the uk, threshold status and responsible nuclear sovereignty

The UK, threshold status and

responsible nuclear sovereignty

International Affairs 86: 2 (2010) 447–464© 2010 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs

WILLIAM WALKER*

The example of the UK will be used here to explore two linked ideas, or ways of looking at things, that touch on important questions of international concern about nuclear weapons. The first is the notion of the disarmament threshold state; the second, that of responsible nuclear sovereignty.

The term ‘threshold state’ was widely used in the 1970s and 1980s to describe a group of six states (Argentina, Brazil, India, Israel, Pakistan and South Africa) that were outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and were assumed to be standing on—or moving towards—the threshold between not possessing and possessing operational nuclear weapons.1 The purpose of international policy was to hold them on the threshold and persuade them to draw back from it, eventually bringing them into the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states.

My suggestion is that this term should again be adopted but in order to describe a state moving in the opposite direction: from possessing to not possessing opera-tional nuclear weapons. The UK particularly deserves to be called a threshold state in this sense, since it is close to the boundary between armament and disar-mament and seems closer to it than any other nuclear weapon state.

The term ‘threshold state’ has relevance in contemporary international debates about nuclear disarmament because all nuclear-armed states will have to become threshold states in the above sense if nuclear weapons are ever to be abolished. We need better understandings of what threshold-crossing into disarmament would entail for each actor. Some lessons can be learned from the experiences of South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Libya and other states that have abandoned efforts to acquire nuclear weapon capabilities.2 However, these were not fully

* This is an abridged and amended version of a paper prepared during the author’s Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, Oslo, in May–June 2009. The paper was presented at the Institute’s Sympo-sium on ‘Peace, stability and nuclear order: theoretical assumptions, historical experience, future challenges’ (Nobel Symposium 142) at Oscarsborg, Drøbak, Norway, 25–27 June 2009. The revised text is printed here with permission. The symposium’s proceedings will be published by Routledge in a book edited by Olav Njølstad, entitled Nuclear proliferation and international order: challenges to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (forthcom-ing, June 2010).

1 Israel had, unannounced, already crossed the threshold into nuclear armament by this time, and was assumed to have done so by other states. It was grouped with the five other threshold states for reasons of political expediency, and to avoid breaching the policy of ‘opacity’. See Avner Cohen, Israel’s nuclear bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

2 For a thorough assessment of reasons for the abandonment of nuclear weapon programmes, see Harald Müller and Andreas Schmidt, ‘The little known story of de-proliferation: why states give up nuclear weapon

William Walker

448International Affairs 86: 2, 2010© 2010 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Affairs

fledged nuclear powers that had absorbed nuclear deterrence into their ways of conceiving of security and conducting politics over several decades. In addition, they had yet to establish large R&D and industrial capabilities to support a nuclear arsenal.3 The UK could be the first state with these attainments to eliminate its nuclear force and all that goes with it. That a founder member of the nuclear club had decided to go down this path would give the UK’s abandonment of nuclear weapons added significance.

In discussions of disarmament, it is important to acknowledge the distinctive-ness of the individual eight or nine nuclear-armed states. We are used to hearing, for example, that ‘Russia is a nuclear weapon state’, ‘France is a nuclear weapon state’ and now ‘India is a nuclear weapon state’. Of course, the nuclear-armed states share a basic quality: they possess nuclear weapons, enabling them to practise nuclear deterrence and use their weapons as instruments of power and prestige. That apart, they are marked more by difference than similarity. Their capabilities vary in scale, kind and deployment; each state has its particular history of involvement with nuclear weapons and with the non-proliferation regime, rooted in domestic and regional as much as global politics; the value and inten-sity of meaning that a government and nation attach to nuclear weapons—the security and identity that they are perceived to confer—differ and may change over time; the political and military processes by which capabilities are managed and decisions taken are not the same; some nuclear-armed states are signatories of the NPT, and others are not.

Much of the recent discussion of nuclear disarmament has been concerned with the collective, multilateral moves required for its achievement.4 However, crossing the threshold would have idiosyncratic implications for each of the states involved and for their neighbours, allies and adversaries. Crossing the threshold into elimination would therefore be different and feel different for each state and region. Although states pursuing disarmament may come to share a common purpose and accept common rules and practices, it is important to understand (but not exaggerate) these differences and to tailor policies accordingly.

The two types of threshold state—one moving from non-possession towards possession, the other in the reverse direction—might be called ‘armament threshold states’ and ‘disarmament threshold states’. It may be objected that passage in either direction is unlikely to be clearly marked in time or behaviour, resulting in a need for clarity on what constitutes a threshold. Capabilities, policies and practices take time to build up and take apart. Furthermore, a ‘virtual’ condition of armament or disarmament can exist, a way station that states might occupy for a considerable time (as India did before 1998). Nevertheless, ‘threshold’ remains a valid metaphor

activities’, in William C. Potter, ed., Forecasting nuclear proliferation in the 21st century: the role of theory (forthcom-ing, 2010). The authors found that the emergence of the non-proliferation norm and its encapsulation in the NPT, and democratization, were the most influential factors.

3 South Africa came closest to being a nuclear weapon state, having manufactured seven warheads before dismantling them. But its activities did not approach Britain’s in scale, variety and longevity.

4 See e.g. George Perkovich and James Acton and various respondents in Abolishing nuclear weapons: a debate (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009). It is surprising that none of the 18 respondents addressed the individuality of threshold-crossing.

The UK, threshold status and responsible nuclear sovereignty


for describing the passage from one politico-military condition to another, even if that passage is gradual and may not involve the same steps and sequence of steps for each state.

Turning to the second idea, ‘responsible sovereignty’ emerged as an issue in the United Nations in the 1990s largely in connection with human rights and their infringement by governments and leaders. ‘Sovereignty implies responsibilities as well as powers’, as Kofi Annan was keen to emphasize.5 Those responsibilities were both inwards, towards the citizens of a state, and outwards, towards communities of states and peoples. The responsible sovereign is respectful of certain widely accepted norms of behaviour.

