Introduction

Part of a fundamental global transition to the peaceful settlement of international disputes, to a full collective security model replacing the unilateral use of force, and to an international order based on a genuine rule by law, is to design and implement a clear, ambitious and systemic program – the “massive and coordinated action” referred to by Arias, above – of international arms control and disarmament.

The UN Human Rights Council has, for example, affirmed that an equitable and democratic international order requires, among other things, the realization of the “right of all peoples to peace,” stating that:

In this chapter, as well as providing framing background perspectives relevant to tackling the very fundamental international problem of systemic disarmament, we sketch the outline of and starting points for robust new proposals, which would include UN Charter amendment, for the essential restructuring of global practices in relation to the current “glut of military spending.” There have been, indeed, recent calls for the reform or revitalization of Article 26 of the UN Charter, which allotted to the Security Council a responsibility to develop comprehensive and concrete plans for a system for the global regulation of armaments.

In summary, in parallel with the creation of the International Peace Force (IPF), a new, consolidated and empowered Standing Committee on Disarmament should be established to develop, implement, and monitor a binding yet staged global disarmament process, to reduce national armaments to levels needed for self-defense only. During a preparatory period, an inventory of armaments would be undertaken, sites/facilities identified or constructed for their neutralization and decommissioning under UN monitoring and coordination, and the necessary budget and financial allocations organized. This would be followed by a phase of disarmament proper, which would be managed to be simultaneous and proportional among the greater powers in particular. Special attention would be given to nuclear arms and the long-term storage of the resulting wastes at neutral sites, as well as to new and emerging forms of weaponry such as programs for cyberwarfare. Unprecedented intensive global monitoring and verification would be needed to ensure that no arms are hidden or developed for later use.

Such an approach, indeed, forms part of the core of ensuring a stable and operable international collective security system (where the IPF is an effective “global policeman” rather than the “Big Four,” as envisioned at the end of World War II), and adhesion to such a system should be a condition for acceptance of any state by the international community as a “peace-loving nation.”Footnote ⁴ Such systematic global arms control has long formed one of the core aspirations of the international community (see the following section), and is made ever more urgent given current destabilizing forces, some of which are described in this chapter. The disruptive and unpredictable forces seen today, including in relation to technological developments, make a fragmented and piecemeal approach to arms control and disarmament – which the international community has adopted to date – wholly untenable.

Background

Comprehensive and controlled disarmament among the community of nations has been an aspiration of the international legal project since its very early years. The first Hague Peace Conference of 1899 convened by Nicholas II, Tsar of Russia, had as a main agenda item military and arms limitation among the then great powers (particularly focused in Europe at that time). British Lord Salisbury, in a speech to the London Guild Hall in 1887 reportedly urged Nicholas II’s predecessor, Tsar Alexander III, to convene a major power disarmament conference, in the name of collective social progress.Footnote ⁵ Pragmatically, it was understood that the unsustainably expensive and destabilizing arms races in Europe (e.g., with a Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy evolving in opposition to the Entente of France and Russia), were prohibitive in cost and risky to all those involved. World War I of course, would bear out these concerns, with the first and second (1907) Hague Peace Conferences proving themselves a failure on the core disarmament issues.

In terms of wasteful and destabilizing expenditures today implicated in the global arms trade, recent numbers are truly staggering. The Stockholm Peace Research Institute estimates world military expenditure in 2017 to have reached more than $1.7 trillion ($1,739 billion), representing “the highest level since the end of the Cold War, equivalent to 2.2 per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP) or $230 per person.”Footnote ⁶ According to the IMF, military expenditures are “unproductive” in relation to countries’ unmet needs and do not benefit productivity and economic efficiency. The trade-offs or “opportunity costs” of countries’ spending on military versus more productive social expenditures for the national – and international – economy, such as education, health and child care, are dramatic.Footnote ⁷

The classical “security dilemma” of individual states or alliances explains the danger and the seeming inevitability of intensifying, tit-for-tat arms races, as described by security scholar Christopher Browning:

