Why nuclear proliferation is good

Small nuclear powers will neither have them nor need them. Lesser nuclear states might deploy, say, ten real weapons and ten dummies, while permitting other countries to infer that the numbers are larger. The adversary need only believe that some warheads may survive his attack and be visited on him. That belief should not be hard to create without making command and control unreliable. All nuclear countries must live through a time when their forces are crudely designed.

All countries have so far been able to control them. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Even if they buy the weapons, they will have to hire technicians to maintain and control them. We do not have to wonder whether they will take good care of their weapons. They have every incentive to do so. Hiding nuclear weapons and keeping them under control are tasks for which the ingenuity of numerous states is adequate.

Nor are means of delivery difficult to devise or procure. Ports can be torpedoed by small boats lying off shore. Moreover, a thriving arms trade in ever more sophisticated military equipment provides ready access to what may be wanted, including planes and missiles suited nuclear warhead delivery. Lesser nuclear states can pursue deterrent strategies effectively. Deterrence requires the ability to inflict unacceptable damage on another country.

To deter, a country need not appear to be able to destroy a fourth to a half of another country, although in some cases that might be easily done. And what would be left of Israel if Tel Aviv and Haifa were destroyed? The weak can deter one another.

But can the weak deter the strong? The population and industry of most States concentrate in a relatively small number of centres. This is true of the Soviet Union. Geoffrey Kemp in concluded that China would probably be able to strike on that scale. And, I emphasize again, China need only appear to be able to do it. A low probability of carrying a highly destructive attack home is sufficient for deterrence.

A force of an imprecisely specifiable minimum capability is nevertheless needed. In a study, Justin Galen pseud. He estimates that China has 60 to 80 medium-range and 60 to 80 intermediate-range missiles of doubtful reliability and accuracy and 80 obsolete bombers. But surely Russian leaders reason the other way around. Despite inaccuracies, a few Chinese missiles may hit Russian cities, and some bombers may get through. Not much is required to deter. What political-military objective is worth risking Vladivostock, Novosibirsk.

Prevention and pre-emption are difficult games because the costs are so high if the games are not perfectly played. Inhibitions against using nuclear forces for such attacks are strong, although one cannot say they are absolute. Some of the inhibitions are simply human.

Can country A find justification for a preventive or pre-emptive strike against B if B, in acquiring nuclear weapons, is imitating A? Awesome acts are hard to perform.

Some of the inhibitions are political. The Credibility of Small Deterrent Forces. The first is physical. Will such countries be able to construct and protect a deliverable force? We have found that they can readily do so. The second is psychological. Will an adversary believe that retaliation threatened will be carried out?

Deterrent threats backed by second-strike nuclear forces raise the expected costs of war to such heights that war becomes unlikely. But deterrent threats may not be credible. In a world where two or more countries can make them, the prospect of mutual devastation makes it difficult, or irrational, to execute threats should the occasion for doing so arise. Would it not be senseless to risk suffering further destruction once a deterrent force had failed to deter?

Why retaliate once a threat to do so has failed? Instead, in retaliating, one may prompt the enemy to unleash more warheads. The Soviet Union, some feared, might believe that the United States would be self-deterred. One earlier solution to the problem was found in Thomas Sche! No state can know for sure that another state will refrain from retaliating even when retaliation would be irrational. Bernard Brodie put the thought more directly, while avoiding the slippery notion of rationality.

To ask why a country should carry out its deterrent threat once deterrence has failed is to ask the wrong question. The question suggests that an aggressor may attack believing that the attacked country may not retaliate. This invokes the conventional logic that analysts find so hard to forsake. In a conventional world, a country can sensibly attack if it believes that success is probable.

In a nuclear world, a country cannot sensibly attack unless it believes that success is assured. An attacker is deterred even if he believes only that the attacked may retaliate.

One may nevertheless wonder, as Americans recently have, whether retaliatory threats remain credible if the strategic forces of the attacker are superior to those of the attacked. Given second-strike capabilities, it is not the balance of forces but the courage to use them that counts. The balance or imbalance of strategic forces affects neither the calculation of danger nor the question of whose will is the stronger.

