Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

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A Great Equalizer	2 min 20 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Decreasing Violence	2 min 02 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Accidents are a Major Risk	3 min 11 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Better Red Than Dead	2 min 27 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime
Focusing on the Demand Side	2 min 44 sec	Windows Media | QuickTime

A Great Equalizer

I guess I am neither particularly optimistic nor pessimistic. I think that the pessimists, who thought 20 or 30 years ago that there would be 20 or 30 countries with nuclear weapons, as President Kennedy said, were quite wrong. But I think the optimists are wrong as well. There are major problems out there, and I think one of the fundamental difficulties is that nuclear weapons really are useful for a number of countries. People wonder why North Korea is reluctant to give up its nuclear weapons. Well, North Korea wouldn’t be taken seriously by anybody in the world if it didn’t have nuclear weapons. If North Korea gave up its nuclear weapons, it would be extremely concerned that it would likely be attacked by the United States or South Korea. It may not, that may be an unreal fear, but it’s certainly a fear that North Koreans feel.

If you ask the question, ”Why was it that the United States was prepared to use military force against Iraq and not against North Korea?” the answer is that North Koreans have nuclear weapons.

The message that comes out of the different response of the United States to those two countries is: if you are a small country in the developing world and you are worried about being attacked by the United States, get nuclear weapons. I think that rationale is always going to be there. If you are Israel, you are never going to give up your nuclear weapons until the political landscape of the Middle East has changed radically and has been that way for a long time, because for Israel, nuclear weapons are a great equalizer. If you look at other countries... India, for example, is always going to say that it wants to have its nuclear weapons—partly because of prestige reasons, partly because of China, partly because of Pakistan. Pakistan wants to have nuclear weapons because India has nuclear weapons.

I don’t think that we are ever going to get away from those countries having nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future. There is reason to hope that we are not going to see a great deal of other countries proliferating. Brazil has given up, Argentina gave up, South Africa gave up, Libya gave up. Nuclear weapons aren’t actually terribly useful for anything other than deterrence. I think a lot of countries that don’t worry about being attacked realize that and realize that having the expense and all the odium associated with having nuclear weapons simply isn’t worth it.


Decreasing Violence

When we published the Human Security Report we surprised a very large number of people. We surprised them because we had essentially two highly contrarian findings. Firstly, we showed beyond all possible doubt that political violence around the world had decreased dramatically since the end of the Cold War. We’re talking about a 40 percent decline in wars and a much greater decline in the number of people that are killed in wars; a decline in military coups and international crises and the arms trade—a decline right across the board. That was the first surprise. Most people didn’t know that that was happening, including many policy-makers.

The second surprise was that we said the best and most compelling single explanation for this was the explosion of international activism that followed the end of the Cold War. At the end of the Cold War, you suddenly saw the United Nations released from the stasis of East-West politics, where nothing had happened in the Security Council. Suddenly the Security Council started acting collaboratively. You see an explosion in the number of UN peace operations, preventive diplomacy missions, peacemaking (trying to stop wars that had run away), electoral assistance missions. On every single dimension of international activism on the security front—you see a huge increase.

We believe that that increase, notwithstanding all the mistakes, notwithstanding the screw-ups—Srebrenica, Rwanda, Somalia—nevertheless made a huge difference. Even if only 30 to 40 percent of these UN operations have succeeded, that is 30 to 40 percent where previously there was absolutely nothing. We think that that’s the best single explanation. We’ve looked at all the alternative explanations—increasing democratization around the world, rising levels of economic development—and they are all important in the long term, but they can’t explain that major decline since the end of the Cold War.


Accidents are a Major Risk

The International Atomic Energy Agency, a highly technical institution, does a pretty useful job. Its terms of reference in the past have been insufficient, so that it has only inspected facilities that are declared and it hasn’t gone around giving surprise inspections. That means, of course, that many countries that have a clandestine nuclear weapons program don’t put them in the facilities that are likely to be inspected, for obvious reasons.

It does a fairly useful job. The Conference on Disarmament, the multilateral negotiating entity of the United Nations, is totally useless. It should be closed down; it does absolutely nothing. It has been in stasis for more than five years, with no program of work. It’s a waste of time and a waste of space.

The Americans are quite clearly uninterested in nuclear disarmament. The irony is that of all the countries in the world that you would think have a clear interest in complete nuclear disarmament, it would have to be the United States. Because if the United States could be assured that no one else had nuclear weapons it would be the unchallenged and unchallengeable military superpower. But just one country with 100 nuclear weapons hidden in the basement would mean that the United States would then be vulnerable to that country in a way that it wouldn’t be vulnerable to conventional military weapons.

