Making nuclear weapons taboo

by Carlos Umaña

When the Cold War ended in 1991 and the Doomsday Clock was at its furthest from midnight, the world sighed in relief. The prevailing thought was that, in a world that was no longer bipolar, there would be no more use for nuclear weapons, so the superpowers would disarm, and we would all be safe. It was a moment of hope where many believed this low tension between the military and economic powers of the world would lead to peace talks and nuclear disarmament.

So, why didn’t nuclear disarmament happen when the iron curtain fell? Why didn’t nukes die when the Cold War ended, as they should have? What was missing? What did the international community get wrong?

Simply put, nuclear weapons had become a status symbol. After decades of propaganda equating nuclear weapons with power and prestige, those possessing them had a vested interest in keeping them around. Nukes had become the currency of power, and this did not change when the so-called superpowers lost their main reason to threaten each other.

Now, currency doesn’t have a fixed value; it is commonly agreed to by society, and it shifts according to the circumstances. If we understand, for instance, that money is an imaginary concept, we can understand this better. Surely, money is tied to many material things, it can provide us with independence, shelter, safety, health, and can even help us avoid death, all very real things. People live for it, die for it and even kill for it; however, money itself is not a tangible thing. It is a concept, a common myth that many people have agreed to and that most of us have to live by.

If one were to get lost in a forest and found a bag of gold coins, this bag would do very little to aid one’s survival. It would be a nuisance to carry around these small, heavy, metallic cylinders when our main concern is saving our energy to stay alive. No other animal, however intelligent, would give them a second thought. Nonetheless, we hold on to them because we have learned that they have value, and once we find our way to civilization, they will allow us to do a great deal of things. If it were a bag of cheap metal, we would likely not stop for them, but in the civilized world, those round, flat, pieces of gold, are everything. Their inherent value, what they can do for us by themselves, isn’t great, but their given value, what we have decided they can do for us, is very high. If we understand this difference, we understand that the power of myths and stories is not just significant, it is absolute. 

Logically, the owners of the gold coins don’t want to get rid of them or for them to be devalued, so, logically, they will do everything they can to keep them and to keep their value high. This is precisely why leaving nuclear disarmament solely to nuclear weapons states has been a failed strategy. This is also the reason why these states -and their acolytes-, have done everything in their power to stop the nuclear ban treaty in all its political stages. Pleading with them has not worked and will not work.

Now, the nine nuclear weapon states do not exist in isolation. They did not come to be that way because of independent, internal processes, but as a reflection of international relations and power dynamics. Their treasured nuclear status relies on a global system of norms and values. Like with gold, they have acquired nuclear weapons because there is an international system that makes it advantageous to have nuclear weapons. Hence, nuclear weapons states are not the problem per se, but, rather, they are a manifestation of a bigger problem. Speaking in medical terms, nuclear weapons are a generalized disease, and nuclear weapon states are but a local symptom of this disease. Conversely, to cure this disease, as we would with any other disease, we must treat the underlying cause and not just focus on the symptoms. The treatment must be systemic, not localized.

Abolition requires stigmatization, there is no way around this. Stripping nuclear weapons of their given value is a necessary step towards getting rid of them. This is the process whereby several behaviors in human history -like slavery- have been changed, and how other weapons of mass destruction have been abolished. Because of this taboo, nowadays, no country boasts of being a chemical weapons power or of having biological weapons in their security doctrines. What was an acceptable behavior not so long ago is now unthinkable. Conversely, we will be able to get rid of nuclear weapons when they are universally condemned, when the nuclear status is not a subject of praise, but of scorn.

De-escalation also requires stigmatization. For children to stop playing “chicken”, one of them has to be mature enough to recognize the dangers of the game. This was the case of the famous, “Reagan reversal”. Ronald Reagan, who was previously quite hawkish regarding his stance on nuclear weapons, later came to an agreement with his Soviet adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, when at the Geneva summit in 1985 they both declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought”. This change of heart was the product of a tireless campaign of awareness on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons that seeped through all layers of society. The risk was high, and everyone knew it. Back then at least.

However, there was a missing ingredient to achieve the elimination of nuclear weapons. The awareness of the horrific nuclear impact had to be coupled with a normative change. This is how the abolition of the other weapons of mass destruction was achieved: the humanitarian impact was the compelling reason for abolition (the “why”), and the prohibition was the way to achieve it (the “how”).  Hence, a normative change was created and, gradually, the legal and moral pressure from this normative change became universal and ultimately accepted and followed even by the countries that hadn’t signed the respective ban treaties and weren’t legally bound by them (as was the case with the United States and landmines and cluster munitions).

Peeling the onion

The normative change that happened with the other weapons of mass destruction is currently the effect that is being sought by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). To understand how this works, it is important to understand how the international community behaves around nuclear weapons. 

The world isn’t black and white when it comes to nuclear weapons. There isn’t a binary between nuclear and non-nuclear weapon states, but rather, every single country has a different relationship to these weapons. As professor Treasa Dunworth, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law of the University of Auckland explained in a conversation with ICAN’s Tim Wright, we can think of placing countries in a series of concentric circles according to the relationship they have with nuclear weapons. In the outermost circle we have the countries that don’t have nuclear weapons, don’t have military alliances with nuclear weapon states and have chosen to prohibit them in their territories, i.e., the countries belonging to the 5 populated nuclear weapon-free zones (Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the South Pacific, South-East Asia and Central Asia). Going deeper inwards, we have the countries that don’t have nuclear weapons themselves but are under the so-called “nuclear umbrella” (the NATO states, South Korea, Japan, and Australia). The 9 nuclear weapon states would be at the center, and at the very core, the US and Russia.

Stigmatization spreads in this direction, peeling the onion of “nuclearism” layer by layer to reach its core. Understandably, the countries that have already rejected and banned nuclear weapons locally and regionally -the outermost layer- have been the ones that have most readily condemned them and banned them on a global scale. Once this layer has been peeled, its effect weakens the reliance on nuclear weapons of the countries in the next layer. And so forth.

Stripping nuclear weapons of their given value is a necessary step towards achieving nuclear abolition. Stigmatizing them, making them taboo, is a proven strategy; it is the process whereby several paradigm shifts in human history have taken place. The international community will be able to get rid of nuclear weapons when the world finally agrees to see nuclear weapon states not as nuclear powers, but as nuclear liabilities.

IPPNW Co-President Carlos Umaña is a general practitioner, former local health director, and epidemiological surveillance officer with the Costa Rican Ministry of Health. Dr. Umaña is on the ICAN International Steering Group and is president of IPPNW Costa Rica.