As Israel and the United States attack Iran in a bid to deter its ability to produce nuclear weapons, it’s worth reflecting on the fact that in the 80 years since the United States unleashed the first nuclear detonations on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only eight other countries have gained nuclear weapons: China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, and the United Kingdom.
It could have been many more. In 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy feared as many as 25 states could have nuclear weapons in the near future—a possibility he regarded as “the greatest possible danger and hazard.” That only nine states have nuclear weapons today is a product of sustained effort, above all by the United States.
In each of the four instances that countries have given up nuclear weapons in their possession—South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—U.S. diplomatic, financial, and technical involvement played a significant role. Over the years, sustained U.S. efforts have also influenced several governments to abandon plans to develop nuclear weapons: Egypt, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
And then there are the countries that have the wealth, technological know-how, and arguable security need that could have begun nuclear weapons programs but chose not to, such as NATO members Germany, Poland, and Turkey, and Indo Pacific allies Japan and Australia. That nuclear weapons have not proliferated across such countries owes a huge amount to two factors.
The first factor, controversially, is the United States’ extended nuclear umbrella. If Washington had not consistently backed their defense with nuclear weapons, then these rich, technologically sophisticated countries would almost certainly have developed their own arsenals.
The second factor is international social pressure. Since the 1970s, there has been a broadly accepted taboo on nuclear weapons proliferation, backed by diplomacy and robust international mechanisms aimed at restricting access to relevant materials and technologies. These include the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), the Hague Code of Conduct, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Regional nuclear weapons-free zones in Latin America, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central Asia have strengthened these efforts by erecting political barriers and strengthening norms against proliferation.
More recently, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which entered into force in 2021, has helped consolidate international opinion against possession of nuclear weapons. The TPNW prohibits all activities related to nuclear weapons and assistance to any other state in carrying out such activities. Already, 94 countries have signed the TPNW; of these, 73 have ratified or acceded to it.
Perhaps most important of all, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has been vital in sustaining the taboo against nuclear proliferation since it was signed in 1968, with the United States as an early proponent. At its heart is an implicit deal that, in return for assistance with peaceful nuclear uses and for the eventual disarmament by the five signatory nuclear weapons states (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), non-nuclear states will forego the weapons for themselves. Of the United Nations’ 193 member states, only India, Israel, Pakistan, and South Sudan have never ratified the NPT. (North Korea withdrew from the treaty in 2003.)
In an imperfect world, this extensive nonproliferation ecosystem is a huge achievement.
Unfortunately, pressures are growing on this system and the institutional, political, and social dams holding proliferation at bay. Once again, the United States is playing a key role in shaping the nonproliferation landscape—but this time, not for the better.
In recent weeks, months, and years, the behavior of states with nuclear arsenals has made a compelling case for others to acquire them. For instance, would Israel have attacked Iran if Tehran had already acquired nuclear weapons? Would the West have been as restrained in supporting Ukraine, were it not for Russia’s nuclear threats? In South Asia, India and Pakistan’s recent conflict could leave the impression that having nuclear weapons reduces the necessity for diplomatic solutions and increases the scope for provocation below the nuclear threshold. Meanwhile, the NPT’s nuclear powers are far from disarming: Russia has substantially modernized its arsenal, while China, the U.K., and the United States are all modernizing or planning to do so. Taken together, it’s apparent that states still find utility in having nuclear weapons.
As for the United States, while Washington has not always been consistent on nonproliferation (arguably turning a blind eye to Pakistan’s and Israel’s programs, for example), it has never been so erratic as it is today.
As a U.S. presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump said that countries such as Japan, South Korea, or even Saudi Arabia should develop nuclear weapons because “it’s going to happen anyway” and “wouldn’t you rather, in a certain sense, have Japan have nuclear weapons when North Korea has nuclear weapons?”
In his first term as president, Trump tried to make friends with nuclear North Korea, but he pressured non-nuclear Iran, torpedoed the 2015 deal that limited its nuclear capabilities, and thus accelerated Iran’s nuclear program. In his second and current term, he has sought to coerce Iran into negotiating away its program but has now backed Israel’s attempted military solution. If Iran’s program has not in fact been fully eliminated, Tehran will have every reason and incentive to use what remains to build nuclear weapons. Should Iran proliferate, Saudi Arabia would not be far behind, nor would Egypt or Turkey.
Particularly in this term, Trump has destroyed allies’ belief that the United States will protect them in times of need. As a direct result, U.S. allies in both Europe and East Asia, are—for the first time in decades—publicly and privately debating whether to acquire nuclear weapons.
