The Strategy of Non-proliferation: Maintaining the Credibility of an Incredible Pledge to Disarm
| Author | Anne Harrington de Santana |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0305829811413312 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
MILLENNIU
M
Journal of International Studies
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
40(1) 3–19
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829811413312
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Corresponding author:
Anne Harrington de Santana, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University, USA.
Email: ahds@stanford.edu
Northedge Prize Essay
The Strategy of Non-
proliferation: Maintaining
the Credibility of an
Incredible Pledge to Disarm
Anne Harrington de Santana
Stanford University, USA
Abstract
This article criticises the leadership of the new nuclear disarmament movement in the United
States for not going far enough. Whether the US administration actually wants to achieve
disarmament or not, implementing the current US nuclear policy agenda will not produce a world
free of nuclear weapons. Rather, it will reinvigorate an ailing non-proliferation regime by adapting
it to confront new nuclear threats. This conclusion is based on a two-part argument. Firstly, non-
proliferation is a strategy much like the Cold War-era strategy of extended deterrence. Just as
extended deterrence required the US to maintain the credibility of an incredible threat to attack,
non-proliferation requires the US to maintain the credibility of an incredible pledge to disarm.
Thus, re-establishing disarmament as a credible long-term goal of US nuclear policy will persuade
other states in the short term to forgo nuclear weapons and cooperate in restricting access
to fissile materials. Secondly, contrary to the common-sense interpretation of the relationship
between non-proliferation and disarmament, it does not follow that a robust non-proliferation
regime will lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons. In fact, experience suggests just the
opposite: Non-proliferation does not lead to disarmament. In conclusion, whatever the Obama
administration’s aim, the current US nuclear policy will reduce the threat nuclear weapons pose
to the US, while obviating the need for the US to disarm itself.
Keywords
deterrence, disarmament, non-proliferation, nuclear security strategy, nuclear weapons, nuclear
zero
This article is the winner of the F.S. Northedge Essay Competition 2011. The Northedge
Essay Competition was established in 1986 in memory of one of the founders of Millennium,
Professor F.S. Northedge. It furthers a Millennium tradition of publishing well-argued
4 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40(1)
student work in a journal open to new issues and innovative approaches to International
Relations. It is open to students currently pursuing or who have recently completed a degree
in International Relations or a related field. The winner is chosen on the basis of the essay’s
contribution to the advancement of the field, originality of the argument and scholarly
presentation.
Since the 1950s, the policymakers who have shaped US foreign policy have consist-
ently regarded nuclear disarmament as a laudable, but ultimately unrealistic, goal. As a
result, when prominent architects of the Cold War nuclear order – led by George Shultz,
William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn – proclaimed publically for the first time
that they supported the goal of ‘a world free of nuclear weapons’, their announcement
marked a turning point in the US debate about nuclear security.1 In particular, their 2007
Wall Street Journal op-ed had a transformational effect, fundamentally reconfiguring the
positions within the debate on US nuclear policy for the first time in more than half a
century.2
Until the recent contribution from these statesmen, debates about nuclear security
strategy reproduced predictable Cold War fault lines. On the one hand, disarmament
idealists believed that we could all work together to overcome national rivalries and
achieve the global good of complete nuclear disarmament. Disarmament idealism is
epitomised by the grassroots activism of the anti-nuclear movement in the early 1980s.
On the other hand, hard-headed realists insisted that parochial power politics would
always trump idealistic aspirations, leaving nuclear deterrence as the only viable alterna-
tive. Henry Kissinger’s academic work from the 1960s exemplifies this kind of
deterrence-based nuclear realism, as did the political agenda he implemented under
President Nixon.3 Surprisingly, not even the dissolution of the Soviet Union revolution-
ised ideas about US nuclear security policy: facts were rapidly changing, but in the
domain of ideas, interest in the topic of nuclear threats declined, debate stagnated and
nuclear deterrence remained the foundation for US national security strategy.4
This stagnation in the mainstream debate ended with the argument the four Cold
Warriors offered in their op-ed. Surprisingly, they endorsed the idealist pursuit of disar-
mament based on a hard-headed, realist rationale: since new nuclear threats can no lon-
ger be countered through nuclear deterrence, the only way for the US to protect itself
from those threats is to limit access to nuclear materials through global programmes
aimed at the (as of yet unobtainable) goal of abolishing nuclear weapons.
While it is tempting to interpret this fundamental reconfiguration of Cold War positions
on nuclear security as heralding a new era in American foreign policy, in this article I reach
the conclusion that, even in the long term, embracing this discursive shift will not eliminate
the US nuclear arsenal. What it will do is reinvigorate an existing non-proliferation agenda
by re-establishing the credibility of the US pledge to disarm. Thus, I argue that what at first
1. George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, ‘A World Free of Nuclear
Weapons’, Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2007.
2. J. Peter Scoblic, ‘Disarmament Redux’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 64, no. 1 (2008): 34–9. As Scoblic
observes, others including Paul Nitze have also expressed similar changes of heart, but none had such a
significant impact on the shape of the debate.
3. Henry Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1969).
4. Janne E. Nolan, An Elusive Consensus: Nuclear Weapons and American Security after the Cold War
(Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999), 105.
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