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The Second Nuclear Age, by Colin S. Gray
3. Beyond the Fuel Cycle: Strategy and the Proliferation Puzzle
Chapters 3 and 4 together tackle the heartland of contemporary nuclear issues. Chapter 3 proceeds from consideration of just how important, or otherwise, nuclear proliferation may prove to be, to a critical and somewhat skeptical commentary on the proliferation study industry; after detailed consideration of the principal motives for nuclear possession, the chapter presents six “signposts” that point toward areas worthy of subsequent development.
Who Cares? and How Much?
This is not intended to be a book about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other WMD. The scholarly and popular literature on nuclear WMD, though not on BCW—and not quite on delivery vehicles 1 —is overabundant in quantity and in many aspects of quality also. It follows that the last thing needed by this exploration of the nuclear condition is yet another inquiry into the wells of nuclear proliferation. This is not to say that the nuclear status of polities is unimportant; quite the contrary. But it is to say that the erstwhile cottage industry of proliferation analysis, which since 1991 has expanded to a more industrial scale of enterprise, by and large can be trusted to treat competently the significant secondary matters of how, how much, and when, though perhaps not so reliably the overriding strategic questions of why, and so what.
In the years of Cold War, the primary nuclear problem was the menace of a World War III that could, in some variants, have ended the human experience. It followed, sensibly, that other nuclear (and WMD) problems—in Western or Eastern perspective, at least—were apt to be addressed as subsets to the dominant peril. At some risk of giving gratuitous offense, one must add that “the best and the brightest” among U.S. strategic thinkers during the Cold War devoted only a modest fraction of their time and creative energy to what then appeared to be the objectively secondary field of nuclear proliferation. The fact that more and more of the leading lights of the extended defense community have addressed questions of proliferation in the 1990s does not necessarily stand as a rebuke for their former focus on East-West concerns.
Nuclear proliferation, like “the Balkans,” is an issue area that the United States should care about. But, should it care about it very much? More to the point, should it be prepared to do much about it? And, even more to the point, is there much that the United States reliably, let alone definitively, can do about its WMD proliferation concerns? Once one descends below the level of standard pieties, the answers to questions such as these become less and less obvious. The central point of the asserted analogy between the Balkans and nuclear proliferation is that in both cases the stance of U.S. policy virtue is overshadowed by the reality of unwelcome forces that ultimately cannot be denied. The United States may hold back the evil day, as it did for ten years in Vietnam, but it cannot engineer a just and lasting solution to the unpleasantness in the former Yugoslavia, any more than it can command the tide of proliferating WMD to retreat. This is not to deny in principle the contextual value of an imposed delay—indeed one can argue that U.S. intervention in Vietnam in 1965–1975 had strongly positive consequences for the region (though admittedly not for Cambodia) 2 —but it is to suggest that some missions are impracticable and hence strategically foolish. The relevant mission for the United States may well be to cope with, and survive in, a world insecurity condition wherein WMD and their delivery vehicles will proliferate. Even if I favored a distinctly muscular, preventive coercive diplomacy and direct military action to oppose the proliferation of WMD, the target intelligence and political requirements for such a policy would be unduly heroic for U.S. (or anyone else’s) statecraft.
Of course, there is a problem for the United States with the proliferation of WMD, and especially of nuclear weapons. But as we shall see, that problem is both generally manageable in and of itself and of modest significance when compared with the nuclear dimension to the defining (bipolar antagonistic) political characteristic of the first, and eventually probably third (and beyond), nuclear age. WMD in the hands of “lawbreakers” carry the threat to neutralize the power and authority of the sheriff for order—that is, the practical authority of a hegemonic United States. Lawrence Freedman is right when he notes that “rather than reinforce power politics as usual, nuclear weapons in fact confirm a tendency towards the fragmentation of the international system in which the erstwhile great powers play a reduced role.” 3 By raising the risks for all concerned, or all of those contemplating concern, nuclear proliferation encourages a self-regarding autarky in security practice. This means, in principle, that notwithstanding its “unipolar moment” in this second nuclear age, the United States is going to be ever more reluctant to play regional “balancer,” let alone global cop, when such roles carry the risk of exposure of forces, allies, and just possibly the U.S. homeland to counterdeterrent (or retaliatory) action by WMD.
Unfortunately, balanced political and strategic judgment is apt to be the first victim of the retreat into technicity and a world of presumptive nuclear peril that often is the dense thicket of expert scholarship on proliferation. Proliferation experts have a way of being expert on almost everything except what the subject of their expertise means politically and strategically. To be fair, the whole realm of strategic and security studies is awash with such niche cases of genuine, but bounded, expertise. Theorists of seapower, airpower, spacepower, and now cyberpower vie for our respect. But are they offering a whole theory of sufficient strategic effect for success in statecraft? Or, is the plat du jour but one course in what needs to be approached as a balanced meal overall?
Lest I should be misunderstood, proliferation could matter to the point where vital or even survival levels of intensity of interest are engaged because of the following considerations:
Valid though these points certainly are, they are not by any means the whole story.
So proliferation matters strategically. But the study of the proliferation of WMD and their means of delivery needs to be rescued from suffocation by undue technicity on the part of those who have ploughed this section of the field of modern strategic studies.
The Proliferation Study Industry
Contemporary scholarship, even official policy, seemingly is better equipped with impressive-sounding answers than it is with authoritative questions. Wherever one looks for clear direction on the nature and character of what has been called “the proliferation puzzle,” one tends to find inconsistent suggestions. What is the problem of nuclear security in this second nuclear age? Most likely there is no single dominant problem. Anyone who has monitored the Western scholarly, and official, literature on matters of military security in the 1990s should have been impressed by the sheer volume of work devoted to the issue area of the proliferation of WMD and their principal means of delivery. 8 The literature is large, but it has a frustrating formlessness. A small army of analysts, officials, soldiers, and popular commentators are expending great energy on the subject of “proliferation,” but somehow the endeavor has the appearance of an exercise in futility.
Several fundamental problems beset the proliferation study industry. First, the United States is an engineering-minded, problem-solving culture, whose analysts are ever vulnerable to cultural seduction by the challenge of yet another problem in need of solution. 9 In other words, the idea that nuclear proliferation might be a condition rather than a problem, and a diversely manifested condition at that, is not one that sits easily in the word processors of some U.S. experts. After all, if the proliferation of WMD and of cruise and ballistic missiles is researchable as a topic, as obviously it is, then that which is researchable should lend itself to treatment with conclusions that allow confident researchers to manipulate their findings with some controlling solutions.
Second, there is a Scholar’s Fallacy that beguiles many more people than scholars alone. Although there is much to be said in favor of careful study of proliferation phenomena, understanding is not by any means the golden key to wise and effective policy. Logically, understanding may have to be the preceding enabler for action, but it is neither action itself nor a functional substitute for action. Both the technical and political challenges posed by the proliferation of WMD are well understood today. Many fantasies, plausible fallacies, and other myths persist—as I explain in the next chapter—but truly there are no great mysteries about NBC proliferation or about the spread of missile technologies and missiles themselves.
The somewhat uneasy contemporary guardian of global order, the United States, does not really need to expend tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of personhours to study the problem of nuclear (and other WMD) proliferation. Of course, every actual and potential case is distinctive, but each such case fits readily enough into a fairly simple framework of theory on motivation. 10 U.S. exceptionalism has a lot to answer for in the realm of helping to misinform those whom it encultures.
