Obama’s Nuclear Cross to Bear

After the end of the Cold War, everything lead to the belief that nuclear arms would soon cease to have a raison d’être. In fact, this week, three major events are pointing in this direction.

First, the accord that was just signed in Prague between the Russians and the Americans to replace START I (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), signed in 1991 in Moscow and expired in December 2009, will reduce the number of nuclear warheads possessed by both of the superpowers from 2,200 to 1,550; what’s more, the number of vectors (intercontinental missiles aboard submarines and bombers), deployed and non-deployed, will be reduced to 800, compared to 1,600 today. Then, the United States solemnly forbade itself to use nuclear weapons against countries not producing them or who have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — aside from Iran and North Korea. In other words, a war against a non-nuclear country will remain conventional. That is a radical change in that it reduces the possibility of using nuclear arms on the battlefields, and therefore makes their use less unpredictable.

Finally, President Obama succeeded in bringing 47 heads of State together in Washington and mobilizing them against “nuclear terrorism.”

These are considerable advances. But we are far from the end. First, other countries besides these two superpowers, authorized by treaties (France, Great Britain and China) or not (Israel, India, Pakistan), each have more than 100 warheads and some even more than 200.

Second, other countries, like Iran or North Korea, are letting it be heard, almost overtly, that they will not cease to equip themselves with nuclear arms. Furthermore, while it takes some 25 kilos of fissionable material to make a nuclear bomb, and some grams of waste to make a dirty bomb, 1,587 tons of highly enriched uranium — allowing for the development of bombs — are stored in 40 countries, sometimes in hazardous conditions, with no serious international controls in place. Finally, a new category of semi-nuclear countries is starting to arise: those approaching the possession of nuclear weapons, but still three or six months from their possession. It is in fact possible, according to the treaties, in all legality, to equip oneself with separate pieces of a weapon, of its fuel and its trigger, without assembling them or even acknowledging that one has the intention of doing so.

The deterring element is therefore unchanged. That is the present state in Japan. It will soon, without doubt, be so in North Korea. Then in Iran. And the next day, without fail, many other countries that have just furnished themselves at the nuclear supermarket. North Korea has come under the benevolent eye of Beijing and the powerful one of the United States, which has asked too much economically of China to put pressure on her.

How, then, to intervene to stop these countries? How to struggle against this perfectly legal quasi-proliferation? No treaty can protect us from it. The wisdom of the directors and the quality of the government in these countries alone can succeed. The only fragile guarantee is the establishment of democratic institutions from one to the next, with the transparency and the opposing powers that they imply. Democracy would be the only global guarantor of nuclear peace. We are far from it.