Description
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons won 2017’s Nobel Peace Prize. Yet if a multilaterally disarmed world was actually achieved, just how militarily stable would that world be? This paper begins from the premise that the knowledge required to reconstruct nuclear weapons can never be expunged from the world, meaning that rearmament – even in a world where all nuclear powers had agreed to dismantle their extant weapons – would always be attainable. That being the case, a race towards nuclear reconstitution would remain possible during serious international crises between latently capable major powers, even if the seemingly desirable goal of multilateral nuclear disarmament had previously been achieved. Crucially, moreover, unlike contemporary deterrence – which is stabilized by the survivability of the major powers’ seaborne nuclear arsenals – the facilities of rearmament would not be survivable, creating acute first-strike incentives and thus crisis instability. As such, the argument that conventional military aggression would be more likely in a world free of nuclear weapons may indeed be commonplace, reflecting a risk that disarmament advocates are willing to bear. But this paper’s rationalist analysis demonstrates that nuclear aggression would also be more likely in a world that had dismantled its extant nuclear warheads, casting doubt on the desirability of the multilateral disarmament goal.