Second-strike forces have to be seen in absolute terms. In answering these questions, we can learn something from the experience of the last three decades. The United States and the Soviet Union limited and modulated their provocative acts, the more carefully so when major values for one side or the other were at issue. This can be seen both in what they have and in what they have not done.

The United States, to take another example, could fight for years on a large scale in South-East ASia because neither success nor failure mattered much internationally. Victory would not have made the world one of American hegemony. Defeat would not have made the world one of Russian hegemony. No vital interest of either great power was at stake, as both Kissinger and Brezhnev made clear at the time. One can fight without fearing escalation only where little is at stake.

And that is where the deterrent does not deter. Actions at the periphery can safely be bolder than actions at the centre. In contrast, where much is at stake for one side, the other side moves with care. Trying to win where winning would bring the central balance into question threatens escalation and becomes too risky to contemplate.

The United States is circumspect when East European crises impend. Thus Secretary of State Dulles assured the Soviet Union when Hungarians rebelled in October of that we would not interfere with efforts to suppress them. Thus her probes in Berlin have been tentative, reversible, and ineffective.

Strikingly, the long border between East and West Europe—drawn where borders earlier proved unstable—has been free even of skirmishes in all of the years since the Second World War.

Both of the nuclear great powers become watchful and wary when events occur that may get out of control. The strikes by Polish workmen that began in August of provide the most recent illustration of this. The Problem of Extended Deterrence. How far from the homeland does deterrence extend?

One answers that question by defining the conditions that must obtain if deterrent threats are to be credited. First, the would-be attacker must be made to see that the deterrer considers the interests at stake to be vital ones. Nuclear weapons, however, strongly incline them to grope for de facto agreement on the answer rather than to fight over it. Second, political stability must prevail in the area that the deterrent is intended to cover.

It the threat to a regime is in good part from internal factions, then an outside power may risk supporting g one of them even in the face of deterrent threats. The credibility of a deterrent force requires both that interests be seen to be vital and that it is the attack from outside that threatens them.

Given these conditions, the would-be attacker provides both the reason to retaliate and the target for retaliation. Deterrence gains in credibility the more highly valued the interests covered seem to be. The problem of stretching a deterrent, which has so agitated the western alliance, is not a problem for lesser nuclear states. Their problem is to protect not others but themselves. Many have feared that lesser nuclear states would be the first to break the nuclear taboo and that they would use their nuclear weapons irresponsibly.

I expect just the opposite. Weak states find it easier than strong states to establish their credibility. Not only will they not be trying to stretch their deterrent forces to cover others, but also their vulnerability to conventional attacks lends credence to their nuclear threats.

Because in a conventional war they can lose so much so fast, it is easy to believe that they will unleash a deterrent force even at the risk of receiving a nuclear blow in return.

With deterrent forces, the party that is absolutely threatened prevails. Use of nuclear weapons by lesser states will come only if survival is at stake. And this should be called not irresponsible but responsible use. An opponent who attacks what is unambiguously mine risks suffering great distress if they have second-strike forces. This statement has important implications for both the deterrer and the deterred. Where territorial claims are shadowy and disputed, deterrent writs do not run.

As Steven J. Establishing the credibility of a deterrent force requires moderation of territorial claims on the part of the would-be deterrer. For modest states, weapons whose very existence works strongly against their use are just what is wanted. In a nuclear world, conservative would-be attackers will be prudent, but will all would-be attackers be conservative? A new Hitler is not unimaginable. After all, the western democracies had not come to the aid of a geographically defensible and militarily strong Czechoslovakia.

In those years, Hitler would almost surely have been deterred from acting in ways the immediately threatened massive death and widespread destruction in Germany. And, if Hitler had not been deterred, would his generals have obeyed his commands? In a nuclear world, to act in blatantly offensive ways is madness. Under the circumstances, how many generals would obey the commands of a madman? One man alone does not make war.