For reasons that seem excellent and generally valid, the United States is apt to regard its strategic choices and subsequent behavior through the lens of understanding provided by the assumption of an exceptional, and exceptionally benign, U.S. role in world politics. Many U.S. strategic commentators would be shocked to be told that there are people abroad who genuinely believe that sometimes the United States needs to be deterred. For a related point, it is surprising just how many apparently sophisticated and well-informed people in the United States are comfortable with the deeply pejorative, and prospectively perilously misleading, concept of the “rogue state”—an issue raised briefly in Chapter 1. 11 What is a rogue state? How would a particular polity qualify to be so classified? The answer, stolen as an analogy with the misbehavior of some large mammals in the wild animal kingdom, is a state that behaves in a grossly antisocial manner—always assuming that the concept of an international society of states has some authority, of course. In practice, the problem is that the spectrum of antisocial behavior in world politics can range from regimes that set out to conquer the world—truly the neighbors from hell—through regimes whose security demands are incompatible with the reasonable needs of other regimes in the immediate region, to regimes whose principal sins fall in the category of an honest and not unreasonable definition of national interests that is at some odds with contemporary preferences in U.S. foreign policy.
A significant problem promoted by the U.S. thesis of exceptionalism is that it lacks a natural frontier. Leaving aside the large and potent ideological cultural dimension to the claim for U.S. exceptionalism, even the fairly raw and brutal realpolitical claims for exceptional global license that flow from hegemonic, or unipolar, superpower status are prone to mislead the unwary. A United States that is profoundly exceptional in U.S. self-assessment is not exactly a United States well equipped to distinguish the universal from the exceptional in its strategic reasoning. A hegemonic superpower is apt to suspect “roguery” when what it sees is not so much roguery as it is common political thought and behavior on the subject of security.
For strategic cultural reasons, the argument that follows can be difficult to explain to a U.S. audience. Some of the reasons the United States is, and in my opinion should be, the most lethally militarily equipped polity in the world pertain to the unique political condition of the United States as the global hegemon. But other important reasons the United States is an abundantly nuclear-armed polity are reasons that find resonance in many regions around the world. To Americans, and indeed to non-Americans who are sympathetic or committed to the U.S.-protected world order, it is all but self-evident why the United States should enjoy counterdeterrent effectiveness at worst and escalation dominance at best in all categories of weapons and classes of conflicts. The point is that some of the more important reasons the United States chooses to remain a nuclear weapons state (NWS) are common to a range of polities and, frighteningly, even to some would-be polities around the world.
The political and strategic logic that underpins the preceding paragraphs is probably easier to grasp if one is not American. The problem for Americans is how to grasp what is not at all exceptional in their basket of strategic cultural beliefs. The careful U.S. study of WMD proliferation thus is likely to run afoul of the problem, or condition, that beliefs and behavior that are roguish to Americans are simply prudent to the “natives.”
The study of nuclear (inter alia) proliferation is unlikely to yield significant benefit to Western clients so long as the motives of “threshold” states, and other presumed would-be proliferants, are framed by a theory of roguery. For every genuine rogue state there will be a handful of candidate proliferants whose core motives for WMD acquisition are entirely congruent with some large fraction of U.S. motivation. Some of the reasons currently authoritative for the effectively indefinite maintenance of British status as an NWS look distinctly attractive to polities geostrategically far more exposed to danger than Britain is likely to be during the next half century. 12
U.S. scholars need to be warned of two perils to the value of their scholarship. On the one hand, they are potentially vulnerable to the effects of the ubiquitous Scholar’s Fallacy, which encourages the view that study of a problem is equivalent to its effective treatment. Study is not the moral or strategic equivalent of action. On the other hand, those U.S. scholars need to be alerted to the strategic cultural fact that they are U.S. scholars, and that much of what they believe to be U.S. strategic truth happens also to be geostrategic common sense, worldwide.
The third problem area worth highlighting about the study of proliferation is the challenge of local diversity. This point can be made most clearly with the aid of an analogy from international relations theory. It is obvious that the many scholarly endeavors committed to the study of the causes of wars (or war) and the conditions for peace over the past eighty or so years have produced no single dominant, let alone plausible, solution or answer. 13 The principal reason may be that the scholars involved have not been good enough scholars, but one doubts if that is the key explanation for failure in theory building. The leading reason scholars have failed to develop a compelling dominant theory of the causes of wars/war is because the subject does not lend itself to the aggregation and reduction that theory needs. Modern scholars have not really improved upon Thucydides’ insistence in The Peloponnesian War that the will to fight for empire rests upon “three of the strongest motives, fear, honor, and interest.” 14 These three universal and enduring motives explain war yet leave almost everything to be understood about any particular conflict. Theory building about the proliferation of WMD runs into a like difficulty.
“Fear, honor, and interest” explains both everything and nothing about proliferation. There are generic reasons encouraging nuclear weapons status that transcend geopolitics and strategic culture—as we shall see in the next section of this chapter—but those generic reasons (e.g., security or fear) themselves explain nothing in particular. Even the most general, adaptable, and seemingly reasonable of rationales for nuclear acquisition transpire in practice to explain nothing very much. For example, although there is a host of fairly plausible specific explanations for British retention of its strategic condition as an NWS, the core of the matter is to be found neither in any one of those explanations, nor even in a coherent assembly of them all. The true explanation for Britain’s persistence as an NWS into the twenty-first century lies in minor key in domestic politics (“New Labour” is determined to look responsible on national security to its domestic constituency) but in major key (in Aron’s cardinal principle of prudence) in statecraft (as that principle is defined by a classic realist). 15 Because the future is open-ended, unknown, and unknowable, and because even the recent past alerts us to the possibility of peril and tragedy on a heroic scale, it is responsible for the British government to face the uncertainties of the next century nuclear armed, particularly when currently there are no compelling arguments for unilateral national nuclear disarmament (the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks [START] process may yet produce such arguments, of course).
Local circumstances of history, geopolitics, and culture, however, have the probably net fortunate effect of denying British prudential logic any general authority. British reasoning on the permanent merit in national nuclear armament could appeal to every polity in the world; the logic is not by any means specific to Britain. Whereas politically and strategically it was entirely unremarkable that the Britain of the 1950s should become the world’s third nuclear weapons state, few if any polities today or tomorrow could approach the nuclear option as if it were just another, albeit unusually expensive, 16 decision in the realm of force planning for national defense.
What we find, and this is one of the general themes of the book specified in Chapter 1, is that one size does not fit all via a general theory of nuclear (and other WMD) proliferation. Local and regional conditions differ and as a consequence have different implications for the likelihood and probable consequences of particular policy choices. Much as can be said of the scholarly literature on the causes of war, more and more study of proliferation problems is unable to yield a general wisdom beyond the injunction to be attentive to local detail. To repeat: one size of theory, or of U.S. counterproliferation policy, does not appear to fit all actual or potential examples of the phenomenon to be opposed (with variable energy).
The implications of this argument are not particularly happy, but they do help explain the deeply unsatisfactory character of the expert literature on nuclear (and other WMD, and their means of delivery) proliferation. General theory is only that and applies as general theory to no particular case in any self-evident fashion. The result is that academics, such as Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth Waltz, are at liberty to conduct an essentially meaningless expert scholarly debate about the general merits and the general perils of nuclear proliferation. 17 Proliferation is always specific to time, place, and circumstance. To debate proliferation as if it were in limbo is as foolish as to debate war per se. War is massively undesirable, unless one has no superior alternative at hand. Similarly, WMD proliferation is never an abstract topic pertaining to strategic truth but invariably a topic with a specific context.