In Europe, the situation is somewhat mitigated by the U.K.’s NATO commitment and France’s openness to making its nuclear deterrent more European. But in East Asia, there is no nuclear alternative to the United States unless Washington’s friends were to find a place under a hypothetical Chinese nuclear umbrella. Faced with North Korea’s energetic nuclear weapons program, it is no surprise that more than 70 percent of South Koreans want their country to have its own.
In several parts of the world—Asia, the Middle East, and maybe Europe—numerous states now have greater incentives to acquire nuclear weapons and fewer obstacles to prevent them from doing so. The pressures on the nonproliferation dam are growing. It’s not clear yet whether the dam will hold, leak, or burst. But there is a very clear case for trying to reinforce it.
In any sober geopolitical calculation, the United States would find value in bolstering the international nonproliferation regime. Trump has expressed a long-standing interest in nuclear weapons reduction and a conviction that he can negotiate arms control deals. But he hasn’t focused on nonproliferation as such.
Reassuring allies, securing a realistic deal with Iran, ending talk of resumed nuclear testing, ratifying the CTBT, or pursuing nuclear arms control would all breathe fresh life into the international nonproliferation regime and be a boon for Trump’s legacy. Unfortunately, Trump’s self-promotional, isolationist, and extortionist instincts will likely outweigh his nonproliferation ones for the time being.
Given this, what should the rest of the international community do to bolster the nonproliferation dam? Three propositions offer a good place to start.
The first is for all states to give nonproliferation more weight alongside the pursuit of nuclear risk reduction and disarmament. The international community is divided: Unsurprisingly, nuclear states and their allies tend to focus on risk reduction, while non-nuclear states want disarmament. Though both camps have an interest in nonproliferation, they often concentrate on what divides them in multilateral settings instead.
But like it or not, nonproliferation is a global public good, independent of whether nuclear states are fulfilling their NPT disarmament commitments or managing to reduce nuclear risks. Moreover, strengthening nonproliferation doesn’t weaken disarmament and risk reduction efforts—it enhances them. It is a fallacy to imagine that the addition of new nuclear states would change the international landscape enough to persuade current ones to give up their stockpiles. Perhaps only a much greater and more unpleasant nuclear shock would achieve that.
The NPT community should set some of their divisions aside and use next year’s Review Conference to give nonproliferation concerns a greater profile. In parallel, it would be especially welcome to see TPNW states make more of the treaty’s first article, which includes bans all transfers, assistance, or encouragement for nuclear arms-related activity. For example, there hasn’t been enough pushback on talk in Germany and Poland about a European nuclear deterrent nor enough diplomatic sympathy for Seoul’s security predicament. At the margins, greater political and practical support could be lent to strengthening control regimes such as the IAEA and the MTCR.
Second, the non-nuclear international community should use multilateral forums such as the United Nations General Assembly, the U.N. Security Council, and the G-20 to push back on great-power competition and the salience of nuclear weapons in that competition.
States that have given up nuclear weapons or reversed their development have the international standing to lead this charge. Some of these states, including Kazakhstan and Japan, are already active in this regard. But action does and should extend to a wider range of non-nuclear states from, say, Indonesia and Mexico to players under the U.S. nuclear umbrella such as Turkey and, implicitly, Taiwan.
To be sure, it is difficult to imagine small- and medium-sized non-nuclear states diplomatically resolving the security tensions that make states want nuclear weapons, whether between North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, Iran and Israel, or Russia and Europe. But non-nuclear states are not powerless to influence the normative environment if they address both sides of the proliferation equation: the temptation to acquire nuclear weapons and the perceived threats creating this temptation.
For example, in its 2022 and 2023 summits, the G-20—a grouping that includes six nuclear states, seven states allied with nuclear states, and six nonaligned or neutral states—declared for the first time that “the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible.” This was implicitly directed at Russia over its nuclear saber-rattling in Ukraine. But it applies equally to other nuclear states, and it could be built upon diplomatically and politically to penalize any thoughts of acquiring or controlling territory by nuclear coercion and to strengthen a norm against nuclear weapons being considered a political tool.
Finally, there are nonproliferation collaborations to be forged between states that need and care about a law-based international order. At its core, nonproliferation is about upholding international agreements, a subset of a larger need to defend the international rule of law for the sake of global stability. With several great powers challenging fundamental norms, action against nuclear proliferation takes on a larger significance. Doing so could help build an informal global community of “rule-of-law countries” that work to protect the global commons from toxic great-power behavior. Such a community might even bring non-nuclear states together with smaller nuclear ones, such as the U.K. and France, to support nonproliferation.
None of this is easy. It requires a willingness to push back against friends and allies that are contemplating acquiring nuclear weapons, even when one’s ability to help may not seem like enough to defend against a nuclear bully in the friend’s neighborhood. But it is an order of magnitude easier than dealing with the dangers of a world in which the proliferation dam has burst.
This essay is published in cooperation with the Asian Peace Programme at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.
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