The Second Nuclear Age

Colin S. Gray

Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.

1999

Preface

 

At the close of the twentieth century, Western governments and peoples do not want to think strategically about nuclear weapons and do not know how to think strategically about biological and chemical arms. The Second Nuclear Age is designed to help correct those deficiencies.

The drive behind this book is the conviction that Western defense communities are doing everything about what have come to be termed weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—except take them seriously as a source of major menace. By way of terse explanation, I cite a few examples: in 1997, the United States accepted new, indeed the first ever, formal constraints on theater missile defense (no space-based interceptors), even though the Soviet/Russian-U.S. ABM Treaty of 1972 has no strategic relevance for a world bereft of a Russian-U.S. strategic balance; impracticable measures of arms control are lauded for biological, toxin, and chemical arms even though they are systemically incapable of helping to alleviate security problems; much confidence continues to be reposed in mechanisms of deterrence, despite plausible arguments that advise to the contrary; many Western experts believe that there is extant a “nuclear taboo” against the use of nuclear arms; and Western governments and publics are setting themselves up to be shocked by WMD events early in the next century.

Although I feel strongly about the subject of this book, as the paragraph immediately above attests, I have chosen to write a scholarly and balanced review of the WMD—though especially the nuclear—dimension to our future insecurity. Although the text is scholarly in attitude and approach, I have striven to keep the language lively and the footnoting minimal. Furthermore, although the argument is balanced, it is not balanced between truth and error to the point where error is honored beyond its station.

Rightly or wrongly, I strive here to play the ball rather than the ballplayer. This intention can have the effect of depersonalizing the argument to the point where I may appear evasive, or where I may risk offering a caricature of positions that I oppose. On balance, I choose to risk appearing guilty of confronting unnamed persons rather than drag the debate into the zone of personalities.

The text cites and explores much evidence of intellectual laziness, imprudence in policy, and plain old misunderstanding; I therefore confine my observations here to four claims that contain both good and bad news. First, notwithstanding the arguable arrival of an information-led revolution in military affairs (RMA), we continue to live in a nuclear era, and this nuclear era has distinctive nuclear “ages.” Second, we should not be lulled by five-plus decades of nuclear peace into the complacent belief that some happy mixture of deterrence, arms control, political evolution, and military-technical progress has banished the specter of nuclear war. Third, WMD are likely to be used for biological, toxin, and chemical—as well as nuclear—war; and such war easily could generate casualty lists for which Western governments and publics are wholly unprepared. Fourth, and finally, we are far from helpless: the real reason this book was worth writing is because there are measures that states can take, especially with respect to the provision of robustly layered offensive and defensive counterforce capabilities, that would help us to cope well enough (if not really well) with the perils posed by WMD. Otherwise we are reduced to a condition wherein our security must reside in faith, hope, and UN weapons inspectors.

Some readers will not like this book because it speaks of matters that make people, and governments, uncomfortable. The nonmarginal prospect of a “small” nuclear war in, say, South Asia, or the menace of biological or toxin agents in the hands of terrorists, does not make for comfortable reading. Scarcely less comfortable is the implication that if the argument about threats presented in this book is judged plausible—perhaps not implausible—then money and political courage are required if policy is to be prudent.

The Second Nuclear Age is a work that stands alone; it does, however, necessarily share arguments with a previous book of mine, House of Cards: Why Arms Control Must Fail (1992), and it benefits from my broader study, Modern Strategy (1999). During the course of researching and writing The Second Nuclear Age, I benefited greatly from the excellent cognate study, by my longtime friend and colleague Keith B. Payne of the National Institute for Public Policy, Deterrence in The Second Nuclear Age (1996). I could not be more pleased that he has contributed the Foreword to this book.

One of the great pleasures of academic life is having a colleague who disapproves thoroughly of your argument but whose points in detail put you on your mettle. I am hugely indebted to Eric Herring of the University of Bristol for demonstrating error to me so plausibly.

I am grateful to my students and colleagues at the University of Hull for their generally empathetic forbearance while I committed my thoughts on the second nuclear age to paper. I am even more grateful to my family, who have endured my lengthy obsession with the thoroughly unpleasant subjects of nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare.

Colin S. Gray