DIPLOMACY ДИПЛОМАЦИЯ

A SHIFTING ASIAN NUCLEAR ORDER
believed Washington assurances were credible.
Further, US nuclear weapons provide a useful backstop to Australian security, one which
we should be reluctant to abandon in any event. It’s unrealistic to believe that our security
turns solely upon continental defence. Rather, it turns upon a secure region and a stable,
favourable set of force balances along the Eurasian rimlands. Those balances would be
harder to sustain in the absence of nuclear weapons.
But if nuclear weapons are here to stay, and if Asian nuclear relationships are destined
to become more complicated and – probably – contentious, Australia should do what it can
to make sure that regional deterrence policies don’t become shrill. As this paper has argued,
there’s long been a degree of shrillness to North Korean nuclear policy – softened only a
little by a more responsible pledge at the recent party congress – and it’s unclear whether
Canberra can do much to alter that tone. Pakistan’s nuclear policy, shaped like North Korea’s
on the premise of a considerable power differential with a likely adversary, turns increasingly
upon a promise of early use of nuclear weapons in conflict. Finding ways to draw Pakistan
towards nuclear normalcy will be one of the key challenges of the emerging order.
The US-China relationship constitutes a different sort of problem. Managing the tone of
the relationship is clearly important, but both players sense a flattening of the power gradient
between them, and that makes for a set of new challenges to the current strategic order
and not merely the nuclear one. Both orders seem likely to tangle together: it will be hard to
insulate the US-China nuclear relationship from the broader bilateral strategic one, and vice
versa. Beijing, in particular, having only a thin record of formal nuclear arms control and no
record at all of formal nuclear weapons ceilings and reductions, might well be uncomfortable
with any attempt to move the bilateral relationship from one based on voluntary restraint
to one based on formal commitments. But its willingness to do so seems likely to be an
emerging test of China’s regional leadership.
Australia can’t redesign the nuclear order to its will. But we should do what we can to
support the continuing pre-eminence of deterrence in regional nuclear doctrines, work where
we can to enhance crisis-stability arrangements, and advocate the continuing importance of
the principle of voluntary restraint in Asia’s pre-systemic, pre-managed nuclear order.
Finally, even with such efforts, we must accept that nuclear weapons could spread quickly
in Asia. Worries among US allies about the continued willingness of the US to offer extended
nuclear assurances – something previously taken for granted but now less certain – could
be a particularly important driver of near-term regional proliferation. Such an outcome would
leave Canberra with a series of complex and unattractive choices, not merely over how
to respond to proliferation by US allies in Northeast Asia, but in thinking through what a
fundamental shift in the regional order meant for Australia’s own nuclear identity.
NOTES
1. See, for example, Devin Hagerty, The consequences of nuclear proliferation: lessons from South Asia, MIT
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998.
2. Muthiah Alagappa (ed.), The long shadow: nuclear weapons and security in 21st century Asia, Stanford
University Press, California, 2008, pp. 13–21.
3. Ashley Tellis, ‘Overview’, in A Tellis, AM Denmark, T Tanner (eds), Strategic Asia 2013–14: Asia in the second
nuclear age, National Bureau of Asian Research, Seattle, p. 23.
4. Toby Dalton, Michael Krepon, 2015. ‘Nuclear mainstream’, Dawn, 27 August 2015.
5. The terms ‘extended nuclear deterrence’ and ‘extended nuclear assurance‘ are used here, and throughout
the paper, to refer in particular to the nuclear elements of US extended deterrence and assurance policies.
Washington offers in support of its allies a range of capabilities that deter adversaries and assure friends. Some
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ДИПЛОМАЦИЯ 18/2016