Policy Briefs on Cooperative Security, Arms Control and Disarmament

The Cold War-era weapons governance structures are no longer fit for purpose in contemporary equations where nuclear dyads have morphed into nuclear chains. In an increasingly polycentric global order, the dyadic nuclear arms control structure can neither regulate nor constrain the choices of other nuclear-armed states. Yet growing risks point to the urgent need to institutionalise a nuclear restraint regime fit for purpose in the Asia–Pacific. In this Policy Brief, Ramesh Thakur explores the merits of adapting the Open Skies Treaty and the Incidents at Sea Agreement from the North Atlantic to the Asia–Pacific, and, in the reverse direction, of universalising a no-first-use of nuclear weapons policy from China and India to all nine nuclear-armed states.

Establishing strategic stability in a multipolar and complex contemporary nuclear landscape is riddled with complexities. This paper seeks to identify some of the features peculiar to Southern Asia that complicate attainment of strategic stability between China, India and Pakistan. Thereafter, it offers some tentative measures towards strategic stability. While the task appears daunting given the state of relations, it is critical to give some thought to this conundrum and explore options. Not doing so could only exacerbate instability and heighten chances of deterrence breakdown – a risk that the region can ill afford.

Over centuries, advances in science and technology have made possible new kinds of weapons that often provided an advantage in war. Sometimes qualitative change is so big that one can speak of military-technological revolutions. For about thirty years, the term “revolution in military affairs” has been used for the rise of electronics, sensors, precision weapons, networked communication, combined to a “system of systems”. Now we are on the verge of a more fundamental revolution, characterised by cyber warfare, autonomous weapon systems, general military use of artificial intelligence, with new possibilities in the fields of genetics, of manipulation of the human body and mind, and more wide-spread access to technologies of destruction. Preventing the rush to destabilising technologies requires nothing less than a fundamental re-orientation of the political and military strategies of the main actors.

The EU seems to be at a watershed in its foreign, security and defence policy. A number of broad trends—the migration to Europe, Brexit, the Trump Administration’s “America first” policy, the re-emerged geopolitical rivalry and the Corona crisis—suggest that the EU is confronted with tough decisions to find its role in this changing environment when the multilateral world order is crumbling. The ambition of strengthening the Common Foreign and Security Policy has been put in second place by national interests and foreign policy contradictions. Many indicators point in the direction of realpolitik and an intensified military role for the EU. In this process it is essential to design and agree upon a realistic EU Common Foreign and Security Policy, so that the priorities are clear: first the political concept, followed by the necessary civilian and military capacities.

The world order is in a state of flux with, amongst other factors, sovereign states as the new building blocks of international affairs, trade and technology wars at the top of the international agenda, and a tense relationship between the US and China. Such a world does not leave many options for cooperative action. In the military field, states have returned to unilateral security policies as primitive as those of the Cold War. There is one overriding common concern, however—to avoid nuclear war. To this end, stability measures are of the essence. In such a turbulent world, where big powers compete for positions and influence in the face of an unpredictable future, what are the prospects, if any, for cooperative security policies, arms control, and disarmament?