LProponents of nuclear weapons claim that current international tensions highlight their “centrality”, and that the “nuclear deterrence regains its full meaning”. This is a distorted view of reality. If nuclear weapons allow Russia to attack sovereign non-nuclear-weapon states, this is due to the intrinsically terrorist nature of nuclear weapons. By legitimizing the concept of a defense whose “keystone” is nuclear deterrence, programmed to commit massacres of civilians, even by illicitly invoking self-defense, how can we not make this “supreme” weapon attractive to the predatory countries?
Recent weeks have seen the resurgence of unqualified pleas in favor of nuclear deterrence, in reaction to the tensions caused by Russian aggression against Ukraine. Commenting on his latest work, Pax atomica?in an interview in the worldBruno Tertrais asserts that “ [l]he hardening of the international context makes us rediscover the centrality of nuclear weapons.”
After minimizing Russian threats, consistent with the doctrine of deterrence, including the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, he cites the increase in the number of patrols by French nuclear submarines, the increase in Chinese arsenals, “the maturation of Indian, Pakistani and North Korean nuclear forces”and the approach of the nuclear threshold by Iran.
Does he conclude that the nuclear risk has become higher than during the Cold War, as the UN Secretary General and many leaders and experts have declared? No, he repeats the mantra of nuclear deterrence: if the great powers no longer wage war against each other, it is thanks to nuclear weapons, because they “continues to play – in a risky manner, of course – a stabilizing role by making large-scale military confrontation between the States which have it extremely improbable, because it is too costly”.
An increasingly isolated reassuring speech
In his column published on February 7 on the website of the world, Sylvie Kauffmann wonders if Ukraine would not have been attacked by Russia if it had kept “its” nuclear weapons. Certainly the pressure from the three depositaries of the non-proliferation treaty (United States, United Kingdom and Russia) was strong on Ukraine, which hosted some 4,000 warheads. But, at no time has Ukraine exercised the slightest control over these weapons for which Moscow has always kept the codes, and Kiev could never have even threatened to use them in defense against aggression, not to mention the costs, technology and fissile materials for their maintenance, which were not within its reach.
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