I think we may assume, with Thatcher, that “it is probably unrealistic to expect military intervention to remove” those weapons of mass destruction that are in hostile hands. What, then, about missile defense as a parrying technology to nuclear proliferation? Is it really sensible to think that providing the great states of the West with ballistic missile defenses would actually discourage a “rogue state” to a greater degree than the assurance of nuclear annihilation that would surely follow such an attack already deters them today? To believe this assumes a psychological hypersensitivity to the mere possibility of failure on the part of the leaderships of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that seems incompatible with their characters, insofar as we know them, and an indifference to survival that these leaders, though they may seek it in their recruits, do not prominently display themselves. To the contrary, Martin van Creveld, in his study Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict, concludes:
There seems to be no factual basis for the claims that regional leaders do not understand the nature and implications of nuclear weapons; or that their attitudes to those weapons are governed by some peculiar cultural biases which make them incapable of rational thought; or that they are more adventurous and less responsible in handling them than anybody else.7
The real strength of Thatcher's proposal lies, as the last sentence in the passage quoted from her speech discloses, in the hope that a sound defense would enable retaliation, thus removing the possibility of successful extortion by the rogue states. Yet the day in which any states vying for “rogue” status could disable retaliation through accurate preemption is, thankfully, far off.
An alternative approach was reflected in the Clinton administration's efforts at “counterproliferation.” This was a multifaceted policy whose central method combined U.S. pledges not to use nuclear weapons with various arms control schemes like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, renewed with great effort, and the Missile Control Technology Regime (MCTR), whose enforcement has so bedeviled American relations with China and other states.
If I am correct in arguing that deterrence is crucial to the successful pursuit of nonproliferation, then the administration's policy could have been at most a partial success. A sincere pledge of no-first-use of nuclear weapons would scarcely reassure those states that feel the need to acquire nuclear weapons to protect themselves from us (as to which Iraq's recent experience with American conventional arms is exemplary) nor buck up those states who fear such attacks from others and look to us for protection. Israel, to take one case, can hardly be expected to renounce her nuclear weapons in light of a pledge by the American president not to use nuclear weapons first to protect it. Counterproliferation is, rather, the response of a political community that seems to have only the ideas that were in play before the end of the Long War; in that respect, the Clinton administration's nonproliferation strategies were no worse than those of its immediate predecessor.
Let us return to the criteria proposed to enable the international community to determine when nuclear proliferation is unacceptable. Then perhaps we can see which of these proposals, or others, might successfully enforce the rules implicit in those criteria. The first proscription was against multipolarity. This suggests that a principal task of any nonproliferation regime must be to prevent Germany and Japan from “going nuclear.” The second proscription was against the aggressive use of nuclear weapons, and the third, against proliferation to states so unstable that aggression might suddenly become attractive as a means of consolidating domestic power. These suggestions imply that states recently or currently engaged in aggression or threats of aggression against others are unwholesome candidates for the possession of nuclear arsenals—such states as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. And states like Indonesia, owing to its political instability, ought to be on a watch list. As to others, there may be strong reasons to discourage their acquisition of nuclear weapons, but proliferation to such states is not necessarily critical to the system as a whole. It may be unsettling for Peru if Chile begins a nuclear program, or for Turkey if the Greeks do. But these developments do not threaten a systemic collapse of deterrence, even if they are cause to activate the diplomatic efforts of states that have influence in those regions.
For Germany and Japan the question of reassurance is more problem-tic in some ways now than it was before the end of the Long War. For the Japanese, the prospect of a North Korean nuclear device is no more threatning than a Chinese nuclear capability, with which they have lived for some time. The real anxiety arises from what might ensue if the Americans confronted either North Korea or China. Thus the Americans are in the paradoxical position of having to tread softly where northeast Asian nuclear proliferation is concerned, precisely to avoid a far more dangerous proliferation should the Japanese become alarmed by a turn of events toward crisis. In the case of Germany, the problem is exacerbated by the prospect of an E.U. nuclear capability. If NATO should falter, then such a capability could repolarize the nuclear world—the second Rome, as it were,* that seems so dear to the hearts of many in Brussels and Paris. Here the American role is not the decisive one. Rather it depends upon E.U. members, especially the British and French, to argue for, paradoxically, the maintenance of independent but modest proliferated deterrents, such as France and the United Kingdom currently deploy, rather than for a specifically E.U. nuclear force. These examples of nuclear proliferation can act as inoculations against an E.U. nuclear virus. French behavior on this matter has thus far not been entirely encouraging. There have been many reports of French efforts, at present quiescent, to seduce the Germans into a nuclear partnership.