To believe that nuclear deterrence would have worked against Germany in is easy. It is also easy to believe that in , given the ability to do so, Hitler and some few around him would have fired nuclear warheads at the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union as their armies advanced, whatever the consequences for Germany.

Two considerations, however, work against this possibility. Early in Hitler apparently ordered the initiation of gas warfare, but no one responded. In the latter, no country will press another to the point of decisive defeat In the desperation of defeat desperate measures may be taken, but the last thing anyone wants to do is to make a nuclear nation feel desperate. The unconditional surrender of a nuclear nation cannot be demanded.

Considering one such scenario is worthwhile because it has achieved some popularity among those who believe that deterrence is difficult. Albert Wohlstetter imagines a situation in which the Soviet Union might strike first. Her leaders might decide to do so in a desperate effort to save a sinking regime. Imagination places the Soviet Union in a situation where striking first is bad, but presumably not striking first is even worse. One common characteristic of scenarios is that they are compounded of odd elements.

How can the Soviet Union suffer disastrous defeat in a peripheral war? Another common characteristic of scenarios is the failure to say how the imagined act will accomplish the end in view. Some rulers will do anything to save themselves and their regimes. That is the assumption. But how a regime can hope to save itself by making a nuclear strike at a superior adversary, or at any adversary having a second-strike force, is not explained.

Why is not striking first even worse than doing so, and in what way does it entail a smaller risk? We are not told. The most important common characteristic of scenarios, and often their fatal flaw, is also present in this one.

The scenarist imagines a state in the midst of a terrible crisis in which the alternatives are so bad that launching a first strike supposedly makes some sense, but he does not say how this situation might come about. How could the Soviet Union get into such a mess, and what would other states be doing in the meantime? Scenarios often feature just one player, keeping others in the background even though two or more states are necessarily involved in melting and in preventing wars.

To think that the Soviet Union would strike the United States because of incipient revolt within her borders is silly. To think that the Soviet Union would strike first believing that we were about to do so is not.

It is sometimes surprisingly difficult for strategists to think of the actions and interactions of two or more states at the same time. No country will goad a nuclear adversary that finds itself in sad straits. No one would want to provoke an already desperate country it that country had strategic nuclear weapons. Equally, a regime in crisis would desperately want to avoid calling nuclear warheads down upon itself.

What scenansts imagine seldom has much to do with how governments behave. Three confusions mark many discussions of deterrence. Second, those who are sceptical of deterrence easily slip back from nuclear logic, by which slight risk of great damage deters, to conventional logic, by which states may somewhat sensibly risk war on narrowly calculated advantages. Thus some Amencans fear that the Soviet Union will strike first—destroying most of our land-based warheads, planes on the ground, submarines in port, and much else besides.

No one can say what the odds might be. They have failed to notice that radical states usually show caution in their foreign policies and to notice that nuclear weapons further moderate the behaviour of such states when vital interests are at issue.

Nuclear peace depends not on rulers and those around them being rational but on their aversion to running catastrophic risks.

Arms Races among New Nuclear States. One may easily believe that American and Russian military doctrines have set the pattern that new nuclear states will follow. One may then also believe that they will suffer the fate of the United States and the Soviet Union, that they will compete in building larger and larger nuclear arsenals while continuing to accumulate conventional weapons.

These are doubtful beliefs. One can infer the future from the past only insofar as future situations may be like present ones for the actors involved. First, nuclear weapons alter the dynamics of arms races. In a competition of two or more parties, it may be hard to say who is pushing and who is being pushed, who is leading and who is following. If one party seeks to increase its capabilities, it may seem that the other s must too.

The dynamic may be built into the competition and may unfold despite a mutual wish to resist it. But need this be the case in a strategic competition between nuclear countries?

It need not be if the conditions of competition make deterrent logic dominant. Deterrent logic dominates if the conditions of competition make it nearly impossible for any of the competing parties to achieve a first-strike capability. Early in the nuclear age, the implications of deterrent strategy were clearly seen.