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the “threat or use of force” of member nations in their international relations, and the excessive or nontransparent build-up of armaments can present serious problems in this respect. As noted by Browning, it can be difficult to distinguish between the defensive and offensive nature of armaments acquired by a given nation. The International Court of Justice has explored, for example, in an Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, whether a nation possessing nuclear weapons could be considered to be in violation of Article 2(4) of the Charter, by posing a threat of use of force and violating requirements of necessity and proportionality in the deployment of weapons under international law, even if anticipated to be used defensively.Footnote ⁹

In relation to the overall global system today and the precarity of shifting global power dynamics – in particular but not only in relation to the US–China configuration – various authors have raised the alarm as to the care and focus currently required to navigate these new power constellations, to ensure that war (“cold” or “hot”) is not inevitable.Footnote ¹⁰ One report notes the contemporary shifting “geostrategic relationships” where bipolar (Cold War) or unipolar (post–Cold War) models are no longer helpful, noting that while “it is clear change is under way, it is not clear what the outcome will be.”Footnote ¹¹ Given current dilemmas, it is urgent to devise effective, systemic solutions in order to halt spirals of insecurity and arms races, and to put in place a coherent, transparent, thorough and well-designed global security regime for the control and limitation of armaments, as was envisioned in the specific provisions on arms control and disarmament in the current UN Charter (see next section).

Key framing provisions of the 1945 UN Charter were in fact intended to lay the groundwork for a general international enabling environment to build sustainable trust among nations, in order to transcend traditional interstate security dilemmas and maximalist military competition. For example, the goal of the Charter is to create conditions necessary for the respect of international law (Preamble) and the peaceful settlement of international disputes under Chapter VI (to resolve, for example, territorial disputes, which have been a major cause of interstate wars; see Chapter 10), in order to transcend anarchic international conditions, which are the basis of “realist” thinking on the inevitability of war. The Charter requires that all members of the United Nations be “peace-loving” as a condition of membership (Art. 4(1)), should “live together in peace with one another as good neighbours” (Preamble), should “develop friendly relations” (Art. 1(2)), and must fulfill “in good faith the obligations assumed” under the instrument (Art. 2(2)).

All of these provisions, alongside the Charter articles relating to collective security,Footnote ¹² undergird the contemporary international striving to move beyond anarchic conditions and irrational cultures of unhealthy military competition and opaque mistrust that drove the senseless wars of the past. These are the fundamental tenets of the modern international order that still must be made fully incarnate in state practice and institutions, and in practical, newly ambitious commitments in the sphere of arms control.

The UN Charter Provisions on Disarmament/Arms Control

The UN Charter gives both the Security Council (Article 26)Footnote ¹³ and the General Assembly (Article 11(1)) specific mandates in the sphere of arms control and disarmament, clearly recognizing that these projects are integral to international peace and security, and also have a diversionary effect on the “world’s human and economic resources” (see also discussion in Chapter 4 on GA engagement in disarmament issues).

The Security Council was tasked with the responsibility of formulating, with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee, “plans to be submitted to the Members of the United Nations for the establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments.” Needless to say, no such plan was developed. Military competition – ironically – between key members of the Security Council intervened. Despite efforts in the later 1940s to begin to attempt to draft such plans, lack of unity among the permanent members of the Security Council, by 1952, essentially arrested these efforts, which have not been revived in a serious way since that time.

The General Assembly was tasked, in parallel, with the power to “consider the general principles of co-operation in the maintenance of international peace and security, including the principles governing disarmament and the regulation of armaments, and may make recommendations with regard to such principles to the Members or to the Security Council or both.” Again, while there have been many excellent and aspirational statements issued by the General Assembly (and admirable piecemeal/incremental progress on disarmament which may be linked to a General Assembly initiative; see Box in this chapter), no significant comprehensive progress as anticipated by the Charter has yet been effected. One independent expert, calling the urgent need to reduce military expenditures worldwide an “endemic” barrier to development, has noted:

Recent Developments in Arms Control

Against this backdrop, there have, however been some notable, positive recent developments in the disarmament field. For example, in relation to efforts to promote the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW; see Box) was adopted in 2017, as the first binding international treaty comprehensively prohibiting nuclear weapons. Talks had been opened on the negotiation of this treaty in 2016 (mandated by a General Assembly resolution), impelled by the frustration of many states with the lack of progress of nuclear weapons states to make progress on nuclear disarmament in conformity with their obligations under the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT; see Box below). Commentators note the significance of the adoption of the TPNW as follows: “[t]he humanitarian initiative and attendant effort by a large group of non-nuclear-armed states and civil society actors to institute a global ban on nuclear weapons constitutes a process of collective resistance to entrenched power structures that perpetuate the existence of nuclear weapons.”Footnote ¹⁵ The TPNW, adopted by 122 states (excluding the nuclear weapons states and their allies), is expected to have a normative and longer-term impact on the development of international law and the further stigmatization of nuclear weapons. Additionally, the broad-based civil society and non-nuclear weapon state efforts to convene negotiations and adopt the TPNW may have catalyzed a greater sense of urgency in various areas of global disarmament.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, there has been some recent movement on a number of topics at the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament, the only standing international forum for negotiating arms control and disarmament agreements, with a new initiative to break through the gridlock that had left it, since 2009, unable to adopt a work program. The UN Secretary General has also released, in May 2018, a 73-page “non-paper,” Securing our Common Future: An Agenda for Disarmament, outlining possible strategies on a wide range of current international disarmament issues, including an analysis of the deteriorating international security environment, addressing weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, outer space and new types of destabilizing strategic weapons, as well as conventional weapons, and challenges posed by new technologies, AI and cyberspace.Footnote ¹⁷

However, against this backdrop of the apparent “coalition of the many” desiring to move forward proactively in global arms control, there have been worrying developments in particular on the bilateral plane. The United States has announced that it may withdraw from the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) with Russia, a Soviet–US agreement from 1987, which facilitated the elimination of thousands of Soviet missiles based in Europe and paved the way for the end of the Cold War. Also, neither Russia nor the US have committed to extending the New START (the 2010 Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms), limiting strategic nuclear forces, before its 2021 expiration, nor negotiate additional reductions under the regime. Since the US has withdrawn from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) for Iran to limit its nuclear program, Iran hesitates to implement the arrangement (as of mid-2019), while the other partners to the agreement, the EU, France, Germany, the UK, China, and Russia, continue to honor the agreement. The US has also, subsequent to its 2018 “nuclear posture review,” begun to manufacture new, low-yield nuclear warheads for Trident missiles, prompting some to suggest that this more flexible weaponry could lower the threshold for the instigation of a nuclear conflict.Footnote ¹⁸

The current deterioration of the significant post–Cold War achievements in bilateral disarmament among the two involved “great powers” (which helped to make the world a safer place) has prompted Mikhail Gorbachev to write a New York Times opinion piece entitled A New Nuclear Arms Race Has Begun, citing the demise of the INF as the “latest victim in the militarization of world affairs.” He issues the following warning to contemporary leadership’s seeming compulsion to repeat old mistakes:

Currently, it does seem that, with an increasingly unstable international security environment where regression to previous patterns is a substantial risk, sober minds are turning their attention to the real, practical need for the international nonproliferation of a wide range of weapons types, existing or yet to be invented, with worrying new weapons technologies on the horizon. Uniquely ambitious comprehensive plans “for the establishment of a system for the regulation of armaments,” that were to be the responsibility of the Security Council under the Charter, should be undertaken, taking advantage of the expertise and technical skill acquired in the field of arms control since the advent of the Charter (see Box). As with the adoption of the TPNW in 2017, a broader and more decentralized collective leadership is currently needed to push ahead on this topic. Early efforts by such bodies as the Commission on Conventional Armaments (CCA), established in 1947 as a subsidiary organ to the Security Council (upon recommendation of the General Assembly) and disbanded in 1952, could serve as an inspiration and starting point for modern efforts. For example, working papers and reports of the CCA began to analyze what it considered to be essential elements of an international system of verification and control of armaments, and also the delineation of the range of basic challenges inherent to the regulation of armaments. New perspectives on “human security” can frame contemporary initiatives, alongside a consolidation and rationalization of the presently fragmented and outdated multilateral efforts developed since the Cold War, that are not fit for present needs and potentials.Footnote ²⁰

The Challenge

The challenge presented by ambitious and comprehensive global disarmament regimes – unlike anything the world has seen to date in this field – is a significant one, as systemic change in the global acquisition and use of arms would also represent a paradigm shift in social organization and a range of traditional cultural assumptions. A fundamental attribute of national sovereignty, before the era of the Charter’s legal regime and precursor instruments, has been conceived to include the right to wage war on other nations in the defense or advancement of national interests, in a presumed anarchic environment. Apart from some indigenous societies, warfare has been part of human experience since before recorded history; and recorded history is largely the history of wars.Footnote ²¹ There is a certain “path dependency” in considering war and mass armed conflict to be inevitable.