Borrowing this term with some adaptation, what are the responsibilities of a nuclear sovereign, the government of a state that possesses nuclear arms?6 A first observation is that the responsibilities of non-nuclear sovereigns (the non-nuclear weapon states) are clearly defined by the NPT’s legal rules and safeguards arrange-ments, and by the treaties underpinning nuclear weapon-free zones. In contrast, the greater responsibilities of nuclear sovereigns—greater because of the capacities to annihilate that come with the possession of nuclear weapons—are less clearly defined and are given legal expression in only a few particulars.7 Indeed, the nuclear-armed states have from time to time exercised sovereignty to avoid a clear enunciation, let alone formalization, of responsibility, partly so that they can retain freedom of action in the shaping and usage of their nuclear forces for deter-rence.8 The fuzzy language in Article VI of the NPT bears witness to this trait.

There is, in fact, a spectrum of views on the responsibility of ‘nuclear sover-eigns’ in diplomacy and in the International Relations literature. At one end is the claim that the prime responsibility of a state is to use nuclear deterrence for the protection of itself and its citizens. National survival and the deterrent’s credi-bility come first. At the other end is the claim that all states have a paramount responsibility to abolish nuclear weapons for ethical and prudential reasons. The survival of the community and the planet comes first. The latter assertion has been expressed through the NPT and in many other statements across the years. Indeed, many states regard the abolition of nuclear weapons as an indisputable obligation under the treaty and thus under international law.

An intermediate position is that, although ‘nuclear sovereigns’ have a responsi-bility to protect themselves and their citizens from attack or intimidation, nuclear weapons must be used politically and militarily with the utmost restraint, and 5 Address by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to the International Peace Academy, 15 Feb. 2002. Jonathan

Glover opens his book on responsibility with the observation that ‘the concept of “responsibility” is an elusive one’. I take this as given. Jonathan Glover, Responsibility (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 1.

6 The notion of responsible nuclear sovereignty is discussed at more length in an as yet unpublished paper on weak nuclear states that I have co-authored with Nicholas Wheeler of Aberystwyth University.

7 For NPT nuclear weapon states, the main legal restriction (in the treaty’s Article I) is on the transfer of nuclear technology and assistance and control over nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapon states. There are no formally agreed rules constraining their use of nuclear weapons (beyond its being constrained, perhaps, by jus in bello), deployment is limited only by extant arms control treaties between the US and Russia, the NPT does not require them to place facilities and materials under international safeguards, and the negative security guarantees offered by the NPT nuclear weapon states lack the force of international law.

8 Sometimes they and structural realists come close to claiming ‘diminished responsibility’, given the inexorable pressures of the security dilemma in which they are trapped!

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nuclear-armed states have an exceptional duty of care over the capabilities that they have acquired. Furthermore, they have a responsibility to move themselves and others towards nuclear disarmament—to create the conditions in which it can happen safely, verifiably, and without unduly endangering international order. This is the stance that the UK has adopted with increasing earnestness. Indeed, the British government has, through steps taken over many years, sought to position the UK as the most responsible of all nuclear-armed states. It likes to hold itself up as an exemplar, justifiably or not. Its stance also has a moral tinge. As one of its shapers, Michael Quinlan, wrote shortly before his death in 2009: ‘There remains a grave moral duty both to take seriously as a long-term vision the possibility of eventual complete escape from [the shadow of nuclear weapons] and meanwhile to manage their continuance with as little risk and at as low a cost as possible.’9

How are the ideas of responsible nuclear sovereignty and the disarmament threshold linked? Responsible nuclear sovereignty implies, along with responsible sovereignty in the original sense, that a state belongs to an international society and has responsibilities to fellow members—and to humankind—as a result. It pays heed to the common as well as the national interest. Alistair Buchan observed in 1966, when discussing Rousseau’s use of the fable of the hare and the stag to ‘illustrate the conflict between the particular and the general interest which, in [Rousseau’s] view, was the basis of international conflict’, that

each government [of the then five nuclear-armed states] has been able to produce reasons that convince the majority of its own people why the improvement of its own national security should have priority. It has been able to appease consciences by the assertion that the certainty of the hare offers a better immediate prospect of survival and stability than forgoing it in the uncertain prospect of a bigger game.10

When a state is profoundly threatened, the responsibility to defend its interests and citizens will usually trump the wider responsibility to serve a common good. The state will chase the hare rather than join others to catch the stag. Nuclear history has nevertheless been notable for efforts made to counter this behaviour by instilling norms and rules of behaviour that oblige states to serve the common good as well, however precarious their situations may be. At a collective level, achieving a world free of nuclear weapons implies that all states will be prepared to give priority to the common over the individual interest, or to strive at least to bring the two into line. This is why sceptical observers regard the abolition of nuclear weapons as a highly unlikely prospect unless some nuclear catastrophe changes values and forces the choice on governments.

It is nevertheless reasonable to suppose that security in a world with several nuclear-armed states, and progress towards and across the threshold into nuclear disarmament, depend on a shared understanding of and loyalty to norms of ‘responsible nuclear sovereignty’, even if agreement on what they should encom-9 Michael Quinlan, Thinking about nuclear weapons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 55. 10 The editor’s introduction, in Alistair Buchan, ed., A world of nuclear powers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-

Hall, 1966), pp. 1–2. In Rousseau’s fable of the hare and the stag in his Discourse on inequality, a group of hunters’ attempt to capture a stag fails because one chases a hare to satisfy his hunger more reliably, allowing the stag to escape.



pass is not straightforward and if their evaluation involves an unavoidable element of subjectivity. Demonstration of responsibility and approaches to the disarma-ment threshold are therefore connected. A disconcerting corollary, again suggested by the UK, is that states’ observance of these norms might become (in part) a pretext for not crossing the threshold into disarmament—rather as alcoholics try to avoid demands to give up drinking by asserting that they are controlling it and generally observing the social graces.

