Amid fears of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, as Iran appears to be on track to develop its nuclear capabilities and other countries are certain to follow, is it still feasible to dream that nuclear weapons may one day be abolished altogether? Some experts still believe it is.
Yet we are entering a new era where the poles of power as we knew them are shifting. I call this the post-nuclear exclusivity era, where the monopoly once held by the Big Five — the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain and France — no longer holds. Today you can add to that list Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea and very possibly Iran.
Libya admitted to having invested in trying to develop a bomb with North Korean help. But spooked by the US invasion of Iraq and nudged on by Muammar al- Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, Libya turned over its bomb-making kit to the Americans in exchange for better relations with Washington — and it worked. Libya has stopped trying to blow planes out of the sky and just last month US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to Tripoli to meet with al-Gaddafi.
But now there is also another name that may be added to this list, that of non-state entities. And here lies the real danger when it comes to nuclear weapons.
The one nuclear story with a happy ending is South Africa which voluntarily dismantled its program under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency after Apartheid was ended, getting rid of two evils in the same decade.
While the Big Five held the monopoly on nuclear technology the dangers associated with them were minimal. Throughout the decades of the Cold War, with the US possessing more than 10,000 nuclear warheads and the Soviets some 8,000 and each pointing at the other side’s major cities, none were ever fired. There were one or two tense moments — such as the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s when the Soviet Union deployed missiles to Cuba and President John F. Kennedy threatened to take them out — but luckily the worst was averted.
In essence, nuclear weapons of mass destruction acted more as deterrence as no country, the logic went, would attack another if it possessed nuclear weaponry. This quite possibly is what today keeps India and Pakistan from fighting another war.
Iran realized this when it was confronted by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s in a “conventional war” lasting eight years and claiming 500,000 Iranian lives.
However, non-state entities — groups such as al- Qaeda — are trying to obtain weapons of mass destruction not for deterrence, but rather with the intent to maximize the damage caused and inflict the greatest number of casualties possible.
So when it comes to the powers possessing WMDs today, is its still feasible to believe that those countries would be at greater risk of being attacked if they didn’t possess nuclear weapons? This is the question George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and director of its non- proliferation program, and James M. Acton, a physicist by training who lectures at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, ask in the latest issue of the Adelphi Paper (No. 396) published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The authors believe the following to be the case: “None of today’s nuclear-armed states would fall prey to major aggression if they all eliminated their nuclear arsenals,” they wrote. Indeed, who would attack the US, Russia, France, Britain or China today, with or without a nuclear arsenal?
And if India and Pakistan managed to retain cool heads despite their differences and their border disputes, perhaps, just perhaps, they could get rid of their WMDs?
Countries with nuclear weapons are not the danger here, and although many analysts in the West may disagree, the danger does not come from so-called “rogue” states, either real of imagined members of President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil.”
Assuming for a moment that Iran were to develop nuclear weapons, and assuming its leadership was adventurous enough to use them, the rulers in Tehran know full well what the reply would be like.
So today’s real concern has more to do with terrorist groups trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction: not only nuclear, but also chemical and biological, too.
As Brian Michael Jenkins — who has just recently released the book Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? — wrote, “There is no doubt that the idea of nuclear weapons may appeal to terrorists.”
Today, it is that new threat that ultimately will prevent the abolishment of nuclear weapons — at least until the threat of nuclear terrorism dissipates, and that may be a few years still.
Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times in Washington and a political analyst
