Abstract
Disarmament measures included in the Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) are, for most of the nuclear-weapon states, an objective to be reached in a very long-term. Based on this position, the current nuclear-weapon states parties to the NPT believe that they do not have to show, at this stage, the necessary political will to begin the nuclear disarmament process at the multilateral level and under international supervision, as requested so many times by the international community on the basis of article VI of the NPT. For this reason, all of them are in the process of modernising their nuclear weapons arsenals, ignoring their commitments and obligations as NPT states parties.
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Notes
Nuclear disarmament under the NPT means, to quote the treaty’s preamble, the ‘liquidation’ of all existing stockpiles of nuclear weapons and their ‘elimination from national arsenals’ as well as ‘the means of their delivery’. In other words, nuclear disarmament is an end state, the culmination of a process or processes eliminating nuclear arms, not just the process itself (Borrie and Caughley 2014).
The second group of states include Ukraine, Belarus, South Africa and Kazakhstan, all of them now non-nuclear-weapon states parties. The third group of states included Israel, India, Pakistan and DPRK, all of them in possession of nuclear weapons and outside of the NPT.
In the early decades of the Cold War, the U.S. and NATO made arrangements to bury what were known as “atomic demolition munitions” (in essence, nuclear mines) at key points in West Germany, to be detonated if Warsaw Pact forces ever invaded. Although this plan, if enacted, might have slowed the enemy advance, it also almost certainly would have turned vast West German territories into radioactive wastelands littered with corpses and smouldering buildings—the stuff of hellish alternative- history scenarios. The West viewed such tactical nukes—NATO fielded 7000 to 8000 of these shorter-range, smaller-yield weapons for most of the Cold War—as tripwires in anticipation of the Soviet Union’s own plans for its thousands of tactical weapons. That is to say, the forward positioning of these nuclear weapons was a signal: If the Soviet Union invaded Europe, confrontation would escalate quickly to the nuclear realm, and the United States would intervene.
With the end of the Cold War and the reduced risk of a Russian invasion, NATO eliminated almost all its tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Today, five NATO countries—Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey—are widely believed to host 180 US-owned nuclear bombs at their air bases. These weapons, variants of the B61 warhead, a stalwart of the American thermonuclear arsenal since the late 1960s, are viewed by some security experts as provocative anachronisms. The critics argue that strategic missiles and bombers posted in the United States and the UK, along with missiles on nuclear submarines, provide more than enough deterrence against any Russian aggression.
The number of warheads on deployed ICBMs and SLBMs are estimates; other numbers are taken from the official US report.
New START reporting explicitly lists five types of Russian land-based ballistic missiles that are considered operational under the treaty—RS-12 M (also known as SS-25 or Topol), RS-12 M2 (SS-27 or Topol-M), RS-18 (SS-19 or UR-100 NUTTH), RS-20 (SS-18 or R-36 M2), and RS-24 (Yars). These missiles are deployed at 12 ICBM bases that are operated by the Strategic Rocket Forces. An analysis of open-source information suggests that Russia has 312 deployed ICBMs.
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Morales Pedraza, J. How Nuclear-Weapon States Parties to the Non-proliferation Treaty Understand Nuclear Disarmament. Public Organiz Rev 17, 211–235 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-015-0335-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-015-0335-x