Thus I think it can be demonstrated that the strategic innovation represented by the development and deployment of nuclear weapons played a decisive role in ending the Long War and that, as we saw in Book I, this will have important constitutional effects on each of the states that fought that war. For the society composed of these states, the most profound impact is the restructuring required to deal with such weapons, for they cannot now be uninvented.
The problems that nuclear proliferation pose for the society of market-states arise from this question: is the possession of whatever weapons a state can acquire and deploy an attribute of sovereignty? For if it is not, then by what right do certain states possess weapons of such awful magnitude? And if it is, how can there ever be measures both appropriate and practical to limit the deployment of such weapons? And finally, even if having a nuclear weapons capability is a condition to which any state may aspire, does the possibility of a widespread nuclear proliferation pose such a threat to the peace and survival of the society of states that what hitherto was a state's sovereign right—the right to deploy the weapons of its own choosing—must now be rethought?
Nuclear weapons made a decisive contribution to the end of the Long War because their staggering ratio of destruction to attrition makes them virtually impossible to defend against. There are some targets of nuclear attack that can be defended against ballistic missiles—missile silos or underwater vessels, for example—but the nuclear weapon itself is so devastating that thus far methods of defense against its delivery to most targets are rendered absurd. Thermonuclear weapons can inflict such damage that even if virtually all the delivery systems used in an attack on a city were deflected, a single warhead arriving at its target would make further defense pointless. The enormity of this threat has obvious implications for individual states: the security of the United States is, on the one hand, at an all-time high, given its dominant economy and the pre-eminence of its armed forces, and on the other hand, at an historic low because the detonation of a handful of weapons launched from anywhere on the globe could utterly destroy it. “Counterproliferation” is at the top of the U.S. security agenda today, having moved from the periphery of the national security consciousness, along with the protection of the environment and of human rights, to the center of American concerns. What, however, is the importance of counterproliferation to the society of states, when some members may gain from acquiring such weapons, and none currently possessing such technology seem eager to give those weapons up?
A state's deployment of nuclear weapons can be either stabilizing or destabilizing for the international system. This is largely a function of the mechanics of deterrence, and thus it ought to be the policy of the international state system to deny nuclear weapons to some states, just as certain unstable geological regions are unsuitable for nuclear reactors. A nuclear weapons state can be reinforcing for the security of the society of states when its capabilities do not introduce multipolarity into the system, when its intentions do not threaten the legitimate constitutional sovereignty of other states* (unless it is attacked), and when its political culture is stable enough to ensure the endurance of such benign intentions. A nuclear weapons state imposes unacceptable risks on the system of deterrence when it threatens to make other states nuclear targets for geopolitical objectives that are incompatible with the maintenance of the current state system† or for geostrategic goals that are incompatible with the stability of the system of nuclear deterrence.‡ In either case, the unpredictability of nuclear attack increases, with potentially devastating consequences for populations and states.
This observation helps us answer the sovereignty question: no state that does not derive its authority from representative institutions that coexist with fundamental human rights can legitimately argue that it can subject its own people to the threat of nuclear pre-emption or retaliation on the basis of its alleged rights of sovereignty because the people it thus makes into nuclear targets have not consented to bear such risks. At a minimum, the Peace of Paris stands for this. One inference from this rule is that no such state therefore has a sovereign right to impose such threats on other peoples either.
For the same reason, such a state has no sovereign right to develop weapons of mass destruction generally. This argument turns around the usual rationale for the acquisition of nuclear weapons. States claim that they must deploy these weapons in order to deter attacks on their peoples. And there is a good deal of truth to this: the United States would doubtless not have bombed Japan with nuclear weapons if Tokyo could have retaliated in kind. But the acquisition of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of attack by pre-emption or by a disguised attack (so that the threat of retaliation cannot successfully deter). Each state must decide for itself how to resolve this calculus of risks. A state without representative institutions and effective guarantees of basic human rights has no way to win consent to such a decision.
A state that derives its legitimacy from representative institutions free of coercion can demand that other states recognize its right to acquire nuclear weapons, but though a state has this right, it ought to be dissuaded from acquiring these weapons when their deployment is destabilizing for the international system. When does this occur, and just how can this dissuasion be accomplished?
Thus far I have implied a link between proliferation and deterrence, suggesting that the society of states as a whole can determine when proliferation poses a systemic threat by asking whether a state's acquisition of nuclear weapons strengthens or weakens the prevailing system of nuclear deterrence. That system is currently underpinned by United States nuclear forces. It rests on the assumption that the United States will not use nuclear weapons as a means of aggression, but that it will actually destroy another state if that state cannot be otherwise dissuaded from attacking a state protected by the American nuclear deterrent. If the United States were to change its policies in either aspect, the current system of deterrence would be difficult to sustain, as formerly protected states raced to arm themselves and formerly deterred states began to explore the rewards of coercion.