Furthermore, war, or national war-readiness, as a demonstration of the ultimate use of force and display of power can play to the (mostly masculine) ego,Footnote ²² inflating the self-worth of autocrats and powerful elites, and even corrupting democratically elected leaders. The pride and glory that can be associated with military parades show this only too well. The instruments of war find their extension in militarized dictatorships, police states and repressive regimes, where the institutions of government are turned to the benefit of those in power rather than to the welfare of the population. Such governments, within a global intergovernmental system, will themselves become obstacles to the functioning of that system in general, and to disarmament in particular, as genuine arms control may threaten the basis of their authority and facilitate their exit from power. An external enemy is important for some governments, and even for the identities which have been cultivated within certain nations.Footnote ²³ However, such predispositions and historical tendencies only support the argument for strong international initiatives and mechanisms to hold national leaderships to account (for example under international criminal law or in relation to a new international anti-corruption court; see Chapters 10 and 18), to facilitate trust among peoples and nations, as well as intercultural knowledge, and to further shared international norms (see Chapter 20), including democratic and participatory governments at the national level, within a framing “culture of peace.”Footnote ²⁴

Ending traditional security dilemmas and achieving disarmament are therefore also a human and social challenge, requiring changing minds and hearts, including, importantly, in leadership – and in the public conception of what leadership entails. Outdated political concepts of power as domination, and the control of substantial armies and navies and the power of life and death as instruments of that domination, have attracted certain personality types to leadership positions, often with the ends justifying any means. History is full of such examples. Where such people are in power today, they will cling to outdated notions of national sovereignty as a defense of their association with power. More mature concepts of leadership as service to one’s country and its people (see Chapters 19 and 20), and as responsible, constructive and rational actors on the international stage, will be needed to engage governments in ambitious proposals for the reform of our current international system. More prominent leadership from the representatives of “middle powers,” who may be more committed to and better understand the rational basis for a strengthened international system, are badly needed. Generally, reforms in many national government structures, changes in education, and broad civil society engagement are all necessary to move forward effectively and to reduce the number of countries which may feel threatened by global governance reforms (e.g., which suffer from insufficient democratization or legitimacy of leadership), and the international community must re-double its efforts to assist such countries.

Abolition of War

All this implies that a precondition for successful disarmament will be a general consensus among governments and in public opinion that, as war is prohibited as an anachronistic and unnecessary human institution (one can already see clear signs of this consensus; see Chapter 10), the means for its waging should be eliminated, with global armaments strictly controlled and subject to monitoring, in conformity with Charter norms. Credible alternatives to settle disputes must be available, and processes established to punish violators of key international norms and to bring recalcitrant governments into line. This chapter outlines some approaches that may be necessary to enable this transition and to reap the benefits of a global peace economy. For generations, many have hoped for a world without war, especially after suffering through one. We are convinced that, in the 21st century, this is now a realistic possibility for the following reasons.

First, with modern technology, the nature of warfare and its capacity for destruction have fundamentally changed. Yes, there were times in the past when a city was besieged and overwhelmed, its men and boys slaughtered and its women raped and taken into slavery, but the scale was different. War as combat only between large armies of soldiers or fleets of warships is largely a thing of the past. The distinction between military combatants and civilians has increasingly disappeared. Weakening “the enemy” means firebombing or laying waste to whole cities, targeting hospitals and schools, and driving out entire populations. Some attempts have been made to outlaw chemical and biological weapons, and antipersonnel mines that go on killing long after the end of a conflict, with moderate success. However, with the development of nuclear weapons with the capacity to vaporize whole cities, contaminate the atmosphere and trigger a nuclear winter wiping out most of the human race, war has given us the potential and the risk of collective suicide. The fact that the nuclear powers still contemplate war with these weapons and prepare for it defies logic and underlines the fundamental flaws in national governance as presently practiced.Footnote ²⁵ Even those who believed that nuclear weapons “were essential to maintaining international security during the Cold War” based on the doctrine of deterrence, have argued that they now pose immense dangers to global society.Footnote ²⁶

