Nobel Lecture Delivered on Behalf of
the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs
by Professor John P. Holdren,
Chair of the Executive Committee of the Pugwash Council,
Oslo, 10 December 1995
part 2.
ARMS LIMITATION AND PEACE BUILDING IN THE POST-COLD-WAR WORLD
Copyright (c) 1995 The Nobel Foundation
Although the Pugwash Conferences came into being, four decades ago, in
response to the extraordinary dangers posed by thermonuclear weapons, and
while the pursuit of ways to reduce those dangers has always remained at the
core of Pugwash concerns, our founders recognized from the outset the seam-
lessness of the web of interconnections linking the nuclear danger with the
dangers of other weapons of mass destruction, with conventional conflicts,
and with the ultimate causes of war rooted in the human condition. Thus the
Pugwash agenda expanded, in the early years of the organization, to embrace
not only the perils of nuclear weapons but also those aspects of the wider
security landscape in which the Pugwash format -- natural scientists meeting
with other scholars and political and military figures for off-the-record
exploration of the issues -- might be able to make a contribution.
That Pugwash was constituted from the beginning not solely along bilat-
eral lines but rather with much broader participation was a great asset in
dealing with this wider agenda, in which the interests of every region are
at stake and the participation of every region in the solutions is required.
Pugwash efforts in the 1960s on the safeguards regime for the Non-Prolifera-
tion Treaty and on the Biological Weapons Convention, in the 1970s on a code
of conduct for technology transfer for development, and from the 1970s to
the present on the resolution of regional conflicts, on the Chemical Weapons
Convention, and on limiting the accumulation and transfer of conventional
weapons, have all benefitted particularly from our organization's multi-
national reach. The establishment, in the 1980s and 1990s, of Student/Young
Pugwash chapters in many countries and the important work of Pugwash,
throughout its history, on the desirability and feasibility of ultimately
achieving a nuclear-weapon-free world, were also facilitated by our multi-
lateral character.
At the same time, the strength of U.S. and Soviet participation in
Pugwash in its first three decades, and the strength of U.S. and Russian
participation today, have enabled our organization to treat effectively
those aspects of the nuclear danger that have been dominated by the nuclear
arsenals and postures of these powers. This dimension of Pugwash's
activities has included the organization's efforts in the 1950s and 1960s on
the technical basis for the Limited Test Ban Treaty, in the 1960s on the
issues underlying the ABM Treaty, in the 1980s on the intermediate-range
nuclear forces issue, and in the 1990s on managing -- and shrinking -- the
U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and nuclear-weapon-production complexes in
the aftermath of the Cold War.
My purpose in this capsule characterization of how the bilateral and
multilateral facets of the Pugwash organization have related to our work
over the past 38 years has not been to offer a history of Pugwash (which
would be a larger task than befits this lecture) but only to suggest that
the structure and historical pre-occupations of our organization are reason-
ably well matched to the six-fold list of post-Cold-War security problems
that I outlined earlier. All of these issues have evolved, of course, but
at least the predecessors of all of them have been on the Pugwash agenda for
many years. Accordingly, we think we have some ideas about what needs to be
done. Let me take the remainder of this lecture to outline some of this
thinking.
First, with respect to the danger of use of the nuclear weapons still
deployed, it is most important that all nations deploying nuclear weapons
should move promptly to a "zero alert" nuclear posture. This would entail
making it physically impossible to launch nuclear weapons except after a
time delay of hours or even days (as could be accomplished, for example, by
demounting the warheads from delivery vehicles and storing them separately).
As long as they were invulnerably based, nuclear weapons in this condition
would retain their deterrent capacity against the use of nuclear weapons by
others. (This so-called "minimum deterrent" role is the only rationale for
nuclear weapons for which a halfway persuasive case can be made, and even
that case, in the view of the Pugwash Council, is provisional and temporary;
but more about that in a moment.) In any event, such a deterrent function
does not require that the reaction to a nuclear attack should be instan-
taneous, and giving up the possibility of an instantaneous reaction has the
great benefit of practically eliminating the danger of accidental nuclear war.
Accompanying the physical implementation of "zero alert" postures should be
unilateral commitments of no-first-use and no threat of use of nuclear
weapons by all nuclear-weapon states, pending early conclusion of a treaty
to this effect.
Second, with respect to the danger of stagnation and reversal of ongoing
arms-reduction processes, the immediate exercise of forceful leadership by
President Clinton and President Yeltsin is called for in order to bring about
the ratification, by the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma, of both the START
2 agreement and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Russian agreement to ratify
START 2 would be facilitated, for reasons both economic and military, by the
early initiation of negotiations toward a START 3 agreement entailing deeper
cuts, tactical as well as strategic weapons, and reserve warheads as well as
deployed ones. Every effort should be made, as well, to engage the United
Kingdom, France, China, and the undeclared nuclear-weapon states in the START
3 process. It also must be recognized that abandoning the ABM Treaty would
surely doom START 2 as well as all efforts to achieve deeper reductions in
U.S. and Russian offensive nuclear forces or to bring the possessors of
smaller nuclear arsenals into the reduction process -- all this for the
ILLUSION of a defense against nuclear attack, not the reality of one, which
for fundamental reasons will remain out of reach.
