Nuclear Extremists, Militarism, and Arms-Control Conservatism

I rocked up to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade today to deliver remarks at The Public Advisory Committee on Disarmament and Arms Control (PACDAC)—an entity mandated by anti-nuclear legislation in New Zealand from 1987. As far as crowds go, this was a friendly one—plenty of government workers, but ones trying as best they can to advance disarmament and arms control.

Anyone who knows me knows I can’t stand being in government environments. The bland-fanatical art of saying words that mean nothing. The cloistered conservatism of government culture. The necktie as a noose. The contradiction of being an elite who acts like an elite and thinks like an elite but tells himself that he’s a “servant” of the people. Kill me.

Rosa Luxemburg said,

Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.

I never felt more unfree than the moment I started having independent, critical thoughts about foreign policy yet was still trapped in the system as one of its makers. That is not a position you want to find yourself in.

Anyway, my remarks aimed to drive home a single point: The ability to reduce the dangers of nuclear war depends on getting rich-country militarism under control. Focusing on nukes alone will not get it done. Because all of our governments have failed at this, the world is darker and risks getting much darker still. Is there even a bottom?

The Nuclear Extremists are destroying everything and justifying it on the grounds that China is a threat to Western supremacy. The world is a village; the Nuclear Extremists will burn it in order to save it.

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Remarks before The Public Advisory Committee on Disarmament and Arms Control (PACDAC), as delivered (mostly—I had to remove one very spicy paragraph at the end for time).

14 JULY 2026, Wellington

Some of you might be familiar with the late scholar-activist Randy Forsberg. She led the Nuclear Freeze Movement in the 1980s, which played a pretty large role in ending the Cold War. And I want to share a quote from what she wrote in 1984 about the movement she was involved in because her strategic insight sits underneath several of the themes of this panel.

She said,

it has been and will continue to be impossible to make deep cuts in nuclear arsenals until we have come to grips with the problem of ending conventional warfare. Unless the long-term objectives of arms control efforts are substantially expanded and strengthened, arms control negotiations will continue to achieve exactly what they now seek: the bilateral management of a permanent technological arms race.

I’ve been heartened by the Pacific practitioners of disarmament and arms control I’ve met in recent years, but most people who work on arms control today in the US and Asia specifically are doing almost nothing that you could call nuclear restraint. I worked in that world as a policy practitioner, and it was one of the things I became most disillusioned about. It’s actually one of the reasons I find myself here.

The name “arms control” implies you’re creating new regimes and arrangements and entanglements to bridle the most horrific weapon ever made…but the West’s (and East Asia’s) arms controllers are instead presiding over the slow death of existing arms control architecture. It’s become a conservative vocation in the US and East Asia, and I don’t mean that as a complement.

This audience is already well acquainted with the facts, but let me estrange you from them slightly. The Trump presidency has been a permissive environment for nuclear extremists in the US to kill arms control as we know it. In 2002, they got George W. Bush to kill the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Under Trump 1.0, they killed the INF Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty.

With Trump’s announcement on October 30 last year ordering the resumption of nuclear testing, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is under threat. And the day after that announcement, on October 31, 2025, the US, for the first time, was the only “no” vote on an annual UN First Committee resolution on the global moratorium on nuclear testing.

And then just a few months ago, on February, 5, they’ve now killed New START treaty with Russia too.

I worked with some of these nuclear extremists in a past life—they’ve spent decades wanting all this. A bunch of these dudes—and they’re mostly dudes—served in the first Trump administration, and they argued to resume nuclear testing back in 2019. Back then, their argument was that a rapid nuclear test—a bolt from the blue—would put pressure on Russia and China to undertake a three-way arms control process. That’s a farce, and the irony of that is that these selfsame nuclear extremists opposed a trilateral arms control process too!

Ultimately, these folks are aiming to kill the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and, by a thousand cuts, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty too. The nuclear extremists have a project of seeking American primacy in a world where that’s no longer possible. And because of that, they want to be totally unencumbered, and they don’t care what consequences others might have to eat in the process.

We’re living in Randy Forsberg’s nightmare—and it’s because her most basic insight has been lost to history.

Conventional arms buildups and the risks associated with nuclear weapons are mutually constituted. None of our governments are operating foreign policy on the basis of that understanding. And that’s a problem because if you do not get conventional militarism under control, you will not make any durable progress toward arms control, to say nothing of nuclear disarmament.

We find ourselves in 2026 feeling like the NPT is under threat. And how could it not be when all these other regimes of nuclear restraint are either dead or suffering puncture wounds from so many violations of the basic premise of nuclear restraint? The health of the NPT depends on its embeddedness in a global regime of nuclear restraint, the crown jewel of which is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The NPT feels fragile because everything other than the TPNW is being crushed under the weight of militarism.

It’s not a coincidence that world military spending is up for 11 years in a row. That the US has unilaterally abrogated all these arms control arrangements in parallel with spiking its own military spending to something like 38% of global spending. It’s not a coincidence that, in that context, China is expanding its nuclear capabilities. And the increase in Chinese warheads and Chinese missile silos followed—not predated—America’s $1.7 trillion in nuclear modernization, which for what it’s worth, started in the Obama administration that I worked for.

And it’s also not a coincidence that the South Pacific Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone is much smaller than it might be because the Micronesian region is mostly excluded from it. Micronesia is saturated with American military installations, forces, and capabilities, including nuclear weapons. Micronesian governments are mostly not part of the Treaty because the US won’t allow it. So by a defiant miracle, you have the Marshall Islands signing the Treaty of Rarotonga in March last year, but that was before Trump’s nuclear testing announcement on October 30, and this US administration will not allow the Marshall Islands to ratify the Treaty.

And you ignore what I’m saying here at our collective peril. China’s submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) test over the Pacific last week got a lot of press, a lot of government statements criticizing China—and rightly so. But what good is condemnation without explanation? The US uses its military dominance of the Pacific to plan an essentially unwinnable war against China, and in service of those war preparations, the US sets off 5-10 ICBMs and SLBMs in the Marshall Islands every year. If you don’t want Chinese militarism to reach the Pacific—and I sure as hell don’t—you can’t have the Pacific be a site for American militarism and Australian militarism and eventually New Zealand militarism.

We have been paying a price for ignoring Randy Forsberg’s insight: Reducing the risks associated with nuclear weapons requires reducing conventional arms buildups and militarization.

And this is why I think we (New Zealand) are making a massive mistake by ingratiating ourselves with a declining superpower that’s no longer hegemonic, that no longer provides global public goods, and that’s throwing off new levels of violence and flagrant war crimes every month. And we (New Zealand) are using what resources and diplomatic capital we have to morally underwrite—to legitimate and collaborate with—a predatory, revisionist power of the first order.

So what is to be done?

There’s more I could say about this, but to put it perhaps undiplomatically, if you recognize that the risks of nuclear war are bound up with processes of militarization and geopolitical rivalry, you would be a fool to sign up to being a force multiplier, to sign a military space cooperation agreement, to agree to a minerals extraction “partnership” that pumps your natural resources directly into America’s war machine. You’d be a fool to depend on that country’s technology solutions.

And the New Zealand Defence Force would be wrongfooted with the goal of arms control and disarmament if its primary drive was “remilitarization” and acquiring naval capabilities that have no real function other than warfighting against New Zealand’s largest trading partner.

Nuclear dangers are growing as a symptom of the global North’s military solutionism, and America’s rivals have been reacting in kind and will continue to do so. And that’s not in New Zealand’s interest, and that’s not in the interests of a Pacific peace.

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