It appears to me that the cottage industry of proliferation studies is unduly prone to march down two blind alleys. The first such blind alley is the quest for the theory and the policy, when the actuality is that real-world diversity denies governments the luxury of adopting “golden key” policy and strategy to cover all significant corners of the proliferation field. The second blind alley, which really is a consequence of the necessary frustration of the first one, is the retreat into detailed technicity. Lest one should be accused of unfair victimization of proliferation studies, one must hasten to add that the U.S., and indeed the transnational, community of arms control scholars is wont to retreat into expert detail on a whole range of topics. 18
What we have here is operation of the Law of the Instrument. Scholars and officials do what they know how to do. These experts do not really understand whether or not a particular polity will exercise its nuclear option as a threshold state, so they do what they can do. What the experts can do, and do at great length in an ever burgeoning library of descriptive effort, is “tell the story” of the fuel and weaponization cycle(s) in question and of the pertinent political, administrative, and industrial quests after nuclear (and other WMD) prowess. Much of this study effort is well conducted, indeed truly expert. Unfortunately, it has generically the same weakness as did the hugely technical literature on strategic arms control between the superpowers in the last two decades of the Cold War. Specifically, the deeply technical analysis available in the classified and open literature was all but comprehensively irrelevant. Until the Soviet polity changed politically in a fundamental way, arms control worthy of note was impracticable. Readers may recall a classic definition of fanaticism: the redoubling of effort long after the purpose of an enterprise is forgotten, or perhaps long after the practicability of an enterprise has been assumed as an item of faith. The industry of proliferation studies, though genuinely expert, itself has become something of a barrier to clear-eyed policy and strategy on its subject. A central reason for this condition has been inferred already and warrants recognition as the fourth general point.
My fourth general problem with the industry of proliferation studies is that it has been captured by a tribe of some distinctly prosaic, if undoubtedly expert, people for whom it has become a permanent rice bowl. It may be unjust to single out proliferation studies as being particularly plagued by uninspired, and uninspiring, data collectors and technicians; nonetheless, this area of scholarly endeavor in strategic studies has become a meal ticket for thousands of people. Part of the problem lies in the character of “the American way” of government by consultancy. Officials with public money to spend will always find willing fundees. A million dollars of study effort is likely to reward the funding agency with the “insights” that a polity that has a serious national security problem may well consider pursuing a nuclear option, and that the less well heeled of would-be WMD proliferants should find that biological or toxin weapons offer the most cost-effective lethality (and terroristic-coercive return) for the buck.
The proliferation study industry is vulnerable to challenge by the same quintessentially strategic question that can embarrass a wide range of fields of enquiry: So what? The mountain of facts, quasi-facts, and possible facts about near, or undeclared but actual, “proliferants” amounts to what? Proliferation, nonproliferation, antiproliferation, and counterproliferation studies have nothing of much interest to tell us beyond what Thucydides offered: the motives of “fear, honor and interest” rule.
Finally, a fifth general difficulty with the proliferation study industry is that it tends to exhibit, and be driven by, an all but self-parody of parochial Western attitudes. I share many of those attitudes. Nonetheless, a certain strategic cultural self-awareness can be a useful check against overambitious expectations. There are reasons—pertaining to robustness of command and control arrangements, 19 the technical safety of weapons, possible proclivities to take extreme risks, and the general unreliability of deterrence—that it is sensible to affirm the principle that the best WMD proliferation is the least WMD proliferation. Nonetheless, that principle is by no means necessarily authoritative for all cases of conflict, and even when it is commanding in its apparent prudence, it rests upon shaky political, strategic, and ethical foundations.
The Western professional and popular literature on proliferation tells us almost as much about ourselves as it does about the subject. Moreover, the very concept of proliferation itself has a less-than-helpful pejorative ring to it. The point is not that the further spread of WMD and their means of delivery should be regarded generally with equanimity, let alone should be welcomed, but rather that our attitudes can blind us to the necessary strategic understanding of what is going on. It may be useful to prestigmatize nuclear acquisition by “threshold” nuclear weapons states, but not if we immunize ourselves against comprehending where this second nuclear age is tending.
Overall, there are grounds for concern lest the Western proliferation study industry is spending too much time, and too much of the taxpayers’ money, massaging and trumpeting its/our values and prejudices, and too little time trying to come to grips with the phenomenon at issue. That phenomenon is best understood as an expression of the political demand for security as locally and regionally defined. It is high time for this analysis to move directly into the country of motivation, into the key area that is the demand side of the proliferation puzzle.
Security Demand is King—Or Is It?
In the understructured new security environment characterized by U.S. hegemony, technical hindrances to the spread of WMD and missile means for their delivery are distinctly inadequate to cope with heroic challenges. A heroic scale of challenge can be defined as a policy demand for WMD assistance in protection of core security values. If a polity is determined to acquire nuclear weapons, for example, and if that polity has access to large funds, supply-side constraints from the global nonproliferation regime in its several dimensions will not succeed; 20 at least, supply-side constraints on scarce materials, technologies, and skills ultimately will not succeed in denying nuclear acquisition. Those constraints, especially with reference to the supply of plutonium or highly enriched uranium—the most key of scarce materials 21 —can succeed, however, in raising the costs, delaying program completion, and impairing the quality of a national program to acquire WMD. Those qualifications to a failing endeavor at control may be important. To buy time is perhaps to buy time that allows for a suddenly or cumulatively dramatic change in political context. After all, South African–type political miracles do happen, albeit not often, not predictably, and not necessarily always to a definitively benign outcome. 22
It is important to emphasize the significance of an argument I advanced in a controversial book I wrote a few years ago. In House of Cards: Why Arms Control Must Fail, I suggested that efforts to achieve arms control and disarmament—as contrasted with the control of arms, which fortunately is a different and more practicable matter altogether—rested upon a critically debilitating fallacy. 23 I argued that there is an “arms control paradox” that holds that the more urgently a conflict relationship is in need of the services of arms control medicine or surgery, the less likely is it to be able to enjoy those services. Why? Because the political antagonisms that fuel a war-prone condition work to preclude that meaningful measure of cooperation between adversaries that is the core activity of an arms control process.
The proliferation puzzle is at risk to the same genus of fallacy as are other regions of arms control. Nuclear and other WMD proliferation phenomena are driven by demand-side forces, not by the availability of relevant technical supply. It would be difficult to exaggerate the salience of this point. The superordinate importance of demand over supply applies not only to narrowly contemporary matters of attempts at enforcement of nuclear restraint, but also to the prospects for nuclear weapons acquisition in the most distant future. There is no great nuclear secret that can be protected against polities or other agencies who have determination and money; and no matter how successful the NPT regime may be in slowing the pace of proliferation, the nuclear era is here to stay. Nuclear denial and nuclear self-denial are both reversible in future strategic history. The belief, or hope, persists that the nuclear era can be ended by some grand global human achievement in nuclear self-denial. Such an exercise in “abolition,” even if feasible, would endure only until it was contradicted by a desperate security need. Polities could agree only to forgo the benefits of WMD until they were obliged by circumstances to change their minds. 24
The scholarly literature on the proliferation puzzle, properly sifted to sideline the tendency to undue technicity, is quite unambiguous and generally persuasive in its treatment of the motives behind nuclear acquisition. It will come as no great revelation to readers to be informed that polities want to acquire nuclear (and other) WMD because they seek security, in the hope of gain, because the institutional interests that contend in their domestic processes find WMD advantageous to their substate level of stakes, and because there can be symbolic value in nuclear weapons status. Scholars have tended to revel in their discerning of the obvious about the motives to proliferate, but nonetheless they have grasped some of the essentials of the topic. What remains to be accomplished is the highlighting of the dominant basket of motivation—which is to do with security—and definition of the challenges that that dominance implies. Specifically, how best can we cope with and in a persistently nuclear (and BC) future that likely has at least some terms and conditions notably different from those that obtained in the first nuclear age of the great Cold War (though that future will share with the Cold War years an unhappy unreliability of deterrence)?
Arms are not the problem; rather it is the political demand for arms. Salvador de Madariaga wrote in his memoirs:
The trouble with disarmament was (it still is) that the problem of war is tackled upside down and at the wrong end. Upside down first; for nations do not arm willingly. Indeed they are sometimes only too willing to disarm, as the British did to their sorrow in the Baldwin days. Nations don’t distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. And therefore to want disarmament before a minimum of common agreement on fundamentals is as absurd as to want people to go undressed in winter. Let the weather be warm, and people will discard their clothes readily and without committees to tell them how they are to undress. 25
The transnational arms control community has long had intellectual, emotional, and even some ethical difficulty with the following points: arms control is not identical to the control of arms; arms are tools of political purpose; and humans and their polities are remarkably flexible and adaptive in their willingness and ability to find ways to hurt other humans and polities.
