Nuclear Disarmament

The Arctic and the East-West Nuclear Confrontation

Not so long ago, the Arctic was a region of low tension and high cooperation. In the brief interlude from the final years of the Cold War and Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous 1987 call to establish the Arctic as a zone of peace to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, several notable agreements on international cooperation were reached. But Today’s headlines and commentaries reflect a starkly different regional and strategic climate, and these heightened strategic tensions are exacerbated by the ways in which Russian and NATO nuclear weapons-related forces are now operating in the region.

A logical, if modest, policy response would be to seek a mutual agreement or arrangement to curtail ASW operations against second strike deterrent forces in designated areas.

Read the full policy brief at the Centre for International Policy Studies, University of Ottawa.

We are in perilous times, yet Canada is silent on the proliferation of nuclear weapons

Ernie Regehr and Douglas Roche in The Globe and Mail June 27, 2024:

President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials repeatedly threaten the use of nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war. China is rapidly expanding its arsenal of nuclear-armed missiles. In response, the U.S. is signalling intentions to increase its number of deployed nuclear weapons. Continue reading in The Globe and Mail.

Inevitable or Inadmissible? Threatening Nuclear Weapons Use

Of the world’s nine states with nuclear weapons, two – Russia and Israel – are now fighting high intensity wars. Another three of the nuclear nine – the United States, the United Kingdom, and France – are deeply invested in both wars, supplying weapons and expecting to influence outcomes. The other four nuclear powers – China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan – are building up their arsenals, hoping to gain strategic advantage in their respective zones of chronic tension. Continue reading at CIPS Blog (University of Ottawa, Centre for International Policy Studies)…

US Strategic Ballistic Missile Defence: Why Canada won’t join it

Two Parliamentary Committees have recently recommended that Canada “reconsider” it’s 2005 decision against joining the US homeland Ballistic Missile Defence system. The Pentagon acknowledges the system has no capacity against Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles, and its operational design means it also has no capability against cruise and hypersonic missiles. With continental security concerns shifting to the latter, Canada is unlikely to seek direct involvement in strictly ballistic missile defence.

Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

Strategic Nuclear Patrols and an Arctic Military Code of Conduct

While rising northern tensions clearly challenge notions of the Arctic as a durable zone of peace, current tensions are rooted in fears of a European conflict spilling northward, not in conflict endemic to the Arctic. Two decades of high north military expansion have certainly added to the region’s strategic uncertainty, but even more consequential are the currently increasing levels and pace of competing strategic patrols in the Arctic and North Atlantic, especially those that undermine basic nuclear deterrence. Strategic patrols impacting geopolitical stability need to be guided by normative operational rules. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

Doubling Down on a Retentionist Nuclear Posture: NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept

Nuanced changes to the nuclear weapons elements of NATO’s new Strategic Concept do not alter its substance. Once again, the alliance propagates the dangerous myth that nuclear weapons are the “supreme” source of security, doubles down on the threat of nuclear weapons use in response to conventional attack, continues to insist that alliance security depends on stationing US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. The overall nuclear posture remains stubbornly retentionist. It entrenches policies that bolster already daunting barriers to progress in nuclear arms control and disarmament and deepens strategic instability into the bargain. Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

NATO has a chance to step back from the edge of a nuclear abyss

From the Globe and Mail, May 24, 2022
By Ernie Regehr

Russia’s recent threats to add nuclear attacks to its brutal assault on the people and infrastructure of Ukraine is a cruel reminder of the harsh, inescapable reality of nuclear deterrence – the very existence of nuclear weapons carries the ever-present danger that they will be used.

Every state with nuclear weapons threatens to use them. In the case of Russia, President Vladimir Putin recently promised his adversaries “consequences you have never experienced” if he decides to unleash these weapons. The more measured language of the 2021 Summit Communiqué of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, meanwhile, said that the organization would only use nuclear weapons in “extreme” circumstances to “impose costs on an adversary that would be unacceptable and far outweigh the benefits that any adversary could hope to achieve.” Russia’s threat of nuclear warfare is more immediate and therefore much more dangerous in this moment, but the point is that both statements clearly threaten the use of nuclear weapons as a possibility. These weapons, both warn, are always at hand and could, in desperate circumstances, be unleashed.

By the simple fact of their Damoclean presence, in both wartime and peacetime, nuclear weapons impose on humanity the relentless task of keeping them from being launched. It is an imperative dangerously dramatized by the Ukraine war, with United States Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin coming to the only credible conclusion – nuclear war is “where all sides lose.” That truth applies regardless of which side makes the first move.

The preamble to the international Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons states that any use of a nuclear weapon would be “abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t change the tragic fact that neither Ukraine nor its NATO neighbours have the means to prevent a Russian nuclear attack. We can continue to discourage the use of nuclear weapons in our appeals to Russia’s leadership, but in the end we are left waiting to see what the dangerous vagaries of the Kremlin will bring next.

