Article published in Financial Times, December 18 2009

A plan to eliminate the world's nuclear weapons

Prof Gareth Evans and Ms Yoriko Kawaguchi*

It is sheer dumb luck that since Nagasaki no nuclear weapon has exploded in a major population centre by accident, miscalculation or design. Some 23,000 warheads still exist, nearly half actively deployed, and more than 2,000 on dangerously high alert. Command and control systems are much more susceptible to error than commonly believed, and it is not beyond the capacity of terrorists to buy or build nuclear weapons. Climate change is not the only man-made threat capable of destroying life on this planet as we know it. The prospect of a nuclear catastrophe defies complacency, and maintaining the status quo indefinitely is not an option.

No responsible leader wants to see any new nuclear weapon state emerge, or weapons or material fall into the hands of terrorists. But unless the present nuclear-armed states get a lot more serious about not only non-proliferation and nuclear security but dramatically reducing and ultimately eliminating their own arsenals, they are going to find these risks almost impossible to contain.

The necessary interdependence of non-proliferation and disarmament is a central theme of this week's report of the Australia-Japan sponsored International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, which we co-chair.

The argument, though sometimes caricatured this way, is not that disarmament by itself will guarantee non-proliferation: no determined proliferator is going to be moved by example alone not to follow suit. Rather it is that to achieve almost any effective policy outcome in this area, there has to be serious buy-in - preferably outright support, but at least no opposition - from a very wide range of countries. Think of sanctions resolutions in the UN Security Council, compliance determinations by the International Atomic Energy Agency, negotiations on the cut-off of fissile material production for weapons purposes in the conference on disarmament in Geneva, or consensus agreements in the non-proliferation treaty (NPT) review conference.

It is no coincidence that agreement indefinitely to extend the NPT in 1995 followed intense downsizing of cold war nuclear stockpiles, that the proliferation reverses of the last decade occurred in the context of overt antagonism to arms control by the Bush-Cheney administration, or that the currently more optimistic outlook for the 2010 NPT review followed President Barack Obama's commitment actively to work for a world without nuclear weapons. When double standards diminish, co-operation increases.

In the period immediately ahead, there are three major contributions that the big nuclear-armed states can make to demonstrate a serious commitment to disarmament.

The first is for the US and Russia - holding between them more than 95 per cent of the world's nuclear warheads - not only rapidly to conclude the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty follow-on presently being negotiated, but to commence a new round of negotiations designed to produce further deep cuts in each side's arsenals.

The second is for all the nuclear weapon states to agree a strong statement on disarmament at next year's NPT review, renewing and extending the commitment they made in 2000 but failed to endorse in 2005.

The third, and perhaps most important of all, is for all the nuclear-armed states to adopt a nuclear doctrine that significantly reduces the role and salience of nuclear weapons in their defence posture. Credible "no first use" commitments are the ideal way-station to abolition, but will take time to achieve.

What would be entirely consistent with President Obama's Prague speech last April, and would give the greatest possible boost to international co-operation, would be for the US to make a genuinely transformational statement in its nuclear posture review scheduled for publication early in the new year. This would declare that the "sole purpose" of nuclear weapons, so long as they exist, should be to deter the use of nuclear weapons by others against oneself or one's allies. Other threats can and should be dealt with by conventional weapons: extended deterrence does not have to mean extended nuclear deterrence.

Washington's allies would have nothing to fear from such a move, and the world as a whole an enormous amount to gain.

* Gareth Evans is former Foreign Minister of Australia and President of the International Crisis Group. Yoriko Kawaguchi is former Foreign Minister of Japan and member of the Upper House of Parliament.  They are Co-Chairs of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament.