Putin’s Nuclear Threats Show that Jacinda Ardern is Wrong About Nuclear Weapons

“[Prime Minister Ardern] is correct that nuclear weapons arsenals carry with them great risks of widespread destruction. However, the greatest risk lies in committing not to use them.”

The spirit of the United Nations’ Nuclear Non-Proliferation Conference in August contrasts sharply with the reality of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent nuclear threats over the annexation of Ukraine. During the August 1st-26th Conference on the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which is widely held to have failed, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called for a renewal of efforts to achieve global nuclear disarmament in an article in The Guardian. Her commentary, which was published on August 24th, is noteworthy because it is very typical of views expressed in other medium democratic powers, like Italy, Germany, and Spain. Australia, by contrast, has a more sanguine approach to the possibility of having to provide its own security, and Canada has largely followed the United States on this issue.

Prime Minister Ardern begins her Guardian commentary by citing the figure of 355,000 presumably innocent Japanese non-combatants killed by nuclear weapons in the port city of Hiroshima and the military industrial city of Nagasaki in 1945. Prime Minister Ardern sidesteps the fact that these nuclear strikes, in conjunction with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, saved the lives of perhaps millions of Japanese civilians had the United States been compelled to invade Japan.

Imperial Japan was itself engaged in nuclear weapons research, with both a naval and an army program, and it is unimaginable what it would have done with such an arsenal if it had succeeded. It had a robust biological weapons program (Unit 731) conducting full-scale experimentation on Chinese villages, such as Changchun, and with plans for balloon delivery to North America. Tokyo sought to unify Asia through the invasion of China, India, the Russian Far East, Southeast Asia, and Australia; killed approximately ten million Chinese between 1931 and 1945; and egregiously flouted the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Even if one were to resurrect the rightist Japanese argument that Tokyo’s role was to liberate Asian people from European colonization, it would not explain why Filipinos, Indonesians, and the Vietnamese were adamant in not wanting to replace one occupier with another. One would have to engage in legal contortions to see the Japanese people as victims of the government they fought so fanatically to protect. If legal responsibility for initiating an aggressive war could only apply to a dozen or a few hundred government officials, then, absurdly, conducting a defensive war to protect freedom could be prosecuted as a war crime.