Distinctive features of the UK’s engagement with nuclear weapons

Four aspects of the UK’s distinctive engagement with nuclear weapons will be touched on here to illuminate my themes: geography and strategy; economics and the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US; domestic politics; and the UK’s conception of an international nuclear ‘order of restraint’.

Geography and strategy

The UK is a small, densely populated archipelago. From the outset of the nuclear age there has been awareness of its vulnerability to attack with just a few nuclear weapons. The British state, society and people would be annihilated in a nuclear war of any scale.

During the Cold War, this perception of acute vulnerability provided one justi-fication for the possession of a nuclear force and for the focusing of strategy on the destruction of Moscow. If deterrence were to be effective, the Soviet govern-ment had to believe that the UK was capable of causing unacceptable harm despite the relatively small size of its nuclear arsenal. There was also great sensitivity to the dangers to national survival that could follow disturbances in relations between the US and USSR and political adventurism on either side. The UK would ‘draw fire’ in any nuclear exchange, not least because of the forward basing of American bombers and submarines in Britain. Persuading the superpowers to exercise restraint in their relations was therefore a consistent aim of British leaders, starting with Prime Minister Attlee’s journey across the Atlantic in December 1950 to persuade President Truman not to authorize the use of nuclear weapons in the Korean War.11 The avoidance of nuclear war anywhere has long been a central objective of British diplomacy.

Fear of nuclear war has also encouraged the UK’s longstanding interest in arms control. Properly designed, nuclear arms control provides a mechanism for creating stability and predictability in relations between adversaries, and for limiting the spread of nuclear weapons that complicates the strategic environment and might eventually trigger nuclear conflict. Beginning with Harold Macmillan’s promotion of a test ban treaty in the late 1950s, the UK government has developed a tradition, never disavowed, of encouraging arms control and contributing to treaty negotiations.

11 See Alan Dobson, Anglo-American relations in the twentieth century (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 107.

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This said, the UK has resisted entering its own nuclear forces into arms control negotiations. Its longstanding policy, imitated by France and China, has been to join arms control negotiations between the US and the Soviet Union/Russia when their arsenals are no longer orders of magnitude larger than the British arsenal (say when they are reduced to a thousand warheads apiece). The UK would never-theless exercise restraint unilaterally by deploying a ‘minimum deterrent’. Of the five NPT nuclear weapon states, the UK now has the smallest and least operation-ally active nuclear force, involving one weapon system (Trident) operated by just one armed service, the navy. As numbers have reduced, it has also refrained from keeping a surge capacity, unlike the US and Russia. Retired weapons have been dismantled, evidence of the UK’s commitment to the irreversibility of nuclear arms reductions.

The UK has therefore been keen to proclaim that it has exercised its responsibil-ities to the maximum extent by minimizing the size of the nuclear force required to meet its security needs, and by deploying them in an unthreatening way. The capability is now so reduced that the task of decommissioning and dismantling the weaponry and its associated infrastructure, carrying the UK physically across the disarmament threshold, would also be insubstantial.

If the UK government were asked whether it was thereby meeting a ‘respon-sibility to protect’, I can imagine an affirmative answer along the lines that it is protecting the British state, armed forces and people at least from risk to themselves and to others.12 If asked to elaborate on the manner in which the British deterrent protects others, the answer would be vaguer. The familiar official position is that the British nuclear force is ‘assigned to’ or ‘available to’ NATO. What this entails has never been publicly spelled out in any detail. It probably means that British nuclear forces can be made available for use—placed under the command of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) and targeted in accordance with a joint (largely American) operational plan—when a NATO member is attacked. How this arrangement would function in practice is open to many questions. This probably explains why it was not discussed in the white paper on Trident’s replacement that the government published in December 2006.13

The more significant point is that the UK does not practise extended deter-rence on a bilateral basis. No other state shelters, formally at least, under a British nuclear umbrella. Other states do not therefore rely on the British deterrent to anything like the same extent that they rely on the US deterrent, and benefits, insofar as they are felt at all, are felt only within Europe. The UK nuclear force

12 Linked to notions of responsible sovereignty, there has been much discussion inside and outside the United Nations of states’ and leaders’ ‘responsibility to protect’, especially in regard to their citizenry. Whether failure to meet this responsibility justifies external intervention has become very controversial. Although it would probably be unwise to transfer the term into the nuclear context, given the political baggage that it now carries, it has a certain appeal in provoking and clarifying a longstanding debate. Who is being protected by nuclear weapons, by whom, and at what risk to the public good? What intervention is justified, when, to protect that good?

13 The white paper was preceded by a letter from Mr Blair to President Bush in which he wrote that: ‘Future UK deterrent submarine force … will be assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and except where the United Kingdom Government may decide that supreme national interests are at stake, this successor force will be used for the purposes of international defence of the Atlantic Alliance in all circumstances’.



does not therefore contribute directly to the security of any other state, although it may be considered to contribute indirectly to collective security and power balancing, especially in the European region.

Economics and the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and US

The UK’s limitation of the scale and scope of its nuclear capability has also been influenced by scarcity of economic and technological resources. In the 1950s and 1960s there were moments of doubt that the deterrent could be sustained given the economy’s weakness. In the event, undue strains on military budgets were avoided by keeping numbers of weapons low and relying upon American largess.

The UK and US are usually depicted as locked in an amorous embrace in the nuclear field. However, the relationship has often been troubled. The atomic weapon was essentially invented in Britain in 1940–41. The Frisch–Peierls memorandum of 1940 on the critical mass of fissile material required to make a usable bomb was followed by the MAUD Committee’s research programme in the UK which laid the foundations of the Manhattan Project.14 Launched in 1942 on the other side of the Atlantic, by 1945 this cooperative British–Canadian–US project to develop the bomb had effectively been nationalized by the US govern-ment. Following passage of the McMahon Act in 1946, the United States’ British and Canadian partners were evicted and left to their own devices. Over the next decade, a primary goal of the British government was to re-establish the coopera-tive partnership with the United States. Success came with the US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement of 1958, the cooperation being consolidated by the Polaris agreement of 1962.

