Will the Ukraine war ring the knell for nuclear arms control?

Editor’s note (August 1st 2022): President Joe Biden today offered to “expeditiously negotiate” a new nuclear arms-control deal with Russia to replace the New START treaty, which expires in 2026. Mr Biden also put pressure on China to discuss limits on its growing nuclear arsenal. It is not clear whether either power will take up his call, but it allows America to cast itself as a responsible power at the start of a big nuclear conference in New York.

IN THE SEA of hostility between America and Russia, an island of co-operation endures: the rival powers routinely share information about their long-range nuclear weapons, from the movement of warheads in and out of maintenance to telemetry from ballistic-missile launches. This is both striking and reassuring in the sixth month of war in Ukraine, as Russia periodically threatens to use nuclear weapons and America warns of “severe consequences” if it does.

America’s State Department says Russia is complying fully with the New START treaty, which limits each side to 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles (with range greater than 5,500km, or 3,420 miles), heavy bombers and submarines. Especially at a time of acute tension, an American official says, its provisions help “mitigate the potential for miscalculations, misunderstandings and over-reactions.”

This may be the only good news in the darkening world of nuclear arms control as delegates from 191 countries gather in New York on August 1st for a big “review conference” (or RevCon) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a cornerstone of global nuclear security. Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association, an American think-tank, says the danger of nuclear war, or at least a return to a nuclear arms race, is greater than at any time since the mid-1980s.

Iran is on the nuclear threshold now that negotiations to revive a deal from 2015 restricting its atomic programme have all but failed. North Korea has already gone nuclear. It has resumed testing intercontinental ballistic missiles and may soon conduct another underground nuclear test. Britain is expanding its arsenal. France is reported to have raised its deterrent posture by sending out to sea three submarines armed with nuclear-armed missiles, rather than the usual one. China is building up its stockpile fast. The Pentagon reckons it will have more than 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030. That is still smaller than the arsenals of America and Russia, which each have a total of more than 5,000 warheads. But unlike them China is bound by no ceiling and has resisted American attempts to draw it into arms-limitation talks.

Russia has developed newfangled nuclear weapons, from hypersonic glide vehicles to torpedoes, some of which are not covered by any treaty. America is also working on new weapons after withdrawing from a host of arms-control agreements—among them the anti-ballistic missile treaty of 1972 (abandoned in 2002) and the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty of 1987 (disavowed in 2019). Under the AUKUS deal last year, the United States and Britain agreed to supply nuclear-propelled submarines, but not nuclear weapons, to Australia.

The world’s nuclear stockpile is thus set to expand again, having shrunk from about 70,300 warheads in 1986 to some 12,700 this year, and in many cases is being modernised. Given that America and Russia account for nine-tenths of these, many experts worry that all restraint will be abandoned once New START expires in February 2026. America halted talks on a follow-on deal when Russia invaded Ukraine, and there is no sign that they will resume soon, or ever. “The biggest question is whether and how the 50-year history of negotiated restraints in nuclear weapons is going to continue,” says Rose Gottemoeller, the chief American negotiator of New START. “If it does not, then we are well and truly in the midst of a new arms race and a new build-up.”

Stephen Lovegrove, Britain’s national-security adviser, sounded the alarm in a speech in Washington on July 27th. The world, he said, was “entering a dangerous new age of proliferation, in which technological change is increasing the damage potential of many weapons, and those weapons systems are more widely available”. During the cold war the risk of nuclear escalation involved just two blocs and was largely predictable, he argued; now there are more paths to escalation, not least through cyber-attacks, and rivals’ nuclear doctrines are “opaque”.

The month-long NPT review conference—originally scheduled for 2020, the 50th anniversary of the treaty’s coming into force, but delayed by covid-19—ought to be the central venue to deal with these multiplying dangers. But the RevCon may well start and end in acrimony over Ukraine, particularly Russia’s weakening of the nuclear taboo, which makes the unthinkable thinkable. In January, just before the invasion, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council issued a joint statement echoing the words of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev: “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Forget such big-power alignment now.

The NPT is, at heart, a pact between the nuclear haves and have-nots: the five recognised nuclear-weapons states agreed to negotiate disarmament “in good faith”; the rest forswore developing nukes. All promised to share the benefits of nuclear technology for peaceful uses. And the International Atomic Energy Agency would safeguard the system. The deal still holds, more or less, though there are now nine countries with nukes (including Israel, India and Pakistan), and more may yet follow.

Like many UN events, the review conference can involve much pious hypocrisy. And in a body that operates by consensus, any country can hold up agreement, as happened at the last RevCon in 2015. Besides the growing splits between the big powers, many non-nuclear states are fed up with the slow progress on disarmament. More than 120 countries sought to anathemise nukes by adopting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017; it entered into force last year and 66 countries have ratified it. Its aim to ban nukes altogether is not binding on nuclear-weapons states, which regard it as unrealistic and a threat to the NPT. But New Zealand, one of the new treaty’s signatories, has vowed to turn on the heat. “I will be making clear New Zealand views the lack of action by nuclear states in holding up their end of the grand bargain as totally unacceptable,” tweeted Phil Twyford, its minister for disarmament.

How to overcome what he calls a “Catch-22”—the notion that disarmament is impossible at a time of war, ie, that creating nuclear stability requires stability? Mr Kimball argues that, at a minimum, America and Russia should resume mutual on-site nuclear inspections under New START, which were halted by the pandemic. Moreover, the RevCon should push them to resume work on a successor treaty, and to keep abiding by the terms of New START even if they fail to reach agreement.

Ms Gottemoeller argues that another good place to begin would be to restore limits on shorter and intermediate-range (500-5,500km) missiles. One stumbling block is that America wants to deploy conventional missiles of this class in the Pacific, where China has the advantage in such weapons. Ms Gottemoeller says Russia has already offered such limits in Europe, and she thinks China may be interested in something similar in Asia if restricted to nuclear missiles.

President Joe Biden, a long-time advocate of nuclear restraint, wrote in a letter in June that America had to “continue beyond” New START and keep working “to engage Russia on issues of strategic stability”. But his room to negotiate anything is shrinking. He is deeply unpopular. Republicans, more suspicious than Democrats of arms limitations, may win back one or both houses of Congress in the mid-term elections in November, and perhaps the White House in 2024.

Some experts, such as Franklin Miller, a former arms-control official, argue that New START is no longer fit for purpose because its 1,550-warhead cap does not allow America to deter both Russia and China. “Arms control, rather than augmenting our ability to deter, is undercutting it,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. He said America should build up to 3,000-3,500 deployed strategic warheads, either in accord with Russia or unilaterally. This month’s conference in New York may be the best chance to prevent a nuclear free-for-all.■

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.