It is easy to be misunderstood. I do not despise efforts at a supply-side approach to the proliferation puzzle. The argument here is not that supply-side action is without merit, but rather that the demand side of the proliferation challenge is so dominant—especially today when access to a supply of key skills, materials, and technologies is feasible, if not always easy and rarely cheap—that any approach that seeks to sideline demand-side issues is certain to fail.
For a powerfully apposite analogy to nuclear proliferation, consider the challenge posed by the “drug problem.” What is the drug problem? Is it, for example, the fact that Andean peasant farmers can make far more money growing coca plants than growing coffee? Or is the problem the demand for drugs that guarantees that those Andean peasant farmers will be able to sell their coca crop to the agents of the Medellín or Cali cartels? Some defoliation action in the Andean foothills will have a temporary effect on drug prices as supply and demand readjust. But in a world where coca itself, and several coca substitutes, can be grown over a large area, a supply-side assault on the drug problem must fail. This analogy is extreme, but it does make the necessary point with uncompromising clarity. Just as we have to cope with drug addiction because we cannot solve the “problem” of the demand for drugs, so we have to cope—as an extension of the ways in which we do at present—with a more nuclear-, indeed more WMD-proliferant world, because we cannot solve the “problem” of local and regional political demand for the security that is believed to flow uniquely from possession of such weaponry.
As theorists, scholars are addicted to drawing distinctions that have the potential to mislead as well as inform. Such may be the case here. What follows is a summary, though critical, analysis of the conclusions of scholarship about the motives for nuclear proliferation. Scott Sagan’s generally excellent writings necessarily figure here prominently, but this presentation is not simply a précis of his recent scholarship. He has provided three “models” that can explain nuclear proliferation. 26 These are useful, but I elect to add a fourth “model” (which codes as Security II), and I would record unease about an academic exercise that risks distinguishing matters that more truly are one, whole phenomenon.
It is instructive to march the four models in explanation of nuclear weapons status past a British policy reviewing stand. Polities endorse nuclear status for reasons of Security I (external danger); “Security II” (hope of external gain); domestic politics; and symbolism. Britain’s (semi-)independent nuclear deterrent—four Vanguard-class SSBNs armed with Trident II SLBMs—certainly enjoys political cover with a dominant security (I) argument. That argument reduces to the thoroughly plausible claim that the future (a long time!) is deeply uncertain and—who knows—a British nuclear force one day might be useful for British security. But in addition to the usefully opaque Security I rationale, persistence of the British nuclear deterrent also can be explained with reference to British domestic politics. A New Labour government is committed to appearing, and being (to be fair), realistically “prudent” in policymaking for national security. Given that unilateral nuclear disarmament is a ghost that lurks in the wings only slightly off stage for Tony Blair’s administration, the commitment by his Labour government to a nuclear future for British defense policy has obvious domestic, as well as international, policy resonance.
Scholars of international relations, or world politics, often seem to forget that the world is organized into polities, as security communities. The rigorous semi-nonsense of Waltz’s neorealism would have us treat the actors in world security politics largely as if they were black boxes, 27 but all knowledge is local knowledge, all policy is made domestically, and every maker of policy and strategy has been encultured by a particular tradition and society. So why do polities, or other security communities, seek WMD?
Security I: To Cope with Perceptions of External Threat
The external threat that is perceived, or anticipated, is determined according to more or to less expansive definitions of the requirements of national security. For example, compare the relative strength of the security challenge to U.S., as contrasted with French, definition of needs for nuclear forces. Insofar as there is an external security rationale for French national nuclear forces, it pertains to a generalized raising of risks for any polity that might imperil core French security values. In the gloriously apposite phrase quoted by Michael Quinlan, “A nuclear state is a state that no-one can afford to make desperate.” 28 The commonsense appeal of this strategic logic has not been lost on Iraqis, Libyans, and Iranians. France believes it requires nuclear forces for the mission of what Herman Kahn called “Type I deterrence”: deterrence of direct attack on the homeland. 29
The United States, by contrast, requires in addition to Type I deterrence some potency in Type II deterrence, the deterrence of attack upon distant allies and friends. This “extended” form of deterrence typically raises questions of credibility that have profound implications for nuclear doctrine and force planning. 30 A nuclear force posture judged good enough to send a putative foe’s risk calculus healthily into the red zone may well be far from good enough to extend protection over a distant ally who faces the prospect of defeat in a conventional war. This analysis is edging close to the basic geostrategic problem of NATO’s defense during the Cold War. For an extended nuclear deterrent to be sufficiently credible (to the deterrer, the intended deterree, and to the would-be deterrer’s security clients), yet tolerably reassuring (again, to all interested parties), it has to appear to offer an all-but-seamless web of possible scales of action, useful major uncertainties, and above all the absence of any catastrophic cliff edge over which the would-be extended deterrer promises to throw all parties (including itself). 31
Although the scale and character of the U.S. nuclear force posture can be explained in good part with reference simply to the size (and wealth) of the United States and the size (and erstwhile wealth that could be devoted to defense functions) of the USSR, somewhat redundantly perhaps one also has to point to the challenging mission of extended, Type II deterrence that the United States long has accepted. The security rationale for nuclear possession, in part at least, is deeply subjective in particular definition. If a polity’s foe is a nuclear weapons state (or a nuclear threshold state), then the strategic case for a nuclear deterrent to cover core national values can be qualified only by a policy willingness to acquire some kind of effective offset to that perceived nuclear threat. Many countries discern good enough alternatives to national nuclear arsenals; some authoritative facsimile of a security guarantee is the most popular, if also the most difficult, to achieve. Nuclear weapons states, no matter how well armed, are understandably reluctant to underwrite the security of distant polities against threats from WMD.
The Security I motive for the acquisition or sustainment of a national nuclear weapons arsenal is therefore in principle as variable in its implications for force planning as it is common in its basic strategic logic. Notwithstanding the points just made, the actual contemporary practice of nuclear strategy sees only one polity more or less—and it is becoming less and less—committed to extending nuclear deterrence: the United States. None of the world’s other nuclear weapons states (Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, and Pakistan) or nuclear threshold states (certainly North Korea and possibly Iran) have any intention, no matter how improbably contingent, of engaging in extended nuclear deterrence. Nominal caveats to that judgment include British and French obligations under the NATO and Western European Union (WEU) treaties, and residual Russian obligations, legal and less so, to protect her “near abroad” in the ever more shadowy Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Security, like deterrence and stability, is one of those essentially contestable concepts that lends itself to cynical manipulation yet points to the most basic area of a polity’s responsibility to its citizens for an uncertain future. Although every polity that affords large conventional forces could find merit in the fundamental security case for national nuclear armament, in practice very few polities have elected to cross the line to become either a declared, or an undeclared, nuclear weapons state. National security may well diminish as a result of nuclear possession. The considerable force of that argument, however, with its allusion to the perils of “pariah” status and to the licensing of WMD threats against oneself, should not be taken as a blanket strategic truth. There will be occasions when polities under threat will decide that they should accept no substitutes for nuclear forces. (Chemical, and especially biological, WMD certainly are much cheaper and generally easier to acquire than are nuclear weapons, but they are less reliably predictable in their effects as weapons.) That thought is unfashionable today and heroically politically incorrect for a second nuclear age that in 1996 signed up for indefinite extension of the 1968 NPT treaty; nonetheless, that unfashionable thought has strategic merit.
