The growth and possession of WMD has seriously undermined international security. Discuss. (2008, 60 Marks)
Weapons of mass destruction (WMD), meaning nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons, kill indiscriminately and on a scale no battlefield logic can contain. Whether possessing them has undermined security or underwritten it is the oldest argument of the nuclear age. The best answer is that WMD have made great-power war rarer while making every other kind of insecurity more dangerous and more unequal.
How WMD undermine security
- Existential risk and near-misses: the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) and the Able Archer war scare (1983) show how close deterrence came to failing. Scott D. Sagan (The Limits of Safety, 1993) argues that complex, tightly coupled command systems will eventually produce an accident.
- Arms races: the arsenal peaked at about 70,300 warheads in 1986, and a new build-up has begun. China has roughly doubled its stockpile since 2020, New START lapsed in February 2026, and world military spending reached $2,887 billion in 2025 (SIPRI).
- The stability–instability paradox (Glenn H. Snyder): a nuclear ceiling invites violence below it. Cross-border terrorism, Kargil (1999) and the four-day India–Pakistan clash of May 2025 all took place under that ceiling.
- Nuclear coercion: Russia’s signalling since 2022 has shielded its war in Ukraine, a state that gave up its inherited weapons for the Budapest Memorandum (1994) assurances.
- Erosion of taboos: the Syrian regime’s sarin attack at Ghouta (2013) and the Novichok poisonings of Sergei Skripal (2018) and Alexei Navalny (2020) show chemical weapons still in use. Aum Shinrikyo’s sarin attack in Tokyo (1995) and the A. Q. Khan network brought in non-state actors.
- Biological weakness: the Biological Weapons Convention (1972) has no verification body, and advances in synthetic biology lower the barrier to entry.
- Counter-proliferation as a cause of war: Iraq was invaded in 2003 over stockpiles the Iraq Survey Group never found. Iran’s safeguarded sites were bombed in June 2025, and the US–Israeli war that began on 28 February 2026 has turned a proliferation dispute into a regional war.
The case that they have underwritten security
- The Long Peace (John Lewis Gaddis): no war between great powers since 1945. Kenneth N. Waltz credits the certainty of catastrophic cost, which makes leaders cautious.
- Regimes work: the OPCW verified the destruction of all 72,304 tonnes of declared chemical stockpiles by July 2023, and in July 2026 restored post-Assad Syria’s rights under the Convention after its new authorities began cooperating with inspectors. The NPT has 191 parties, and warhead numbers are down by more than four-fifths.
- Taboos hold: Nina Tannenwald’s nuclear taboo and Richard M. Price’s chemical-weapons taboo explain eight decades of nuclear non-use, even against non-nuclear adversaries.
Whose security?
Post-colonial critics note that “WMD” became a selective label: legitimate in P-5 hands, criminal elsewhere, the order Jaswant Singh called “nuclear apartheid” (1998). India’s record cuts both ways. It keeps a no-first-use, credible-minimum posture, destroyed its declared chemical stockpile under the CWC and passed the WMD Act (2005) to implement Resolution 1540; yet it lives with the stability–instability paradox on two fronts.
Conclusion
WMD have not produced the general war once feared, so “seriously undermined” overstates the case for great-power relations and understates it for everyone else. The risk is low in probability but catastrophic in consequence, and it now runs through regional dyads, non-state actors and a collapsing arms-control architecture. Security rests less on the weapons than on the eroding norms that restrain them.