What use is the humanitarian pledge?

September 25, 2015

Australia should embrace the humanitarian focus on nukes

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2015/09/25/commentary/world-commentary/australia-embrace-humanitarian-focus-nukes/#.VgZnUZfwmic

by Ramesh Thakur

Canberra – Using the freedom of information law, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has obtained a tranche of confidential cables between Canberra and various Australian diplomatic missions around the world in relation to the recent movement regarding the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons. To anyone who has followed Australian policy on the global nuclear debate over the last three to four years, the cables contain no surprises. Rather, they document what is broadly known about Australia’s approach to this issue. They underline some positive features of Australian foreign policy but also confirm the limitations inherent to bureaucracies in looking for imaginative solutions to intractable problems.

The cables show Australia is a responsible state actor that takes its international commitments very seriously. It is not prepared to go along with a trending popular movement simply for the sake of getting along with the world’s “moral majority.” It takes its signature on international documents as a commitment that must be honored. If the obligations conflict with existing commitments and policies, Australia will withhold its signature, even at the cost of unpopularity with sections of the domestic audience and the international community.

In this case, Canberra concluded that signing on to the humanitarian consequences statements at the three global summits held so far — in Oslo, Nayarit (Mexico) and Vienna — and at the U.N. General Assembly would be inconsistent with Australia’s security alliance with the United States and its stated dependence on the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Australia is to be applauded for holding steadfast to the courage of its convictions and demonstrating national integrity in foreign policy.

Moreover, there is no daylight between what Foreign Ministry officials were writing confidentially to one another and their explanations to concerned outsiders on the reluctance to join the humanitarian impacts movement. Having gone through the 126 pages of declassified and released cables, I can find not one item that surprises or contradicts any explanations and clarifications provided earlier. (My curiosity was piqued but not satisfied at discovering that their report on our own “State of Play” presentation in Geneva by Gareth Evans and I in March has been redacted.) There may be details that were left out — no government can operate a foreign service with 100 percent transparency on internal deliberations and processes — but at no stage and on no single point was I ever misled as to what Australia wanted and why. It is good to have the consistency between public professions and private positions confirmed as a hallmark of a healthy democracy.

That said, there are two major grounds for the Australian opposition to the humanitarian consequences movement. Neither stands up to critical scrutiny and their hold on government policy betrays a failure of rigorous evidence-based analysis. First, like Japan and South Korea, Australia shelters under U.S.-supplied “extended nuclear deterrence,” meaning it relies on the threat of a retaliatory nuclear strike by the U.S. to deter a nuclear attack on Australia.

There are several problems with this. Romancing nuclear weapons ignores the complete lack of evidence to indicate that any country ever planned to attack anther but was deterred from doing so because the target country had or was defended by nuclear weapons. Nor is there a single example of a nuclear armed country successfully threatening their use to change another’s behavior. Indeed in the 1980s Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands knowing Britain had the bomb but fully confident it would not be used even in the face of a British defeat.

The core claim by the humanitarian impacts movement is that it is in the interests of the very survival of humanity that nuclear weapons are never used again, under any circumstances. Canberra can subscribe to the first part but finds the final phrase — “under any circumstances” — deeply problematical and inconsistent with its reliance on extended nuclear deterrence. It would be interesting to do a rigorous analysis of what potential enemy targets — on a realistic list of possible enemies — cannot be destroyed by the extremely powerful conventional U.S. arsenal.

This is true, for example, with North Korea even if Pyongyang were to use a nuclear weapon itself; it could be finished off without Washington having to retaliate with a single nuclear bomb. If all targets can be taken out by the highly lethal and totally effective conventional U.S. firepower, then Australia (and Japan and South Korea, for the analysis largely holds true for them also) could drop the word “nuclear” and rely on U.S. “extended deterrence” for their security.

Without a prior nuclear attack, the reputational damage of first use of the bomb would vastly exceed any conceivable military gains. If deterrence has failed and Australia is hit by the bomb, it would not profit Australia for the Earth to be destroyed with U.S. retaliatory strikes on the attacker that triggers an all-out nuclear war. This would not be a rational strategy of defense but an irrational act of revenge initiating an all-consuming nuclear Armageddon.

In other words, beyond their sole (if questionable) utility in deterring attack, nuclear weapons cannot in fact be used — under any circumstances. Their very destructiveness robs them of any military or political utility, which is an important part of the explanation for why they have not been used again since August 1945.

Australian officials dismiss the humanitarian consequences movement for indulging in symbolic gimmicks at the cost of pursuing a “realistic” and “practical” agenda.

The key phrase animating the movement is “to stigmatize, prohibit and eliminate” nuclear weapons. Of course they can be eliminated only by those who have them. But the second item, prohibition, can be broken into two components, possession and use. For states without the bomb to ban their possession by those with nuclear weapons is also an empty gesture. Banning their use without prohibiting possession, however, is an attempt to deepen the stigma and add yet another significant normative barrier to use of the bomb. They are so morally repugnant and abhorrent that their use can never be justified. And every additional stigma adds to the global pressure to reduce numbers, deployments and role of nuclear weapons on the Damascene road to their elimination.

The realistic agenda that Australia favors through practical steps in collaboration with those with the bomb is unobjectionable. But they have been stalemated for so many years now that the nuclear disarmament agenda has fallen far behind the urgency and gravity of the very real threats posed by these most indiscriminately inhumane weapons ever invented. The humanitarian pledge is a critical step to their elimination, not an exercise in futility. The growing global support for it reflects, not naivete by its proponents, but frustration with the glacial efforts of the nuclear armed states in containing, minimizing, reducing and eliminating nuclear risks that pose intolerable threats to all of us and should be as unacceptable to Canberra, Seoul and Tokyo as they are to Oslo, Mexico City and Vienna.

Ramesh Thakur is a professor at the Crawford School of the Australian National University.