The Mutual Defence Agreement remains unique among nuclear weapon states.15 It has involved, inter alia, exchanges of weapon-grade materials, cooper-ation on warhead design and guidance systems, leases of ballistic missiles, and British testing in the Nevada desert. Along with the extensive Anglo-American cooperation in intelligence-gathering, the exchanges of knowledge and materiel pertaining to nuclear weapons have been central to the transatlantic special relationship since the late 1950s.

Within the UK, the degree to which the government can launch and direct its missiles without US consent has long been a matter of public speculation. Wherever the truth may lie, the UK has been locked into an unusually restricted political and military usage of its nuclear weapons by knowledge that US opera-tional and developmental assistance could be withdrawn if it stepped out of line. Furthermore, the US could at any time, if it wished, push the UK across the

14 Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls had sought refuge in the UK. The MAUD Committee was set up by the British government to verify their research results, identify means of separating the isotopes of uranium (plutonium had yet to be discovered) and work out how to detonate a nuclear device. The research was carried out secretly in a handful of British universities in cooperation with Imperial Chemical Industries. See Margaret Gowing, Britain and atomic energy 1939–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1964).

15 On the origins of the US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement, see John Simpson, The independent nuclear state: the United States, Britain and the military atom (London: Macmillan, 1983).

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threshold into nuclear disarmament. Ironically, the US has possessed a power to disarm over its close ally that it has craved but lacked over its adversaries.

There has also been significant loss of independence in foreign policy stemming from London’s anxiety that American nuclear assistance would be withheld if it opposed Washington on issues of high importance. Whenever the UK has required injections of US nuclear expertise and technology, particularly at times of system renewal, it has had to gain the consent of the president and Congress.16 Although other interests were involved in the British decision to join the US government in waging war against Iraq in 2003, it may not be coincidental that agreement was reached on renewal of the US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement in the following year, opening the way for Trident’s replacement. This appears to have been one of the paybacks for Mr Blair’s support for an unpopular war.17

Another consequence of the close ties between the US and UK has been the inability of France and the UK to cooperate meaningfully on the manufacture or operation of nuclear weapons. Bertrand Goldschmidt once told me of talks initi-ated by Prime Minister Heath and President Pompidou in the early 1970s. They became known to insiders as ‘the cornflake talks’ because participants could only freely discuss what an Anglo-French submarine crew might eat for breakfast—and the choice was still American! Joking aside, the persistence of two separate nuclear weapon capabilities in Europe and their different relationships to NATO and to the US have discouraged the emergence of a debate over a European deterrent, let alone an Anglo-French deterrent.

US assistance has therefore been vital to the UK’s effort to maintain a credible and affordable nuclear deterrent. Whether the nuclear cooperation remains as valuable to the US today as it was in the Cold War is debatable. It probably matters comparatively little to Washington whether the UK now keeps or abandons its nuclear weapons, so long as abandonment (if that were the government’s choice) happened without damaging the broader political relationship, did not disrupt NATO and was not accompanied by a retreat from allied military operations abroad. It might matter more to the UK’s European neighbours, accustomed as they are to the status quo and the psychological balance of power that the British nuclear force has helped to maintain among Europe’s leading states. In particular, most European governments would probably be uncomfortable with the political and military prospect of France becoming the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in Europe, as might France itself.

It is worth emphasizing here the large difference between the British and French stances on nuclear weapons, particularly regarding their attitudes towards nuclear disarmament. Bruno Tertrais wrote recently:

16 There have been periods when this consent was less forthcoming, for instance in the 1960s when relations cooled, partly over the Wilson government’s refusal to join the Vietnam War. Consolidating cooperative arrangements for Trident was one reason for Mrs Thatcher’s flirtation with President Reagan in the early 1980s.

17 UK governments have routinely refrained from publicly criticizing US policies and decisions on nuclear-related matters even when they have been fiercely critical in private and have pursued a different policy themselves. The government gagged itself, for instance, when the US Senate rejected the CTBT in 1999 and when John Bolton did his best in 2001 to destroy negotiations on the Verification Protocol to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention when they were at an advanced stage.



When it comes to nuclear policy, France is the most conservative of the three western nuclear weapon states … Paris may not want to be isolated if a major global political movement was initiated in this direction [towards nuclear abolition]. But any decision by France to give up its nuclear weapons entirely would require extraordinary circumstances and profound changes in the strategic and political environment.18

Although the British and French governments often agree on specific policy measures, such as the test ban and international safeguards, this is far from the British position.19 In addition the UK, unlike France, is allergic to the idea of a common European deterrent tied to the European Union, as it implies a depth of political and military integration that is unacceptable in British politics. In White-hall an Anglo-French deterrent is conceivable ( just), an EU deterrent inconceiv-able. For these and other reasons, signals from a British government that it was seriously contemplating unilateral nuclear disarmament could provoke debates in Europe for which there has been no significant preparation, revealing divisions within the EU—and possibly within NATO—that might be hard to overcome. My surmise is that the UK’s move across the disarmament threshold would be more unsettling to intra-European than Anglo-US relations.

Domestic politics of nuclear weapons: division in the Labour party

The possession of nuclear weapons has been more controversial in the UK than in any other nuclear-armed state. There is a long tradition of activism in civil society against the bomb involving the Churches, CND, Pugwash, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Acronym Institute and many other organizations and individuals.

Public concern about nuclear weapons in the UK has ebbed and flowed. What has made this issue particularly influential in British domestic politics has been the division caused in the Labour party, both in government and in opposition.20 From the outset, a wing of the party has been antagonistic to the UK’s playing the nuclear game, and there has never been an enthusiastic majority within the party for deploying nuclear weapons. The British deterrent has been anchored by the Conservative party’s strong support, but there have been moments of doubt even in its case.

Two episodes were particularly damaging within the Labour party, one pushing it towards adoption of a policy of unilateral disarmament, the other back towards determined if uncomfortable support for the deterrent. The first arose from the decision of Edward Heath’s Conservative government in the early 1970s to upgrade

18 Bruno Tertrais, ‘French perspectives on nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament’, in Barry Blechman, ed., Unblocking the road to zero (Washington, DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2009), p. 1.

