It’s hard times for those seeking global denuclearization

These are hard times for advocates of denuclearization. Wherever one looks, there are plans afoot for nuclear weapons projects. 

Countries are building up their nuclear arsenals and stepping up their attempts to build weapons: India, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is taking a different approach and trying to use its relations with Israel to its advantage.  

The much-discussed potential U.S.-Saudi-Israeli normalization plan on the White House’s agenda, for example, faces the obstacle that one of Riyadh’s conditions is that Washington build or furnish it with nuclear energy tech. Meanwhile, the Saudis are also negotiating with China for such a program if the U.S. cannot oblige them. There are also longstanding accounts of a Saudi-Pakistani nuclear program.  

While Saudi Arabia needs to move from fossil fuels, and there can be no denying the real threat from Iran’s nuclear and missile program, which reportedly is being supported by Russia, nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is hardly desirable.

Many actual or potential proliferators often make it difficult to disentangle the arguments for nuclear energy from those for weapons and often couch their actual motives for obtaining nuclear energy in more respectable terms of acquiring an energy source that does not derive from fossil fuels. With this caveat in mind, it remains clear that too many international actors have in their minds a potential weaponization of civilian nuclear power or an expansion of their existing nuclear arsenals.

In areas like Central Asia, many states now confront an energy dilemma in light of grave ecological challenges like the drying of the Aral and Caspian seas and must calibrate to what degree they prioritize energy sources such as nuclear energy. Many of these states, and especially Kazakhstan, have abundant non-carbonized energy sources. For example, Kazakhstan has huge amounts of uranium that helped power the Soviet atomic project. It possesses about 12 percent of global stocks and currently supports 13 civilian nuclear projects; three of its own and 10 with partners, including foreign governments and corporations.

However, Kazakhstan has been and remains a strong proponent of military denuclearization following the policy set by its founding president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Nazarbayev, having personally witnessed the devastating impact of the Soviet nuclear program on Kazakhstan, renounced the Soviet nuclear arsenal and pursued what is now a well-known series of initiatives to persuade neighbors and other states to forsake nuclear weapons. This ultimately culminated in the dismantling of the fourth-largest nuclear arsenal of the time. His nascent country benefited by improving its image and attracting foreign investments in hundreds of billions of dollars since it became independent in 1991.

Central Asia is a target of great power maneuvering to gain access to investments, raw minerals like uranium and trade access. Further plagued by its own local tensions like the Kyrgyz-Tajik strife, access to uranium could also intensify what is already a scramble for influence there among many nuclear states unless great powers agree upon rules of the road.

There is considerable danger in ongoing proliferation, such as spiraling nuclear threats as seen in Russia’s threatening rhetoric over Ukraine and the breakdown of the arms control regime and China’s total absence from it.

Nazarbayev understood that acquiring nuclear weapons entails placing your state in the center of the vortex of international rivalries, and Kazakhstan has made enormous gains from his wisdom. By disengaging from the nuclear quagmire, Nazarbayev was able to leverage considerable diplomatic and economic gains. For instance, the International Atomic Energy Agency chose to organize its low-enrichment uranium bank in Kazakhstan to assure uranium users of a “bank of last resort” provided they seek to use nuclear energy for exclusively peaceful purposes.

Unfortunately, Nazarbayev’s position is not widely held. The international security architecture is imperiled because we are now in a new situation where, for many states, nuclear weapons are a compelling objective to realize strategic objectives.

There is neither an international consensus nor an overarching international authority that commands a universally acceptable regime regarding nuclear issues. As noted above, Russia has broken numerous arms control treaties with impunity, regularly proclaims blood-curdling nuclear threats and facilitates proliferation abroad. China has a long record as a facilitator of nuclear proliferation in Pakistan and North Korea. These instances showcase a failure to learn from Nazarbayev’s approach, which has embroiled great and small powers in ever more dangerous confrontations whose number may arguably grow.

On the Korean peninsula, the rivalry between North and South Korea and their allies is expanding. Both Korean states are going beyond conventional and nuclear weapons (or, in the South’s case, U.S. nuclear weapons) to launch satellites. And North Korea is diversifying its nuclear arsenal to threaten the U.S. with intercontinental ballistic missiles and everyone with unmanned submarines and/or underwater drones. Japan is following this arms race with understandable concern.

Widespread nuclear proliferation is creating a situation where the ability of leaders to back down or escape from Armageddon is shrinking. In any machine or system, the more moving parts, the more susceptible to error it is. If that system breaks, climate change will be the least of our common threats. The nuclear clock is ticking. 

Stephen Blank, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is a former professor of Russian national security studies and national security affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and a former MacArthur fellow at the U.S. Army War College. Blank is an independent consultant focused on the geopolitics and geostrategy of the former Soviet Union, Russia and Eurasia.