Second, recent technological transformations are changing the nature of warfare in fundamental ways. The latest technologies of autonomous weapons guided by artificial intelligence are further shifting the strategic balance from deterrence to attack, as they make possible the simultaneous destruction of all or most of an adversary’s retaliatory capacity.Footnote ²⁷ The capacity of computers to process masses of data and to explore options allows them to make decisions almost instantaneously with no human intervention, empathy or ethical values. It may seem logical to program autonomous weapons for particular missions, but it would be impossible to model or control the simultaneous deployment of thousands of such weapons by both sides in a conflict. Such a war would rapidly spiral beyond any human control. As a result, the risk of war, intentional or accidental, is again increasing, in particular given the current unpredictable shifting of the geopolitical tectonic plates.

Third, war is no longer restricted to conflict between nation states or civil wars within a state. Many other actors are now involved, including terrorist organizations, fanatical religious movements, extremist groups situated on the far reaches of the political spectrum, and (transnational) organized criminal syndicates, all of which may be ready to kill and destroy without discrimination to reach their ends. Achieving peace no longer just means settling a dispute between countries, but must involve wider circles of participants and address many more causal factors.Footnote ²⁸

Fourth, technology has not only created new armaments, but also new capacities to organize for collective good, to communicate and understand multiple perspectives, to search for common solutions, to build wide public understanding and support, and thus to create trustworthy institutions to resolve disputes peacefully and to create and maintain peace. Technology has also given us the means for unprecedented, highly reliable monitoring and oversight for new, internationally-agreed arms control measures.

Finally, for those who believe that we have always made war and shall continue to do so, we can provide the contrary example of various systems evolving to maturity, as for example, noted in studies of aggregate data in relation to the decline in violence generally across societies.Footnote ²⁹ We should be now striving to reach a point of social maturity at a planetary scale of organization, beyond irrational systems based on ad hoc violence and contested domination, which, indeed are dangerously anachronistic given current interdependence and the global challenges we are facing. One important part of this is to leave warfare behind and to create more rational, civilized forms of dispute prevention and settlement (see Chapter 10). Modern scholars have exposed the constructed nature of international relations cultures marked by mistrust, secrecy and fear, and “competitive strategic mindsets,” noting that “alarmist zero-sum thinking is not inevitable, but a self-fulfilling outcome of the tendency of political and military elites to unthinkingly accept realist worldviews” which consider conflict as inevitable.Footnote ³⁰ With accelerating, looming environmental crises on the horizon, the only realist worldview today requires devising new “win-win” intensively comparative and collaborative problem-solving strategies at the international level.

Self-Defense

The maintenance of military forces is often justified as necessary for self-defense. In a world where governments cannot be trusted and aggression has been frequent, this is understandable given the anarchic global system without adequate governance mechanisms. At present, there exists under international law (e.g., the UN Charter and precedent-setting international decisions and analysis) a relatively well-defined concept of national self-defense and when it is legitimate and legal in response to an attack or imminent threat by another state or nonstate actor. However, there is no universally binding international rule of law or enforcement, where assessments of actions said to be made in self-defense can be regularly made by a supervising judiciary. Likewise, the current Security Council and its permanent members have latitude, when convenient, not to take preventive action, or to ignore belligerent activities which would cause a threat to a state, or would go beyond the more established definitions of self-defense under international law. A reformed international judicial system with compulsory jurisdiction, including over the international crime of aggression (e.g., universal jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; see Chapter 10) will largely cure any ambiguity in a definition of self-defense, an ambiguity which indeed may be deployed cynically – or in an over-broad way – by various actors.

Under the current UN Charter, states are entitled to defend themselves until such time as the collective security mechanism of the Charter takes effect (see Article 51). A future amended Charter should include a similar sensible provision, although with the collective security responsibilities shouldered by the UN IPF (see Chapter 8). During a transition period of staged international disarmament (see below), care will be needed to ascertain, based on objective/non-political peace and security expertise, the current, interim and future “self-defense” needs of states given the new paradigm of enhanced collective security. Ultimately, the national possession of armaments should be determined by a new standard of the need for “internal security” rather than for “self-defense,” as a genuine system of international collective security takes root and its institutions mature.

