A blast at the 'nuclear non-proliferation complex'

Alarmism about nuclear proliferation may not be what it seems, according to two recent articles.

In The Guardian, John Mueller, professor of political science at Ohio State University in the US, argues that a higher priority than non-proliferation should be “avoiding militarily aggressive actions under the obsessive sway of worst-case scenario fantasies, which might lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people” – like Iraq.

And in an article in the London Review of Books, Campbell Craig and Jan Ruzicka attack the multibillion-pound “non-proliferation complex”, a “loose conglomeration of academic programmes, think tanks, NGOs, charitable foundations and government departments.”

They argue that this non-proliferation industry has not only created a comfortable, well-funded place for itself in the international community, but, more dangerously, by avoiding realism and focussing on the spread of weapons to small states, it has made nuclear disarmament less likely.

Nuclear abolition will not happen, they argue, unless a control regime can be put in place to stop countries building a nuclear bomb in secret.

But such a regime would have to be more powerful than any existing state, so cannot be part of a world divided into sovereign nations.

That’s the reality that must be confronted if you want to achieve “nuclear zero”, they say.

Their conclusion is that “As long as the tacit twin goals of the [non-proliferation] complex– selective non-proliferation and ineffectual abolition – continue to shape the international agenda, one outcome is certain: a world filled with nuclear weapons.”

For the riposte of those in the non-proliferation complex, you’ll have to wait for the letters page in the next issue of the Review.