Recorded on September 21, 2021
Ward | Sood | Lieven | McGlynn | Chernenko: “The Return of the Taliban”
Published in Hindustan Times on September 25, 2021
Last week witnessed the aukward birth of a new security alliance – AUKUS – bringing together Australia, United Kingdom (UK) and the United States (US), coupled with a deal involving US and UK building eight nuclear attack submarines for Australia. The announcement was guaranteed to create waves in the Indo-Pacific but the fall out of Australia cancelling the five-year old deal with France for a dozen diesel powered attack submarines created bigger waves across the Atlantic.
The objective of AUKUS is “to deal with rapidly evolving threats” and it envisages closer intelligence sharing and cooperation in areas of AI, cyber warfare and quantum computing. The three are already part of the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence network, together with Canada and New Zealand. Up to this point, it would have been seen as an attempt to shore up an Anglo-Saxon grouping in the Indo-Pacific, attracting dismissive commentary from Beijing and mild speculation about how AUKUS would engage with the Quad. It is the abrupt cancelling of the submarine deal that has shocked and angered France.
There is more than just the Euros 31 billion at stake. Both Australia and France saw it then as a long-term investment and recognition of shared interests in the region. It is true that there was some unhappiness about growing costs and time delays. The hard fact is that in last five years Australia’s threat perceptions about China have radically changed. Relations have nosedived with Australia curbing Chinese influence activities and cutting out Huawei and China has retaliated with significant sanctions on Australian imports.
Yet the reason that France reacted angrily and Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian described it “a stab in the back” is because Prime Minister Scott Morrison had visited Paris in June. The outcome was a highly publicised Vision Statement, a long-term strategy for enhancing partnership through the Australia-France Initiative (AFiniti). It was followed by the inaugural session of the 2+2 Strategic Dialogue between the Foreign and Defence Ministers on 29-30 August. For Le-Drian, it was a blow because he had negotiated and concluded the deal in 2016 as Defence Minister during the Hollande period.
In 2015, Australia had specifically sought diesel-electric boats. France outbid competition from Germany and Japan with the Barracuda nuclear attack submarine, modified into a conventionally powered Shortfin Barracuda Block 1A design. An unwritten understanding was that if the nuclear-power option was to be explored, it would be available. Former Australian PM Tony Abbott has been urging a switch since 2017. In 2016, Australia concluded that US would not share nuclear propulsion technology. USA has shared it only with UK but that relationship is different as the US even supplies UK the Trident SLBMs.
In a biting comment about the US, Le Drian complained that “this brutal, unilateral and unpredictable decision looks very much like what Mr Trump used to do, Allies don’t do this to each other, it’s rather insufferable”. France has recalled its ambassadors from US and Australia for ‘consultations’ to convey its displeasure. Asked about UK, he dismissively said that it was just “the third wheel” and UK’s “opportunism had been a characteristic trait”.
The reactions in the region have been along predictable lines. China has called it “irresponsible” and warned that it can “exacerbate an arms race”. Japan and Taiwan have welcomed the submarine deal while South Korea has been muted. Indonesia and Malaysia have voiced concerns.
With the Quad summit taking place in Washington, Foreign Secretary Shringla distanced the Quad – “a plurilateral grouping of four countries that have a shared vision of their attributes and values” from AUKUS – “a security alliance between three countries”, adding that “from our perspective, it is neither relevant to the Quad nor will it have any impact on its functioning”.
Following a telephone conversation between Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron, both sides have tried to put a lid on the issue; both leaders will meet next month and the French ambassador will return to Washington. However, the French will recalibrate its ties with the Anglosphere. Unlike UK, France has always seen itself as an independent global player and preferred greater autonomy while being pragmatic about the US lead. This attribute has been a key factor underlying its close strategic partnership with India that dates back to 1998.
India’s nuclear submarine programme (ATV) began in the 1980s but progress has been slow. That is why India has been leasing Russian nuclear attack submarines (INS Chakra I and II) since the 1980s and Chakra III is due in 2025. India’s programme switched after 1998 to the ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) class with Arihant deployed, and Arighat now on trials. It will move in tandem with development of longer range SLBMs, K-5 and K-6 with 5000 kms and 6000 kms range respectively.
The shortfall is in achieving the target of 24 submarines, 18 diesel-electric and six nuclear-powered, originally set out in 1999. Six conventional boats are being built under Project 75; six more conventional vessels were cleared by Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) earlier this this year under Project 75 I with deployments scheduled for 2030s.
The Navy has agreed to give up the third aircraft carrier in order to fast-track the six nuclear attack submarines project. Now that US has breached the taboo regarding nuclear propulsion and cleared the way, the time has come for India and France to set a new milestone for strengthening their strategic partnership. As French strategist Bruno Tertrais explained, “Trump didn’t care about allies; Biden does, but perhaps not all of them equally”.
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My Background Memo for Council of Council’s Annual Conference, May 24-25. 2021
In March 2020, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) turned fifty. The tenth Review Conference (RevCon), originally scheduled for April and May, was postponed to January 2021 and is now tentatively planned for August 2021 amid continued monitoring of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The NPT is often described as the cornerstone of the global nuclear order. It is among the most widely adhered to global treaties. All countries except four (India, Israel, and Pakistan never joined, and North Korea withdrew in 2003) are parties to the NPT. Despite its enviable record, a sense of disquiet and uncertainty surround the RevCon and its future.
