Nuclear reminders

Former International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Pantelis Ikonomou writes occasionally for peacefare.net. We have never met in person, or even spoken on the phone, but his unequivocal commitment to containing and reducing nuclear risks, combined with his technical expertise, has been more than enough reason for me to open the blog to his always welcome contributions.

He has now written and published with Springer a wonderful comprehensive volume modestly titled Global Nuclear Developments: Insights from a Former IAEA Inspector. It is a first-rate primer on:

1. the technology required to make a nuclear weapon,
2. how the current international regime to control nuclear weapons evolved and how it functions,
3. how major nonproliferation crises have been handled in North Korea, Iran, Syria, Libya, Romania, and the former Soviet Union,
4. possible future proliferators, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Japan, and South Korea,
5. nuclear incidents/accidents, and
6. the nuclear weapons states, both within the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty–US, Russia, China, UK, and France–and outside it–India, Pakistan, Israel, and South Africa.

Throughout, Pantelis demonstrates his excellent and dispassionate command of the details while also offering practical and well-founded guidance for the future. North Korea, he thinks, will not be giving up nuclear weapons but its program might be frozen, given the right incentives. The US, he thinks, made a colossal error in withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal (the JCPOA) and thereby shortening the time required for Tehran to obtain the material needed to build a nuclear weapon. He understands that the deal in which Libya gave up its military nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief was a good one, but Qadaffi’s ultimate end will have strengthened North Korean resolve not to do likewise. I found his discussion of the South African and Israeli pursuit of nuclear weapons particularly interesting.

Pantelis is proud of the work of the IAEA, but blunt about the shortcomings of the regime it administers. He regards its Additional Protocol as adequate to limiting the possibility of hiding a military nuclear program within a civilian one, but he also notes that it is not universally and unconditionally accepted, most notably by Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran (which accepts it only within the context of JCPOA) as well as Israel, which remains outside the NPT. He also underlines the tensions between nuclear weapons and non-nuclear weapons states over the reluctance of the former to deliver on nuclear disarmament, which contributed to the failure of the 2015 review conference and what he feared would be the likely failure of the 2020 edition before it was postponed this spring.

In the end, Pantelis speculates on the emergence of a new “tetra”-polar equilibrium among nuclear weapons states:

1. US and UK;
2. Russia and India;
3. China, Pakistan, and North Korea;
4. Israel and France.

I am not sure how he comes to this conclusion. Even if 1. and 3. are historically well-rooted, I’m not convinced that India will ally with Russia or that today’s France is interested in allying with Israel, even if Pantelis is correct that France helped Israel develop its nuclear weapons in the past. Nor do I see why this configuration should be stable. It seems to me that two-party nuclear standoffs (US/USSR, India/Pakistan, US/China) are far more likely to be stable than anything with four corners to it.

Pantelis reserves his final enthusiasm for an epilogue in which he pleads with the world’s scientific community to convince the nuclear weapons states, especially the US and Russia, to engage seriously in nuclear disarmament rather than their current race to modernize and proliferate nuclear weapons, which is intensifying. I wouldn’t fault him there at all. The craziness of pursuing weapons that can never be used without sealing your own country’s destruction has not been lost on most of the world’s states. Lowering the level of mutual assured destruction could free up a lot of resources for more useful things. It is fortunate we have well-informed observer/participants like Pantelis to remind us of what we should be doing.