The United States has sometimes designed her forces according to that logic. Donald A. To repeat: If no state can launch a disarming attack with high confidence, force comparisons are irrelevant. Strategic arms races are then pointless. Those who foresee nuclear arms racing among new nuclear states fail to make the distinction between war-fighting and war-deterring capabilities.

War-fighting forces, because they threaten the forces of others, have to be compared. With war-fighting strategies. Forces designed for deterring war need not be compared.

Because thwarting a first strike is easy, deterrent forces are quite cheap to build and maintain. Once that capability is assured, additional strategic weapons are useless. More is not better if less is enough. Deterrent balances are also inherently stable. This is the way French leaders have thought. Human error and folly may lead some parties involved in deterrent balances to spend more on armaments than is needed, but other parties need not increase their armaments in response, because such excess spending does not threaten them.

The logic of deterrence eliminates incentives for strategic arms racing. Because most of them are economically hard pressed, they will not want to have more than enough.

Allowing for their particular circumstances, lesser nuclear states confirm these statements in their policies. Britain and France are relatively rich countries, and they tend to overspend. Their strategic forces are nevertheless modest enough when one considers that their purpose is to deter the Soviet Union rather than states with capabilities comparable to their own.

China of course faces the same task. These three countries show no inclination to engage in nuclear arms races with anyone. India appears content to have a nuclear military capability that may or may not have produced deliverable warheads, and Israel maintains her ambiguous status.

New nuclear states are likely to conform to these patterns and aim for a modest sufficiency rather than vie with each for a meaningless superiority. Second, because strategic nuclear arms races among lesser powers are unlikely, the interesting question is not whether they will be run but whether countries having strategic nuclear weapons can avoid running conventional races. No more than the United States and the Soviet Union will lesser nuclear states want to rely on the deterrent threat that risks all.

And will not their vulnerability to conventional attack induce them continue their conventional efforts? American policy as it has developed since the early s again teaches lessons that mislead. For almost two decades, we have emphasized the importance of having a continuum of forces that would enable the United States and her allies to fight at any level from irregular to strategic nuclear warfare.

A policy that decreases reliance on deterrence increases the chances that wars will be fought. This was well appreciated in Europe when we began to place less emphasis on deterrence and more on defence.

The policy of flexible response lessened reliance on strategic deterrence and increased the chances of fighting a war. New nuclear states are not likely to experience this problem. The decrease followed from the making of peace with Egypt and not from increased reliance on nuclear weapons. Since they are by no means unambiguously hers, deterrent threats, whether implicit or explicit, will not cover them.

From previous points it follows that nuclear weapons are likely to decrease arms racing and reduce military costs for lesser nuclear states in two ways. Conventional arms races will wither if countries shift emphasis from conventional defence to nuclear deterrence. For Pakistan. And deterrent strategies make nuclear arms races pointless. The success of a deterrent strategy does not depend on the extent of territory a state holds, a point made earlier.

It merits repeating because of its unusual importance for states whose geographic limits lead them to obsessive concern for their security in a world of ever more destructive conventional weapons. The Frequency and Intensity of War. The presence of nuclear weapons makes wars less likely. One may nevertheless oppose the spread of nuclear weapons on the ground that they would make war, however unlikely, unbearably intense should it occur.

Nuclear weapons have not been fired in anger in a world in which more than one country has them. We have enjoyed three decades of nuclear peace and may enjoy many more. But we can never have a guarantee. We may be grateful for decades of nuclear peace and for the discouragement of conventional war among those who have nuclear weapons.

Yet the fear is widespread, and naturally so, that if they ever go off, we may all die. People as varied as the scholar Richard Smoke, the arms controller Paul Warnke, and former Defense Secretary Harold Brown all believe that if any nuclear weapons go off, many will. Although this seems the least likely of all the unlikely possibilities, it is not impossible. What makes it so unlikely is that, even if deterrence should fail, the prospects for rapid de-escalation are good.

For military, although not for budgetary, strategy this was the wrong question. States are not deterred because they expect to suffer a certain amount of damage but because they cannot know how much damage they will suffer. States are deterred by the prospect of suffering severe damage and by their physical inability to do much to limit it.

