overcome, the larger question remains: is universal disarmament desirable? It may seem ironic but the huge nuclear stockpiles during the Cold War maintained international stability. Indeed, it was also important in the rather slow rate of nuclear proliferation as their huge arsenals allowed the two superpowers to provide extended deterrence to their client states, thus reducing the value of nuclear weapons for them.
In the post-Cold War international system, universal nuclear disarmament can be highly destabilizing, as the nuclear threat would be transformed. The probability of the use of nuclear weapons may increase manifold as conventional wars may rapidly transform into nuclear wars by the losing side. In the absence of a third power capability to force restraint the situation might deteriorate further. Therefore, any arms control or disarmament measure needs to be evaluated based on its impact on international stability as opposed to the emergence of some utopian international society of states.
This does not justify the status quo. Obsolete ideas about the value of massive nuclear arsenals need to be discarded by the policymakers in the US and Russia. A heightened awareness about the dangers of unauthorized attacks and nuclear proliferation needs to be developed. Bold steps to reduce nuclear inventories to much lower levels would enhance American and Russian national security along with international peace. In fact, it has been recommended that the US and Russia should adopt minimum deterrence strategies and force structures containing 200-500 weapons each. New issues, meanwhile, are changing the global strategic landscape. There is a possibility that the US pursuit of the missile defense project (BDM) coupled with the reductions in the Russian nuclear arsenal might be a recipe for nuclear instability. This will be because Russia will be forced to adopt a more offensive nuclear posture in order to neutralize the advantages of a BMD. Moreover, there is the issue of China's reaction, which still remains clouded in mystery. The only thing that is clear is that it is seriously going ahead with its military modernization program. How this affects the US-China relationship and China's immediate neighbourhood will determine the future of international stability.
The evidence, overwhelmingly, suggests that great power attempts at arms control have at best been useless and at worst can be highly destabilizing. However, great powers have deftly used various arms control provisions to constrain the strategic autonomy of other states in the international system. Indian nuclear tests were the first direct challenge to the great powers and the result has been a complete overhaul of the international security environment.
The demise of the international arms control is a small part of that overhaul. India has always been dissatisfied with the global non-proliferation and arms control regime as it felt that it constrained its autonomy to make foreign policy decisions as dictated by national interests. India argued that an inequitable regime that gave a few countries permanent right to nuclear weapons and denied others was inherently unstable. There are reasons for India to feel vindicated by its long-held stance on these issues. Today as the global arms control regime crumbles under the weight of its own contradictions, India can rightfully claim that it was one of the first states to draw the attention of the world community to these challenges.
Radically new global security architecture is needed to tackle the emerging problem of proliferation and terrorism. The old security structure has failed and it's time this is recognized if the world hopes to tackle the emerging challenges. India along with older nuclear powers should rise up to the challenge and offer ideas on a new construct of international security order that is suitable for the 21st century. Great powers not only challenge the status quo that is inimical to their interests but also provide responsible alternatives to managing the challenges facing the globe. It is time for India to respond to its rising global profile.
The major global powers need to explicitly acknowledge that the old nuclear regime is crumbling and without strong corrective measures, it faces a complete collapse. As of now, there's a perception that if somehow the extant problems vis-à-vis Iran and North Korea could be fixed, everything would be back to normal. What is not being realized is that these problems are merely symptomatic of the larger failure of the global nuclear order. Iran and North Korea are on the verge of going nuclear, not simply because they are "rogue" states. They are going nuclear because they have some very legitimate security concerns.
It was also the reason why India and Pakistan went nuclear and Israel remains an opaque nuclear state. The biggest failure of the old nuclear order has been that it has failed to assuage the security concerns of many states in the international system. And so long as we live in an anarchic international system where states have to fend for their own security, the lure of nuclear weapons for states facing volatile strategic environment will remain irresistible as nuclear weapons are an excellent deterrent.
The new international security architecture should rectify this lacuna in the old nuclear order, as states cannot be expected to give up their responsibilities to ensure the legitimate self-defense of their citizens. The international community will have to work together to find a broad-based arrangement that satisfies the security needs of states as well as gives them a stake in non-proliferation.
India, in many ways, is in a unique position to offer credible leadership on this issue. Since India's nuclear weapons capability evolved in response to the South Asian security environment, it recognizes the need that many other states feel for nuclear weapons because of their strategic environment. On the other hand, the concerns of the broader international community with regard to nuclear weapons falling in the hands of terrorist organizations and other irresponsible actors is also a possibility that India has to contend with in its immediate neighborhood.
Perhaps because of these contending pulls and pressures, India has been an exemple in so far as nuclear non-proliferation is concerned. Despite going nuclear for its security needs, India has actually pursued the principles of non-proliferation beyond what the performance of many treaty members of the non-proliferation regime has been.
India has also explored new avenues for preventing proliferation. It has decided to abide by the rules of the Proliferation Security Initiative launched by the Bush Administration. It has also entered into various nuclear confidence-building measures with Pakistan and has declared a no-first use nuclear doctrine.
The world must also be looking beyond arms control if it really wants a more stable order to emerge in the future. Given the horrors of September 11, 2001, the danger of nuclear terrorism, and the prospect of numerous Iran and North Korea just a screwdriver away from nuclear weapons, it is time for the international community to promote a bolder nuclear arrangement than the NPT of 1968. In addition, a recognition that the old nuclear regime has failed is a much-needed first step in that direction. © Harsh V. Pant
| |||
 | | | |