Security: Threats and Security Analysis - Essay Example

To be successful, such efforts must be in harmony with continuing power changes in the global system (Burke, 2009). This essay critically analyses both the desirability and the feasibility of nuclear disarmament. Overview The aftermath of the Cold War greatly influences nuclear weapon strategies until now. Especially worth mentioning are the persistence of nuclear deterrence principles and threat-based strategies. Insofar as particular threats are no longer adequate to rationalise the continuation of aggressive nuclear positions, they were perhaps required to fight off the unknown.

Within the Cold War perspective, the unpredictability of the future should be dealt with by the most potent weapons (Acheson, 2010). Eventually, 9/11 pushed the threat of terrorism at the forefront; Saddam was made an unequalled threat; and Iran turned out to be a powerful catalyst of threat-based strategies. The principles of nuclear deterrence thus lasted longer than global competition and conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States (Karp, 1992). The vision of a world without nuclear weapons raises a perennial question: is it feasible?

However, there is another similarly vital question that has to be addressed: what is a good alternative to nuclear power as a means to ensure the safety of the people and the security of the world? Making the world free of nuclear weapons is desirable as long as a more secure and peaceful world is truly created. How can this be made possible? Several of the barriers to progress stem from the problems of reconciling the interests of states, but others are rooted in wider disagreements in the U.S. about the desirability and feasibility of nuclear disarmament.

An agreement on such issues is absent. Oppositions to nuclear disarmament are not recent, but they have resurfaced with remarkable vitality in response to Obama’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons (Kelleher & Reppy, 2011). Is it really desirable to get rid of nuclear weapons? There are arguments against nuclear disarmament which are based on the idea that nuclear weapons have contributed to the maintenance of peace and order by proving to the world powers that confrontation among them would be very damaging that it could not fulfil any valuable political goal.

Within this perspective, nuclear disarmament would simply re-create opportunities for more destructive, far-reaching wars, unless the global order were efficiently restructured as to put an end to war itself (Freedman, 2009). The current state of affairs, if it could be pacified or stabilised, would be more favourable than the pursuit of eradication. However, this idea received serious criticisms. The present situation is unlikely to be stable in time, for a selective nuclear order will only be brief; more countries will desire to have their own nuclear weapons, resulting in persistent crises as states with nuclear weapons try to deter other states from developing nuclear power of their own (Chowdhuri, 2004).

Another argument is that the earlier experiences with nuclear weapons do not give guarantee that the global community would be more peaceful and secure in the long run with a larger number of nuclear states. It is a fact that nuclear weapons have been absent in warfare after 1945, but there have been conflicts wherein the likelihood that nuclear weapons could be utilised has seemed to be threateningly imminent (Ritchie, 2012). A