What Can Nuclear Powers Agree Upon?

By JASON SIBERT

In the years after World War II, humanity faced the dangers of nuclear proliferation – a danger still with us today.

The United States used the atomic bomb to shorten the war, and the Soviet Union, our geopolitical competitor at the time, soon possessed an atomic bomb. Next, the weapon proliferated to countries around the world.

With the rise in geopolitical tensions and authoritarian populism around the world, the existence of nuclear weapons threatens our security. In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly created the UN Atomic Energy Commission and charged it with the mission of “the elimination of national armaments of atomic weapons.”

Internationalists celebrate the creation of the body as a key moment in the push to eliminate nuclear weapons. There were talks of the regulation of nuclear weapons in the years after the war. President Harry Truman hosted the prime ministers of the United Kingdom and Canada to chart a position on the international control of nuclear energy. Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, took charge of the US position. He outlined a three-step program that he hoped our wartime ally, Soviet Russia, would accept. The first two stages required the sharing of atomic information and the establishment of inspections for the materials used in nuclear weapons. The third stage would dismantle existing atomic bombs, transfer their fissile material to peaceful nuclear power plants, and help ensure that the future production of fissile material be used solely for peaceful purposes. An outright ban on the bomb was not discussed at this time.

In a letter to then Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, Bush thought “the program of international understanding should involve no premature outlawing of the bomb.” He felt that any state which possessed the knowledge could make an atomic bomb, making a ban problematic.

The Soviet Union wanted the AEC to exist under the UN. This arrangement gave members of the security council veto power over the AEC. Although this was a valiant attempt to provide some international control over nuclear weapons, it left nuclear weapons in the hands of the great powers of the time. Small and medium-sized powers were left out of the decision-making process altogether. Within months of its creation, the US and the Soviet Union tied up the AEC with dueling plans for nuclear disarmament, as the tensions of the Cold War were spilling over into international bodies.

In 2017, the UN passed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to outlaw nuclear weapons worldwide. However, no country with nuclear weapons signed the treaty. Many TPNW advocates admit to the problems of the treaty and hope that the nuclear powers will be shamed into giving up their nuclear arms.

The problem Bush worried about remains. Even if all the nuclear weapons in the world were abolished, any country that wanted one in a time of heightened tensions could make one in a matter of months. To remedy the problem, the main geopolitical powers of the world must use their power, in an arms control organization of some sort, to not only drawdown nuclear arms but also detect any state trying to build them (after the drawdown) and prevent the state from doing so.

This is a tall order considering the US, Russia, and China are challenging each other on the geopolitical stage, and international organizations like the UN have proven themselves inept in more than one area. Perhaps a revamped UN, or a successor organization, could develop a larger security council that reflects the dispersion of power in the world today. India, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Japan would be included. The control of nuclear arms would be a simple, basic point of security these different political systems could agree on!

Jason Sibert is executive director of the Peace Economy Project in St. Louis, Mo. Email jasonsibert@hotmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 15, 2021

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