Any global order needs two enabling conditions: a convergence of interests among the present major powers to define a shared objective and an ability to package and present it to the world as a global public good. The conditions for nuclear order and the NPT were no exception.
In 1963, only four countries (the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom) had tested a nuclear device when U.S. President John F. Kennedy sounded the alarm that by 1975 there could be as many as twenty countries with nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union shared similar concerns. This convergence of interests between the two Cold War adversaries enabled the NPT negotiations.
To make nuclear order attractive as a global public good, it was packaged as a three-legged stool: nonproliferation, obliging those without nuclear weapons to never acquire them and accept full-scope safeguards; disarmament, requiring the five countries with nuclear weapons (the United States, China, France, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom) to negotiate the reduction and eventual elimination of their nuclear weapons; and peaceful use of nuclear energy, guaranteeing non–nuclear weapons states full access to peaceful applications of nuclear science and technology.
Since the NPT was concluded, only the four countries outside the NPT have acquired nuclear weapons, bringing the total number of nuclear weapons states to nine, far fewer than Kennedy feared in 1963. By this measure, the NPT has been enormously successful, even though it has no means of dealing with these four states.
Among the oft-cited successes of the NPT is the dramatic reduction in the number of nuclear weapons from a peak of over 70,000 warheads in early 1980s to around 14,000 at present, with the United States and Russia accounting for over 12,500 of them. However, these reductions were a result of bilateral negotiations between the United States and Russia, reflecting the state of their relations. No negotiations have ever been held within the NPT framework. In fact, during the first fifteen years of the NPT, the U.S. and Soviet arsenals increased from below 40,000 to over 65,000, making it clear that the nuclear disarmament leg of the NPT was being ignored as the United States and Soviet Union embarked on a nuclear arms race.
Some claim that the NPT helped strengthen the taboo against nuclear weapons. However, a closer examination of recently declassified papers indicates that since 1970, there have been over a dozen instances where the United States and Soviet Union came close to initiating a nuclear exchange, many of which were based on system errors or misperceptions about the intentions of the other. Even today, with some nuclear weapons maintained on hair-trigger alert, the risk of an accidental or inadvertent nuclear exchange remains.
Today, the nuclear taboo is being challenged as major nuclear powers undertake research and development (R&D) for more usable low-yield nuclear weapons. Ballistic missile defense, hypersonic systems that carry both conventional and nuclear payloads, and growing offensive cyber capabilities further blur the line between conventional and nuclear weapons.
The NPT has reached the limits of its success as far as the proliferation objective is concerned. Further, its packaging as a balanced three-legged stool stands exposed as a wobbly, one-legged stool, for the NPT delegitimized proliferation but not nuclear weapons.
The clearest reflection of this growing frustration among the non–nuclear weapons states party to the NPT was the humanitarian initiative spearheaded by a coalition of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society to negotiate a treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) was concluded in 2017 and entered into force in January 2021, making it the only multilateral nuclear treaty to emerge since the NPT fifty years ago. (The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was concluded in 1996 but is yet to enter into force after twenty-five years, indicating its political infirmity.) Each of the TPNW’s eighty-six signatories and fifty-four ratifying states are members of the NPT in good standing.
For the first time, an NPT RevCon will take place with a new, unignorable divide between states that rely on nuclear weapons (or nuclear-armed allies) for their security and states that believe nuclear weapons are a threat to global security and accept that the NPT cannot be the route to nuclear disarmament.
However, the five nuclear weapons states party to the NPT are convinced that the TPNW undermines the NPT even though the TPNW’s 140 signatories and ratifiers provide legitimacy.
Other divisive political challenges for the RevCon include Iran and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was unilaterally discarded by the Donald Trump administration; a push by non–nuclear weapons states for substantive reductions in nuclear arsenals; lack of progress on the 1995 initiative for the Middle East as a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction; a U.S. push for universal adherence to the International Atomic Energy Agency Additional Protocol; and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, among others.
For the last fifty years, a substantive consensus outcome has been the criteria for a successful RevCon. Yet anticipating the difficulties of a consensus, the NPT supporters are suggesting that the definition of a successful outcome should be reconsidered.
The NPT record indicates that no consensus was reached in 1980, 1990, 2005, and 2015. In 1995, despite the failure to reach consensus on a comprehensive final document, the critical objective of an indefinite and unconditional extension of the NPT was achieved (it had an original duration of twenty-five years). Some use this outcome to argue that a consensus final document need not be a true measure of success. Conversely, the 2000 and 2010 RevCons reached consensus after difficult negotiations, but none of the agreed steps or recommendations were ever implemented. Even these past agreements are unlikely to be endorsed today. The convergence of interests among the major powers has broken down, removing the basic political pre-condition for any progress.
Nuclear weapons–dependent states suggest setting a lower bar for a successful outcome. Merely holding a conference should be enough, according to some, as this would avoid the acrimonious and time-consuming negotiations that create undue expectations. However, such an approach is at best a temporary resolution. Any permanent resolution would lie in accepting the limitations of the NPT and seeking to join the TPNW proponents in a constructive dialogue. This needs imaginative approaches and a shift from the zero-sum model of negotiation to a win-win outcome, preserving the NPT while looking beyond it. A mindset change is necessary for the NPT to overcome its midlife crisis.
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RAKESH SOOD 