The dream of Nuclear Disarmament is over.
No country will ever willingly give up their nuclear weapons again.
Canada is not ready for the coming age of nuclear proliferation. Far more widespread than the first age of proliferation during the Cold War, we are witnessing what will quickly become a horrific unravelling of the global non-proliferation regime. From Europe, to the Middle East, to the Taiwan Strait, the value of nuclear weapons to the states that possess them is being actively demonstrated in global conflict.
The moment Russia sent their “little green men” to annex Crimea in 2014, it became perfectly clear that the only way for a state to guarantee it’s independence, the autonomy of their people, is the possession of nuclear weapons. The contemporary Prime Minister Stephen Harper pointed out at the G7 that Ukraine had given up it’s nuclear weapons willingly, despite possessing ⅓ of the Soviet Union’s total nuclear arsenal at the time of the USSR’s dissolution.
Ukraine did so because Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States made assurances in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 to fully respect Ukraine’s territorial and political independence. They willingly ceded their nuclear arsenal because they believed that NATO’s nuclear powers would protect them, promises that proved utterly fruitless.
As reported in the Globe and Mail during the emergency G7 meeting in response, Stephen Harper was quoted as warning “that Moscow's seizure of Crimea would trigger an arms buildup around the world as countries grow more anxious about the security of their borders and more skeptical about Western efforts to halt nuclear proliferation.” Harper was prescient of the wider consequences that would follow Russia’s larger invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The economic links between Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China have significantly undercut the effects of Western sanctions, allowing not only civilian trade but the exchange of military secrets and equipment. In colluding with each other to advance their own geopolitical aims, they provide each other the means to evade accountability under international law. In parallel to the hegemonic influence of the United States and the European Union, they form a new Second World that allows them to advance their own rival hegemonic ambitions.
Wealthy neutral states with strong defences are able to compound their wealth by brokering access between these two increasingly siloed global economies. Neutral states without the ability to defend their neutrality, in contrast, will become the victims of neo-colonialism, consumed by a new wave of imperialist nuclear powers.
With their independence at stake, as the nuclear powers of the world seek to establish regional hegemonies, it is no shock that the neutral states of the Third World seek access to the nuclear deterrent. If they possess their own nuclear weapons, they gain a shield against other nuclear powers, and indeed can begin to reap the advantages of nuclear status for themselves.
A nuclear power has, ultimately, two freedoms: they gain the ability to flex imperial ambitions, and they gain the ability to resist the imperial ambitions of others. And when a region only has a single nuclear power, that massive imbalance in geopolitical influence is felt severely by it’s neighbours, reduced from peers to client states.
The neighbouring states will attempt to pursue their own nuclear weapons, in order to reassert the geopolitical balance and protect their integrity. Meanwhile, the regional hegemon will engage in counter-proliferation, and sabotage both military and civilian nuclear programs to ensure the hegemon preserves their monopoly on nuclear force.
Iran has demonstrated their ability to evade Israeli counter-proliferation efforts, and additionally is now a nascent nuclear power, with enough enriched uranium for several warheads and the ability to obtain delivery systems from North Korea.
The fact that Israel has redirected their attention away from tensions with Iran and back to Rafah, despite recent escalations between Israel and Iran, likely indicates that Israel takes the nuclear threat that Iran poses seriously, as Iran takes the nuclear threat of Israel seriously. For better or for worse, there is now a regional cold war between Israel and Iran because of their mutual nuclear status.
If at any point, one of these nuclear hegemons is truly threatened in a conventional war, the nuclear deterrent provides the ability to render any victory against the hegemon utterly meaningless. In a way, threatening to use your nuclear bomb after losing a war is the ultimate version of a kid taking their ball and going home.
Except in this case, instead of a spoiled child leaving the playground early because they’re mad, we’re watching aspiring superpowers threaten to obliterate entire cities from the Earth. They threaten to kill millions of innocent people, by boiling the flesh away from their skin with an artificial sun, a twisted and unnatural sun that perverts the very air itself, turning it into radioactive poison that unfurls the strands of your DNA and warps their bodies with malignant tumours.
For a time, Taiwan believed that it could deter a military invasion from Mainland China through their monopoly on advanced semiconductors with TSMC, but China has now demonstrated the ability to create their own homegrown silicon at SMIC. China may not use nuclear weapons due to their goal of reinhabiting Taiwan, but they can use their nuclear weapons to deter foreign intervention in defence of Taiwan.
As the United States limited willingness to defend Ukraine against Russia became clear, Taiwan must now question whether the United States would be any more willing to defend them against China. Such a proposal is highly controversial among the Taiwanese public, and yet every state must now contemplate whether they are truly safe without their own nuclear deterrent.
Nuclear weapons are an abomination unlike any other weapon of mass destruction, and at the same time nuclear weapons are the only robust solution ever demonstrated that can deter the aggression of another nuclear power. No state is safe without nuclear weapons of their own, and yet as more states seek to wield the atomic fire as a weapon, the risk of calamity increases exponentially.
This house of cards is the world we have built for ourselves. We have taken the gift of nuclear energy, a massive boon in the fight against climate change, and with that gift we created the worst weapon ever wielded by the hands of human beings. We have utterly failed to advanced the cause of nuclear disarmament.
In this new and terrifying age of proliferation, as more states build their own nuclear arsenals, only one thing is clear:
We are not prepared.
Ukraine never had a nuclear arsenal on its own. It was controlled by Moscow. Similarly there are nukes stationed in North Dakota. If North Dakota decided to become an independent state would it assume control of the nukes. No, they they are under the command of Moscow.