The Challenge of Nuclear Weapons to the UN Security Council: Adapt or Die

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This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations on 2 October 2024 and is reproduced with permission.

The United Nations is the biggest incubator of global norms to govern the world and the vital core of the rules-based global multilateral order. Four parts of the UN system have complementary roles in efforts to regulate and eliminate nuclear weapons.

• The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is a technical organisation that functions as the nuclear watchdog, overseeing nuclear facilities, materials and programmes to ensure peaceful use.
• The International Court of Justice (World Court) is the adjudicator of legal obligations that bind states.
• The General Assembly is the standard-setting body that functions as the normative centre of gravity consequent to its universal membership with each state having one vote.
• The Security Council, with its 15 Member States, is the enforcement arm with legal authority to mandate the necessary measures, from peaceful means and coercion to the use of force, in order to enforce international law and norms. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council (P5) can protect their interests with the veto. All this makes it the geopolitical cockpit of the global security order.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT, 1968) embedded the geopolitical preferences of the two Cold War superpowers. It entrenched the privileged position of the five major powers of 1945 and empowered them to regulate the conduct of all other states. There is absolutely no basis in the entire history of the United Nations to believe that the five ‘NPT-licit’ nuclear-weapon states (NWS) – China, France, Russia, UK, USA – as long as they are also the P5, will contemplate relinquishing the bomb.

The nine nuclear-armed states (the original five plus India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan) have ignored the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW, 2017) and doubled down on their investment in nuclear weapons, delivery systems, doctrines and deployments. They and those of their allies including Australia that shelter under the nuclear umbrella of the NWS will also continue to affirm faith and confidence in the credibility of nuclear deterrence doctrine and practices. But the NPT’s five NWS are no longer able to claim the mantle of international legality and legitimacy that the NPT had conferred on their possessor status. They may not like the result, but their constant refrain that the nuclear genie cannot be put back in the bottle can now be turned against them: neither can the TPNW.

With the adoption of the TPNW, for the first time in UN history, the General Assembly asserted its normative primacy over the united opposition of the P5 geopolitical heavyweights. The Treaty reflects the normative vision of the global South, backed by like-minded states from the North. Rebalancing the UNSC–UNGA relationship is critical for restoring the legitimacy, and therefore the effectiveness, of the United Nations.

The outlawing of nuclear weapons is the historic significance of the TPNW. The second might well be that the non-Western and small states of international society forced through an instrument of international humanitarian law against the will of most Western countries and all major powers. Thus, the states that created the laws of war now find themselves, for the first time in history, the objects of that law as ownership is taken over by the rest.

It will be recalled that in 1999, NATO intervention in Kosovo, illegal under UN Charter law and also under NATO as no member state had been attacked, was justified by invoking a distinction between legality and legitimacy. For the foreseeable future, there is no substitute for the Security Council as the legal enforcement arm of the international community. Can the UN avoid a significantly wider gulf between legality and legitimacy in any enforcement decisions by the P5 dominated Security Council against nuclear challenges by others? Unlike the NPT, for the TPNW, any country that possesses nuclear weapons is a violator of the global prohibition norm, implying a moral equivalency between the five NPT-licit NWS and others. How can the P5 act as the primary enforcement agents of TPNW obligations when the main point of the Treaty is to stigmatise their nuclear policy and they are its principal norm violators?

As someone who has believed both in nuclear disarmament and in the United Nations my entire professional life, it is a painful choice to make between supporting disarmament or the UN. But there it is. That said, the choice is made easier by the compelling case for Security Council structural reform, even independently of the nuclear conundrum.

In the broad and extensive agenda of UN reforms, the most critical and pressing issue is that of the Security Council. Tackling incremental reforms that are doable, while shelving the one transformational reform most imperative, has become a political tactic of deflection. The ossified Security Council remains trapped in the power equations of 1945 and is therefore out of sync even with its core defining logic. Let us construct a simple thought experiment: which country can one think of that could still function efficiently, effectively and legitimately today, with its governmental structure essentially unchanged since 1945?

The world is vastly more complicated than any single country. Absence from the UN’s top table ensures that the global South is limited to being mostly on the UN’s menu. The erosion of the representative and performance legitimacy of the Security Council weakens its ability to make decisions guided by a full understanding of the development, security, human rights, and environmental dynamics in areas where peace is most threatened. It diminishes the UN’s capacity for effective implementation of all four normative mandates.

This is why structural reform of the Security Council’s composition, particularly permanent membership, is critical. This must necessarily include dropping some as well as adding others from permanent membership; otherwise, it will remain unrepresentative and become more unwieldy. Yet, I am not aware of any major reform proposal that has identified which of the P5 should be dropped, why and how. All proposals to add permanent members have floundered even without tackling the need to keep it trim.

I would favour a P8 model at most. Bring in Brazil, India, Japan, Germany, and one of Egypt, Nigeria or South Africa. And drop Russia (its pretence to great power status is highly questionable) and one of France or the UK. And, while the summit to negotiate this via Charter amendment is in session, also amend it to convert permanent membership into renewable 15-year terms for eight countries. This would give us a balance of four nuclear-armed states (China, India, France/UK, US) and four that are not (Brazil, Germany, Japan, and Egypt or Nigeria or South Africa).

Is this likely and feasible? The history of UN reforms to date answers with an emphatic negative. The most likely trajectory is for the UN’s legitimacy, effectiveness and authority to continue to erode and the organisation, in turn, to become increasingly marginalised and irrelevant. But do we believe that:

• The history of the rise and fall of great powers was put on permanent pause in 1945?
• If not, how long can we persist with the 1945 P5 structure – another 10, 20, 50, 100, or more years?
• Is there any reason to expect that the UN will stop leaching legitimacy and effectiveness with each passing year?

Between the ossified hard place of an increasingly illegitimate and ineffective existing Security Council, and the immovable rock of a reform-proof Security Council, is there a third way? Giving up on nuclear disarmament via the NPT and switching attention and efforts to the TPNW, without the involvement and against the opposition of the nuclear powers, shows the only way forward. The majority of the world’s countries should give up on the UN and convene a new conference for a replacement international organisation more fit for purpose in addressing and solving today’s challenges and threats.

I am not in search of advice that the above proposal is extremely problematical – I know that only too well. Instead, we need to explore why the standard refusal to confront the hard choices is any more realistic.

The key fact is not that the choice between nuclear disarmament and a reform-proof UN is painful. Rather, the issue at hand is this: at which point does the choice become unavoidable and we then need to begin organising a new coalition of civil-society and nation-state actors to convene a global conference to design United Nations version 2.0?

This is the final section of a longer paper published by the New Zealand Centre for Global Studies last year: Self-Defence and Nuclear Deterrence: The Challenge for the UN Security Council.

Related articles:

Realising the UN’s vision: Steps toward a new architecture for peace (3-minute read)

What stands in the way of a nuclear weapon free world (3-minute read)

Shaping a sustainable future through the UN Pact for the Future (3-minute read)

Ramesh Thakur, a former UN assistant secretary-general, is emeritus professor at the Australian National University, former Senior Research Fellow at the Toda Peace Institute, and Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. He is the editor of The nuclear ban treaty: a transformational reframing of the global nuclear order.