Australian political scientist Marianne Hanson has written a clear-eyed book about the prospects for nuclear disarmament. Hanson soberly concludes that the nuclear-armed states, left to control the terms, the pace and the outcome of an endeavour to which they have pledged themselves for decades, will never give up nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, a path forward to the elimination of nuclear weapons exists, and Hanson describes that path and the challenges along the way.
The reason progress on nuclear disarmament has ground virtually to a halt – and has even gone into reverse – Hanson argues, is that the nine nuclear-armed states and their allies, regardless of ideological differences, share a common commitment to nuclearism, ‘the belief that nuclear weapons are essential for the security of their holders’. (208) Global status is also part of the calculation, as are the enormous profits available to those who participate in the production of nuclear weapons and their entire support system.
Nuclearism, as Hanson defines it, has a number of distinct components: a language that is abstract and impenetrable by design; an institutional structure that is run by small groups of individuals who deliberately exclude most people from decision-making or even from participating in public debate about nuclear policy (easier in authoritarian states but no less present in democracies); massive and deeply entrenched material investments in the nuclear weapons complex that are locked in place as a result of lobbying and long-term budget commitments; and a refusal to take the humanitarian impact of the use of nuclear weapons into account when formulating nuclear policy.
Since the nuclear-armed states and those with whom they are in extended nuclear deterrence relationships have been the dominant voices in the main forums tasked with pursuing nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation – the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the UN Conference on Disarmament (CD) in particular – no one should be surprised at how little progress has been made towards eliminating nuclear weapons, regardless of occasional treaties that bring the numbers down – until they start to go up again. The nuclear-armed states have, in plain sight, paid lip service to the goal of nuclear disarmament while keeping nuclear weapons permanently at the centre of their security arrangements and insisting upon non-proliferation for the rest of the world. The current possessor states have worked relentlessly to persuade the international community that (their) nuclear weapons are essential to global peace and security while sidestepping any discussion of the catastrophic consequences that would result from the use of nuclear weapons.
Having established that nuclearism is the single largest obstacle to nuclear disarmament, Hanson shifts to her real purpose for writing this book: the potential for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) to challenge nuclearism as a worldview and to create a path to the elimination of nuclear weapon despite nuclear state stonewalling.
The treaty, which was adopted by the UN in 2017 and entered into force in 2021, has already broken the exclusive hold of the nuclear-armed states on the discourse about nuclear weapons. From the earliest years of the nuclear age, nuclear-armed states have assiduously avoided talking about what the world would look like during and after a nuclear war. The language of nuclearism dictated that the only legitimate topics of discussion were national security interests, the central role of nuclear weapons (for certain states) in maintaining global peace and order, and the presumed effectiveness of deterrence in ensuring that they would not actually be used. The ‘humanitarian process’ that produced the TPNW replaced that sanitized, jargon-laden framework with inescapable reality: nuclear war would devastate human life and the environment, perhaps irrecoverably. (The war in Ukraine, which was in its early stages when this book was published, has, of course, further exposed the dangers of nuclear deterrence policy while making the consequences of the failure of deterrence all the more apparent).
Most readers of this book, I suspect, will be familiar with the process that produced the TPNW, and Hanson’s description of the educational, political and campaigning threads that led to successful negotiations adds little to the first-hand accounts of diplomats and civil-society experts who were direct participants (Acheson Citation2021; Kmentt Citation2021). The real value of this book, aside from the trenchant critique of nuclearism itself, is Hanson’s evaluation of the work that needs to be done to give the TPNW political as well as moral weight. She rightly, if uncomfortably, points out that most of the signatories up until now are small-to-midsize countries without much political influence over the nuclear-armed states. While she calls out the importance of adding to the number of states parties to the treaty as quickly as possible, she also recognizes that the accession of one or more NATO countries or influential Asian-Pacific states (e.g. her own Australia) will be needed to get the attention of the nuclear-armed states and those in their orbits. This is not to say that the TPNW lacks clout without such states: ‘A prohibition regime might in the past have required great power propulsion, but as we have seen with the landmines and cluster munitions debates, and now with the nuclear prohibition treaty, the drivers of change in determining what is considered legitimate behaviour can be very different’ (182).
Hanson argues that the scientific evidence and victim stories, which were at the forefront of the ban treaty process, must be given even more visibility if the treaty is to build on the sense of urgency that produced it. She is right. Putting the treaty’s prohibitions and obligations into practice, even if only among the existing members, would start to increase the pressure on the nuclear-armed states and their allies to take its normative principles more seriously. As an example, Hanson points out the work of PAX and ICAN to encourage financial institutions to divest from companies involved in the production of nuclear weapons (PAX/ICAN Citation2022). The TPNW can also be used to draw states out on their positions with regard to humanitarian law and its incompatibility with nuclear weapons. ‘[E]lements of identity politics and reputation will be important in the long-term process of moving to a nuclear-free world, and … the emergence, reinforcement, and “cascade” of the norm defining nuclear weapons as abhorrent will place pressure on all states’ (172).
The take-home message from Challenging Nuclearism is two-fold: without the TPNW or a comparable instrument that stigmatizes nuclear weapons and establishes their illegality under international law, the elimination of nuclear weapons will not happen, because the nuclear-armed states are dead set on keeping them. On the other hand, the TPNW itself will help bring about the elimination of nuclear weapons only if those who share its vision work collectively and relentlessly to push back against nuclearism and its inevitable outcome.
References
- Acheson, Ray. 2021. Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. [Google Scholar]
- Kmentt, Alexander. 2021. The Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons: How It Was Achieved and Why It Matters. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003080879. [Crossref], [Google Scholar]
- PAX/ICAN. 2022. “Rejecting Risk: 101 Policies Against Nuclear Weapons.” Utrecht, PAX/ICAN. Accessed July 24, 2023. https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/ican/pages/2490/attachments/original/1642593421/RejectingRisk-web.pdf?1642593421. [Google Scholar]