Past Multilateral Disarmament Measures and Proposals

One would think that the suffering from World War II would push the nations most involved into intense efforts at disarmament to prevent future wars, as stipulated by the Charter. Unfortunately, for the military establishments of the victorious countries, the reverse was the case. Particularly between the United States and the USSR in the decades following World War II, disarmament proposals were repeatedly exchanged in the knowledge that they would be refused by the other side. If one side unexpectedly accepted a proposal from the other, it was rapidly withdrawn. The bilateral agreements adopted not infrequently served to authorize continued weapons development and it has been observed that disarmament proposals were generally made in bad faith to placate the public and other states.Footnote ³¹ This refusal of the major military powers to cooperate in reductions in armaments contrary to their strategic goal of wide spheres of influence continued for many years, with, however, the very important breakthroughs achieved in the late 1980s between the US and the USSR (beginning with the INF Treaty in 1987 signed by Reagan and Gorbachev). As noted above, these achievements are currently under serious threat.

It is in this context that intergovernmental efforts at disarmament, mostly within the framework of the United Nations, need to be evaluated. The Box below, “A short history of multilateral disarmament measures and proposals,” based largely on UN sources, highlights the great efforts that have gone into multilateral disarmament agreements. Very regularly, however, the states with the most – or the most destructive – armaments have refused to cooperate fully, and disarmament efforts remain piecemeal, fragmented and prone to slow or obstructed progress.

Notwithstanding the critical, but seemingly momentary, progress associated with the close of the Cold War between the then two world superpowers, the major powers, and other states with military ambitions (also in regional contexts), have generally not signed or become parties to agreements that may limit their military capacity, and many other states have not respected them at one time or another. As a rule, there are significantly inadequate or non-existent international verification and enforcement mechanisms. What has also substantially been lacking, in addition to good faith commitments to the positive mutual goals of disarmament, is trust between states, as the Charter sought to establish. As noted, “security dilemmas” have strong psychological components.Footnote ³⁵ What good is an agreement if you do not expect your competitors to respect it, and cheating is assumed to be the rule rather than the exception within a culture of cynical, low expectations? The progress made has been based on the good will of a majority of states, but not the most militarily endowed, who are often jockeying for relative power and influence.

Proposals to Enable Modern Comprehensive Disarmament

At the international level, disarmament will only work to the extent that states feel that they are able to trust the process and objectively verify commitments; thus building trust through a range of the measures recommended here will be a necessary precondition and accompaniment to the disarmament process. “Confidence-building measures” are a necessary and common part of modern disarmament practice and should be employed systematically at the international level.Footnote ³⁸ Each stage will need to be carefully defined and balanced, and binding in application. Full transparency and regular monitoring and inspection will be necessary to assure governments that there is no evasion of obligations, and all governments are held to objective standards. As noted in Chapter 8, a UN IPF is envisaged to be established in parallel to the process of disarmament, not only so it can, in extreme cases, intervene if any country tries to destabilize the disarmament process to its own advantage, but also to deal with other conflicts and to significantly strengthen the UN’s ability to fulfill its peace and security mandate.