Defensive measures can reduce casualties, but they would still be immense were either of the great powers launch a determined attack. Warheads numbered in the hundreds can destroy the United and the Soviet Union as viable societies no matter what defensive measures they take.

Deterrence works because nuclear weapons enable one state to punish another state severely without first defeating it. Those who compare expected deaths through strategic exchanges of nuclear warheads with casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in World War II overlook this fundamental difference between conventional and nuclear worlds. Deterrence rests on what countries can do to each other with strategic nuclear weapons.

From this statement, one easily leaps to the wrong conclusion: that deterrent strategies, if they have to be carried through, will produce a catastrophe. The United States has long had the ability to place hundreds of warheads precisely on targets in the Soviet Union.

The intent to do so is sometimes confused with a war-fighting strategy, which it is not. It is a deterrent strategy, resting initially on the threat to punish. The threat, if it fails to deter, is appropriately followed not by spasms of violence but by punishment administered in ways that convey threats to make the punishment more severe. First, deterrent strategies induce caution all around and thus reduce the incidence of war.

Second, wars fought in the face of strategic nuclear weapons must be carefully limited because a country having them may retaliate if its vital interests are threatened. Fourth, should deterrence fail, a few judiciously delivered warheads are likely to produce sobriety in the leaders of all of the countries involved and thus bring rapid de-escalation. War-fighting strategies offer no clear place to stop short of victory for some and defeat for others.

A war between the United States and the Soviet Union that did get out of control would be catastrophic. Even while destroying themselves, states with few weapons would do less damage to others. As ever, the biggest international dangers come from the strongest states. Since the great powers are unlikely to be drawn into the nuclear wars of others, the added global dangers posed by the spread of nuclear weapons are small.

The spread of nuclear weapons threatens to make wars more intense at the local and not at the global level, where wars of the highest intensity have been possible for a number of years. Lesser nuclear states will live in fear of this possibility. But this is not different from the fear under which the United States and the Soviet Union have lived for years. Small nuclear states may experience a keener sense of desperation because of extreme vulnerability to conventional as well as to nuclear attack, but, again, in desperate situations what all parties become most desperate to avoid is the use of strategic nuclear weapons.

Still, however improbable the event, lesser states may one day fire some of their weapons. Are minor nuclear states more or less likely to do so than major ones? The answer to this question is vitally important because the existence of some States would be at stake even if the damage done were regionally confined.

Looking at the situation of weaker nuclear states and at the statements of stronger nuclear states, one suspects that weak states are less likely to use nuclear weapons first than are strong ones. Moreover, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December of , American officials considered using nuclear weapons in the Middle East if need be.

At various times, some Americans have thought of reasons for making limited counterforce strikes—firing a few missiles at the Soviet Union to show our determination—an idea revived by James R.

Schlesinger when he was Secretary of Defense. Among others, Generals Earle G. Presidential Directive 59, signed by President Carter in July of , contemplates fighting a limited nuclear war, perhaps a prolonged one, if deterrence should fail.

The United States and the Soviet Union have more readily contemplated the use of nuclear weapons than lesser nuclear states have done or are likely to do. But planning is distinct from deciding to act. Planners think they should offer Presidents a range of choices and a variety of nuclear weapons to carry them through. In the event, Presidents, like Party Chairmen, will shy away from using nuclear weapons and will act with extreme care in dealing with situations that might get out of control, as they have done in the past.

New nuclear states are likely to be even more mindful of dangers and more concerned for their safety than than some of the old ones have been. Ordinarily, weak states calculate more fearfully and move more cautiously than strong ones. The thought that fear and caution may lead insecure countries to launch pre-emptive strikes has amplified anxieties about the instability of regions populated by lesser nuclear powers and about the extent of destruction their weapons may bring.

Such worries rest on inferences drawn froom the behaviour of conventional states and do not apply to nuclear ones, for reasons already discussed. Nuclear weapons lessen the intensity as well as the frequency of war among their possessors.

