New START

The nuclear challenge today and tomorrow

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

On 6 and 9 August this year, we will mark the 80th anniversaries of the two occasions on which nuclear weapons have ever been used in war – the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.* Humanity has perpetrated and experienced a great deal of harm in the past eight decades but nuclear weapons have not been used again. Despite today’s widespread and intensifying perception of nuclear risk, the nuclear taboo survives.

That does not mean the nuclear problem has been solved, of course. It is “an encouraging fact”, as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee put it when giving the 2024 award to the movement of Japanese nuclear survivors (the hibakusha), Nihon Hidankyo. But not more than that. And honouring the hibakusha in this way was also intended as a wake-up call to those many people who until recently regarded nucleapons as yesterday’s problem.

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The worries of a peace researcher

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

“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.

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New START: Putin suspends Russian participation

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On 21 February, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would suspend its participation in New START, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the world’s two nuclear superpowers: Russia and the United States.

This is a disappointing, unimaginative but unsurprising step from which nobody benefits.

And from which we all may lose. Including Russia.

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The arms control agendas of 2021: some reflections

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The extension of the US-Russian New START agreement on strategic nuclear weapons was achieved through the exchange of two sets of diplomatic notes between the respective governments, on 26 January and 3 February. The process was super-straightforward. Both President Putin of Russia and Joe Biden while US President-elect made clear they would each favour extension. The day after inauguration President Biden officially confirmed the position. A few days later, it was done. This was the lowest of low-hanging fruit. Good to have gotten it out of the way (and stupid that the previous administration let it go down to the wire) but now the real work starts.

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Extending New START

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So Joe Biden, as anticipated, has moved quickly to arrange with Russia the extension of the New START bilateral nuclear arms control agreement. Signed in 2010, taking effect in 2011, and due to expire on 5 February this year, the treaty permits extension for up to five years by mutual consent.

The good people at Deutsche Welle asked me the two key questions – “Is this good news?” “Why”? And let me answer them on their 8 o’clock bulletin yesterday evening.

For a more extended discussion, Jan Eliasson and I put out our thoughts earlier this week. In brief, as I argued in my previous post, in a tough period with a complex set of issues, the approach on arms control of the new US President is welcome. He faces some demanding tasks. And the first signs are positive.

Arms control in 2021

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

There are so many crucial items on the global agenda that one struggles to keep up (though I do wonder whether there really are more now than there used to be or does it just feel that way?). Covid-19 and its economic consequences, the likely increase in extreme poverty and hunger, climate change and the rest of the compound environmental crisis, the attack on democracy in the world’s richest and most powerfully armed state, rising inequality, toxic geopolitics, intractable armed conflicts. And more. This does not seem to be a happy age that we are living through.

In this (rather lengthy) post, I focus on prospects for arms control in 2021. The big challenge is how to make progress against such an unpromising backdrop.

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SIPRI Yearbook 2019: Nuclear weapons and other key trends

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

The SIPRI Yearbook 2019 is now available on line. It registers key data in the world of peace and security in 2018 and establishes some of the basic indicators that let us track and assess the trends. It is not a comfortable picture.

You can get a quick take on it from my shorthand overview below and/or from the latest short film in our Peace Points series.

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Arms control: scanning the landscape

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Even before President Trump announced the USA would withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 (see my last blog post on this), the arms control landscape did not present a happy picture. Experts from SIPRI and from the Russian Institute, IMEMO, met in October and discussed the problem. The occasion marked the 25th anniversary of the SIPRI Yearbook being published in Russian, thanks to translation effected through IMEMO, together with a Russian supplement produced by IMEMO. We captured some of the key themes in this short film in SIPRI’s Spotlight series.

The crumbling architecture of arms control

/ Dan Smith / 8 Comments

At a political rally on Saturday 20 October President Trump announced that the US will withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987. This confirms what has steadily unfolded over the last couple of years: the architecture of US-Russian nuclear arms control is crumbling. Continue reading →