Conflict and Cooperation in a Post-Nuclear World

It may seem obvious, but needs stressing, that the shape of a post-nuclear world and of its remaining security challenges would depend on how we got there. It is clear, for example, that major nuclear weapons-owning countries (including those not rec­ognized in the Non-Proliferation Treaty) could only arrive at such a point by a co­operative, consensual route. Nuclear deter­rence itself makes it hard to imagine that any nuclear state would disarm any of the others by force, unless in some scenarios of reckless action by a smaller possessor. The great powers would also surely want strengthened powers for international in­stitutions - where they hold commanding influence - to verify the nuclear weapons ban and investigate alleged infractions. Real-time management might meanwhile belong to a more political framework such as an evolved G20.

Winners, losers, enforcers?

It is less self-evident that all states would celebrate the new order. Some might un­dergo forced disarmament or stoppage of ambiguous nuclear programs in the man­ner of Iraq after the Gulf War. Others, not necessarily planning a weapons capacity, could resent added intrusions into their civil nuclear programs. Both points should be less problematic if the non-nuclear or­der was based on region-by-region coop­eration covered by overarching UN rules, with groups of peer states (including exist­ing alliances) taking co-responsibility for maintaining both compliance and strategic balance in their localities. Such regional communities have so far produced the best results in restraining and reassuring rebel­lious neighbors, opening the way for them to evolve into peaceful partners. They could now also function as a patchwork of active WMD-free zones.

If the great powers were too prominent as arbiters, tension could arise between them over local cases, as troublemakers could take advantage by playing one against the other. Thus if any regional state could only be persuaded to go non-nuclear by new, binding defense guarantees, these would ideally be given jointly by all permanent members of the UN Security Council. North Korea for instance, short of reunifi­cation, might best be calmed by US as well as Chinese and Russian assurances.

Connections with conflict

What could a post-nuclear world mean for security conditions and challenges more generally? A recurring concern has been that nuclear abolition should not 'make the world safe for conventional war'. However, on the assumptions given above, the di­rect risks of war between the great powers should be no greater than before. If they still contemplated such scenarios, they would hardly jettison their nuclear insurance. Further, we might hope that these pow­ers' understanding of the need to combine against other 21st-century challenges - eco­nomic instability, disease, climate change, mass migration and cyber-attack, as well as crime and terrorism - would both stimulate the non-nuclear concord, and have new per­spectives opened by it. The measures need­ed to build a secure firewall around every­one's nuclear energy programs would reach new levels of intrusiveness, and of reliance on collective institutions, that should ease the way for parallel approaches to resolving other global threats that cut across internal/external, civil/military and state/non-state boundaries.

What about local and internal conflicts? The odds of their breaking out should not change across most of the globe because the great majority of players involved do not possess nuclear weapons: or if they do, could not realistically use nuclear lever­age in internal or lower-scale contingen­cies (like the UK in Northern Ireland or the Falklands). Two obvious cases exist where major local clashes may be deterred to some extent by the nuclear factor, name­ly between India and Pakistan, and Israel and its neighbors. These would need extra stabilizing measures - with or without full political resolution, and in the latter case designed also to deal with Iran's security and status - before moving to a non-nucle­ar world. This may sound visionary, but is a condition for getting Pakistan and Israel to give up their deterrents anyway.

Another question is what would happen to the calculus of intervention, especially re­mote deployments by large powers. Con­sciously or not, such powers today rest on their nuclear capacity to ward off both a (conventional) backlash by local oppo­nents against their homeland, and the risk of another large power intervening on the other side. Establishing such 'escalation dominance' by purely conventional means, against a wily local opponent who may also resort to terrorism, has never been easy - as seen since the Vietnam war. (It is even harder against a local superpower, which raises questions about the future defensi­bility of Taiwan.) Could these implications, added to the chastening experiences of the 2000s in Iraq, Afghanistan and Georgia, usher in an age of less intervention overall? There is at least some room for the brighter hypothesis that it would rather promote more consensual interventions (where all large powers would agree on a UNSC man­date), and/or more activism by regional or­ganizations, as mentioned above.

Watching for breakout

Conventional arms flows and balances would need much closer scrutiny in a post-nuclear world to forestall new races and technological breakouts, strengthening a trend already seen in current efforts for a UN Arms Trade Treaty. Verifying the non-use of missiles, including space launchers, for WMD purposes would be an obvious yet hugely problematic task. The worst risks of strategic destabilization would lie, not just in re-weaponization of civil nuclear holdings, but in the possible resort to other old and new mass destruction technolo­gies. Loopholes and enforcement problems in the present instruments banning biologi­cal and chemical weapons would need far greater attention. Especially worrisome is the virtual absence of constraints on sub­stances and techniques designed to main­tain internal order. Arguments for defining and policing the potentially destructive uses of nanotechnology, robotics, electro-magnetic devices and other means of dis­rupting the human metabolism - to name but a few - should move from the margins to the center of responsible security policy. It is not immediately evident why cyber-technology should not be viewed and ad­dressed in the same light.

This underlines that a 21st-century non-nuclear world would be an environment where states and their institutions no longer hold all the answers. Criminal and terror­ist dangers may continue to be addressed through denial and coercion, as with to­day's nuclear security and safety programs. At least equally vital, however, will be the alertness, sense of responsibility and posi­tive cooperation of legitimate private ac­tors ranging from financial, production and transport companies to independent scien­tists. Policing the nuclear prohibition will also be much easier with vigilance from NGOs and civil society: and all these non-state inputs are needed everywhere, not just in the pluralistic West. Fostering and rewarding the necessary 'security cultures' throughout diverse populations could de­mand almost more maturity than breaking the nuclear addiction itself.