Opinion | Three things wrong with the pledge by nuclear powers to never use their weapons

Name: US, China, Russia, Britain and France pledge to only use nuclear weapons for defence
Uploaded: 2022-01-12T19:30:11.000Z
Duration: 3 min 55 s
Description: US, China, Russia, Britain and France pledge to only use nuclear weapons for defence

The US, Russia, China, France and the UK took a stand against the spread of nuclear weapons and their use in war, yet their pledge, as it stands, actually weakens the effectiveness of nuclear stockpiles in preventing conventional combat from breaking out

Reading Time:3 minutes

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The US Air Force conducts an unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile test launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base, in California on October 2, 2019. America’s arsenal of more than 400 Minuteman-III silo-deployed intercontinental missiles is a dramatic demonstration of US power. Photo: AP

Julian Spencer-Churchill

Published: 3:30am, 13 Jan 2022Updated: 11:55pm, 14 Jan 2022

On January 3, the US, Russia, China, France and the UK, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, released a joint statement in which they pledged to work towards a nuclear-free world. The statement emphasised the need to avoid nuclear war and to use nuclear weapons only for deterrence.

The five Security Council members are also the world’s only five countries capable of mass-producing thermonuclear warheads. Between 1959 and 1961, the US manufactured one thermonuclear warhead roughly every 100 minutes.

As weak and regional as France and the UK are in the contemporary world, their ability to mass-produce these devices is why their tenure as permanent Security Council veto-powers persists.

It is also the fear produced by this prerequisite of power that has kept Japan or Germany from applying for a permanent seat. Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea have demonstrated the ability to build nuclear and boosted fission weapons, but at a very slow rate, and their total collective arsenals are the equivalent of just 59 days of US production.

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US, China, Russia, Britain and France pledge to only use nuclear weapons for defence

Article Six of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commits signatories – non-nuclear armed states as well as the five thermonuclear mass-producers – to work towards complete nuclear weapons disarmament. However, accusations of insincerity aimed at the five principal nuclear powers, by such well-meaning but hopelessly unrealistic organisations such as Pugwash, the IPPNW or the Federation of American Scientists, have some truth to them.

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