Can nuclear arms control be revived in the era of nuclear multipolarity?

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Notes

1 See, for example, Uri Friedman, “The New Concept in Washington Everyone Is Talking About,” The Atlantic, August 6, 2019, <www.theatlantic.com/politics/archives/2019/08/what-genesis-great-power-competition/595405>.

2 See Johan Galtung, The True Worlds: A Transnational Perspective (New York: Free Press, 1980).

3 See Tanya Ogilvie-White and David Santoro, “Introduction: The Dynamics of Nuclear Disarmament. New Momentum and the Future of the Nonproliferation Regime,” Special Section, Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 17–21.

4 See, for example, Nina Tannenwald, “The Vanishing Nuclear Taboo? How Disarmament Fell Apart,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 97, No. 6 (November/December 2018), pp. 16–24; Nina Tannenwald, “The Great Unraveling: The Decline of the Nuclear Normative Order,” in Nina Tannenwald and James M. Acton, Meeting the Challenges of the New Nuclear Age (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, April 2018).

5 William Walker, On Nuclear Embeddedness and (Ir)Reversibility, working paper, Program on Science & Global Security, Princeton University, February 2020, p. 39, <https://sgs.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/2020-02/walker-2020.pdf>.

6 See Jeffrey W. Knopf, “Not by NPT Alone: The Future of the Global Nuclear Order,” Contemporary Security Policy, September 27, 2021, p. 4, <https://doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2021.1983243>.

7 Herman Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (New York: Praeger, 1965).

8 The five nuclear-weapon states recognized under the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) reaffirmed the Reagan-Gorbachev “canonical pledge” in a joint statement on January 3, 2022. White House, “Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races,” January 3, 2022, <https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/01/03/p5-statement-on-preventing-nuclear-war-and-avoiding-arms-races/>. See also Shannon Bugos and Julia Masterson, “NPT Nuclear-Weapon States Reject Nuclear War,” Arms Control Today, January/February 2022, pp. 21-22, <https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2022-01/news/npt-nuclear-weapon-states-reject-nuclear-war>.

9 The norms of not testing nuclear weapons and not using or threatening to use nuclear weapons are in article 1, paragraphs a) and d), respectively, of the TPNW.

10 White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Barack Obama in Prague as Delivered, April 5, 2009,” <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-barack-obama-prague-delivered>.

11 For example, “a ceiling could be set on all deployed nuclear warheads or on delivery systems and launchers or on a mix of both” or “including CPGS and/or ground-based missile-defense interceptors within overall delivery vehicles ceilings or subceilings” (p. 195).

12 See Tannenwald, “The Vanishing Nuclear Taboo?”; and Tannenwald, “The Great Unraveling.”

13 See Harald Müller, “Taboo or Tradition or What? A Critical Look at the Terminology and Conceptualization of Nuclear Nonuse,” International Studies Review, Vol. 23, No. 3 (September 2021), p. 1084.

14 Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Chinese Nuclear Weapons, 2021,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 77, No. 6 (2021), p. 318.

15 See Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

16 Thomas Schelling, “Foreword,” in Jeffrey A. Larsen, ed., Arms Control: Cooperative Security in a Changing Environment (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), p. xv.

17 See Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 175.

18 See for example, John Simpson, "The Birth of a New Era? The 1995 NPT Conference and the Politics of Nuclear Disarmament," Security Dialogue, Vol. 26, No. 1 (September 1995), pp. 247–56.

19 See Bruce W. Jentleson, “Refocusing US Grand Strategy on Pandemic and Environmental Mass Destruction,” Washington Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2020), pp. 7–29.

20 See “Documentation,” International Security, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Summer 1976), quoted in Krepon, p. 183 and p. 559.

21 George Kennan, who predicted the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, was prescient about Russia’s reaction to NATO enlargement: “‘Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era.’ It would ‘inflame the existing nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, restore the atmosphere of the Cold War to East–West relations, and impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.’” George Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” New York Times, February 5, 1997, p. A23, quoted in Krepon, p. 358.

22 At the Reagan–Gorbachev summit, held in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 11–12, 1986, the American and Soviet leaders entertained the idea of complete abolition of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and offensive nuclear arms. The “dream” of the global zero movement did not come into existence, partly because of Soviet opposition to the American Strategic Defense Initiative. Yet the Reykjavik summit paved the way for the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty (signed in Washington 14 months later) and the groundbreaking 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

23 See, for example, John Borrie, “An Introduction to Implementing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons,” Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2021), pp. 1–12.

24 See Michael Quinlan, “Abolishing Nuclear Armouries: Policy or Pipedream?,” Survival, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Winter 2007/8), pp. 7–16.

25 Alton Frye, “Strategic Build-Down: A Context for Restraint,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Winter 1983/84), p. 298.

26 Kjolv Egeland, “Nuclear Weapons and Adversarial Politics: Bursting the Abolitionist ‘Consensus,’” Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2021), p. 108.