Every nation can argue that it has “special” security needs since that is a subjective term. However, the rationale that “special” security needs can only be met with nuclear weapons ignores the advantages of other options, such as multilateral cooperative security assurances or different security policies.

In spite of past, present, or future security needs, whether real or imagined, special or otherwise, 180 or so other nations have found it possible to honor their legal commitment under the NPT. All of them have resisted nuclear weapons’ siren call of international prestige; a few nations, such as South Africa and Libya, have even desisted from their own programs.

Contrast that to the conduct of the five nuclear-weapon-state signatories to the NPT, which have not lived up to their legal obligation to negotiate disarmament. As the Bulletin reported in its July/August 2007 issue (”The Next Generation of Nuclear Weapons”), the United States and Britain are planning to upgrade old warheads with more reliable replacement warheads. Russia, France, and China are also modernizing their nuclear arsenals. Their continued possession of nuclear weapons and insistence on needing them for security may be the single greatest stimulant for nuclear proliferation.

All nations must support the NPT in practice, and nuclear weapons must come to be irrelevant to their security needs. If no nation has them, no nation needs them. The world made biological weapons illegal in 1975 and did the same with chemical weapons in 1997. Let’s put our principles into practice and finally make nuclear weapons illegal too. If not now, when?

Bruce A. Roth
Atlanta, GA

Robert J. O’Neill, A.O.
Rylstone, NSW, Australia
Chichelle Professor Emeritus of the History of War, All Souls College, University of Oxford
Former Chairman of the Council, International Institute for Strategic Studies