The Second Nuclear Age: Foreword

The Second Nuclear Age

Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.

1999

Foreword

Keith B. Payne ^*

The Second Nuclear Age is the most recent of Colin Gray’s already prodigious roster of published works. His writings, now familiar in expert defense circles from Washington to Tokyo and all stops in between, span more than two and a half decades. In toto, they earn him the status of one of the West’s preeminent civilian strategists. Whenever Professor Gray pens a new title, expectations are high and note must be taken; when that title proclaims the arrival of a “new nuclear age,” particular attention is warranted.

The analytic goals identified for The Second Nuclear Age are not modest. They are, first, to understand the strategic threats posed by nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons in a dramatically unfamiliar international political context (until now described only by what it is not, i.e., the “post–Cold War period”); and, second, to identify those measures most useful to the West in addressing those threats, including discerning what is and is not worth retaining from Cold War security policies. The enormity of this analytic task is daunting, calling for Gray’s obvious mastery of military history, Cold War strategic policies both East and West, the direction of current threats and policies, and a keen insight as to the significance of emerging features of international politics.

Gray’s starting point is to observe that Cold War thinking and policy concerning nuclear weapons were shaped decisively by the context of East-West enmity and competition. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, that context was so altered as to call into question established wisdom and policy involving nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the security age now dawning remains dominated by the existence of nuclear weapons (with biological weapons emerging as a particularly salient factor). In short, the Eastern bloc’s political upheaval of the early 1990s gave birth to a dramatically different security context, albeit one that continues to be shaped decisively by nuclear weapons—hence a “second nuclear age.”

Gray’s conclusion about the continuing significance of nuclear weapons does not reflect any harkening back to the comfort of long-familiar approaches to strategy and policy; far from it. He poses and addresses without flinching the fundamental questions of the emerging security environment that still only rarely surface in Washington’s corridors of power: Western Cold War strategic theory and nuclear policies were creatures of the then-existing bipolar divide. What of that body of thought and policy, if any, is likely to retain integrity in the very different unfolding political conditions, and what new directions may be most useful?

As in the past, Gray is masterful at dissecting and dismantling the illusions du jour that pass for sophistication concerning nuclear weapons and nonproliferation. For example, progressive circles in Washington place enormous significance on the international “nuclear taboo” and the emerging global “norm” against nuclear weapons. These, they confidently claim, have created a solid basis for the West to aim its sights at nuclear abolition. Gray subjects all such views to empirical scrutiny without sentiment and concludes that Washington’s obvious longing to move away from nuclear weapons is not shared in key regional capitals. He reminds us that although a “nuclear taboo” shapes much Western thinking, we dare not confuse with reality Washington’s vision of a world in its own image. He does not claim that all future ages must be nuclear, but that until the current ratio of vision-to-evidence is reversed, “movement for nuclear abolition is as hopeless as it is well-intentioned.”

Indeed, Gray makes the devastating point that a goal underlying at least some of Washington’s promotion of the “nuclear taboo” is a security environment wherein the United States’ overwhelming conventional force cannot be trumped by regional nuclear powers. Denying the U.S. such an advantage is ample reason alone for some to seek security in nuclear weapons and the threat of escalation. Washington’s self-serving, nonproliferation goal carries the seeds of its own demise. Why expect “rogues” to eschew a nuclear security path that NATO trod for decades in response to the Warsaw Pact’s conventional force advantages?

In The Second Nuclear Age, Gray sets his analytic sights on the strategic meaning of the recent international political upheaval and emerging threats. The topic could not be more significant nor the author more qualified. The result is a text that is original and brilliant, and in classic Gray style, one that does not shy from boldly identifying intellectual chaff. Gray’s work is disciplined by his multiple roles: he is both a rigorous academic and an adviser heeded by serious power. The Second Nuclear Age is what all too few works can be: it is both scholarly and pertinent, academic without being ponderous. If we are fortunate, as has happened in the past, much of what Gray presents in these pages will initially raise considerable ire, then be repeated by others as their own, and ultimately become the basis for actual policy.

Endnote:

*: Keith B. Payne is chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy, Fairfax, Virginia, and adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Back.