Introduction: thinking about ‘enlightenment’

and ‘counter-enlightenment’

in nuclear policies

International Aff airs 83: 3 (2007) 427–430© 2007 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs

DAVID S. YOST*

William Walker’s essay ‘Nuclear enlightenment and counter-enlightenment’ off ers a vigorously written and wide-ranging discussion of the challenges of interna-tional nuclear order, including deterrence, non-proliferation and disarmament. He makes so many remarkable observations, assertions and accusations in his stimu-lating and thought-provoking essay that no single article-length response can deal with all of them. It is for this reason that this special issue of International Aff airs presents several responses to Walker’s work. These responses do not by any means exhaust the subject; but they may well furnish points of departure for further refl ection on the important issues that Walker has raised.†

Pierre Hassner recommends caution in applying enlightenment philosophy to contemporary problems of international order. In his view it is only to a ‘very limited extent that one can apply Kant’s treatment of war in general to weapons of mass destruction or, more particularly, to nuclear weapons’. Hassner reviews three hypothetical models of international nuclear order that would satisfy enlighten-ment-like ‘criteria of rationality, universality and reciprocity’—complete nuclear disarmament, world government and universal nuclear proliferation—and concludes that each is impractical and/or undesirable. The current order centred on the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has ‘inherent limitations’, including its discriminatory character, the weaknesses of its technical barriers to proliferation, the lack of agreement on appropriate sanctions for violations, and its foundation in ‘the hypocrisy which prevailed almost without exception among nuclear powers and to a large extent also among many non-nuclear states’. However, Hassner sees substan-tial political obstacles to constructing a new nuclear order in a context in which the two key factors—‘power and legitimacy—have been profoundly modifi ed in a direction unfavourable to the West’. He prescribes a ‘muddling through’ that distinguishes among short-, middle- and long-term goals and emphasizes political and institutional reforms.

Joseph Pilat considers several issues at the heart of Walker’s essay. He surveys the challenges to the nuclear non-proliferation regime and analyses the prospects * The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not represent those of the Department of the Navy or any

US government agency. † Professor Lawrence Scheinman of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of Inter-

national Studies, was unfortunately not in a position to complete his article for this special issue of International Aff airs.

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428International Aff airs 83: 3, 2007© 2007 The Author(s). Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd/The Royal Institute of International Aff airs

for the several initiatives taken by the United States and others in recent years to strengthen this vital regime, including the Proliferation Security Initiative, the Global Threat Reduction Initiative and the Global Nuclear Energy Partner-ship. In contrast with Walker, who objects to proposals by the United States and other countries to limit access to reprocessing and enrichment technologies, Pilat maintains that the further spread of these technologies under the cover of article IV of the NPT must be stemmed. Pilat holds that reforming and strengthening the NPT-centred non-proliferation regime is essential to current and future non-proliferation eff orts and a critical priority. He argues, however, that if the regime is to address the full range of challenges we confront, it must be complemented by counterterrorism and counterproliferation measures, including ‘eff orts to deter, dissuade and defend against nuclear proliferation and terrorism’.

Joachim Krause fi nds that Walker’s analysis is laden with myths unsupported by the historical record. Chief among these, he argues, are the beliefs that the NPT is a disarmament treaty, that the nuclear deterrence relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was managed through consensus on mutual vulnerability, and that the Bush administration has undertaken a radical shift in US nuclear non-proliferation policy. Krause notes that members of self-referential epistemic communities may cling to cherished myths that lack empirical justifi ca-tion. Krause also points out that Walker’s use of the tropes ‘enlightenment’ and ‘counter-enlightenment’—with the former standing for the NPT and other policy instruments of the 1960s and 1970s, and the latter for the policies of the Bush administration—is unilluminating and misplaced, partly because the most potent historical manifestations of counter-enlightenment have been totalitarian regimes such as those which ruled Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Paul Schulte raises several fi rst-principle questions about Walker’s thesis, including whether the pursuit of a universal vision is always necessary to make progress in promoting nuclear non-proliferation. Schulte points out that many dangerous fruits of technical rationality have grown from the enlightenment in addition to nuclear weapons, and notes that these other dangers logically also deserve an ‘exceptional politics and statecraft’. Even for nuclear order the two-system (deterrence and abstinence) model which Walker proposes is likely to be unstable without a ‘third system’ of policing and enforcement which remains so far undeveloped and unreliable. Walker harshly criticizes US policies since the late 1990s, and particularly since the start of the George W. Bush administration in 2001, and holds the United States responsible for frustrating the pursuit of what he regards as ‘a grand enlightenment project’ based on the NPT and designed to bring about nuclear disarmament. In response, Schulte underscores the limits to American power and questions whether alternative US policies would have neces-sarily had the positive eff ects that Walker imagines, given the absence of consensus in the UN Security Council and beyond on how to deal with cases of non-compli-ance with treaty commitments.

