Nuclear peace hangs by a thread

THE 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, was observed last week. The catastrophic human tragedy unleashed by the bombings was only outdone by the cruel irony of the folksy names the bombs were given by the attackers — Little Boy and Fat Man. And the pilot of the aircraft which dropped the bomb thought it was a proud moment of his life to pilot this vaahan of death, which he named after his mother, Enola Gay. Such is the banality of evil.

As the years have gone by, the memory of those horrors, of melting human flesh and vapourised bodies, of clocks and watches frozen in the moment of impact and the awesome terror of the mushroom cloud which has become the signature of apocalypse, has been dimmed by time. It should not be. The danger of an apocalypse of a greater scale and intensity lurks beneath a pervasive complacency. The younger generations have scant familiarity with this tragic history, even though it is they who must work to ensure that it is never repeated.

It is true that the taboo against the use of nuclear weapons has prevailed since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And, contrary to the many dire predictions made in the post-atomic age, the number of nuclear weapon states has increased from the original five (US, UK, Russia, France and China) to only nine today (adding Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea).

It is also true that the global stock of nuclear weapons, mainly in the arsenals of the US and Russia, has come down from a maximum of 40,000 at the height of the Cold War to about 14,000 today, with the US and Russian stocks still by far the largest. This may be a cause for hope, but as long as nuclear weapons exist, the danger of a nuclear holocaust will persist.

What is worrying is the lack of civil society mobilisation and activism in calling for a nuclear weapon-free world. In the 1980s, when I was representing India at the Geneva-based Committee on Disarmament, there was the most vocal Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in Europe. Even the Mahabodhi Society under its venerable head, Fujii Guru, parked itself outside the Council chamber, chanting hymns for peace, reminding the world, as only a Japanese activist could, of the need to ensure that Hiroshima and Nagasaki remained compelling reasons to achieve a nuclear weapon-free world.

Later, at the turn of the century, I was part of the Global Zero movement, which campaigned with passion and perseverance for a world free of nuclear weapons. It was led by Bruce G Blair, who had been part of the US nuclear command and control and well understood the fragility of nuclear peace. Blair passed away in 2020 and the movement lost its drive and energy. I believe that without a civil society movement on a global scale, the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons will remain a chimera.

There are several reasons to doubt the stability of the global nuclear regime. Theories of nuclear deterrence, which it is claimed has kept the nuclear peace over the past 80 years, have always been of questionable value and are even more questionable today. Most doctrines of nuclear deterrence evolved in an essentially binary equation between the East represented by the then Soviet Union and the West represented by the US, UK and France.

Concepts such as Mutually Assured Destruction (the capacity of each side to annihilate the other in a nuclear exchange, irrespective of which side initiated the exchange) and Graduated Response (or the notion that it would be possible to control escalation from the use of theatre weapons right up to a strategic, no-holds-barred exchange) proliferated. These were more mind games than reflections of reality. If nuclear deterrence, even in a binary context, proved to be so complicated, how would it work in a landscape populated by several nuclear weapon states?

Would a binary nuclear exchange, say between India and Pakistan, remain binary or must factor in the role of China? Would China’s entry into a nuclear war in the sub-continent draw in Russia and the US? The multiplicity of nuclear actors and the impossibility of predicting their reactions make the danger of managing relations among nuclear weapon states much more complex and unpredictable. It is only in multilateral negotiations involving all N-weapon states that one may begin to address the danger of a nuclear war.

A start could be made by a multilateral compact among nuclear weapon states never to be the first to use nuclear weapons and ideally to pledge never to use or threaten to use them. Such a compact would have inhibited Russia from brandishing the use of a theatre nuclear weapon against Ukraine in the ongoing war.

Technology is also playing a role in enhancing the threat of a nuclear war. The technology to assemble a crude but highly destructive device is now freely available. Deterrence may work against states, but becomes irrelevant in dealing with non-state actors. It is conceivable that a terrorist or a jihadist group lays its hands on a useable device and launches it against a state from the territory of another state without the latter’s knowledge and connivance. Would retaliation with nuclear weapons against that state be justified? It may even be conceivable that the device may be launched from within the territory of a state. What would retaliation entail in this context?

Nuclear weapons are now integrated with cyber systems and rely for targeting on satellite systems. There is already a nuclear-cyber-space continuum and a disruption at any point in this continuum can cause accidental use of nuclear weapons, or false alarms triggering a premature retaliation. The application of artificial intelligence and the diminishing of human agency in decision-making will make the nuclear danger far greater than it already is. We are hurtling into a future which contains the seeds of our own extinction.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserve more than pious memorials. They are a warning to be heeded.

Shyam Saran is a former Foreign Secretary.