Description
In 2017, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for its ground-breaking efforts” to prohibit nuclear arms. Yet if such a multilaterally disarmed world were ever achieved, just how secure would that world actually 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 dismantled their extant weapons – would always be possible. Accordingly, escalatory races towards nuclear reconstitution would remain possible during serious international crises between latently capable states, even if 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 – rearmament facilities would not be survivable, creating acute first-strike incentives. As such, the argument that conventional military aggression would be more likely in a non-nuclear world may indeed be commonplace, and 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 disarmament goal.