So again, I don’t see much possibility of that changing in the foreseeable future. I think the things that are most useful that are going on at the moment are the various programs which are designed to take some of the risks out of maintaining nuclear weapons stockpiles. The Nunn-Lugar Program—the whole series of programs in the former Soviet Union that went under the name of Nunn-Lugar (now they call it the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program)—these are essentially designed to say, ”There are a lot of nuclear weapons out there, there is a lot of nuclear material out there, there are a lot of people with nuclear weapons expertise out there. We need to have better safeguards for all those sorts of things.” Of course, the United States has recognized that it is very much in its interest to try and help the Russians control those things because they have not been very good at controlling them themselves.

All of those sorts of things, they’re modest, they’re useful. But I actually don’t think that many countries contemplate using nuclear weapons against anyone else. It doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Even if you used nuclear weapons against a country—in principle, you could use nuclear weapons against a country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons, but what would you do it for? You can imagine the last thing the Israelis would do before being overrun by Arab armies is to use nuclear weapons. But the prospect of Israel being defeated by Arab armies today is zilch. Most of the Arab governments have given up the idea of going to war against Israel. It’s just too expensive, you always lose, and so forth.

So, I don’t think that is such a problem. I think nuclear accidents are a major risk, which is why I think that Americans have been moving towards effectively saying to the Indians, ”We know that we are not going to be able to do anything about this. We may be able to collaborate on ways to reduce the risks of war by inadvertence,” which is much more likely than war on purpose.


Better Red Than Dead

If I were to look around and ask what the problem is... Think about the arguments you heard coming in the Cold War: that space-based weapons were highly destabilizing because if one side believed that it could defend itself from attack from the other side, it would then have an incentive to attack its enemy. Everybody would say, ”That’s not a problem today, we don’t have to worry about that.”

Now think about China. The Chinese have, I don’t know what the latest figure is, but a few years back it was 18 on-alert intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Americans were planning a space-based system which they said was against rogue states like North Korea, but would be able to stop perhaps 100 missiles. The Chinese look at that and say, ”Wait a minute. If it could possibly stop 100, it could probably quite easily stop 18.” So from our point of view, in China, that is destabilizing. That is the sort of thing that in the event, unlikely as it seems, of a fight between the United States and China (although Taiwan would be the obvious case), the Chinese might fear that the Americans were going to launch a strike against them, and therefore launch a pre-emptive strike against the United States. Is it likely? No, it’s not at all likely. But it is a risk. And that is the sort of unlikely but just possible risk that is involved wherever you have nuclear weapons.

Again, if you look at India/Pakistan, we know that there was a risk of war a few years back between those two. My guess is that in the last analysis, at the last minute, people would have held back. It was very interesting during the Cold War when they tried to get NATO commanders to play war games with the Soviet Union. They modelled that, and it was almost impossible to get NATO commanders to issue the signal to launch a nuclear attack, because they knew that once they did it, they were wiped out. Why would you ever want to commit suicide? In some ways it is better to be Red than dead. If you are Red, at least you have been invaded by the Russians and you have a chance of fighting back. And look what happened to the former Soviet Union. It wasn’t defeated by tanks and guns or nuclear weapons. It was defeated from within.


Focusing on the Demand Side

No one really knows, but the figures are around 600 million small arms and light weapons in the world today. Probably around a third of those are in the United States—which constitutes a major threat to other Americans but it’s not much of a threat to anyone else in the world. A very large proportion of those weapons are in the developing world, particularly in conflict zones. In almost all of these countries now there is the indigenous ability to make ammunition. What that means is that even if you could get, what is at the moment beyond the wildest dreams of the coalitions trying to reduce and control the trade of small arms and light weapons—even if you could stop every single gun going across any frontier, there is still enough stuff out there, in conflict zones, for people to keep fighting for a very, very long time.

My view is not quite the National Rifle Association’s view—that guns don’t kill people, people kill people—but there is a point to that. The reality is that unless we address the demand side of the problem—which is why people want to fight each other in the first place—then just focusing on the supply side is essentially a waste of time.

This, by the way, also applies to nuclear weapons. I think in many ways it makes much more sense today to focus on the reasons that people have for wanting access to nuclear weapons in the first place, rather than looking for technical fixes to try to stop them getting them, because as I said earlier, the way that the world is today, it’s very difficult to stop people getting access to nuclear technology. 

So, small arms are the weapons of mass destruction today. They kill far more people than do any other form of ordnance, including of course nuclear weapons—we don’t have any nuclear wars at the moment. Preventing their trade is just about impossible. Even if you could prevent the trade, you still have the problem of dealing with the weapons that are actually there. The UN constantly embarks on what it calls DDR operations—disarmament, demobilization and reintegration. They can have some utility, they are not a bad thing, but the disarmament part of it is really more an exercise in confidence building than anything else. All of those programs suffer from one fundamental problem, and that is, nobody knows how many weapons are there in the first place. So if you say, ”We’ve disarmed” and you’ve handed in 10,000 weapons and you have another 5,000 hidden somewhere, no one knows. In a sense, it’s really a gesture of trust.

Last Updated:2006-11-01

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