Third, in the matter of proliferation of nuclear weapons and other
weapons of mass destruction, and of the delivery systems for these, the most
important next steps depend on the existing nuclear-weapon powers. Prompt
achievement of a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- without loopholes for
low-yield tests or so-called "peaceful nuclear explosions" -- is rightly
seen by non-nuclear-weapon states as part of the basic bargain sealed by the
recent indefinite extension of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Among non-
nuclear-weapon states, pacts for mutual reassurance and joint monitoring of
nonproliferation commitments -- such as that agreed by Brazil and Argentina
in 1994 -- should be pursued as useful complements to the NPT and regional
Nuclear Weapon Free Zones. Ultimately, though, the prevention of prolifera-
tion will depend on the readiness of the nuclear-weapon states to continual-
ly reduce the prominence of nuclear weapons in their foreign and military
policies and, indeed, to find ways of moving toward a nuclear-weapon-free
world. The idea that a few nations are entitled to retain nuclear weapons
for "deterrent" purposes indefinitely, while all other nations are expected
to refrain from acquiring this ostensible benefit, is untenable in the long
run. In the meantime, every statement or action by a nuclear-weapon state
reinforcing the idea that nuclear weapons might have military utility will
provoke interest on the part of other countries in acquiring them; and
states that are thus provoked but lack the means to acquire nuclear weapons
are likely to try to acquire instead the "poor man's" weapons of mass
destruction -- chemical and biological weapons.
Fourth, with respect to the dismantling of surplus nuclear and chemical
weapons and, especially, the protection and ultimate disposition of their
active ingredients, it is deplorable how much foot-dragging has characterized
U.S. and Russian implementation of such measures -- including, particularly,
cooperative programs between the two countries that have been authorized and
negotiated but only fractionally carried out. While this problem has
received some high-level political attention on both sides, it needs more.
The bureaucrats in both countries with responsibility for these matters, most
of whom appear to be in no great hurry to get on with the job, need to be
reminded that protecting plutonium and highly enriched uranium -- and
ultimately disposing of these materials in ways that effectively preclude
their re-use in weapons -- represent not only one of the most urgent of
arms-contrl and nonpoliferation tasks but also the one of the most
cost-effective.
Fifth, with respect to the local conflicts raging day-in and day-out at
all too many locations around the world, a strategy for abatement begins
with the recognition that nearly all of the killing and maiming in these
wars is being done by artillery, mortars, small arms, and land mines, and
that most of this equipment in most cases is imported. It ought to be
possible, therefore, to limit this violence by restricting international
flows of light weapons; doing so poses practical difficulties, but a
determined effort including strengthened export controls, scrapping stock-
piles of surplus light weapons, and helping governments improve their border
and customs controls is well worth undertaking. Adding a prohibition of
anti-personnel land mines to the United Nations Inhumane Weapons Convention
would also be worthwhile. Taking seriously the problem of local conflicts
also compels attention to the evident inadequacies of the peacekeeping
capabilities of the United Nations and of the other international security
organizations, such as NATO, that exist in many regions. Clearly, these
organizations can be no stronger than their member states are willing to
allow them to be, and so far they have not been allowed to be strong enough.
The post-Cold-War world needs a more powerful United Nations, probably with
a standing volunteer force -- owing loyalty directly to the UN rather than
to contingents from individual nations -- as recommended by the Commission
on Global Governance.
The most intractable of the six security problems I have mentioned is
likely to be the one that relates not to the "tools" of conflict -- to
weapons and military forces -- but to the roots of conflict in the inade-
quacies of the economic and environmental circumstances of a majority of the
world's people. The overwhelming economic and environmental predicaments of
the poor cannot be solved by the poor alone without substantial cooperation
from the rich, and, conversely, the predicament of the poor cannot be
eallowed to persist without peril to the rich. We all live under one atmos-
phere, on the shores of one global ocean, our countries linked by flows of
people, money, goods, weapons, drugs, diseases, and ideas. Either we will
achieve an environmentally sustainable prosperity for all, in a world where
weapons of mass destruction have disappeared or become irrelevant, or we will
all suffer from the chaos, conflict, and destruction resulting from the
failure to achieve this. Two of the most distinguished scientist-statesmen of
our age -- the American geochemist Harrison Brown and the Russian physicist
Andrei Sakharov (Pugwash paricipants both) -- concluded independently in
works published in 1954 and 1968, respectively, that the cooperative effort
needed to create the basis for durable prosperity, and hence durable secur-
ity, for all the world's people would require an investment equivalent to 10
to 20 percent of the rich countries' GNPs, sustained over several decades.
In 1995, these figures do not seem far wrong, but they are said to be
politically unrealistic: nothing approaching them has ever been seriously
contemplated by the world's governments. Until this changes, a world free
of war -- correctly understood by the founders of the Pugwash conferences to
be the essential concomitant of a world free of nuclear weapons -- will
remain just a dream.
Clearly, then, the work of Pugwash -- and of all the other nongovern-
mental organizations that labored through the Cold War years to build up
peaceful cooperation and build down military confrontation -- is far from
done. The agenda of dangers still to be overcome is hardly less daunting
than the one faced by the founders of the Pugwash Conferences in the Cold
War gloom of the 1950s. But the world did finally escape the Cold War, and
with a bit of luck, a bit of wisdom, and a lot of work it may yet escape the
remaining dangers, too. It is a pleasure for me to thank, on behalf of the
Pugwash organization, the thousands of participants in Pugwash meetings whose
efforts, I think, have contributed measurably to making a safer and better
world; to thank the many sponsors whose support over the years made the
activities of Pugwash possible; and to thank, once again, the Norwegian
Nobel Committee for this most welcome recognition of our past work and most
helpful impetus for the work ahead.
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