A binding yet staged approach should be applied to the disarmament of all states for a reduction of armaments to those that are strictly necessary for self-defense,Footnote ³⁹ an obligation that can be deduced from the language and intent of the current UN Charter (i.e., under which international use of force is strictly limited to self-defense or duly authorized collective security action). A revised Charter would make this norm clearer and binding on all states, with the corollary duty for states to disarm to appropriate levels within a certain timeframe. A special Standing Committee on Disarmament would implement and monitor this obligation. It could consist of 24 members representing all UN members. Following the proposal for membership in the Executive Council (see Chapter 7), five members (US, China, EU, Russia, and India) would get a single seat each and the remaining 161 members would be grouped in 19 clusters defined by geographical proximity and, to the extent possible, roughly equivalent voting power. Voting power for each of the 24 members would be identical to that in the General Assembly. Its first task would be to commission a transparent and arms-length scientific analysis by independent experts, without political interference, to determine the self-defense needs of each country, taking into account the existence of the new IPF. It has been noted that a key problem with multilateral disarmament processes to date is the extent to which they rely on consensus negotiations (in which parties try to maximize what they think to be in their own interests, to the detriment of a collective solution) without adequate mechanisms to ensure overall fairness in outcomes.Footnote ⁴⁰ After the determination of appropriate limits, a staged approach of disarmament to required levels would then proceed, with a preparatory periodFootnote ⁴¹ and then a 10-year (or more) phase of disarmament proper (for most countries, depending on the weapons and equipment in need of decommissioning), all proceeding within the context of a thorough monitoring and inspection system by independent experts empowered by the Standing Committee.Footnote ⁴² The latest techniques of remote sensing and monitoring/intelligence-gathering should make it possible to ensure that disarmament is proceeding to completion and that no attempt is made to hide or dissemble arms for later use.

Disarmament, particularly of the “great powers,” would have to follow a path of simultaneous execution by all nations, with every nation disarming proportionately. The work of the Standing Committee could consolidate, extend and incorporate, as appropriate, the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, the Conference on Disarmament and other UN bodies or treaties linked to disarmament issues (e.g., the range of arms and weapons related treaties, the International Atomic Energy Agency – IAEA and other relevant bodies).Footnote ⁴³ It should build on the acquired expertise and norms already agreed upon, while taking into account the new binding obligations of states under the revised Charter and binding commitments in existing instruments.

Nuclear weapons would be universally banned as immoral weapons of mass destruction, as required by the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, recently adopted by the majority of the world’s states. However, as the countries with the most nuclear weapons have been opposed to the Treaty to date, it will take confidence building, delicate diplomacy and firm disarmament commitments set out in modern security regimes to bring all such countries to the table. Biological and chemical weapons have already been outlawed by treaty, but enforcement is difficult since they are so easily manufactured and used; enhanced mechanisms will have to be employed. New and emerging forms of weaponry and warfare, including autonomous weapons, military artificial intelligence systems, nanomaterials,Footnote ⁴⁴ and cyberwarfare, would have to be anticipated and included. No state should remain with any means at its disposal that would allow it to force its will on other states. In exchange, its rights and security would be guaranteed by the system of collective security, with obligatory alternative peaceful means of dispute settlement.

Such a fundamental shift in a conception of the classical attributes of national sovereignty represented by the military will involve a paradigm shift that is difficult for some. The most difficult cases may be authoritarian governments for whom fear (linked with militarization and types of violence), both internal and external, is a key instrument with which they are able to maintain power. A number of such governments have acquired, or sought to acquire, nuclear arms as the ultimate deterrent against any attempt to overthrow them from within or without. The military may be the principal instrument through which their power is exercised, when it is not the military itself that pulls the strings of government; such governments may see disarmament as prejudicial to their own power. The international community will need a strategy of positive incentives and stepped sanctions, or other coercive measures, if all other attempts to reason with such governments fail. Poor or dysfunctional national governance, in this domain as in all the other areas of the transition, will be a significant obstacle that may slow the application of comprehensive disarmament proposals.

Technical and Financial Challenges

Clark and Sohn considered in detail the main changes that would be needed in the UN Charter for effective disarmament, including a technical annex on the mechanics of disarmament that would be an inseparable part of the Charter.Footnote ⁴⁵

As mentioned above, the level of and specifics applied to the disarmament of individual states, and a common collective standard for such disarmament, in the light of the new capacities and collective security responsibilities of the IPF, will have to be determined by an independent expert body, which would devote significant study and technical expertise to determining these standards, as well as to standards for the crucial ongoing verification and inspection criteria. Importantly, such an international expert body will have to be insulated from political, entrenched bureaucratic military and other pressures (e.g., those of the business sector presently engaged in the lucrative manufacture of weapons), in order to ensure that its determinations and proposals are truly independent and impartially based on technical expertise. The financing of the transition from a system based primarily on national defense to a genuine international collective security system could also be addressed by such an international expert group, making fair and realistic assessments of the amounts of international funding needed for countries and the international community to transition, and at what points national governments, for example, could start transferring (very substantial, in some cases) national defense expenditures to investments in collective security.