19 Agreement on a list of significant measures is evident in the statement submitted to the Council of the European Union on 3 December 2008 (document 16751/08). However, the paragraph on disarmament lacks the forthright language of the final document of the 2000 NPT review conference on this subject, reflecting France’s distaste for it.

20 On the difficulties that nuclear weapons have caused the Labour party and its leaders, see Len Scott, ‘Labour and the bomb: the first 80 years’, International Affairs 82: 4, July 2006, pp. 685–700.

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Polaris through the Chevaline programme.21 The subsequent Labour govern-ments under Harold Wilson and James Callaghan (1974–9) chose to continue the programme, its heavy cost disguised in the public accounts, without discussion in Cabinet, Parliament or public. Chevaline’s existence was revealed to widespread consternation within the Labour party only when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979.22 Encouraged by the ramping up of Cold War rhetoric after Ronald Reagan’s election to the US presidency, the Labour party swung to a forceful advocacy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. The new policy played a part in the departure of four senior figures to found the Social Democratic party in 1981, and the Labour party’s anti-nuclear stance was an important contributory factor in its defeats in the 1983 and 1987 general elections.

Therefore, when ‘New Labour’ was refashioning policies and tactics in the mid-1990s, it recommitted the party to supporting the deterrent and transatlantic alliance while seeking a compromise that would quell infighting and ‘appease consciences’, in Alistair Buchan’s phrase. The compromise was evident in the Strategic Defence Review published in 1998, a year after Labour was returned to office.23 The UK would keep its nuclear force, but it would be slimmed down and the government would become more active in its promotion of nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament abroad.24

When Tony Blair decided to secure Trident’s replacement before giving up his premiership, he knew from the Chevaline episode that the decision would have to be taken by the full Cabinet and confirmed by parliamentary vote after a period of public consultation (the white paper was published in December 2006 and Parliament endorsed the decision in March 2007).25 He won the support of sceptics in Cabinet by emphasizing the UK’s commitment to multilateral nuclear disarmament, a stance that would also usefully deflect any international objections that Trident’s replacement was inconsistent with the UK’s disarmament obliga-tion under the NPT. That the sceptics included the Foreign Secretary (Margaret Beckett) and Defence Secretary (Des Browne), both with histories of opposition to the UK’s possession of nuclear weapons, meant that the bargain had to be struck and taken seriously.

Hence the series of speeches made by senior ministers after Blair had secured Trident’s replacement: Margaret Beckett’s impassioned plea for progress on nuclear disarmament in Washington in June 2007;26 Des Browne’s statement to the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in Geneva in February 2008, the first occasion on which the defence minister of a nuclear weapon state had addressed the CD

21 Chevaline involved replacing the single-warhead Polaris nose cone with a double warhead plus decoys, its purpose being to guarantee penetration of any missile defence deployed around Moscow.

22 Wilson and Callaghan were following the example of Clement Attlee, who presided over the decision to acquire nuclear weapons in 1947 without debating the matter in Cabinet or Parliament.

23 The Strategic Defence Review, Cm 3999 (London: TSO, July 1998).24 ‘We will retain our nuclear deterrent with fewer warheads to meet our twin challenges of minimum credible

deterrence backed by a firm commitment to arms control’: The Strategic Defence Review, p. 2. The slimming down began under the preceding Conservative government led by John Major.

25 The future of the UK nuclear deterrent, Cm 6994 (London: TSO, Dec. 2006).26 Margaret Beckett, ‘A world free of nuclear weapons?’, keynote address to the Carnegie Endowment’s non-

proliferation conference, Washington DC, 25 June 2007.



on this issue;27 and David Miliband’s launch of the Foreign Office paper Lifting the nuclear shadow in February 2009. Their positions were endorsed by Gordon Brown’s speech in London in March 2009 which lent support to the multilateral disarmament project, albeit while pointedly drawing attention to obstacles.28

To indicate that this was not mere rhetoric, the UK government announced initiatives to develop techniques for verifying nuclear disarmament—putting itself forward as a ‘nuclear disarmament laboratory’—and brought the Norwe-gian government, as representative of the non-nuclear weapon states, into the process.29 Furthermore, it invited weapon laboratories from the four other NPT nuclear weapon states to participate in a conference which duly took place in London in September 2009.

The decision to open Trident’s replacement to public debate can also be regarded, whatever its principal motivations, as further evidence of the UK’s commitment to exercise ‘responsible nuclear sovereignty’, in this case involving the inward responsibility of a state to be accountable to its citizens. However tightly controlled by the executive to deliver just one outcome, the Trident debate marked a departure from the usual habit of governments in nuclear weapon states of entrusting such decisions to small elite groups out of public sight. The UK government’s preparedness to open Trident’s replacement to public debate was also symptomatic of the nuclear deterrent’s loss of salience, since there was no longer the same concern to keep foreign governments in the dark.

The UK and the international nuclear ‘order of restraint’

The UK’s adoption of the personality of an archetypal ‘responsible nuclear sover-eign’ has therefore grown out of the confluence of (a) security interests in avoiding nuclear war, maintaining a credible deterrent at least cost with US assistance, encouraging arms control and drawing states into the non-proliferation regime, and (b) the Labour party’s internal need to reconcile its restive members to the UK’s involvement with nuclear weapons in close alliance with the United States. A cynic might say with some justification that the UK has developed ‘having its cake and eating it’ into a fine art.

There has, however, been a third ‘driver’ of the UK’s nuclear policy which suggests that it has a basic sincerity. I refer to successive governments’ support for a certain conception of an international ‘order of restraint’ without which, they have believed, there can be no lasting stability or escape from nuclear war.30 It has

27 Des Browne, ‘Laying the foundations for nuclear disarmament’, Conference on Disarmament, Geneva, 5 Feb. 2008.

28 Gordon Brown, ‘Speech on nuclear energy and proliferation’, international nuclear fuel cycle conference, ‘Securing safe access to peaceful power’, London, 17 March 2009.