For both Germany and Japan, the utility of antiballistic missile defenses can be very high, both as a hedge against nuclear attacks (or missile attacks with other warheads of mass destruction) and, just as important, as a means of reassuring their respective publics that a national deterrent is not necessary. Thatcher's program of ballistic missile defense development makes a great deal more sense in this antiproliferation role, than as a force for states already possessing nuclear weapons. To the extent that the United States supplies technical assistance for such defenses, this will require a modification of the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. This is, I believe, well worth the diplomatic cost.8
The contribution of international law to preventing major-state proliferation is limited. Germany and Japan are states with representative institutions that can legitimately claim the rights of sovereignty to choose the means of their own protection. Insofar as the peace and stability of the entire international system is jeopardized by the multipolarity such proliferation brings in its wake, there are grounds for condemnation and perhaps even some sort of sanctions, but these are the sort of steps that isolate rather than reassure a state and thus tend to radicalize the domestic politics of a democratic state with problematic consequences for its security policy. Rather the role of international society, and its rules, is as a benchmark: it tells us what steps are disfavored, but it does not tell us what to do once these fateful steps have been taken. The renewal of the prophylactic Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) must be taken as an important accomplishment, although the treaty doesn't specify effective remedies for its violation. Both Japan and Germany are signatories, and despite hard bargaining to the contrary, no new American nuclear guarantees to other states were extracted as a price for the agreement. Such guarantees—particularly to the former Warsaw Pact states and the states of the former Soviet Union—would have run the risk of undermining the tie that binds Germany to the West, because these guarantees put Germany in the position of an unwilling, and unarmed, co-guarantor who might be dragged into a nuclear conflict. We should not want to put Germany in the situation that Japan now finds itself in with respect to the American guarantee to South Korea.
Major-state proliferation that risks multipolarity is the most important, but not the most intractable, part of a nonproliferation agenda for the society of states. That dubious status is reserved for the med
ium-size state that is a party to a long-standing dispute and feels the necessity of acquiring nuclear weapons, either for an advantage in that dispute or to protect against its adversary's gaining an advantage by a timely nuclear deployment of its own. India and Pakistan, Israel and Iraq, Brazil and Argentina, China and Taiwan, Iran and its several targets—all either have nuclear weapons or have at one time had active programs to acquire such weapons. Insofar as such states develop a capacity to deter Western intervention, they check the West's power to enforce international norms, as we saw in the Gulf War. This, too, is a threat to the society of states, because the West—and particularly the United States—underwrites the stability of that society.
There are two ways we might approach such a problem: we could expect the great market-state powers to choose sides in each potential conflict, ad hoc, and give those great powers a free hand to resolve matters by mediation or force; or we could set up rules that specify sanctions (including force) whenever the acquisition of nuclear weapons violates international understandings like the NPT and the MTCR, or is done in contemplation of international aggression. The successful Gulf War action was an amalgam of both approaches, but so was the Bosnian debacle. The latter experience suggests that relying on the West to act forcibly outside immediate threats to its well-being is impractical, even when it is clear that such inaction can ultimately reduce the West's ability to deter or to act.
To date, the only successful examples of active counterproliferation are the Israeli and coalition attacks on Iraq in 1981 and 1991, respectively. These can hardly provide a precedent for action generally. It is more likely that the buyout of North Korean nuclear capacity, should it prove successful, will provide a model for the future. Certainly the South African renunciation of its nuclear program seems to fit within a market-state paradigm—exchanging military power of dubious utility for economic relationships that promise development and investment. But what of the “rogue state”? Is it realistic to think that radical states can be bought off?
Perhaps not. But in such cases, who is really at risk? Is the system at risk? Libya threatens Chad; it does not really threaten Italy, which is a member of NATO, or the United States, which has evidenced its wiillingness to retaliate and whose means, which once deterred the Soviet Union, ought to be adequate to deter Libya. Iran threatens Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—but Israel and Saudi Arabia are protected by U.S. weapons, including nuclear weapons, which the U.S. administration has stated were in readiness during the Gulf War in case Saddam Hussein resorted to weapons of mass destruction. Only North Korea poses a challenge to the international system as a whole, not because it threatens South Korea— which is also protected by the U.S. nuclear deterrent—but for the ironic reason that it can provoke the United States to reactions that will themselves destabilize the system of deterrence, by overreacting or by withdrawing, either of which could propel Japan into developing its own nuclear option. No set of legal rules can help much here: it is a matter of prudence and wisdom in the formation and execution of policy. Nor can the international society of states do much as a group because so much turns on the policies of one state, the United States, which, after all, committed the first act of nuclear proliferation at Alamogordo.
