National defense and security policy prepares and deploys armed forces. In itself, it is a legitimate and essential function of a State, but it is only a response to the first of the three great challenges. For nine states (USA, Russia, UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea), the apex of their forces is nuclear weapons. Although justified in the name of security, nuclear weapons generate, even more than conventional forces, insecurity and risk. Is it possible for the three great powers to abandon their reliance on nuclear weapons and address the real insecurity problems we face?
Over the last decade, the world has stockpiled more weapons and experienced more wars. The peace dividend of the end of the cold war in 1990 has been lost. This is not a consequence of the Russian invasion and the war in Ukraine. It is the culmination of a decade-long trend.
Looking back, the global zone of peace expanded in the twenty years after 1990. Despite horrific events like the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the 1992-1995 Bosnia-Herzegovina war, the 1992-1995 Darfur genocide 2003 and the invasion of Iraq, the number of armed conflicts fell from 50 in 1990 to 30 in 2010. And, on average, they were shorter and less deadly than in previous years. More peace agreements were signed than ever before, and the proportion lasting more than five years also increased. In addition, global military spending fell from about $1.5 trillion in 1990 to just over $1 trillion in 1998. And the number of nuclear warheads fell from a peak of over 70,000 worldwide in the middle of the 20th century. 1980s to just over 30,000 in the year 2000. Reductions have continued and the world total today is less than 13,000 warheads.
However, the peace dividend did not last. World military spending began to rise before the turn of the new millennium and, after a slowdown just after the 2009-2010 economic crisis, grew steadily, approaching $2 trillion in 2020. There are signs that it has returned to increase during 2021 and that it will do so again this year.
The number of wars has increased steadily each year, and in 2020 there were 56. War deaths doubled in the second decade of this century compared to the first, mainly from the war in Syria. The number of refugees and other forcibly displaced persons also doubled; at the end of 2020, they numbered 82.4 million (more than 1% of the world’s population), and their number has almost certainly increased again after the events in Afghanistan in 2021 and Ukraine in 2022.
In short, the problem of force and violence is getting worse, and the response of increasing military force does not solve it; on the contrary, it exacerbates it, because when one side increases its armed force, the other side sees a threat in it and responds in kind.
Although the number of nuclear warheads has been greatly reduced from thirty years ago, all states that possess nuclear weapons are updating their arsenals. The number of operational nuclear warheads increased in 2020 for the first time in decades.
If nuclear weapons exist, there is a risk that they will be used, as President Putin and other Russian spokesmen have emphasized more than once in connection with the war in Ukraine. There are also the risks of an accident. Only very sketchy information is available, but we know of six American and two Soviet nuclear weapons that have been permanently lost.
Software incidents can be more worrisome than the loss of warheads and bombs. The most dangerous known software incident occurred in September 1983. A Soviet lieutenant colonel, Stanislav Petrov, saw information on his computer screen that an American Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile had been launched in the direction of Moscow. Considering that, if a nuclear attack were launched, it would be a massive attack, not with a single missile, he reported the incident as a system failure. When the computer identified four more launches, he stuck to his opinion that there were too few missiles and it was a system failure. Therefore, the information was not passed on to a higher authority that might have considered retaliating against a nonexistent attack. Given that September 1983 was a period of great tension in US-USSR relations, a decision to strike back would have been quite likely and with catastrophic consequences.
If we wanted to imagine a nightmare, let us ask ourselves what would happen today, in the midst of the Ukraine crisis or shortly after, and with technical systems that reduce the time available for decision-making, if a similar failure were to occur.
Meanwhile, the foundations of life and society are being eroded by a series of interrelated environmental crises. In the last forty years, each decade has been warmer than the last. Extreme weather conditions, more frequent due to climate change, are having devastating consequences in both industrialized and developing countries. Sea level rises are more frequent and severe. Areas where drought has always been a major problem are now experiencing even longer dry spells, while rainfall in many areas is becoming more unpredictable. Millions of people face increased risk of wildfires, floods and food insecurity.
Outside of storms and fires, climate change poses a proven health hazard. Extreme heat weakens people and kills them. Climate change is responsible for the increased incidence of respiratory and heart diseases, the increased risk of premature births and birth defects, as well as the increased infectivity of animal-borne diseases such as mosquitoes, ticks and parasites. It also affects water and sanitation, leading to malnutrition and food insecurity, and is among the leading causes of severe food crises, second only to violent conflict.
