The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing the inadequacy of decades-old concepts pretending to be indispensable for both national and international security. The virus does not respect any borders, political views, economic strength, or ambition as superior. As in previous pandemics, death is the great equalizer.
The pandemic has underlined that security, whether on the national or international scale, is always human security: the security of people living in a certain state or, more broadly, on our globe. The fallacy of juxtaposing human and national security has become evident.
Human beings face many different dangers. Climate change and natural catastrophes rank high among them. Only one of them - and certainly not the most likely - is a military attack by another state. While governments should strive to prepare for all possible threats to the security of their populations, hundreds of thousands of people are now paying the price for a disproportionate concentration on the military dimension. COVID-19 shows that more often than not, arms cannot buy security. And certainly not the most costly ones: nuclear weapons. According to figures publicly available, in 2019 alone, $73 billion was spent on nuclear weapons worldwide. Only a tiny fraction of this spent on the healthcare sector would have made our societies better prepared and more resilient to the coronavirus. It has been calculated that for the UK’s share of nuclear weapons-related expenditures, 100.000 intensive care unit beds, 30.000 ventilators, 50.000 nurses, and 40.000 doctors could have been financed.
In a world suffering from COVID-19, it is beyond any doubt that investment in health should be a priority. Furthermore, the trillions of dollars necessary for shoring up severely-hit economies and sustaining millions of unemployed people will have to be repaid over the next years. Thus, public expenditures will have to be cut in some sectors. This makes spending billions on arms programs every year an obvious candidate. The ongoing modernisation programs of nuclear weapons alone may reach trillions of dollars over the coming years. Insistence on a certain budget percentage for defence or continuing the qualitative arms race seem out of touch with the post-COVID reality. It remains to be seen whether rationality will prevail here.
The lack of rationality of political leaders has contributed to making COVID-19 such a severe pandemic. Academia and the WHO have warned already for years that a new zoonotic disease or a new strain of a known one will spread sooner or later. In spite of those exhortations to prepare better for a possible pandemic, the preparations undertaken were at best insufficient. An international organization always depends on the cooperation of its member states starting, from receiving relevant data speedily to sending missions. A late response will delay and hamper effectively addressing a pandemic. An international Lessons Learned exercise after COVID-19 will be essential and will demand reinforced international cooperation to be better prepared for the next potential pandemic. An important aspect should be focusing on improved international cooperation in the early detection of a dangerous virus and its spread. A possible area to study might be setting up an international monitoring system for the surveillance of viruses and other biological agents.
A highly successful example of an international organization achieving just that is to be found in the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). The organisation has built up its International Monitoring System (IMS) to provide a global surveillance system regarding nuclear tests. The IMS is complimented by a global communications structure and the International Data Center, which ensures the rapid dissemination of relevant information to all State Parties. This phenomenal achievement has proved to be helpful beyond its main function of detecting nuclear tests to the speedy identification of earthquakes leading to the prevention of tsunamis and the provision of rapid assistance. An approach modeled on the CTBTO for viruses might help to depoliticize the issue and allow for far greater resilience through international cooperation.
It is a trait of human nature that we do not like to stand out by delivering bad news on issues in our areas of responsibility. A well-rehearsed procedure to collect and swiftly transfer relevant data in a neutral way to a competent, impartial international organization could limit the risk of suppression and speed up the distribution of relevant information to all countries. This could in turn enable the adoption of the necessary precautionary measures and preparations as early as possible. Blaming certain groups or one other for being the culprit of a pandemic has happened many times in history but has never made the world a safer place.
In addition to this lack of rationality in preventing a pandemic, a number of political leaders have not proven adept at taking rational decisions in order to give absolute priority to saving lives. A political or sometimes personal agenda, such as a short-term advantage over locked-up economies or success at elections or military parades, was sometimes prioritized over the advice of scientific experts. This behaviour jeopardized human lives and led to increased damage to the economy. It is most disconcerting that such irrational behaviour of political leaders often happened in nuclear-armed states. Similar irrational behaviour would pose an existential risk in a crisis that might lead to the use of nuclear weapons. Then the number of victims of wrong decisions would not be counted in the tens of thousands but in the millions of people. The concept of nuclear deterrence that nuclear armed states still adhere to presupposes the total rationality of their political decision makers. The evidence of the corona crisis shows, however, that this cannot be relied upon, which in turn demonstrates the lack of credibility of the very concept of nuclear deterrence. Other reasons why nuclear deterrence cannot provide security in today’s world exist as well: the impact of cyber and hypersonic speed making retaliation unreliable or increased multipolarity, just to name a few. In the post-COVID world, a serious discussion on how to get away from basing national security on such an outdated concept is overdue.