29 I had a hand in authorship of the term ‘nuclear disarmament laboratory’, which I used in written evidence to the Defence Select Committee’s inquiry on Trident’s replacement in January 2007 and on a number of occa-sions in 2006. However, I used the term to refer to the comprehensive nuclear disarmament laboratory that the UK might become if it chose to give up its weapons. A more accurate description of the government’s much narrower if laudable enterprise is ‘warhead dismantlement verification laboratory’.

30 On the ‘order of restraint’, see William Walker, ‘Nuclear enlightenment and counter-enlightenment’, Interna-tional Affairs 83: 3, May 2007, pp. 431–54.

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involved the careful management of nuclear deterrence accompanied by persis-tent effort to embed restraint through institutional arrangements founded, where possible, in international law. Over decades a culture has taken root in British officialdom, never seriously challenged, that habitually frames policy within this conception of order. Although the same culture also has a strong presence in the United States, it has had to struggle there against another conception of order—intrinsically confrontational, and antagonistic to multilateral restraint and interna-tional institutions—that gained the upper hand during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Without idealizing the British contribution, it is possible to note that this ingrained culture has manifested itself in several ways:

• The UK has held to a policy of minimum (sometimes called minimal) deter-rence which has recently entailed holding weapons off alert.

• UK governments have played a prominent part in the negotiation and imple-mentation of several multilateral treaties, including the NPT, and have been particularly active in the development of techniques of verification.

• Although the UK has stayed out of arms limitation and reduction treaties, it has encouraged them and signalled its willingness to participate in an expanded START process once US and Russian weapon numbers have been substantially reduced.

• Especially in recent years, the UK has taken seriously the fulfilment of the disarmament obligation enshrined in Article VI of the NPT while insisting that it must be achieved multilaterally.

• The UK has declared a moratorium on the production of fissile materials for weapons purposes that will gain legal force if the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT) is negotiated. All nuclear fuel-cycle facilities in the UK apart from a fuel fabrication facility for submarine reactors have already been placed under international safeguards and are routinely inspected (few are currently inspected in the US and none in Russia).31 The UK has agreed an additional protocol with the IAEA, and alone among nuclear weapon states has announced that materials will no longer be withdrawn from safeguards for defence purposes.

• UN Security Council Resolution 1540, prohibiting transfers of nuclear materials, technologies and expertise to non-state actors and requiring states to strengthen their export control systems and establish domestic laws for dealing with transgression, grew out of a British proposal. The UK has since been prominent in seeking full implementation of this resolution.

None of this is to deny that British activism in multilateral arms control has been useful in deflecting criticism from its possession of nuclear weapons and their periodic upgrading and replacement. Nor should one overlook the most controversial, many would say irresponsible, action by a British government over 31 France has similarly accepted international safeguards across its fuel cycle. Both France and the UK have

become accustomed to international inspection through their compliance with the Euratom Treaty, which requires all nuclear materials ‘declared to be civil’ in all member states to be submitted to Euratom safeguards.



the entire period—Tony Blair’s decision, reluctantly supported by his Cabinet and by Parliament, to join the US government in its war against Iraq in 2003. This action formed part of a shift of emphasis in the UK government under his leadership towards the politico-military practice of counterproliferation from the traditional diplomatic practice of non-proliferation.32

More than the issue of Trident’s replacement, the government’s siding with the Bush administration caused deep division within the Labour party and within the country at large. The Iraq war was followed by widespread regret and guilt over a decision that had so seriously backfired. To a limited extent, the return after 2003 to ardent support for multilateral diplomacy and due process, and the strength-ened advocacy of nuclear arms control and disarmament, were acts of atonement by politicians and officials who could not easily live with their mistakes.

Economic shocks, Trident replacement and the disarmament threshold

Since the end of the Cold War, the security rationale for the UK’s maintenance of an active nuclear deterrent has been observably draining away. I recall a walk in London in the early 1990s with Dennis Fakley, a recently retired senior official from the Ministry of Defence who had been heavily involved with the deterrent since the 1950s. He said that nuclear policy-making had lost its frisson and was becoming a much more ordinary bureaucratic activity. The implication was that the political and security dynamics that had driven the UK to acquire and period-ically redevelop its nuclear arsenal, and that had bound the UK to its nuclear weapon status, had weakened. Henceforth the deterrent would be preserved more out of pride and inertia than in response to compelling security logics. In a way, this was confirmed by Mr Blair when he admitted during the debate on Trident’s replacement in 2006–2007 that the UK would not choose to acquire a nuclear deterrent ‘if starting from here’.

After the Cold War’s end, the UK edged closer to the disarmament threshold but without appearing likely to cross it for years, possibly decades, to come. The main argument presented by the Labour government for Trident’s replacement was prudential: the UK was not at present threatened with attack by a state possessing nuclear weapons or superior conventional forces, but the future was uncertain and such threats could re-emerge. It carried the day in Parliament largely owing to the Conservative party’s solid support. However, there was a flurry of reports in the media in late April and early May 2009 that senior Conservative figures were having second thoughts, reports that were not initially disavowed by the party leader, David Cameron.33

This sudden questioning of the Trident replacement decision from an unex -pected direction was provoked largely by the recent shocks to the British economy and by the government’s running up of enormous budget deficits to avoid recession 32 It was symptomatic that the FCO’s Non-Proliferation Department was renamed the Counter-Proliferation

Department.33 See e.g. Patrick Wintour and Nicholas Watt, ‘Tories cast doubt on £21bn Trident nuclear missile upgrade’,

Guardian, 1 May 2009.