For fear of escalation, nuclear states do not want to fight long or hard over important interests—indeed, they do not want to fight at all. Minor nuclear states have even better reasons than major ones to accommodate one another peacefully and to avoid any fighting.

Worries about the intensity of war among nuclear states have to be viewed in this context and against a world in which conventional weapons become ever costlier and more destructive. Should a great power help a lesser one improve on its force once it has shown the will and the ability to build one? Will great powers be drawn into the nuclear confrontations of lesser ones, or will they draw away from them to avoid involvement?

The Ayatollahs might not wish to commit suicide but their promotion of suicide-bombing among their followers means that the kind of rogue nuclear weapons attack which has so far remained the province of thrillers could not be entirely ruled out. More likely, however, is the scenario in which a nuclear-armed Iran with its range of ballistic missiles would seek to intimidate or intervene in Arab rivals.

Saudi Arabia or the UAE might go nuclear. Many nuclear disarmers and anti-proliferators in the West overlook how much bloodshed goes on in places which pose no risk of radioactive fall-out descending on us. But the human costs are huge nevertheless. Even conventional wars to pre-empt nuclear proliferation have huge costs. Good intentions are never enough, nor is cynicism. Sadly, the world is too uncertain for simple formulas and past performance is no sure guide to future outcomes.

But an obsession with the dangers of proliferation which overlooks its sobering effects risks becoming the disease of which it pretends to be the cure. Here are three of our most praised writers with new offerings written during one or more lockdowns and that also take in the pandemic in their subject matter. Journalist and actor Denis Tuohy has written a rewarding collection worthy of his colourful career. This magnificent one volume history details the tumultuous days of the Indian army in the jungles of Burma.

The ruins of the city of Hiroshima after the dropping of the atom bomb in August US Army Air Forces photograph. Artillery Row. Two Cheers for Nuclear Proliferation. By Mark Almond. Maybe the Ayatollahs would be calmed down if they had nuclear weapons Fortunately, Chinese military planners are still aware of how tough an invasion of Taiwan would be even without coming into direct conflict with the United States.

Yet what about a regime bent on developing the Bomb for use not deterrence? Enjoying The Critic online? What to read next. Ben Obese-Jecty. Dominic Green. Oliver Wiseman. The coronavirus variations Here are three of our most praised writers with new offerings written during one or more lockdowns and that also take in the pandemic in their subject matter.

A much larger number of countries have pursued nuclear weapons programs in the past but have been persuaded to abandon them. The NPT is a complex bargain that discriminates between have and have-not countries.

The have-not nations have agreed not to receive nuclear weapons, their components, or relevant information, whereas the Nuclear Weapons States have agreed not to furnish these items. In order to decrease the discriminatory nature of the agreement, the nations possessing nuclear weapons are obligated to assist other nations in the peaceful applications of nuclear energy. And, most important of all, the Nuclear Weapons States have agreed to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in international relations and to work in good faith toward their elimination.

It is in respect to this latter obligation that the United States has been most deficient. The risk posed by the possible acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorists is growing rapidly. But deterrence will not restrain terrorists driven by fanatical beliefs. Therefore, the prevention of nuclear catastrophe caused by terrorists has to rely either on interdicting the explosive materials that are essential to making nuclear weapons highly enriched uranium and plutonium, in particular or on preventing the hostile delivery of such weapons.

Once a terrorist group acquires nuclear weapons, preventing their detonation on U. Such weapons might be delivered by aircraft or cruise missile, or they might be detonated on board ships near U. As demonstrated by the leakage of illegal drugs into the United States, closing U. Against this multitude of delivery methods, the enormous effort that the United States spends on ballistic missile defense is an inexcusable distortion of priorities.

Indeed, it is extremely unlikely that terrorists would ever gain access to ballistic missiles. The first line of defense against nuclear terrorism must be safeguarding the vast worldwide stockpiles of nuclear weapons-usable materials. Those inventories are sufficient to produce more than , nuclear weapons. According to public sources, small shipments containing a total of roughly 40 kilograms of smuggled nuclear explosive material have been seized worldwide between and , generally originating in Russia.