You’ll Probably Need To Cover Unilateral Vs Multilateral Disarmament: Nuclear Power Essay, UCD, Ireland

Realistic

In this, you’ll probably need to cover unilateral vs multilateral disarmament.

Multilateral

The most multilateral focus has been on either limiting nuclear stockpiles (e.g. the SALT treaties between the US and Soviet Union / Russia) or proliferation (e.g. sanctions on North Korea and Iran).

For stockpiles, I think Trump let the SALT treaty expire and Russia is developing new types of nuclear weapons. That framework also doesn’t include rising power China, because they date from the 1980s I think, so it doesn’t control one of the main points of current expansion/rivalry.

For sanctions, they’ve only really been implemented against pariah nations like North Korea and Iran. When Israel, India, or Pakistan developed nuclear weapons, they largely avoided sanctions because they were too important politically for other reasons.

Given nuclear limitation would have to be successful before multilateral disarmament could be seriously discussed, it’s hard to see disarmament happening in this way.

It’s possible that individual countries might decide to give up their own nuclear weapons regardless of what anyone else does, but that would depend on either voter advocating for it, or at least electing a party or a government that had disarmament on their platform, or for a country’s leadership to be incentivized to disarm.

The only country that has actually given up nuclear weapons in Ukraine, which inherited some from the Soviet Union but gave them up under Russian and US guarantee in the 1990s, but given it got invaded by Russia 20 years later, and probably wouldn’t have if it was nuclear-armed, it’s probably a reason why it’s not realistic to expect other small nuclear powers, e.g. North Korea, Israel or Pakistan / India to disarm. (Small bit on this here but not very thorough).

Countries like the UK (especially the Labour party pre-Kinnock, influenced by the CND) would sometimes look at giving up their own nuclear weapons regardless of what anyone else does, but I don’t think any party that’s actually got into government has had that as a policy.

Germany did decide to move away from nuclear energy in the 2000s via similar processes that might occur for a democracy to disarm, but it has never been a nuclear power. Nuclear weapons are tied to a countries idea of the station, so it’s hard to see e.g. France or the UK disarming because it would diminish their status as a top-tier power, or rivals such as India and Pakistan, or countries with a realistic prospect of invasions like North Korea or Israel.

For some countries, the cost of maintaining their nuclear capabilities is a major burden. That’s obvious for poor countries e.g. North Korea, but even for the UK, the cost of maintaining Trident is extremely high for something they’ll probably never use, compared to effective cut-backs for conventional forces that they do use.

For this, I think it makes sense to discuss if it’s desirable for voters or leaders, e.g. how could they be convinced to disarm (this is related to the points at the end of Realistic), and then would the reality of a Global Nuclear Zero world actually be desirable?

I think the main argument here would be whether conventional wars between world powers would become more frequent if there was no nuclear deterrent. There hasn’t been a war directly between global powers since WW2, with those conflicts very common in the 19th century. Although obviously there have been numerous proxy wars, e.g. the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan, etc, without the risk of escalating to nuclear war, it’s probable that flashpoints like Taiwan or Ukraine would be more likely to drag in other powers.

On the other side of that though, western powers have shown a general hesitancy to accept casualties in any conflict that makes it unlikely that e.g. the US would be more gung-ho about fighting Russia because the consequences were lower. There has probably been a shift in popular opinion in democracies since WW2, becoming less jingoistic, and disarmament is unlikely to change that in the medium term at least.