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becoming depression. Economic stresses have sharpened an existing internal debate about defence priorities. Over several years, voices in Whitehall have been heard saying that the military logic for investing in nuclear deterrence has lost persua-siveness. The main future threats to the UK will come from political instabili-ties and ideological movements in the Middle East and Asia, and from irregular warfare against which nuclear deterrence is largely useless.34 The counterargu-ments have been that only nuclear weapons can guarantee peace among Great Powers, that a nuclear capability is needed to defend expeditionary forces that might be confronted by actors armed with weapons of mass destruction, and that the UK’s international status rests significantly on its possession of nuclear forces. Nick Ritchie has written persuasively that New Labour’s decision on Trident rested, more than on any traditional security logic, upon a conviction that ‘posses-sion of nuclear weapons … reaffirms and in part constitutes the collectively held identity of Britain as an interventionist, pivotal world power’.35

In the new economic and military circumstances, debates over Trident are unsurprisingly swinging in a sceptical direction. The decision taken only three years ago is being destabilized by financial constraints, including the demands of the overstretched British Army, which has no institutional stake in nuclear weapons and needs re-equipment to fight the kind of war being waged in Afghani-stan, and the competition for funds between Trident and other large capital projects including the Eurofighter, two aircraft carriers and the joint strike fighter. A number of alternatives present themselves: abandon the deterrent now or when Trident becomes obsolescent in the 2020s; invest in a cheaper system if it can be found, probably involving cruise missiles; save resources by deploying fewer submarines with fewer weapons; or end deployment while maintaining an unwea-ponized ‘virtual deterrent’ enabling nuclear forces to be reintroduced.36

For the time being, the government seems content to procrastinate. It announced in July 2009 that it would not commit funds to the ‘initial gate’ design phase of the Trident project until after the NPT review conference had ended in May 2010 (September 2009 had been the planned start-up date).37 It has subsequently moved towards abandoning the longstanding British policy of continuous at-sea deter-rence (CASD), whereby four vessels are kept in service so that one nuclear-armed submarine can be permanently deployed.38 Reducing the capability to three vessels brings immediate economic relief by postponing the beginning of heavy expenditure on Trident’s replacement, since the project’s initiation need no longer be driven by the retirement date of the oldest boat in the fleet.

34 See e.g. Max Hastings, ‘If defence is to be strategic rather than politically expedient, dump Trident’, Guardian, 19 Jan. 2009.

35 Nick Ritchie, ‘Trident and British identity: letting go of nuclear weapons’, briefing paper 3, Bradford Disar-mament Research Centre, University of Bradford, 2008, p. 6.

36 The last option is being explored within the Liberal Democrat party. It is unlikely to gain much traction.37 David Blair, ‘Gordon Brown delays Trident work’, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2009.38 On CASD and its possible abandonment, see Malcolm Chalmers, ‘Britain’s new nuclear policy: a credible

roadmap for disarmament?’, RUSI Journal 154: 2, April 2009, pp. 34–41. In the same article, Chalmers draws attention to earlier occasions, especially during the 1967 post-devaluation and 1976 IMF crises, when UK governments contemplated abandoning the independent deterrent for economic reasons.



Whichever party wins the next election will need to face up to the ‘hard choices’, in Cameron’s words. Major decisions on defence priorities and spending are likely to await the conclusion of a defence review that the Conservative party has promised and that the Labour party will probably undertake if returned to office. The outcome is unpredictable. Each alternative to Trident has its own complications and large resource savings are not guaranteed.

A decision to abandon the deterrent would obviously be helped by improve-ment to the UK’s security environment, just as it would be hindered by its deterio-ration. Improvement would entail, in particular, rapprochement between Russia and the US and between Russia and the European Union; developments in Iran and the Middle East that reduced fears of proliferation there; and reinvigoration of the NPT and other legal instruments of international restraint. Deterioration would entail the opposite trends.

The UK’s crossing of the threshold into disarmament would require above all a significant change in the domestic narrative that has been told and retold, with periodic adjustment, during its now lengthy engagement with nuclear weapons. The substitute narrative would have to explain why the security environment had so changed that the nuclear force’s abandonment was now justified; why abandon-ment was required so soon after the public had been informed by both Labour and Conservative parties that it would endanger national security; and why the UK’s national interest would be better served by investing in conventional military technology rather than the previous mix of conventional and nuclear technology, or by using the disarmament dividend for other public purposes. Equally impor-tant, the narrative would have to explain why unilateral disarmament was now justified ahead of multilateral disarmament, when rejection of the former and advocacy of the latter had become so central to Labour and Conservative policy. And it would have to convince doubters that the UK’s role in the world was not being seriously diminished by this act.

A persuasive narrative supporting abolition of the British nuclear force can be imagined, possibly asserting that nuclear deterrence had become less relevant to national security, that it would release funds for more essential military and other purposes, and that the UK would be leading the way in fulfilling its NPT obliga-tions and establishing how the disarmament of a major nuclear weapon state could be implemented. But the narrative would need to be assembled with considerable skill and presented with conviction. In British postwar history, we may recall the changes of narrative that were required when the empire was dissolved, the UK joined the European Communities, and Mrs Thatcher took on the trade unions, and recently when the UK’s major banks were effectively nationalized after decades when nationalization would have been anathema. Such major shifts can happen and be accepted, but they require strong advocacy and political courage.

It follows that, for any state that has long possessed nuclear weapons and formed an identity around them, crossing the threshold to disarmament will be a momentous decision and one that, certainly in the British case, has to be assumed to be irreversible. Approaching and parking the state on the disarmament

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threshold, somehow and at least cost, will be the easiest and least risky option in most circumstances. Yet so positioning itself may ill serve the national interest when resources are scarce and defence and foreign policies need reorientation. It would also jar with the NPT’s non-proliferation and disarmament norms and the treaty’s well-being. Creating a comfort zone on the disarmament threshold may be politically appealing for nuclear weapon states and their agencies, but it will suggest irresponsibility if sustained only for political convenience.

International implications

Most recent debate about nuclear disarmament has envisaged it happening through a process of coordinated incrementalism. It would involved the nuclear-armed states’ convergence on a UK-like policy of minimal deterrence plus submission to increasingly extensive institutional restraint, the latter being achieved through arms limitation and reduction agreements and through multilateral treaties, such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and FMCT, that ban practices associ-ated with the development and production of nuclear warheads. By these means, the states would together move into an end-game in which weapon numbers would be reduced to zero and devices for guaranteeing irreversibility would be introduced. This model disarmament process is implicit in the 13-paragraph plan of action for Article VI’s implementation contained in the final document of the 2000 NPT review conference. It is explicit in most of the recent literature on the subject.