This present system would be gravely undermined by multipolarity—the acquisition of a third superpower nuclear arsenal—for two reasons. First, multipolarity introduces a complexity that tends to weaken American commitments by blurring the identity of the states to be deterred: in a tripolar or n-polar world, responsibility is diffused. The persuasiveness of the argument, often heard in the United States during the Cold War, that the United States must act to suppress international violence or parry aggression, because if the United States doesn't, no one else will, fades in a multipolar world. The sheer complexity of deterrence in a multipolar world, coupled with an understandable American willingness to let other powers take up burdens long carried by the United States, creates a situation similar to that of the paralyzed crowds that attend emergencies. Second, the system of deterrence is stressed whenever a crisis triggers the threat of the use of nuclear weapons to deter aggression: such crises call the American bluff and require the United States to run potentially fatal risks to enforce dissuasion. Multipolarity can only increase, perhaps exponentially, the number of nuclear crises. We could have had another system of nuclear deterrence, perhaps managed by other powers, but this is the one we have, and this is the system bequeathed us by the Long War.
The link between nuclear proliferation and nuclear deterrence is too seldom drawn. In part this is a sociological phenomenon: the deterrence theorists tend to be interested in strategic studies and are often from military backgrounds; they are more curious about targeting and weapons development, and more informed about the formerly “central” balance between the superpowers than about “weapons of mass destruction” per se. The nonproliferation experts tend to be more interested in arms control than in strategic options, more conversant with the design of nuclear reactors and the processes of the nuclear fuel cycle than with the design of missiles and nuclear delivery systems, more global in orientation. In
part, this disjunction is an intellectual phenomenon: the categories of thought are put in different terms, have different vocabularies. Theories of deterrence do not tell us which restraint agreements, like the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), will slow down proliferation; nonproliferation theories, on the other hand, more or less assume that any deployment of nuclear weapons is necessarily an evil, and that their use can never be justified. This largely unbridged chasm is a costly one because the strategic issues brought to the fore by the end of the Long War are pre-eminently questions of voluntary restraint, and thus the advocates of environmental protection and arms reduction can, perhaps for the first time in this era, realistically expect cooperation from the strategic sector.
Or should one say it is the second time? For there is an historic link between proliferation and the prevailing system of deterrence, and it is this link that principally accounts for the enormous success of nonproliferation efforts since the coming of nuclear weapons. The most important thing to be said about nuclear proliferation is not that it did happen in Israel, or India, or even France, but rather that it didn't happen in Japan or Germany; and the main reason it failed to take place in those two states was that the American nuclear guarantee to those countries provided a measure of deterrence sufficient to make it unnecessary for them to deter other states.
This is a controversial assertion. Sometimes it is claimed that Japan, because it had been the subject of nuclear attack, would never acquire such weapons. This may be, but it is equally possible that, precisely because it felt aggrieved over the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Japan might consider itself uniquely privileged to deploy the one weapon that would best ensure that this would never happen again. From time to time Japan has confirmed its pledge to forgo the development of nuclear weapons; the Japan Defense Agency has steadfastly maintained, however, that the bar against aggression in the Japanese constitution does not proscribe nuclear weapons so long as these do not exceed the minimum needed for defense.2 The Indians have shown the world how a single election can quickly be translated into a policy of nuclear weapons acquisition and deployment. The election in Japan of a similarly nationalistic party could have similarly fateful consequences.
The Germans are also said to be unlikely candidates for nuclear proliferation. They, like the Japanese, are supposed to be acutely sensitive to the anxieties they arouse in their neighbors, and it is true that, in the late 1950s, when the Germans discussed the option of a nuclear weapons program, French and British sensitivities were sufficiently aroused to head off this idea. It was ultimately the American role in German defense that dissuaded the Germans, however, who doubtless appreciated the fact that French and British forces in Germany could hardly have withstood a Warsaw Pact assault without using nuclear weapons. Absent the American nuclear guarantee, it is even doubtful that West Germany would have remained in the Western Alliance, with consequences that we can easily imagine.