Security II: To Make Gains
Geostrategic judgment is so subjective that it would be difficult to demonstrate unambiguously that Security II was the dominant, “roguish-looking” motive for nuclear acquisition. Conceptually, the distinction between Security I and Security II is plain enough. Security I motivation points to the fact, or perceived fact, that a polity is threatened from abroad. That threat may be nuclear, conventional, or of some other in kind, but this logic proposes nuclear armament as a solution.
Security II motivation envisages a polity electing to acquire nuclear weapons in order to enhance its external security space at the expense of the security of others. In practice it is frequently less than clear exactly where, or on what terms, the security spaces of geostrategically rival polities meet. 32 At the level of the tactical grammar of nuclear strategy, 33 launch after attack (LAA) can slip apparently prudently into a mode of launch under attack (LUA), which—again apparently prudently—may slip back temporally into a character of launch on warning (LOW), which for sensitive and itchy trigger fingers might translate as launch on suspicion (LOS). Conceptual clarity of distinctions becomes fuzzy in the messy and seamless world wherein those conceptual “thresholds” are hard to locate unambiguously.
Nuclear acquisition for defensive reasons of Security I may give a polity a nuclear force posture that appears to open up newly expansive options in statecraft, no matter how modest the original motivation for nuclear possession may have been. Also, the inherently subjective character of policy definition of security requirements means that even the most genuinely “roguish” of polities—by reasonable assay and with all my previous caveats noted—will have a nominally modest Security I rationale to advance. Both Iraq and Iran, examples chosen not entirely at random, have Security I stories to tell (stories some people will find reasonable) in praise of their unacknowledged bids to become nuclear threshold(-plus) states. Each of them faces genuine external security menace from the other; each has at least a case for the nuclear (and other WMD) option as a counterdeterrent to U.S. intervention and influence in the region; and each can argue that it seeks to use its wealth and skills as a protecting power on behalf of much of the Islamic world writ large in the struggles that that world cannot help but pursue against Zionism and other agencies of the devil, and so on and so forth.
Recall the words of the imperial German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, to the Reichstag on 4 August 1914. The chancellor proclaimed that “we are now in a state of necessity, and necessity knows no law.” 34 With appeal to the ethic of necessity, which if any actions could not be justified or at least rationalized? The same nuclear option that might protect Iraq against further U.S. intervention in the Gulf region also could serve as the strategic basis for a renewed bid for Iraq’s regional hegemony. Self-serving Security I explanations for Security II ambitions are always to be found, and perennially there will be a credulous audience.
Domestic Interests and Politics
Nuclear proliferation may be more the product of contending domestic interests with domestic stakes than the policy result of a process of careful assessment of external menace. More than twenty-five years ago I suggested that arms race theory needed to take “domestic process” theses a lot more seriously than then was doctrinally fashionable. 35 At the time, in the early 1970s, it was almost mandatory for U.S. defense analysts to believe that the superpower “arms race”—if it was such 36 —worked according to a mechanistic process of action and reaction. The ghost of now long discredited action-reaction theory does, however, still linger in the shadows of scholarly proliferation country.
Scott D. Sagan has (re)discovered the obvious, but he has done so with characteristic flair, when he writes that “nuclear weapons programs are not obvious or inevitable solutions to international security problems; instead, nuclear weapons programs are solutions looking for a problem to which to attach themselves so as to justify their existence.” 37 This domestic process (partial) explanation of proliferation does not deny the existence of external threats, even genuine external threats. But the model suggests that the genuine perception of external threat is a necessary convenience for domestic interests that see benefit for themselves in the national pursuit of WMD. Among the more obvious difficulties with this view of proliferation is that it tends to have a circular, self-reinforcing logic. A program for nuclear acquisition, regardless of the balance of arguments and interests prior to the decision to proceed toward threshold condition, must garner vested interests as it proceeds. The argument can become perilously existential; there is a powerful clutch of domestic interests supporting a nuclear program, but those interests have to exist because a nuclear program requires the devotion of a large scale of resources over a long period. Every active WMD program in the world must have an extensive baggage train of vested domestic interests (that train will be more extensive for nuclear than for BC weapon programs). But to argue that there are domestic processes dependent upon an active WMD program is only to state a necessary truth. This is one of those occasional scholarly cases wherein the needs of theory building collide with the inconvenience of many facts that just are as they are.
The domestic focus of some recent theoretical work on motives for proliferation has something important to say. It is all too easy for international relations theorists to forget that all strategic security policy is made at home somewhere, and that all politicians have first to be parochial politicians if they are ever to be unleashed as statespeople on the world scene. The domestic interests and politics model of WMD proliferation thus not only expresses a necessary truth but also probably usefully redirects our attention to the policy (inter alia) processes that actually make and sustain momentous official decisions. Few cases are likely to be as dramatic as has been that of South Africa over the course of the past decade, but even in polities whose political and social history is distinctly linear, the keys to nuclear weapons status may repose more at home than in perceptions or anticipation (again at home, admittedly) of threats from abroad.
Honor
With due acknowledgment of the continuing potency of Thucydides’ analysis of motives in world politics, one must recognize the salience of honor (status, reputation, and prestige) as a prime motivator in a bid for nuclear armament. It is true that the NPT regime denies honor to new nuclear proliferants. In a classic example of sensible international discrimination, the NPT recognizes only five declared (as of 1967) nuclear weapons states. The treaty has had the generally beneficial effect of helping to drive underground at least “opaque” new national endeavors to achieve the ability to exercise the nuclear option. From being a badge that a state was eager to wear in the 1950s and early 1960s, nuclear-weapons status evolved under the legal-political-ethical glare of NPT lights into something furtive that, while not denied, was better not confirmed. Hence, one finds the phenomenon of “opaque proliferation.” 38 We sin, and we enjoy the benefits of sin, but we do not boast about it.
It is true today that strong international suspicions that one is seeking a nuclear threshold condition would yield all the “honor” of guilt by association with Iran and North Korea. Nonetheless, modest or even negative though the honor accruing from nuclear prowess may be, a different view of honor yields a different judgment. The NPT regime effectively has closed the nuclear club as an association that confers honor with membership. But the comfortable and convenient beliefs that are promoted by that regime do not speak to the whole of future strategic history. If nuclear weapons are singularly stigmatized, then a willingness to flout the nonproliferation convention is all the more shocking and possibly strategically effective. One of the concerns that drives this analysis is the suspicion that the contemporary and massively Western-fashionable set of antinuclear attitudes is perilously vulnerable even to relatively minor perturbations from the zone inhabited by “lesser breeds without dominance in cyberspace” (translated as poorer polities unable to compete in information-led conventional capabilities for conflict).
Honor should not be despised as a leading motive for nuclear possession. A high reputation for effectiveness in statecraft, pursued by whatever mix of grand-strategic instruments, translates as a reputation that generally will not be challenged. As a rule, honor cannot be secured by “smoke and mirrors,” but if a polity is credited with particular strategic prowess, challenges are apt to be rare and inadvertent. States aspiring to nuclear weapons, or at least nuclear-threshold, status can aim for honor confident that the terms of engagement in world politics will recognize the value of their achievement.
If the concept of honor is expanded, perhaps stretched, to include those “honorable in notoriety,” it becomes readily apparent why the strategic value of pariah status should not be dismissed peremptorily. To be armed with WMD, even just to be suspected of being so armed, is to induce respect. Respect, as well as approval, can be an adequate basis for honor (and prestige). The honor and prestige pertaining to (newly achieved) nuclear weapons status, even though in some ways offset by the values of the NPT regime, remain consistent with the gold standard of strategic effectiveness in world politics. It is difficult to equate non-nuclear WMD status with honor and prestige, at least as those potent concepts normatively are usually understood. Nonetheless, to be known to be armed with anthrax bombs or with nerve gas weapons may well induce the respect that rests upon fear.