This article on the UK has drawn attention back to the individuality of circum-stances affecting a state’s policies on nuclear weapons. Although the UK govern-ment likes to see itself as working within the above model of nuclear disarmament, its current position has been reached through a distinctive nuclear history. Furthermore, decisions have been shaped in that history by domestic as much as international circumstances, and always by their particular interplay. The same observations could be made about the other nuclear-armed states. Approaching and crossing the threshold into disarmament will have different—sometimes radically different (think of Israel and Pakistan)—implications for different states. Understanding and responding to this individuality, and to the individuality of the state’s regional and global interactions, has to form part of any project of nuclear disarmament.

Although the UK seems closest to the disarmament threshold, the ‘barriers to exit’ from its possession of nuclear weapons remain high. Those barriers are not just connected with security: issues of prestige and identity and the weight of political and institutional commitments are also influential. Other nuclear-armed states are further from the threshold (some further than others), and their barriers to exit seem even higher and more difficult to surmount.39 Indeed, most of their

39 It would be interesting to mount a research project to compare the ‘distances’ of the nuclear-armed states from the disarmament threshold, as assessed in terms of capabilities, strategies, regulation, identity fixation and institutional entrenchment, among other things.



governments would probably deny the applicability of the term ‘threshold state’ to their countries, since they are either far from the disarmament threshold or do not accept that the abandonment of nuclear deterrence is in the national and international interest, today or in the future. Moreover, the Indian and Pakistani governments would probably say (when being honest) that their interests lie in consolidating their moves across the threshold from non-possession to possession rather than in turning back in the other direction.

Come what may, more attention needs to be paid to what the disarmament threshold and threshold-crossing entail for each nuclear-armed state and for its interactions with other states; and the conditions in which individual nuclear-armed states will take approaching, and crossing, the threshold seriously need to be examined. One might go further. If a world with fewer and ultimately no nuclear-armed states is the goal, persuading individual states to approach and cross the threshold from possession to non-possession, and indeed persuading them to accept that the threshold is there to be approached and crossed, would itself have to be undertaken with the same tenacity as the dissuasion of states from crossing in the other direction. Besides general rule-setting, non-proliferation policy has always targeted particular states. Why should disarmament policy not do the same?

When attention is drawn to national and regional particularities, it becomes more difficult to believe that the collective managerialist approach to nuclear disarmament can work, certainly on its own. It is tempting to conclude that there is too much asymmetry, too much national and regional idiosyncrasy, too much internal and external complexity, and too much unresolved conflict for disarma-ment to be achieved mainly in this way. By the same token, it is hard to conceive of its happening without investment in these cooperative processes and without the impetus that they provide. They would gain stronger and more universal allegiance if accompanied by normative change that fundamentally diminished—everywhere—the value attributed to nuclear weapons, raising social intolerance of them. Unhappily, a nuclear catastrophe would be the most effective catalyst of this change; but it need not be the only one.40

It is nevertheless questionable whether complete nuclear disarmament is the main goal, except over the very long term, given all the doubts that surround its achievability. It is probable that the US government, now the leading advocate, would settle for the enhancement of security and stability that would follow if the governments of all nuclear-armed states accepted greater international restraint and became more responsible nuclear sovereigns in the senses discussed above. Were that to occur, the resulting greater equalization of policies, capabilities and regulatory controls could provide a sounder basis for making the final push for elimination.

Unfortunately, this tentative engagement with nuclear disarmament is bound to appear ambiguous in its ambitions, inviting mistrust from states that are seeking immediate satisfaction that decisive action will be taken to eliminate nuclear

40 A limited tactical use of nuclear weapons without enormous casualties could, however, have the opposite effect—encouraging proliferation rather than disarmament as states sought protection against a recurrence.

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weapons in compliance with the NPT’s Article VI and its conference decisions. In their view, elimination is the supreme responsibility of the nuclear sovereign. In July 2008, Barack Obama asserted that ‘as long as nuclear weapons exist, we’ll retain a strong deterrent. But we’ll make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy.’41 He gave a similar double-edged commit-ment in his Prague speech in April 2009. The US stance now mirrors the British stance: we’ll pursue nuclear disarmament and sustain our nuclear armament in the meantime. For some, this is prudent. For others, it is hypocritical. Further-more, both the US and UK governments, along with governments of the other nuclear-armed states, are emphasizing multilateral conditionality: we shall elimi-nate our nuclear weapons only if and when every other state eliminates its nuclear weapons. Again, this may be regarded as prudent policy. But it can also be inter-preted as adding another block to that already contained in the NPT’s Article VI, insofar as ‘no nuclear disarmament without multilateral nuclear disarmament’ has been added to ‘no nuclear disarmament without general disarmament’. Deeds will have to speak louder than words if trust in the nuclear-armed states’ intentions is to be well established.

Where the UK is concerned, it seems more likely that abandonment of nuclear weapons will happen through a domestic decision that ‘enough is enough’ rather than through the conclusion of a grand multilateral initiative, however helpful that might be. The various constraints on threshold-crossing would then fall away for the UK, setting a precedent that could turn out to be much more influential than the present ambiguous advocacy of multilaterial nuclear disarmament. The same might eventually apply in the global context. If a growing band of nuclear-armed states could agree with the UK that enough was enough—that catching the hare could no longer ever and for anyone justify losing the stag—the political task of ridding the world of nuclear weapons would become more straightforward. Without that agreement, maximizing and universalizing restraint are likely to remain the dominant objective, and international nuclear politics will remain as unsettled as ever.

41 Speech at the summit on ‘Confronting new threats’, West Lafayette, Indiana, 16 July 2008.

the uk, threshold status and responsible nuclear sovereignty

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