What has kept Japan and Germany from going nuclear, when proximate states like China and France did so; when they possessed the wealth, ambition, and skill to do so; when they faced the threat of mortal attack on the front lines of the Cold War? It was the assurance provided by the American nuclear umbrella and the positioning of American troops in forward bases such that any invasion would quickly engage them and thus would immediately commit the United States and in all likelihood involve the use of nuclear weapons to protect her forces. Reviewing the period since 1945, Lawrence Freedman has concluded that “the critical variable [that accounts for nonproliferation to Germany and Japan and the acquisition of weapons by India, China and France] is the prevailing alliance structure… Drawing on the deterrent power of another may carry fewer risks as well as lower costs than a drive for a national capability. The incentives for proliferation grow with the lack of a reliable superpower protector.”3 How can this lesson be applied to stem the proliferation of these weapons in the era we are now entering?
If deterrence is a key to nonproliferation, then what regime of weapons deployment might lend the most stability to the international system? Perhaps the most famous proposal that links deterrence to proliferation was made by Kenneth Waltz. In “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better” Waltz suggested that widespread nuclear proliferation would in fact enhance stability, as various nuclear armed states paired off, just as the United States and the USSR had done.4 This would result in a profusion of bipolar systems—India/Pakistan, Israel/Iraq, Ukraine/Russia—rather than a multipolar world. Waltz well recognized the acute danger posed by multipolarity. In “a multipolar world there are too many powers to permit any of them to draw clear and fixed lines between allies and adversaries” while at the same time there are so few (not every state can afford a superpower's arsenal) that the action of any single power is likely to engage the security of others. In a world of dancing partners, each conflict twirling around the international ballroom, however, it is perfectly clear who is to be embraced and who ignored. Multipolarity is neatly avoided.
But is this description entirely plausible? If it is true for India/Pakistan, what about India/China/Pakistan? Or Israel/Iraq/Iran? Or even Japan/ Russia/China? Waltz must assume that each new nuclear state has but a single nuclear-armed adversary, and also that each such state actually has such an adversary, because otherwise the temptation to coerce nonnuclear states would potentially upset the stability of the proliferated international regime. And if Waltz is proved wrong (once we have brought a heavily dispersed and proliferated nuclear world into being), how would we go back to the position we are in today, which might then appear to have been a golden age?
A second suggestion follows directly from Freedman's observation that “nuclear proliferation is most likely to occur where external guarantees have come to be doubted, as in the Middle East, or barely exist, as in South Asia. Acquiring a nuclear capability is a statement of a lack of confidence in all alternative security arrangements.”5 Recognizing this, some commentators have proposed extending the U.S. nuclear guarantee to those former states of the Soviet Union, or former members of the Warsaw Pact, that might otherwise become nuclear powers. In the absence of such a guarantee these states might acquire nuclear weapons in response to the Russian nuclear capability, and then, in response to each other, much as Pakistan developed weapons in response to India, once India had itself responded to the nuclear weapons of China, which initially was reacting to the nuclear capability of the United States and the USSR.
Such proposals have an air of unreality to those of us who lived through the “decoupling” debates that periodically seized the Atlantic Alliance from the late 1950s until the late 1980s. Briefly, these debates arose from European skepticism that the United States, in the event of an attack on its European allies, really would risk nuclear retaliation directed at the American homeland by fulfilling its nuclear pledges to its allies. The European theatre, it was feared, would be “decoupled” from the continental United States if the United States reneged on its promises, or “uncoupled” if those pledges were fulfilled, making Europe a nuclear battleground, while the American and Soviet homelands were kept as tacitly (or even explicitly) agreed-upon sanctuaries. Regardless of the grounds for such doubt—and one may recall Sir Michael Howard's witty observation that, where nuclear risks are concerned, it takes a great deal more to reassure an ally than to deter an adversary*—if these doubts were enough to move France to develop its own deterrent, how could they possibly not assail Ukraine or Belarus? Even if the United States could be induced to make such pledges, how could they be believed in the absence of the kind of American ground forces that underwrote the U.S. pledge to West Germany? And what, in such an event, would be the likely reaction of Russia, whose nuclear attitude remains vastly more significant than even that of the most ambitious potential proliferatee?
Yet a third approach comes from Margaret Thatcher. At a speech in Fulton, Missouri, commemorating Winston Churchill' famous Iron Curtain address there, Lady Thatcher said:
&nbs
p; The Soviet collapse has aggravated the single most awesome threat of modern times: the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction…. If America and its allies cannot deal with the problem directly by pre-emptive military means, they must at least diminish the incentives for [rogue states] to acquire new weapons in the first place. That means the West must install effective ballistic missile defences that would protect us and our armed forces, reduce or even nullify the rogue state's arsenal, and enable us to retaliate.6
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Page 97