To risk being unduly crude, how much does it matter that the G8 world would prefer the list of nuclear weapons states to remain as it stands at present (even as recently expanded, with India and Pakistan)? A new nuclear weapons state, or a threshold nuclear weapons state, obliges established relations of nuclear-led power to adjust, much as the rise of new wealth obliges established societies to accommodate and adjust, no matter how reluctantly. Two general points about honor are widely misunderstood.
First, polities do not seek honor, prestige, or status through the acquisition of nuclear weapons as empty trappings (ceremonial nonsense) attending their search for security. Honor, prestige, and status are valued not because they induce some empty flattery but because they translate as influence when and where it counts. Second, those who stigmatize and singularize nuclear weapons risk achieving precisely the opposite of their generally worthy policy intentions. The problem is akin to that faced by a super/great power protector who seeks to discourage local allied demands for nuclear capability by providing the reliable assistance of an extended nuclear deterrence.
Much as Carl von Clausewitz insists that there is an ever dynamic set of complex relations among passion, chance, and reason that always makes “war a remarkable trinity,” 39 so the four classes of motives for proliferation discussed above also interpenetrate and have unstable interconnections. Motives to proliferate invariably will be mixed, and every historical case will be distinctive, albeit distinctive within the general architecture just analyzed. There is a “proliferation puzzle” in that the pieces that compose the total picture even for a single historical case usually will not all be accessible for study, let alone influence, and the exact pattern the many pieces make up will be difficult to understand.
Onward and Upward? Signposts and Principles
In the practicably constrained world of statecraft, efforts to counter presumed endeavors to achieve nuclear possession among possible WMD arsenals take the form more of a series of obstacles than of the devising of an impassable barrier (biological and chemical weapon capabilities are much more difficult to deny than nuclear). The scholarly literature is awash with references to “proliferation pessimism” and “proliferation optimism.” 40 I probably tend on balance to the side of pessimism, though such a description risks doing violence to a view that is far from resigned to the certainty of policy failure. However, it is less than completely clear where policy failure, or policy success for that matter, would lie. Nuclear proliferation may be generally, if not quite invariably, undesirable; but how important is it when compared with the complex policy goal of peace with security? It may be recalled that this chapter began by posing the following questions: Given that we care about nuclear (and other WMD) proliferation, just how much do we care or should we care? And can we care deeply about a problem that is really a condition with which we need to learn to cope?
With Chapters 3 and 4 together focusing upon key aspects of the broad subject of proliferation, and principally upon nuclear proliferation, it is useful at this halfway point to suggest some “signposts” to guide further discussion. By signposts this author has in mind very much what Clausewitz intended when he had this to say about “principles and rules”:
If the theorist’s studies automatically result in principles and rules, and if truth spontaneously crystallizes into these forms, they will not resist this natural tendency of the mind. On the contrary, where the arch of truth culminates in such a keystone, this tendency will be underlined. But this is simply in accordance with the scientific law of reason, to indicate the point at which all lines converge, but never to construct an algebraic formula for use on the battlefield. Even these principles and rules are intended to provide a thinking man with a focus of reference for the movements he has been trained to carry out, rather than to serve as a guide which at the moment of action lays down precisely the path he must take. 41
Six signposts serve both to summarize much of the argument of this chapter and to point the way to discussion necessary in the next one.
Signpost 1: world politics must always be conducted in the shadow of nuclear peril, actual or potential. Whether or not nuclear weapons are present in a region, indeed whether or not nuclear weapons were to be “abolished,” there are no longer any true nuclear secrets the control of which could thwart bids for nuclear possession. The nuclear era has come to stay.
Signpost 2: nuclear weapons are useful. In addition to the scientific, technological, and industrial truth expressed in the first signpost, a political-military—which is to say strategic—truth was implied also. For reasons probed in later chapters, nuclear weapons have unique strategic properties that find favor with policymakers. On the basis of the history of the nuclear era to date, one can affirm with high confidence that even if nuclear weapons do not readily lend themselves to effective use an as instrument for advantage, assuredly they provide a great measure of insurance against the probability of suffering large disadvantage. That important, though bounded, formula should not be taken as an eternal truth governing the domain of the strategic utility of nuclear weapons. Adolf Hitler did not command a nuclear arsenal, but he might have done; and who can say with assurance what a Hitler-like—if that is possible, which I believe it is—policymaker might attempt if nuclear armed? Today’s nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons threshold states have not drifted into or toward nuclear possession, nor have they remained in their nuclear condition by the power of inertia alone.
Signpost 3: proliferation is more akin to a puzzle to be assembled for understanding than to a problem in need of solution. Careful political, strategic, and technical study of particular candidate cases of proliferation points to tactics that can harass, and therefore slow and render more expensive (and probably less sophisticated), the flow of military-technical achievements that cumulatively constitute a successful program leading toward the possession of nuclear weapons. In addition, empathetic consideration of the policy demand side of particular proliferation cases may, though more problematically, lead to identification of policy initiatives for security that could at least deflect, if not reduce radically, erstwhile local insistence upon national nuclear weaponry. Motives for overt or unannounced nuclear possession, or near possession, will be mixed. It follows that even superior-seeming solutions to some of the security problems, for example, which figured importantly among the motives that favored nuclear weapons, may not be answer enough to the full range of policy demands. France may well be strategically secure beneath the friendly umbrella of U.S. extended (nuclear) deterrence. But what of the security of the French people’s self-respect in such a dependency condition?
Signpost 4: counterproliferation policy—one size does not fit all. Each case of possible nuclear proliferation is unique in the detail of its multicausality and distinctive in its security implications for world politics. It is probably true that every known case of achievement of nuclear threshold status is a standing challenge to the non- or even antiproliferation norms of the NPT regime. Nonetheless, beyond some generic undesirability about further proliferation, every individual instance requires understanding and, just possibly, policy treatment by a concerned international community—always excepting most of “the usual suspects,” of course. Given that for obvious reasons proliferant powers tend to grow in pairs (most recently, India and Pakistan in 1998), if not quite batches, one way for the forces of international order to help cope with, say, a very near-nuclear Iraq would be to ensure that such an Iraq could be balanced by a suitably nuclear-threshold Iran. Notwithstanding some reasonable political and technical anxieties about putative Iraqi and Iranian nuclear arsenals, still one may judge that in the medium term, nuclear balance is preferable to nuclear imbalance—if, that is, nuclear possession cannot reliably be denied both parties. Reassuring thoughts about nuclear balance, even if militarily well founded, do need to be interrogated by the implications of the less reassuring thought that deterrence is not thoroughly reliable. Nuclear armament by a pair of regional rivals could mean not a near guarantee against war but rather a guarantee that their next war will be a nuclear one.
On balance, however, with the caveat noted about the reliability of deterrence, some cases of proliferation should benefit regional stability. British and French nuclear acquisition may have had positive consequences for security in Europe during the Cold War. 42 Again in the context of the Cold War, Chinese nuclear weapons status was as essential to the balancing of Soviet power in central and northeast Asia as it was strategically complementary to the U.S.-led security order in the East Asian region in the 1970s and 1980s. As for the nuclear arsenal of Israel, if the United States did not bequeath it—which was not the case—at least the United States can be grateful for it. There is a military and technological peace in the Middle East (as it focuses upon Israel), which is the most that is attainable pending eventual achievement of a political peace. Finally, it is difficult realistically to be critical of the ill-matched nuclear-armed pair in the subcontinent, India and Pakistan. What could not be prevented at a reasonable cost proportional to the stakes—in this instance, nuclear acquisition by India and Pakistan—should be publicly deplored after the fact only in muted tones. One should not make a political and strategic virtue of the necessity of unstoppable nuclear weapons programs. But scarce policy resources should not be squandered in lost causes of strategically arguable merit.