Michael Rühle agrees with Walker’s view that the nuclear non-proliferation regime is in crisis, but takes issue with Walker’s presentation of the NPT as an

Thinking about ‘enlightenment’ and ‘counter-enlightenment’

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‘enlightenment project’ designed to construct a new international order. Rühle points out that several of the NPT’s structural fl aws were recognized from the outset. He notes that ‘the limits of the treaty’s norm-setting quality’ have long been evident in the policies of the states that have refused to adhere to it (India, Israel and Pakistan) or that have pursued their nuclear ambitions under its auspices (for instance, Iran, Iraq and North Korea). In his view, the eff orts to transform the NPT into a disarmament treaty have had the counterproductive eff ect of depriving the fi ve permanent members of the UN Security Council of any moral authority to address violations by non-nuclear weapon states party to the treaty. Rühle also questions whether it is accurate to place ‘most of the blame for the erosion of the non-proliferation regime’ on the United States, since this approach disregards the longstanding contributions to this erosion by proliferants and non-state actors, including the nuclear technology traffi cking network run by the Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan. In Rühle’s view, the P5 powers are likely to pursue a case-by-case approach in dealing with specifi c proliferators, and the non-proliferation regime based on the NPT will increasingly be supplemented by UN Security Council resolutions, coercive measures and security assurances.

Brad Roberts focuses on one of the central issues raised by Walker: the analyt-ical problems involved in assessing international nuclear order as a subset of the broader question of international political order. Roberts highlights the diffi culties of defi ning a vision for a new nuclear order to replace the one elaborated in the 1960s in conjunction with the NPT, including disagreements about deterrence requirements and the appropriate balance and links between non-proliferation measures and deterrence policies. Roberts concludes that, while responsibility for leadership resides above all with the fi ve permanent members of the UN Security Council, designated in the UN Charter as key guarantors of international peace and security, ‘there are many other major stakeholders in order’ that ‘must step forward to shoulder some responsibility’. In his view, there is an urgent need for ‘new intellectual capital’ to be amassed, because launching an eff ective ‘ordering project’ will require well-founded principles that can command solid support from policy-makers in key governments.

Henry Sokolski discusses what he deems one of the main shortcomings of the NPT-based non-proliferation regime idealized in Walker’s article—the tradi-tional reading of article IV’s reference to ‘the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes’. While Walker deplores the eff orts by the United States and other countries to establish constraints on the diff usion of fuel-cycle technology, Sokolski points out that the spread of reprocessing and enrichment capabilities has led—in conjunction with ‘inept’ and ‘permissive’ enforcement measures by most member states of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the International Atomic Energy Agency—to a situation in which states can now claim to be in compliance with the NPT and yet be capable of producing nuclear weapons within a matter of days or weeks. Sokolski argues that the only hope to remedy this situation would be to make a nuclear project’s economic viability and the ability of the

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International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to prevent military diversions from it the key criteria for determining whether it should be protected as a ‘peaceful’ project under the NPT.

This author’s own essay, the last in the collection, critically examines Walker’s ‘enlightenment’ and ‘counter-enlightenment’ tropes. Each of these terms has been assigned multiple meanings in the history of philosophy, and each has been used to describe radically divergent phenomena. Walker’s proposed defi nitions are vague and tendentious. The terms are accordingly clumsy and unsatisfactory tools for the analysis of contemporary policies concerning nuclear deterrence, non-proliferation and disarmament. Moreover, what Walker presents as the centre of an inspirational narrative—‘a grand enlightenment project’ consisting of the NPT-centred nuclear non-proliferation regime and the US and Soviet nuclear deterrence policies of the 1960s and 1970s—was much less coherent and admirable than Walker indicates. The history of the US–Soviet strategic competition and of the NPT-centred nuclear non-proliferation regime in this period was messier and less edifying than he implies, while US policy since the late 1990s has been more constructive than he concedes. Walker also exaggerates the ability of the United States to infl uence the policies of other countries. The limits of American power help to explain why the challenges at hand—both analytical and practical—are much more daunting than his article suggests. One of the great merits of Walker’s work, however, is to highlight the question of international political order.