A new START, but that doesn’t mean it’s NOFUN

It was Les Aspin, President Clinton’s first
Defense Secretary, who first formulated the great truth about nuclear weapons
in the post Cold War world. It was nuclear deterrence, he noted, which had
enabled the US to ‘equalize’
the conventional superiority of the Soviet Union
through the long decades of confrontation. But in the new world of the 1990s,
the US
enjoyed unmatched conventional military power. “We’re the ones”, Aspin
cautioned, “who could wind up being the equalizee.” Conclusion: accepting that
nuclear weapons could not be disinvented, it had   nonetheless become the US national interest
to do whatever it could to “reduce the salience” of nuclear weapons in
international affairs.

Obama, then, is only picking up where
Clinton left off – and, despite the messianic tone of his original appeal to
“rid the world of nuclear weapons”, he has made no bones about how he sees this
serving the US national interest. Traditional East/West nuclear deterrence is
now beside the point. The real threat to the US is no longer Soviet aggression,
but nuclear weapons appearing in the hands of ‘rogue states’ or, even worse,
terrorists. The logical response is to seek to reduce the number of bombs, and
bomb-making material, world-wide; to encourage better safe-guarding of the
weapons that exist; and to buttress the non-proliferation regime. Hence the
current slew of nuclear initiatives – the new START treaty with Russia,
bracketed by a Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) which contains new promises of
non-use by the US of its nuclear arsenal, and by the Washington summit on
nuclear security.

The only puzzle, perhaps, is that those
promises of non-use in the NPR did not go further. The audience is the
non-nuclear generality of nations who will gather in New York in May for the
five-yearly review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As their
price for preserving or tightening the non-proliferation regime, the non-nuclear
weapon states (NNWS) demand that the nuclear powers show progress on the disarmament
agenda which is meant to be their side of the non-proliferation bargain.
(Strange, really, when you reflect that it is the NNWS who have even more to
fear from proliferation than those who already have the bomb; but the
international dynamic seems stuck on the conception that non-proliferation is a
favour done by those who have no bomb to those who do.)

In terms of declaratory policy, what
advocates of nuclear disarmament are really looking for from the nuclear powers
are NOFUN declarations – no first use of nuclear weapons. In other words,
promises that nuclear weapons would never be used in response to conventional,
biological, chemical or any other kind of attack, except nuclear. If all
nuclear powers adopted such positions, then none could dispute the desirability
of complete nuclear disarmament all round. The issue of ‘whether’ would have
been dealt with, and all that would be left would be ‘how’.

But Obama did not offer a NOFUN
declaration. Instead, he offered a rather more complicated guarantee of
immunity to NNWS party to the NPT, and playing by the rules. Why this
reticence?

US briefing suggested that in this way the US
could keep the pressure on Iran
and N Korea. But is the spectre of an American
pre-emptive nuclear strike against such proliferators even remotely credible? A
massive conventional pre-emptive attack, yes. Nuclear retaliation for nuclear
aggression by the proliferator, yes. But nuclear first use, even against a
defiant proliferator? Never.

Strangely, US reticence is probably as much or
more driven by the desire to keep on the table the option of first use against
– the Russians. Objectively, this seems pretty absurd in the circumstances of
2010. But resort to nuclear weapons to deter overwhelming Soviet conventional
assault on W Europe has been the foundation of
NATO strategy for sixty years. A revision of that strategy is due for agreement
by the NATO allies this autumn: a NOFUN declaration now by the US would have
driven a coach and horses through the NATO consultation process. (And similar
considerations apply to the US’s
Pacific allies, who have abstained from seeking their own nuclear weapons in
the face of China, relying
instead on the US
nuclear umbrella.)

On top of that, the US will have been conscious that any NOFUN
declaration at this point would have rendered instantly redundant their
residual nuclear weapons based in Europe. The
whole point of such forward-based weapons was, historically, to thrust the
prospect of NATO first use into the lowering face of the Soviet
Union. A number of European allies have already called for the
withdrawal of these weapons. The US has no particular desire to keep
them there. But it wants such a fundamental change in NATO’s strategy and
defence posture to come about as the result of careful debate within the
alliance, and not in response to a piece of populism by German foreign minister
Westerwelle.

And it wants to take a trick with the
withdrawal card – the trick of countervailing Russian reductions. The
forward-based nuclear weapons, having secured deterrence for decades, should
perform a final service by acting as bargaining chips in a further round of nuclear
disarmament, this time covering ‘tactical’ weapons. Such weapons, of which the
Russians have inordinate numbers, constitute a particular safeguarding hazard.

Today’s Russia is not going to forsake its
nuclear arsenal: it, too, understands that the nuclear shoe is now on the other
foot, and that where it was once the ‘equalizee’ nuclear power now helps it
‘equal’ the US, and indeed China. But, by its current careful steps, the US
administration can hope to advance towards a world which, if not nuclear-free,
at least has fewer and better-secured nuclear weapons, and one in which nuclear
‘status’ counts for less.