Signpost 5: accept no substitutes—only nuclear weapons will do. Notwithstanding the considerable effort devoted by the proliferation studies industry to biological and chemical weaponry, these weapons—most of which mercifully are probably still only potential—are not well understood militarily or strategically. 43 The leading problems that have inhibited strategic comprehension include the following: uncertainty over how each category of BC, toxin, and radiological weapons could perform usefully as a weapon—tactically, operationally, strategically; at least dim recognition that each broad category of these weapons contains many distinctive technical options with no less distinctive technical-tactical features; a happily severe shortage of historical experience with BC weapons to use as a basis for theory and doctrine building (indeed, the confirmed category of biological warfare in modern times is restricted to Japanese misbehavior in China); and profound uncertainty over how BC weapons relate strategically to nuclear weapons. Contemporary strategy recognizes, albeit barely, that grouping NBC weapons as WMD and conveniently treating BC weapons simply as lesser but included cases of whatever one thinks one knows about nuclear weapons is wrong, or at least unwise. Strategically, what does one need to understand about BC weapons issues, especially in their relation to nuclear arms?
Arms control is especially unhelpful with respect to BC weapons. The widespread manufacture of industrial “precursor” or starter chemicals for innocent functions renders many CW-capable production facilities beyond reliable inspection and control. Difficult though it has to be to identify illegal chemical weapons production facilities, that difficulty is all but trivial when compared with the problems of monitoring for illegal BW research. Medical research, the proper activities of a pharmaceutical industry, and largely approved research on BW for defensive purposes yield a condition that is beyond useful control by multinational agreement. Signature to the Biological and Toxin and the Chemical Weapons Conventions (1972, 1995, respectively) may help make one feel more comfortable, but really it should not. BC, especially biological, weapons programs are relatively easy to hide, or at least explain away. The net effect of arms control conventions concerning this strategic area is to discourage vigilance and active responsive preparation on the part of potential victims. It is unlikely that any polity could be denied BC weapons because of the additional barriers that the legal conventions supposedly erect. (The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972 does not even pretend to a verification and enforcement regime—which is at least honest, if not reassuring). As usual, the overwhelming problem with arms control is simply that it does not work when and where the international community needs it badly. The BC conventions will be obeyed more or less faithfully by all the countries not strongly motivated to behave otherwise.
BC weapons continue to be insufficiently controllable in their tactical domain of action to be very useful military weapons. There are actual, and certainly potential, exceptions to this point, but nonetheless the rule holds well enough. Both chemical and biological weapons lack the reliability of predictable military effect that is characteristic of nuclear weapons. Chemical weapons, as with many biological weapons, can be defeated by an enemy’s protective measures. Although biological, unlike chemical, agents do not need to be produced and delivered in huge quantities, and notwithstanding their potential to outperform even nuclear arms as killing mechanisms, “friction” produced in storage, in mechanical delivery, from the weather, or from uneven terrain could result in catastrophic strategic failure. Moreover, contrary to some popular fears, BW contamination of public water and food supplies is extraordinarily difficult to achieve to the necessary level of strategic effect. Whereas chemical and toxin weapons incapacitate or kill promptly, biological agents can work only at the speed of incubation and reproduction in the victim-host. Conservative war planners will know that a great deal they do not favor can occur between the initiation of aerosolized, explosive, or other release of BW agents and the maturity of the strategic mission of those agents. Nuclear-armed missiles are swifter, more reliable, and more predictable in their military consequences. But as weapons to terrorize and to punish—increase casualties and thereby raise the political stakes precipitously—BC armament represents strategically unknown territory that ought to worry governments.
There are some excellent reasons that the most appropriate responses to prepare against BC threats should be asymmetric to those threats. In other words, unconventional special warfare, conventional action, or nuclear action should be the first lines of defense for deterrence and denial. But deterrence may fail, or fail to apply, and military action of whatever character could be attempted too late, after the fact of BC assault. It is politically convenient to adopt a policy that specifies arms control and passive defensive measures as the twin thrusts of a counter-BC strategy. The problem is that arms control must prove extremely unrewarding for the diminution of BC menaces, while passive measures—immunization, protective clothing, air-filtered vehicles and facilities, evacuation—will be notably attriting of military effectiveness, most likely will not be practicable for all of the “targets” potentially at risk, and may not meet the political mail. There is no simple strategic solution to BC threats. But some combination of deliberately rather heavy-handed nuclear counterthreat, active defenses at least against air-breathing and ballistic means of BC delivery, and very prompt military preemptive—in principle even preventive—measures against the enemy’s known BC armament should serve usefully to reduce the scale of the menace. 44 For technical reasons of survivability, stability, and potency of the necessary BW aerosol, reliable ballistic delivery of live and lethal BW agents in sufficient concentration is difficult to achieve. The principal threat of BW delivery is posed by aerosol spray devices on aircraft, cruise missiles, and just possibly ships (with a following wind and a dedicated crew).
For reliable terrorization and an optimal prospect of achieving counterdeterrence, there is no adequate substitute for “old-fashioned” nuclear weaponry. 45 The manifold major uncertainties pertaining to BC weapons—for example, will they survive storage and delivery, what might they deter, what damage might they do?—are considerably smaller for nuclear armament. This is not to deny the possibility that BC weapons might constitute a halfway house, or perhaps a set of eccentric options, between or aside from conventional and nuclear zones of combat. Polities could persuade themselves that BC weapons would generate exceptional international respect yet should function below the threshold for a nuclear response. So much is only speculation, though we do suspect that in 1991 Iraq may have been dissuaded by Israeli, and possibly by U.S., nuclear growls from delivering chemical warheads with its Scud missiles. 46 The United States was bluffing, though no such confidence can attach to a judgment that Israel would not have responded with nuclear weapons to another chemical assault on the Jewish people.
Overall, a great deal more analytical and defense planning effort needs to be devoted to the still somewhat opaque strategic challenges that BC weaponry predictably will pose. Until very recently, it was easy to note the obvious signs of strategic delegation of BC weapons problems to the less-than-fully serious realms of arms control and passive defensive measures. Strategic historical experience with novel challenges suggests that governments will take the BC weapons problem/condition as seriously as they ought only when dire events in the real world allow no further evasion.
Signpost 6: uncertainty rules. None of the strategic theorists and other commentators active today have known any security condition other than one with a nuclear dimension. Familiarity can breed, if not contempt, at least an overconfident assurance of knowledge that flows inappropriately from long familiarity. Peter R. Lavoy is correct when he claims that “little is known about nuclear-weapons.” 47 Nothing much has been settled about nuclear questions by the passage of time thus far. A great deal can be inferred about the strategic utility of nuclear weapons for deterrence, and many nostrums are believed—indeed have been all but canonized—about “the requirements of deterrence.” 48 But the fortunate absence of nuclear combat presents severe difficulties of evidence for theory, doctrine, and policy. If Lavoy, among others, is plausible in pointing to a lack of historical knowledge about nuclear weapons in strategic action, how much more correct is he with reference to this new and second nuclear age? It is possible, and in some respects probable, that much of what we have accumulated as “nuclear lore” is actually little more than a bundle of hopes and agreeable platitudes that strategic history has yet to refute definitively. It is to this dire prospect that the discussion now must turn.
Endnotes
Note 1: The scholarly literature on the delivery of WMD is less voluminous than is the literature on proliferant WMD programs and arms control over the same. The reason for this disparity lies, I suspect, at least partially with the fact that the technically preferable means for delivery of at least nuclear WMD (ballistic missiles) imply for their negation a serious interest in missile defense. The community of Western arms controllers, which is willing to beat the drum of alarm about proliferant NBC perils, is not at all enthusiastic about Western ballistic missile defense (BMD). The monograph series from Lancaster University’s Centre for Defence and International Security Studies (CDISS) is particularly informative on the subject of delivery vehicles for WMD. For example, see Ewing, Ranger, and Bosdet, Ballistic Missiles; Ewing et al., Cruise Missiles; and Ranger, Devil’s Brews I. Also useful are Nolan, Trappings of Power, and Aaron Karp, Ballistic Missile Proliferation. Back.
