Professor Hon Gareth Evans, Chancellor of the Australian National University and former Foreign Minister of Australia, said the Cold War mindset still affects policymakers around the world today in making their nuclear policies in a keynote speech given at the opening ceremony of the 2013 Beijing Arms Control Forum held on August 8.
Evans said that nuclear weapons, created under the Cold War mindset of mutually assured destruction, had completely overtaken any thought about what these weapons, the most indiscriminately inhumane ever devised, actually did to real human beings.
"The extraordinary thing is how much that mindset still prevails among policymakers today, more than twenty years after the end of the Cold War," said the professor.
He stressed that the governments in Moscow or Washington are unlikely to hurl swarms of nuclear missiles at each other (if it ever was a probability). Nor is it conceivable that China and the United States would ever intentionally start a nuclear war against each other. Even for India and Pakistan, the risk of misjudgment or miscalculation is much greater than that of deliberate nuclear warmongering.
However, Evans noted the strong persistence of old habits of thought regarding nuclear weapons, and nuclear deterrence in particular. Ideas formed in the Cold War years have proven to be just as tenacious in Asia and the Pacific as they have in their Euro-Atlantic birthplace. Nuclear decision-makers almost everywhere seem to be stuck in a Cold War time-warp, in which the only focus is on capability, not the much more positive story about intent; where the only scenarios that matter are the absolute worst-case ones, not those bearing any relationship to real world probability; and where the only language of analysis is arithmetical.
To break out of the Cold War mindset, the professor suggested that the necessary starting point is to intellectually challenge the assumptions on which it is based.
He said nuclear weapons are simply not the deterrent or strategic stabilizer they may seem, whether the context is deterring war between the major powers, large-scale conventional attacks, chemical or biological weapons attacks or nuclear terrorism. They encourage proliferation more than they restrain it. And whatever the case may have been in the past, in the world of the 21st century the risk of retaining them outweighs any conceivable benefits.
The two-day conference, which is co-sponsored by the Beijing-based China Arms Control and Disarmament Association, China Institute for International Strategic Studies as well as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization, was attended by experts from a number of countries, including China, the United States, Australia, Russia, and officials from the European Union as well as international organizations and think-tanks. |