Humanity remains hostage to a global “security” system based on threats and counter-threats of nuclear attack. Russia’s stance is clear, while NATO’s official nuclear doctrine (outlined in its “strategic concept,” which was last revised in 2010) insists that nuclear weapons are the “supreme guarantee” of security for NATO allies. At the same time, NATO also promises to work toward “the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons.”

This inherent contradiction has never been in greater need of resolution and the opportunity to advance that effort will present itself at the NATO Summit scheduled for Madrid at the end of June. As a member of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, Canada has a key seat at the table.

The transition from claiming that nuclear weapons are the “supreme” guarantors of security to creating a world without them will hardly be managed in a single meeting, but the upcoming summit does offer a timely opportunity to challenge nuclear orthodoxy – and Canada, along with like-minded partners, has the opportunity and obligation to help drive change.

A modest but worthwhile effort would be to press for a shift in NATO’s nuclear rhetoric – to acknowledge nuclear weapons not as fundamental to security but as a problem to be overcome.

A more concrete and widely encouraged measure would be for NATO to pledge that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons, and to adjust its war planning measures accordingly. A no-first-use commitment should really be a straightforward matter of heeding American security realist Henry Kissinger, who told the Munich Security Conference in 2009 that “any use of nuclear weapons is certain to involve a level of casualties and devastation out of proportion to foreseeable foreign policy objectives.”

NATO currently hosts U.S. tactical nuclear gravity bombs in five European countries, each with fighter aircraft tasked to deliver those B61 bombs to NATO-defined targets. It is an arrangement meant to signal NATO’s technical and political capacity to launch nuclear attacks in the event of a war – in other words, the capacity to start a war that all sides would lose.

Combined with a no-first-use pledge, returning those tactical nuclear weapons to the U.S. would be a prominent turn toward nuclear de-escalation. And removing these barbarous weapons that are, in the end, unusable by any state at all attuned to “the dictates of public conscience” can only enhance security.

Mr. Putin’s brazen threat to launch nuclear attacks presents us with the reality of the use of nuclear weapons – the mass killing of civilians and soldiers alike, as well as vast physical and environmental destruction. In Madrid, Canada will have the opportunity to challenge its NATO partners to take some modest but deliberate steps away from the abyss that nuclear weapons promise.

Updating NATO’s Strategic Concept: The Nuclear Imperatives

The war in Ukraine once again confirms this inescapable nuclear reality – in war and in peace, nuclear weapons impose on humanity the daily, relentless imperative of figuring out how not to use them. Obviously, for no other weapon system is absolute prevention of its use the over-riding requirement. But the international community has declared nuclear weapons unique – the collective objective is to eliminate them, and most states, and certainly populations around the world, conclude that any use of a nuclear weapon would be “abhorrent to the principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience.”[i] And yet the nuclear powers continue to threaten their use, with Russia the most immediate and alarming example, and to extol the utility of these doomsday weapons. NATO’s current Strategic Concept confirms continued reliance on nuclear weapons in the collective defence of allies. But that strategic guidance document is now under review, offering Alliance members the opportunity to construct policy off-ramps from the path of nuclear peril they now travel.

Continue reading at The Simons Foundation.

[i] From the preamble to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N17/209/73/PDF/N1720973.pdf?OpenElement

Should Canada increase its military involvement in the Indo-Pacific region?

This is the issue debated in the January/February 22 issue of Legion Magazine, with Ernie Regehr arguing the “No” side and David Bercuson, of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military, Security, and Strategic Studies, arguing “Yes.” 

Regehr argues that “de-escalating military tensions and halting the drift toward a Cold War with China are prerequisites for effectively addressing the Indo-Pacific region’s all-too-real security challenges….

“Military exercises like the Rim of the Pacific Exercise, which in 2020 involved about 500 CAF personnel and two frigates, are part of Canada’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific,…but it is the tempo of multilateral engagement, not military operations, that needs to increase. Patrols like the recent voyage of HMCS Winnipeg through the Taiwan Strait alongside a U.S. destroyer are neither destined nor designed to reduce tensions.
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“Instead, diplomacy to promote strategic stability talks and build broad regional support for collective responses to Indo-Pacific security challenges is what will ultimately facilitate the stability on which the region’s security depends.”

The debate is part of the magazine’s “Face to Face” feature. To view the full debate, visit Legion Magazine through this link: Should Canada increase its military involvement in the Indo-Pacific region?

Canada and the Stockholm Initiative

The following paper on Canada and the Stockholm Initiative on Nuclear Disarmament was part of a November 2021 letter to Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly.

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