Perhaps the best argument for a credible, if limited, ballistic missile defense lies not in its impact on “rogue states” so much as in its reassurance to potential proliferatees that fear attacks from such states. Such defenses reduce the extortion value of nuclear threats. The actual operation of missile defense systems, however, will bring new and complex problems of international coordination. These can be greatly eased by the sharing of U.S. air surveillance and early warning capabilities. Indeed, the provision of information by the United States in order to enable missile defense may play as large a role in the twenty-first century as the provision of extended deterrence did in the twentieth. What is needed is an institutional mechanism for sharing and protecting this information.
That brings us to the two other acute threats to a stable security system of market-states, Russia and China. They pose the most signficant concerns in the immediate future precisely because their own constitutional forms are still at issue and because they are both nuclear powers. Insofar as the society of market-states can help bring about a domestic transformation in the constitutional form of these states, it ameliorates the nuclear problem. In the meantime, these proto-market-states are likely to be among the most serious violators of the bans on the sale of missile technology and fissile material. Financial and political assistance to domestic parties in these states that wish to pursue admission and acceptance into the society of market-states is an apt investment for that society.
The market-state will face nuclear threats that are as novel and as market-driven and decentralized as it is. Nuclear terrorism, both on a large scale, involving attacks or threatened extortion against nuclear reactors, and on a micro level, using the nuclear materials commonly found in hospitals, universities, and laboratories, is more likely than an attack using a nuclear warhead. Still, the active international trade in weapons delivery systems and even fissile material will experience the same heady change in the scope of its markets, the speed of its transactions, and the astounding return on investment that the international market has provided other commodities, especially illicit ones. At some point it will simply be impossible to keep up with the nuclear weapons trade, which is at once lucrative and easily concealed. We missed a chance to slow this down when the United States failed to take up a suggestion that Soviet missiles simply be bought intact and destroyed rather than dismantled. This failure led to new opportunities for the diversion of nuclear fissile material, but some dispersion would have taken place at some time in any case. This is a proliferation of a different kind, less statist and all the more difficult to manage for that reason. The society of market-states will find it difficult to police such proliferation because intelligence sharing is as politically and strategically fraught for the market-state at peace as it was for the nation-state at war.
Deterrence and reassurance are the keys to the prevention of nuclear proliferation to states; they offer little in the way of help vis-à-vis transnational, stateless aggressors. This is the most difficult part of a nonproliferation agenda. If such organizations can be denied a state sanctuary, however, it will be difficult for them to assemble and deploy nuclear weapons on any scale that might disturb the system of stable deterrence, though they may be able to wreak a terrible destruction nevertheless. There may be a useful analogy, however: if the contribution of deterrence to nonproliferation is primarily that of reassurance, then the entire battery of market-state mechanisms for reassurance—surveillance, missile defense, redundancy of critical infrastructure, even market programs as mundane as insurance—should prove helpful. Ultimately only a global coalition that shares intelligence and information can hope to forestall terrorist attacks using nuclear weapons. We are in a race against time: can the new society of market-states develop technologies of information collection—like nanosensors, for example, that detect nuclear traces—and habits of cooperation before terrorists deploy nuclear devices in an attack?
CHEMICAL WEAPONS
The materials needed in order to create chemical weapons are far more widely available than those required for nuclear devices and the techniques of manufacture are vastly simpler. For these reasons, chemical weapons are often called the “poor man's nuclear weapons.” As with so many substitutes imposed by poverty, however, the “poor man's alternative” provides nothing like the satisfaction of the real thing. Although chemical weapons are ritually referred to as weapons of mass destruction, the lethality they bear is not all that “mass.” Chemical weapons would cause a small fraction of the deaths caused by nuclear or biological weapons. To take a single example: 100 kilograms of anthrax distributed in an aerosolized weapon by a cruising airplane would cause 300 times the fatalities that would occur if the same plane carried 1,000 kilograms of sarin gas.
BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
The tactical use of microorganisms and toxins as weapons has been attempted by many warring parties, including aboriginal Americans who tipped their arrows in amphibian-derived poisons. Fomites—entities that harbor and transmit disease—have been used to spread infection since antiquity. During the fourteenth century siege of Kaffa, a Genoese cathedral city on the Black Sea, the attacking Tatar force was struck by plague. They catapulted their diseased cadavers into the besieged city in an attempt to start an epidemic in 1347—or perhaps to trigger a collapse of morale within the city walls. An outbreak of plague did ensue and Kaffa fell. Ships carrying refugees from Kaffa are thought to have begun the second plague pandemic in Europe.
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