Other aspects of the general environmental crisis are also detrimental to our health. Some experts consider air pollution to be the world’s greatest environmental risk to health. Between 90% and 95% of the world’s population breathes ambient air polluted beyond the level judged acceptable by the World Health Organization. The number of deaths due to environmental air pollution is increasing; in 2019 it amounted to 4.5 million people. And the link to climate change is clear because climate change creates conditions where pollution spreads slowly. The attack on nature resulting from the economic model of industrialization based on resource extraction poisons us with microplastics and air and soil pollution. The world is losing biodiversity and biomass at an unprecedented rate, creating health hazards in many ways, including threatening the supply of medicines. It is estimated that 4,000 million people depend mainly on natural medicines for their health care, and that about 70% of the drugs used to treat cancer are natural products or, if they are synthetic, they were identified thanks to the effects of natural products and inspired by them.
In the last two years, we have lived through the covid pandemic. Its origin is still uncertain, but there is a clear risk that such pandemics arise from increased contact between humans and certain types of animal life as a result of the way in which human activity encroaches on nature. It remains difficult to define with certainty the magnitude of the effects of the pandemic. The official death toll stands at 5.94 million people through the end of 2021. Such data is generally considered unreliable for several reasons; These include methodological and, in many national systems, reporting deficiencies. The World Health Organization estimates that the number of deaths from covid exceeds the reported deaths by 60%. According to other estimates made from reliable sources, the number of victims would be three times higher than the reported deaths and would range between 17 and 20 million people.
The environmental crisis and the covid pandemic have killed many times more people in this century than war and are linked to issues of peace and security in many other ways.
Climate change creates instability in social relations due to its impact on livelihoods and food security. Drought often forces people to sell their properties, abandon them and move to the fringes of the cities, where youth disaffection is deep and widespread. Flooding gives armed militias an opportunity to offer help to the population before the national government or international organizations can intervene. In both cases, the recruitment possibilities of the militias are expanded. The social and political impact of the pandemic also raises security issues, both due to increased economic inequalities and the weakening of democracy, both factors related to an increased risk of violent conflict, as well-founded research has established.
At the global level, the environmental crisis and the risk of pandemics go beyond national borders, as do their effects and repercussions. To the extent that rising food prices helped spark Egypt’s uprising against Hosni Mubarak’s regime in 2011, it’s worth remembering that these price spikes were triggered by bad weather and forest fires in Ukraine. , Russia, China, Australia and the US, but not in Egypt. And with the pandemic we have seen that it is almost impossible to protect national borders against a virus.
In the absence of international cooperation, it is not possible to resolve environmental crises or reduce the risk of pandemics. And the same is true when it comes to the problem of force and violence. Just as the only solution against international networks dedicated to the smuggling of weapons, drugs and other types of traffic or to the movement of money lies in mutual agreements, the same is true in the case of force and violence, and that is the only way that many states decide to reduce their armaments.
Reducing the scale and urgency of the Big Three security challenges is a huge undertaking. It requires a new conception of security, power and economics, as well as a different approach to nature. It means recognizing that national and state interests, understood in terms of power, constitute too superficial and narrow a base on which to build international politics in a world put in check by an environmental crisis of enormous magnitude. Sustainability and cooperation must come to the fore.
There are many incentives to do so, and it is only prevented by myopic and ultimately self-destructive perceptions of the national interest. However, the problem is that global geopolitics is undermining the foundations of cooperation. The submission of the great powers to the idea that nuclear weapons are indispensable for security and status is a key part of the problem. However, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, or the P-5) elaborated on January 3, 2022 a joint declaration recognizing that a nuclear war it cannot be won and must never be released.
It is a deliberate echo of the statement by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at their 1985 Geneva summit. That statement was followed by historic talks on nuclear disarmament. The new declaration is unlikely to have the same consequences, but it offers a clear rationale for de-escalation and nuclear dependency.
There is, for example, a clear contradiction between abjuring nuclear war and reserving the right to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict. For now, only one of the P-5 countries, China, has a “no first use” policy. The futility and danger of the arms race is also clear, as the P-5 statement acknowledges when it speaks of avoiding “an arms race that will benefit no one and endanger everyone.” And, more broadly in mutual relations, the commitment to avoid nuclear war means avoiding behavior that could lead to it.
Clearly, this is a lesson that has yet to be learned in all relevant instances.
The joint statement concludes by saying that the P-5 is “determined to maintain a constructive dialogue.” It will be a small first step for the great powers to find a way out of their dependence on nuclear weapons. In the context of 2022, it will be a huge leap forward.
Dan Smith is director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
