Nuclear deterrence in Asia and the Pacific

Presentation to Inaugural Conference of Asia and the Pacific Policy Society (APPS)/Asia and the Pacific Policy Studies Journal by Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AC QC, The Australian National University, Canberra, 7 September 2012. Sometimes the biggest policy questions of all get less attention than they deserve. So it is with nuclear disarmament, an issue that in earlier decades mobilized hundreds of thousands of activists all over the world, and on which every political leader and senior policymaker had to have some kind of an opinion, but which now barely resonates at all with policymakers or publics. Part of the reason seems to be complacency: the perception that in the post Cold War world nuclear stockpiles are not the threat they may once have been. Another appears to be an ingrained fatalism: the perception that nuclear weapons can't be uninvented, are always going to be with us, and that there is little point in playing Don Quixote. Perhaps most importantly - and in many ways more disconcertingly - there is the perception on which I will focus in this talk: that disarmament is actually undesirable, because nuclear deterrence works. Having wrestled with these issues in a variety of incarnations over the years,  I believe that is critical that all these perceptions be challenged, and nowhere more so than in  Asia and the Pacific, where every nuclear-armed state except the UK and France is a player, and where, unlike anywhere else in the world, stockpiles of nuclear weapons - in China, India and Pakistan, quite apart from what may be happening at a much lower level in North Korea - are believed to be actually growing.