Note 2: The ten-year delay that U.S. intervention imposed on Hanoi’s schedule in Vietnam was vital for the development and modernization of Southeast Asia. Much of the eventual economic achievement by East Asia’s “tiger” economies in the 1980s is plausibly attributable to the security cover that they gained because of the U.S. venture in Vietnam. The Asia of 1975, when Hanoi finally acquired Saigon, was not the Asia of 1965; those ten years really mattered. It is strangely ironic to suggest that the United States may have lost the war, but—for once in the twentieth century—it probably won the peace. Back.
Note 3: Freedman, “Great Powers,” p. 37. Back.
Note 4: See the discussion in Posen, “U.S. Security Policy in a Nuclear-Armed World.” Back.
Note 5: Freedman, “Great Powers,” p. 39. Back.
Note 6: Clausewitz, On War, pp. 119–121. Back.
Note 7: Johnson and Libicki, Dominant Battlespace Knowledge. Back.
Note 8: The literature is huge and hugely repetitive. The following is merely the shortest of short lists I personally favor. First, I recommend two quasi-official “primers” from the U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment (OTA): Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction. Second are two explicit “primers”: Gardner, Nuclear Nonproliferation, and Forsberg et al., Nonproliferation Primer. Third, there is an excellent trilogy from the fecund pen of Kathleen Bailey: Doomsday Weapons in the Hands of Many; Strengthening Nuclear Nonproliferation; and Weapons of Mass Destruction. Fourth is a handful of especially thoughtful studies: Dunn, Containing Nuclear Proliferation; Davis and Frankel, “The Proliferation Puzzle”; Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons; and Scott Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?” These items are but the small tip of a mighty iceberg. I am grateful to Davis and Frankel for the inspiration for the title to this chapter. Back.
Note 9: Hoffmann, Gulliver’s Troubles, Part II; Gray, “Strategy in the Nuclear Age,” esp. pp. 592–593. Back.
Note 10: Scott Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?” is sound and basic and can be supplemented usefully by two particularly innovative ventures: Lavoy, “Nuclear Myths and the Causes of Nuclear Proliferation”; and Flank, “Exploding the Black Box.” Back.
Note 11: See the discussion of potential “rogues” in Klare, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, ch. 5. It is encouraging to note that by 1998 the U.S. government by and large no longer was referring to “rogue states.” Unfortunately, “rogue state” appears to have been replaced by another highly charged formula—“aggressors.” See William Cohen, Annual Report, esp. pp. 2–8. Back.
Note 12: As a university professor who teaches strategic studies, and especially as one who contributed to the British government’s Strategic Defence Review in 1998, from time to time I am asked by foreign students why it is that Britain, a country almost entirely unmenaced at present by other than domestic Irish “rogues,” is determined to remain nuclear armed. I have been surprised, and even on occasion alarmed, by the approving comments I have received in response to my standard explanation. Some of those students come from countries with far stronger security motivation for nuclear armament than has Britain. Back.
Note 13: This point is all but admitted in the conclusions to the most recent rigorous study of the subject. Suganami, On the Causes of War. Back.
Note 14: Strassler, Landmark Thucydides, p. 43. Back.
Note 15: As explained magisterially in Aron, Peace and War, esp. pp. 580–585 Back.
Note 16: Solingen, “Political Economy of Nuclear Restraint.” Back.
Note 17: Sagan and Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons. See “The Kenneth Waltz–Scott Sagan Debate” and “The Kenneth Waltz–Scott Sagan Debate II.” Back.
Note 18: Every scholarly discipline has its déformation professionelle. Historians, for example, when troubled by big concepts, have been known to retreat into the narrative mode. Back.
Note 19: Seng, “Less Is More”; Feaver, “Neo-optimists and the Enduring Problem of Nuclear Proliferation”; Seng, “Optimism in the Balance.” Back.
Note 20: For reasons superbly, and admirably tersely, laid out in Bailey, Strengthening Nuclear Nonproliferation. In Bailey’s trenchant words, “The key conclusion drawn from the Iraqi case is that the nuclear nonproliferation regime cannot prevent a determined proliferant, even when that nation is a participant in the regime. Iraq was a party to the NPT and placed its declared facilities under safeguards” (p. 34). A classic treatment of this case is Kay, “Denial and Deception Practices of WMD Proliferators.” Trevan, Saddam’s Secrets, is also useful. Back.
Note 21: U.S. Congress, Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction. Also good on nuclear weapons “basics” is Grace, Nuclear Weapons. Back.
Note 22: Stumpf, “South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Programme.” Back.
Note 23: Gray, House of Cards. Back.
Note 24: For views more friendly to the prospects for some variant of nuclear abolition, see Rotblat, Steinberger, and Udgaonkar, Nuclear-Weapon-Free World. Back.
Note 25: Madariaga, quoted in Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 67 Back.
Note 26: In Scott Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?” Back.
Note 27: Waltz, Theory of International Politics, is the sacred text of neorealism. My strong preference is for the more sophisticated, if frequently less theoretically rigorous, classical realist wisdom to be found in Aron, Peace and War, and Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations. Back.
Note 28: Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 19. Back.
Note 29: Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, ch. 4. Back.
Note 30: Huth, Extended Deterrence and the Prevention of War. Back.
Note 31: Howard, “Reassurance and Deterrence.” Back.
Note 32: The concept of security space is one that I find useful. The Caribbean, for example, is within the U.S. security space, psychologically speaking at least. It was Nikita Khrushchev’s misunderstanding of the force of this point that made the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 so dangerous. At the present time, it is less than clear just what is, and what is no longer, within Russia’s security space from among the lost lands of the old USSR. Back.
Note 33: With gratitude to Clausewitz, On War, p. 605, with his powerful distinction between the grammar of war and the logic of policy for war. Back.
Note 34: Bethmann Hollweg, quoted in Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 240. Back.
Note 35: In Gray, “Arms Race Phenomenon” and Soviet-American Arms Race. Also see the discussion in Buzan and Herring, Arms Dynamic in World Politics, ch. 7. Back.
Note 36: Gray, “Arms Races and Other Pathetic Fallacies.” Back.
Note 37: Scott Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?” p. 65. Back.
Note 38: Frankel, Opaque Nuclear Proliferation. Reiss, Bridled Ambition, also is pertinent. Back.
Note 39: Clausewitz, On War, p. 89. Back.
Note 40: For example, Karl, “Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers.” Back.
Note 41: Clausewitz, On War, p. 141. Back.
Note 42: No country cares as much about another as it does about itself. For stable deterrence it was useful for Soviet leaders to have to take account of the political fact that there were three independent nuclear decisionmaking processes within NATO, two of which were in Europe. Back.
Note 43: U.S. Congress, Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, ch. 2, is outstanding. Other useful studies include Spiers, Chemical Warfare; Wright, Preventing a Biological Arms Race; Grove, Banning Chemical Weapons; Spiers, Chemical and Biological Weapons; Dando, Biological Warfare in the 21st Century; Shubik, “Terrorism, Technology, and the Socioeconomics of Death” (though path-breaking and suitably deeply troubling, this article needs to be taken with a dose of strategic salt with respect to the practical operational dimension of its subject); Cole, The Eleventh Plague; Betts, “New Threat of Mass Destruction”; and Falkenrath, “Confronting Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Terrorism.” Back.
Note 44: Cohen, Annual Report, p. 21, is quite encouraging: “The Joint Staff and CINCs are developing a Joint counter-NBC weapons operational concept that integrates both offensive and defensive measures.” Concepts and doctrines are important; they are not, however, synonymous with capabilities or actions. Back.
Note 45: Gray, “Nuclear Weapons and the Revolution in Military Affairs.” Back.
Note 46: See Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age, p. 85. Back.
Note 47: Lavoy, “Nuclear Myths,” p. 200. Back.
Note 48: Kaufmann, “Requirements of Deterrence,” remains classic Back.
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