We are sleepwalking into nuclear catastrophe

In May of his first year as president, John F. Kennedy met with Israeli President David Ben-Gurion to discuss Israel’s nuclear program and the new nuclear power plant at Dimona.

Writing about the so-called “nuclear summit” in “A State at Any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion,” Israeli historian Tom Segev states that during this meeting, “Ben-Gurion did not get much from the president, who left no doubt that he would not permit Israel to develop nuclear weapons.”

President Kennedy was alarmed by the prospect of a world in which more states came to possess nuclear weapons and saw Israel’s acquisition of nuclear arms as particularly problematic. He reasoned that if we could not convince our allies not to develop these weapons, there was little hope of convincing those with whom we had less friendly relations.

Kennedy’s fear of nuclear proliferation only grew after the terrifying events of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which demonstrated to him just how easily human civilization could end should nuclear weapons be used in a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. A world with “15 or 20 or 25 nations” that are nuclear armed would necessarily become ever more dangerous, Kennedy stated in his famous 1963 American University commencement address. This diagnosis would become the fundamental rationale for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was negotiated in the years after Kennedy’s death and signed by key states in 1968, entering into force in 1970.

Kennedy recognized that to get a commitment from non-nuclear armed states to maintain their non-nuclear weapons state status, states with nuclear weapons would have to give something in return, namely access to nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and the promise of eventual disarmament. This idea of a “grand bargain” would eventually turn into the three pillars of the NPT. Five states that had acquired nuclear weapons up to that point (U.S., USSR, U.K., France, and China) would get to keep their nuclear arsenals, while agreeing to negotiate “in good faith” towards not just nuclear but general disarmament. Everyone else would forgo the ability to obtain nuclear weapons. Peaceful use of nuclear energy would be available to all.

The NPT has now been in existence for over 55 years and has garnered an impressive membership of 191 States, with five states — four of which happen to be the other nuclear-armed states — outside of the treaty regime at this time: India, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan (plus South Sudan). Israel did develop nuclear weapons after Kennedy’s death, with its first nuclear weapon becoming operational by 1967, prior to the negotiations of the NPT. India and Pakistan became nuclear powers in 1974 and 1998, respectively, and their recurrent conflicts have threatened the whole world ever since.

Only North Korea has reached nuclear-armed status since, when it tested an atomic bomb in 2006. Having been an NPT States Party, North Korea left the treaty in 2004 after learning the following lesson from Saddam Hussein’s toppling in 2003: Get nuclear weapons or face the prospect of a regime change war, that is, unless you toe the line drawn by the United States and its friends.

That message has only grown stronger since that time, including in Libya and Syria. But the message from the recent Venezuela invasion is even more clear: No national or international laws of any kind need apply. We will do as we please. Law is for whiners and wimps.

The 11^th Review Conference of the NPT will take place April 27-May 22 of this year at the U.N. headquarters in New York City. This gathering occurs every five years, and this year’s conference promises to be particularly contentious amid so much conflict around the world. The last two review conferences in 2015 and 2022 (the latter was postponed from 2020 due to COVID) did not produce an agreed-upon substantive outcome document.

A third failure in a row could set the treaty back in a serious way, potentially unleashing both vertical and horizontal proliferation. In fact, recent articles in Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy encouraged Japan to develop its own nuclear weapons, with the former also recommending that Germany and Canada join the nuclear club, while the latter threw South Korea in the mix.

The threats to the NPT are many, from states and publics that are more skeptical of nuclear energy, which once upon a time was going to be “too cheap to meter,” to the lack of any meaningful progress on disarmament on the part of the five nuclear weapons states party to the treaty. Now there’s even a new arms race afoot. And at no time has the message been clearer to all non-nuclear weapons states: you are either with us or you better have nuclear weapons. If you belong to neither category, we will find you, take your leader in the middle of the night, and take your oil.

But the idea that all countries would be in one of two camps and that all who don’t support the U.S. agenda should have nuclear weapons, is of course preposterous. A world with “15 or 20 or 25 nations” that are nuclear armed would lead to nuclear war and nuclear annihilation faster than we could imagine. But that is exactly where we are heading if the lawlessness is left unchecked and the U.N. continues to be sidelined and emasculated.

In fact, the true lesson of the many decades of the NPT is that non-proliferation without earnest disarmament on the part of the nuclear weapons states and without a solemn commitment to international law does not work. Further weakening of the U.N. Charter, as we have seen play out in Venezuela, will surely make matters worse. Only sober efforts at diplomacy and negotiation, including by extending and re-negotiating the New START Treaty between the U.S. and Russia, can save us from ourselves.