Disarmament is a technically difficult and expensive process. Most military equipment has no other more productive uses, and is too specialized to be modified, and so must be disarmed, dismantled, and recycled. In any case, equipment that could easily be reconverted for military purposes should not be retained. Munitions in particular were never designed to be dismantled, and the explosives within them can become unstable over time. Dumping in the sea was practiced after the two world wars, and created major problems later, so this is not an option. Nerve gases and biological weapons present special challenges requiring highly specialized facilities and precautions to neutralize them.

The military has usually been exempted from environmental regulations; many military facilities and arms factories are highly polluted and will require expensive clean-up. Firing ranges may be contaminated with duds and unexploded munitions. Returning such spaces to civilian uses will be a long and expensive process for which budgeting will have to be arranged.

Nuclear disarmament is a special case because of the dangerousness and toxicity of radioactive materials. The nuclear arms race has created an enormous burden that will inevitably weigh on future generations, producing large quantities of highly radioactive substances, which must be kept isolated from all contact with living things for many thousands of years, while ensuring that there is no risk of contamination over such a long period. The challenge in neutralizing the damaged Fukushima power plant is one example, as is the looming cost of dismantling the many nuclear power plants coming to the end of their useful lives. Adding the much greater quantity of radioactive isotopes from nuclear weapons and the facilities to manufacture them will make the problem much larger, especially since countries are still struggling to find safe places to store radioactive wastes. The risk of accidents is never zero.

It will be necessary to decide whether dismantling arms and storing the resulting wastes would benefit from economies of scale, suggesting the need for centralized facilities under United Nations control, or alternatively the risk of transporting such materials is too great and disarmament should take place close to the present locations of the arms. According to the “polluter pays principle,” the countries that manufactured or purchased the arms should pay for their elimination, but there may be cases where the burden would be more than a country could bear and some sharing of costs would be justified.

Since the financial costs of disarmament will be very high, military budgets should first be diverted to finance the disarmament process and the return of industrial capacity, facilities, and personnel to civilian uses. The peace dividend will not be immediate but will only emerge over time as the disarmament process advances.

Another challenge will be the resistance of the arms industry and defense contractors that have long benefited from the present situation and will shrink dramatically, if not disappear, with substantial, effective disarmament. To the extent that their technologies have other peaceful uses, they should be assisted to diversify in that direction. Another short-term transitional option would be to use them to destroy existing stocks of arms and munitions, military vehicles, aircraft, and naval vessels. It will be important in the long term that no country retains the capacity to manufacture arms and rearm itself rapidly. As noted in Chapter 8, arms production for the IPF would be controlled, monitored, or directed by the United Nations and distributed so that no country could seize significant capacity and turn it to its own uses.

Accompanying Measures

While disarmament would be a specific responsibility under the revised UN Charter, it will have many larger implications that cannot be ignored. A major part of the world economy, and its allocation of financial, industrial, and human capital, is devoted to the arms industry and related supply chains, not to mention the number of people presently employed in the armed services of states. People fight for their jobs, and those who are armed professionally, especially, must be offered alternatives before they will willingly give up their present occupations. As arms factories are closed or transformed, those employed need to be offered equivalent or better options. The disarmament process should be accompanied by a major retooling of the economy toward constructive ends, such as improvements in infrastructure, the transition to renewable energy sources, environmental restoration, resettlement of displaced populations, and other major needs.Footnote ⁴⁶ In this respect, the global 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals offer an excellent blueprint to guide reinvestment and retooling of economies worldwide.

As military forces are demobilized or remobilized to work on global common challenges, they should be moved immediately into alternative occupations, with appropriate retraining, making use of existing skills whenever possible.Footnote ⁴⁷ For some, skills from air forces and navies may be directly transferable to their civilian equivalents, and others will readily find a place in the security, emergency, and medical services. Leadership experience should also be easily incorporated into public institutions and the private sector. Since military personnel have always been paid from public funds, without the military contributing to the more productive economy, it should even be possible for the public funding to continue for a reasonable transition, so that financial security can be guaranteed to the personnel and their families. Similarly, communities that have benefited from the presence of military installations will need assistance in adapting their local economies, unless alternative uses for the facilities can be found immediately.