United Liberty

President Obama became the first sitting President to chair a meeting of the U.N. Security Council today and used the occasion to push through an ambitious anti-nuclear proliferation resolution:

UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations Security Council, with President Obama acting as chairman, unanimously passed a resolution on Thursday morning aimed at increasing deterrents for withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and decreasing the likelihood that a civilian nuclear program can be diverted toward the development of advanced weapons.

The resolution is aimed at ensuring full compliance with international arms agreements from countries like North Korea and Iran, which have either banned inspectors or severely limited their access. Mr. Obama said, though, that the resolution was not about singling out nations, but about ensuring that international agreements have real-world heft. “International law is not an empty promise, and treaties must be enforced,” Mr. Obama said.

The Obama administration hailed the resolution as a significant step forward. But officials said it was not binding, and would become so only if the Security Council required countries to take other steps, including making their nuclear exports subject to additional restrictions. Many countries have balked at that requirement, an indication of how difficult it may prove to toughen the treaty itself when it is up for review next year.

In their remarks following the resolution’s passage, both Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France expressed concern that the actions being taken against Iran and North Korea were not enough.

The British leader called on the council to consider “far tougher sanctions” against Iran.

“What I believe is that if we have the courage to affirm and impose sanctions on those who violate resolutions of the Security Council we will be lending credibility to our commitment to a world with fewer nuclear weapons and ultimately with no nuclear weapons,” Mr. Sarkozy said.

But, is a world without even possible or a good idea.

As I argued nearly 3 years ago, it’s pretty clear that world history would’ve been a lot worse over the past 60 years if nuclear weapons had not been invented:

Here’s a few scenarios that I think are quite likely:

1. The Invasion of Japan

Without the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or a coup in Tokyo (which seems unlikely), the Allies would have been required to invade the Japanese home islands in order defeat Japan. Plans for such an invasion were in the works prior to the end of the war and estimates at the time of more than 1 million casualties and over 200,000 deaths on the allied side and as many as 5 to 10 million on the Japanese side. And that’s assuming things went according to plan, which they often did not in World War Two.

The post-war consequences of such an invasion are unclear, but it’s obvious that Japan would have been far more devastated than it was in September 1945, and would have taken far longer, if ever, to bounce back. The role that Japan has played in the Post-WW2 world would have been far different.

2. World War III In Europe

Say what you will about nuclear weapons, but they accomplished one thing. Thanks to Mutual Assured Destruction, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union pushed a crisis to the point where hot war was inevitable. Without that in place, it is quite likely that another land war in Europe would have taken place at some point. It could have been started by the Berlin Blockade, which started just three years after the war ended at a time when the frontier between NATO and the Warsaw Pact was a place as tense as the 38th Parallel is today. Or, it could have been started by efforts by Hungary and, later, Czechoslovakia, to break away from Soviet control. Or by one of the many leadership crises that the USSR experienced after the war. Without the threat of total destruction holding them back, the military and political calculations and risks taken by both the Soviets and NATO would probably have been very different.

3. A Greater Threat To Israel

There is one thing that has guaranteed the existence of the State of Israel for the past 30 years or so, and that is the unspoken but well-known fact that Israel possesses enough nuclear weapons to destroy any Arab nation, or any combination or Arab nations, that may threaten it. While attacks by terrorists and groups like Hezbollah are still a major problem, the likelihood of a nation like Syria directly attacking Israel is low precisely because they know they face the ultimate sanction. Without that deterrent, Israel would be far more vulnerable, and the Arab world far less restrained.

The point is this: for how horrible people think nuclear weapons are, a world without them would likely have been far worse. With the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there has never really been a crisis serious enough where the possibility of a nuclear exchange was anywhere within the realm of possibility. And, while the world has dealt with many small conflicts over the past 60 years, we have, so far, avoided the world-devastating conflicts that are a common part of history prior to 1945.

And that’s just for starters.

So, no, I don’t think it’s axiomatically true that a world without nuclear weapons is necessarily a better place.

As for whether it’s even possible……well, the nuclear genie has been out of the bottle for 64 years now. The information is out there and the manufacturing process is pretty easy to figure out once you have the materials in hand.

So don’t take this “rid the world of nuclear weapons” rhetoric seriously. We might as well try to rid the world of knives.