In the history of mankind, pandemics have come and gone time and again. Statisticians warned that the fact that 100 years since the Spanish flu no dramatic worldwide pandemic has broken out does not mean that this would be the last in modern times. On the contrary, with every year the probability of an outbreak has increased. But decision makers preferred to look the other way and were then surprised when COVID-19 came, reacting mostly too little and too late. Statisticians also underline that the fact that no nuclear weapon has been used for over 75 years does not mean that the probability has decreased close to zero. On the contrary, the longer the time without a nuclear weapon explosion, the higher the probability of one in the next years, whether unintentionally or intentionally. In spite of a very small margin of probability for each nuclear warhead, the present global arsenal of approximately 13.400 carries a considerable risk. Here too decision makers look the other way instead of intensifying nuclear disarmament and taking risk reduction measures such as de-alerting or no-first-use policies. The lack of preventive measures against the use of nuclear weapons would lead to a health crisis of a magnitude that could not be managed, even after taking the best preparatory measures. The best window into the inhumane effects of a single atomic bomb might be gleaned from the devastation and lingering effects for generations inflicted on innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki 75 years ago. And yet these two bombs were a fraction of the size of the thousands of warheads that make up today’s arsenals.
Experts assume that COVID-19 may return in the form of a slightly modified virus, but other pathogenic substances might also cause old or new forms of pandemics. Technological progress might well allow states or terrorist groups to manufacture a synthetic pathogen. As in the case of nuclear weapons, a confined, localized use of a synthetic pathogen as a weapon would not be possible, so the user state or terrorist group would inflict damage on its own people. Since the attack by a sect in Tokyo many years ago, we have proof that this does not scare away some people. Others believe that nuclear weapons are usable weapons. The catastrophic humanitarian consequences are evident, yet there is no guarantee that such a weapon would never be used. After COVID-19, work on strengthening the biological weapons convention now seems more urgent then before.
The fundamental question is whether our worldview reflects our real needs or just our preferences. Do we want to see the world as a zero-sum game between two powers – absurd in a multipolar world – where geopolitical and economic competition determine the course of history? Such a worldview is appealing to our archaic instincts that our tribe is superior to others, but how can it contribute to the solution of big global security issues such as climate change, nuclear weapons, or the solution to the present COVID-19 crisis? The clear answer is that it does not – it only leads to a confrontational spirit that hinders necessary worldwide cooperation.
There is hardly a better example than COVID-19 for the need for international cooperation and multilateralism. As long as the disease is rampant and the world population remains unvaccinated, we will see further outbreaks that will spread again. Effectively addressing this danger necessitates multilateral cooperation that goes beyond states and international organisations. A multi-stakeholder model that also encompasses science, industry, academia, and civil society is the most effective way of working together in the 21st century. The platforms for such cooperation are multilateral fora and international organisations. This applies equally to addressing the nuclear weapons threat. Confining the discussion to military security specialists and diplomats of nuclear armed states prevents a comprehensive and more realistic view. Since it concerns the security of all states and ultimately the survival of mankind, the stakeholders are universal.
At a time when most nuclear disarmament treaties are ended and multilateral negotiations are not taking place at all, it is time to look for a new impetus. Will some of the lessons from the COVID-19 crisis also be applied in disarmament affairs?
Ambassador Dr. Thomas Hajnoczi graduated as a doctor of law from the University of Vienna in 1977 and is the Director for Disarmament, Arms Control, and Non-proliferation at the Austrian Federal Ministry for Europe and International Affairs - a position he held already in the 1990s. Among his many posts over the years, Hajnoczi served as Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York, Ambassador to the Kingdom of Norway, Director for Security Policy in the Ministry, Permanent Representative of Austria to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office at Geneva. He has been closely involved in several multilateral humanitarian disarmament processes, including the negotiations for the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.