“How easy is it to talk about peace and disarmament today when the world is busy rearming?”

That’s the question that Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s biggest selling daily paper, asked itself, its readers and me in a recent article. About me, it said, “SIPRI’s director says he is a born optimist, but when DN meets him, he describes the world in black and dark grey.”

And yet at the end, the reporter, Ewa Stenberg, managed to find some light amid the dark.

NOTE: This post relays some of the points in the interview with me in Dagens Nyheter on 6 January. It’s my translation, courtesy of google translate and a little polishing, plus a number of comments I’ve added on top.

The article set out my list of woes. It started with “The toxic geopolitics, growing social inequalities and unfairness, the environmental and climate crisis, the horrific war in Ukraine,” and went on, “And the war in Ukraine is just one of more than 50 wars raging now.”

Armed conflicts, refugees and war deaths

I referenced the horror of Gaza since the brutal attack by Hamas on 7 October, of course. There, as in Ukraine, pathways towards a conclusion, whether through a peace settlement or by victory for either side, are elusive and obscure. And we can see a significant risk of the war spreading: violence on the West Bank has risen dramatically, there is fighting on the Israel-Lebanon border as well as Israeli strikes into Lebanon, and from Yemen attacks are being launched on shipping in the Red Sea.

I went on to talk briefly about Sudan, where six million people have been forced to flee recently, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there are seven million displaced people.

Worldwide, the number of refugees and displaced people has more than doubled since 2010. The number of war deaths in the second decade of this century was twice what it was in the first, and on current trends will more than double in this decade.

There now seems to be little capacity in the international system for what used to be known as conflict management. Which meant restraining the parties, dampening the issues, limiting the violence, and nudging (sometimes pushing) the sides towards negotiations and at least to an edgy peace, and, from there, sometimes towards what looked like it could be a more-or-less lasting peace. Whatever the shortcomings of those outcomes and of the international system that produced them, what we see today is weep-inducingly worse.

Arms control and disarmament

To that list, we can add that almost every arms control agreement between the US and Russia has failed. Only one remains, that of strategic nuclear weapons (New START) (sort of). The treaty, agreed in 2010 and entering force in 2011, was limping towards expiry in the final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, then was resuscitated in the first days of Joe Biden’s administration, in February 2021, when he and Russia’s Vladimir Putin quickly agreed on a five-year extension. But now…?

If that treaty were to be replaced by a similar one, perhaps with further reductions in nuclear forces, Russia and the United States should have already started negotiating on it, but they are not doing so. Instead, the Russian president has withdrawn his country from implementing New START, amid threatening words on nuclear weapons and tactical nuclear deployments in Belarus. On the other side, Poland has said it wants American nuclear weapons stationed in its country for defence.

Bright spots?

DN asked me if I can see bright spots in this darkness. I answered that I could: “The  effort to prevent nuclear proliferation remains a relative success story. The number of nuclear weapons in the world is one-sixth of what it was in the mid-1980s. And when the Non-Proliferation Treaty entered force in 1970, there were five recognized nuclear weapons powers and one secret one – Israel. There were fears that there would be another 15. Five decades later there have been only three new members of the nuclear weapons club.”

Sadly, I then had to qualify myself: “But I must unfortunately add that we see signs that the number of operational nuclear weapons is increasing.”

So the excellent reporter pressed me again, along the lines of, “Bright spots, please!”

“What is most encouraging,” I said, “is that awareness of the problems is growing. A few years ago, a number of experienced diplomats and peace researchers sat here at a conference and agreed that the most worrying thing of all was that people don’t worry. Now that is changing.”

Part of the evidence I presented is media interest in SIPRI’s research and data. Measured by the number of press, TV and radio reports, we receive 3 to 4 four times as much coverage for our data and major reports as some 6-7 years ago.

It reminded me of the anti-nuclear movement back in the 1980s. “If the public is not involved,” I suggested, “there will be no disarmament. Public opinion is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition. We also need media that disseminate relevant information and political leaders with vision.”

When that all came together in the 1980s, the process began and eventually tens of thousands of nuclear weapons were scrapped.

What went wrong?

DN asked me when the disarmament spiral started to slow down. I went back to 2002, when the US left the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that had been signed 30 years before. It led Russia to believe that the US was developing a new generation of nuclear weapons. Accusations and counter-accusations of cheating started from there and though there were still active negotiations on strategic arms control, the momentum began to slacken.

What now, what next?

And then came the difficult questions.

Are nuclear weapons always wrong? Can’t they raise the bar for war?

My view is that, since the nuclear genie was let out of the bottle, it has become inevitable that great powers have nuclear weapons. But it is not inevitable that medium-sized countries and states in decline such as France and Great Britain should have them. There it’s mostly a matter of pride.

Next difficult question: Does that mean the goal of a nuclear free world is not realistic?

My response kind of ducks the challenge: I think the world should strive for the lowest possible number of nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia possess nearly 10,000 of the world’s 12,000 nuclear warheads; they have considerable room to reduce their arsenals.

Next one: What about military spending and conventional weapons? Is increasing military spending always wrong?

World military spending is at an all-time high. It went past two trillion dollars in 2021 and stood at 2.2 trillion in 2022, compared to 1.5 trillion dollars at the end of the Cold War (NB: figures in current prices – i.e., the effects of inflation have been removed).

This reflects the increasingly insecure nature of world politics; the graph of military spending is like an old-fashioned temperature chart at the foot of a hospital bed – these days, the world is in a fever that’s getting worse. But that’s the global view. Taken case by case, it is easy to see the logic of increased military spending for many states, such as those that see how Russia has violated international law during its war against Ukraine.

Last tough question (last one this time round, anyway): What happens next in Europe?

This is the big unanswered question, the one for which we need wisdom, energy, focus and clear vision both of current problems and future possibilities. One of the major challenges for Europe’s political leaders is how Europe will be able to live peacefully and in prosperity alongside Russia in the future.

We need pragmatic leaders who can still cooperate in fundamental areas such as health, the environment and trade. We can’t get rid of Russia, can’t just make it go away.

“We are forced to live side by side or die side by side. These are the options.”