Opponents of abolition have long held the high ground in debates, but the assumptions they rely on are questionable.

The destructive power of nuclear weapons is a truism and needs no elaboration. For the first time in human history, there is a feasible way for the actions of man to easily bring about his ultimate demise.

Every day the missiles stand ready in their silos, and the world stands on the cusp of destruction the likes of which would make the ravages of Genghis Khan mere footnotes in comparison.

Important context to understand the next paragraph: What is the Overton Window?

Traditional security debates have a small Overton Window, which limits discussions to how much states should spend on nuclear weapons and relegates serious talks about multilateral disarmament to the status of unseriousness. This taboo about multilateral disarmament must be broken, but it raises questions about the world after nuclear weapons, and these questions deserve answers.

Question: How would a post-nuclear world keep tabs on potential treaty violators?

Answer: Arms control treaties have a weakness: If the international community does not know violations are underway, they are unable to respond to them. Abolishing nuclear weapons requires methods of verification and multilateral trust-building, but these mechanisms are not as nebulous or wanting as one might imagine.

The 1992 Open Skies Treaty allowed 26 states, most notably the United States and Russia, to overfly each other with high-altitude spy planes to examine each other’s military installations. This was a trust-building mechanism, as it showed each party that there was nothing to hide, and it made noncompliance easier to detect.

The treaty was not perfect even before both Russia and the United States abandoned it. Underground installations are difficult to peer into from such an altitude, but this only shows that more trust-building mechanisms are needed, and that Open Skies alone is insufficient.

Other agreements, such as the JCPOA, better remembered as the Iran Nuclear Deal, provide a perfect template for a global disarmament regime. Inspectors had free rein to check all nuclear sites, and if Iran attempted to build a covert one, it would have to rebuild all its nuclear infrastructure and would have been caught in the process.

In the future, states like Russia, China, and the U.S. would likely have to submit to teams of international inspectors from the UN to verify compliance with multilateral disarmament treaties — a small price to pay for a world without nuclear weapons.

Question: The nuclear genie is out of the bottle. How is it possible to un-invent them now that they are a fact of life?

Answer: Things and processes in history are seldom un-invented unless they happen to be Roman concrete or Greek fire, so critics of nuclear abolition are correct that the knowledge of how to construct such devices cannot be expected to be forgotten.

However, the trick to disarmament does not lie in forgetting the schematics of the weapons, but in making them obsolete. Nukes are extremely expensive; the U.S. spends approximately $50 billion a year on their upkeep, and that money could be spent on other weapons systems that could be more easily used.

Related: Defense spending: Why we pay for the permanent war economy

Except for the one-off first use in the Second World War, which created a global norm against their use, these weapons have not been deployed in warfare since, even though generals, most notably MacArthur, have repeatedly argued for their use.

This leads some strategic thinkers to see these weapons as functionally unusable in modern war and thus stagnant investments — and expensive ones at that. Take a contemporary example: The Russians, embroiled in their war in Ukraine (read all about The Economic Impact of the Ukraine War), can hardly afford to lavish much money on luxuries like nuclear weapons when they are busy losing all of their main battle tanks.

Related: See the analogy George R.R. Martin and the Game of Thrones series makes to too-expensive nuclear weapons.

Rational leaders want hard power that they can use, and that means investing in the fundamentals: artillery, armor, infantry, and air power, not unusable weapons.

Question: What about deterrence?

Answer: Deterring aggression is valuable, and no one would deny this. At the same time, there are clear limits to the types of opponents who are deterred by nuclear weapons. 

Despite America’s having a fleet of Ohio-class submarines, the Minuteman system, and the B-2, the terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 were undeterred. Nuclear weapons only work if the enemy has something large and targetable that they want to protect. Non-state actors like transnational terrorist groups do not have sprawling cities or military bases.

Aside from this, deterrence is not exclusive to nuclear weapons, and conventional forces can have this effect as well. It is recognized that during the Sino-Soviet War of 1969, the Chinese were unable to counter the Soviet nuclear advantage but made up for it with a bigger ground army positioned near the Soviet border. Mao successfully practiced deterrence by threatening the Soviets with a difficult ground war in Central Asia, and this principle is just as applicable today.

Question: If there had not been nuclear weapons during the Cold War, what would have stopped it from going hot?

Answer: It is certainly true that, barring a few incidents like the shooting down of a U2 spy plane in 1960, the U.S. and Soviet Union did not engage in direct conflict between 1949, when the latter broke the nuclear monopoly, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The non-recurrence of war in Europe is something to celebrate, but this triumphalist view obscures the reality that the Cold War frequently burned rather hot.

Instead of the Red Army advancing through the Fulda Gap, followed by a grinding advance to the Rhine, proxy wars broke out across the world in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and numerous other theaters throughout the Middle East, South America, Asia, and Africa. While the U.S. and USSR never had troops fighting under their own flags exchange shots, it is not true to say that war was avoided between the two countries; it was only displaced.

It is factually wrong to portray the Cold War as an era of undisturbed peace courtesy of nuclear weapons. Counterfactual history is dangerous territory, but conventional forces also have deterrence characteristics, as do systems of alliances, both of which were present in profusion during the Cold War. War is never a foregone conclusion, and one must resist treating it as one.

From Impossible to Inevitable

A world without nuclear weapons poses conceptual difficulties only because the world is locked into the paradigm of their present existence. Only a failure of imagination prevents the world from abolishing nuclear weapons. The willpower is certainly there.

As of 2023, 191 states formally support the Non-Proliferation Treaty, 177 support the Comprehensive Test Ban, and 125 support the Partial Test Ban. In 2017, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was introduced and has gone from three signing states to 69 and is now supported by 122.

The momentum for nuclear abolition is picking up speed, and there is every reason to be hopeful that this generation can be the last to live in the shadow of nuclear weapons.

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