Foreign Policy: Think Again: Nonproliferation

Foreign Policy
Fall 1998

Think Again: Nonproliferation _*

By George Perkovich _**

When India and Pakistan conducted a claimed 11 nuclear-bomb tests this spring, their leaders argued that national security imperatives drove them to it. Yet Pakistan’s viability as a functioning state has never been more threatened, and India finds its security and foreign relations with China, Pakistan, and the United Nations more troubled than before. More so than security interests, it was political pressures that put Pakistan and India into their current predicaments. Political issues are thus what the United States and other supporters of nonproliferation must address in trying to reverse the spread of nuclear weapons.

Worldwide, the desire to join the nuclear club often has less to do with national security than it does with politics and pride. Israel, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States clearly acquired nuclear-weapons capabilities to redress objective threats to their existence or, at least in the latter three cases, to their systems of government. Yet, in other countries—France, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom—factors beyond security drove the acquisition of nuclear weapons: the quest for national grandeur, prestige, and independence; the ambition and persuasiveness of leading scientists attracted by the technological challenge and the desire to display personal and national prowess; domestic political jockeying—all of these elements stand out as important components of proliferation.

“We don’t want to be blackmailed and treated as oriental blackies,” a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesman said in 1993. “Nuclear weapons will give us prestige, power, standing. An Indian will talk straight and walk straight when we have the bomb.” French security experts believe that a core purpose of their nuclear arsenal is to preserve France’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Irrelevance is the only “clear and present danger” against which France’s nuclear weapons defend.

The desire of France and India to develop and maintain a nuclear arsenal, even in the absence of a pressing security threat, illustrates another global trend: Democratic nations tend to be among the worst nuclear addicts. With the exceptions of Argentina and Brazil, no democracies with publicly known nuclear-explosive programs have initiated nuclear rollback. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine decided to relinquish their inherited nuclear weapons before they had made the transition to democratic government, and, indeed, the process of democratization impaired Ukraine’s rollback. Authoritarian governments in South Korea and Taiwan abandoned secret nuclear-weapons programs. Former South African president F.W. De Klerk decided in secret to eliminate his country’s undeclared nuclear-weapons stockpile and sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, known as the npt, before the South African public and parliament knew the state had ever possessed such weapons. Two established democracies—Sweden and Switzerland—abandoned nascent nuclear-weapons programs, but the programs were kept secret and the decisions to close them were not open to debate.

If democracy and openness do not correlate well with nuclear rollback, democracy does correlate strongly with dogged possession of nuclear weapons: Seven of the eight states now clinging to nuclear weapons are democracies—all but China.

The democratic liability springs from the changes that a country undergoes when it acquires a publicly known nuclear-weapons capability. Whatever a country’s original motivations, its decision to acquire nuclear weapons gives rise to a whole new set of psychological, political, economic, and bureaucratic attachments around nuclear weapons and the establishments that produce them. Scientific institutions win deference for their genius and for the high-paying jobs and large revenues they bring to the communities that house them. The military cohorts that command nuclear weapons generate officer billets and other institutional ties. In democracies, politicians who try to break these attachments by urging the elimination of nuclear weapons meet opposition that draws on the now-threatened interests that extend beyond genuine security concerns. Symbols, emotions, language, and institutional interests can easily be mobilized against such politicians in mass-media politics.

But is not arms control a more achievable objective than rollback? Here, too, recent history suggests that democracy is an obstacle. The U.S.–Russian relationship only recently became “democratic,” and the two states’ efforts to deal with the hangover of nuclear problems inherited from earlier decades have been complicated badly by the Duma and Congress. And, in South Asia, knowledgeable Indians and Pakistanis say that domestic politics keeps their governments from signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which both countries’ leaders now recognize to be in their national interests. Indeed, the cynical dynamics of partisan politics cause the greatest risk of an Indo-Pak nuclear- and missile-arms race, as political rivals jockey to demonstrate toughness by pressing for ever greater displays of military might.

Nothing in politics animates people as much as perceived inequity and unfairness. This is particularly true in former colonial countries where questions of race and religion infuse regard for the nonproliferation regime. Indian officials have referred to this regime as a form of “apartheid” since the late 1960s. One does not have to agree with arguments about racism and religious prejudices to recognize their political power. The fact is that India and Pakistan—just like Britain, China, France, Russia, and the United States—will not roll back their nuclear programs without equity. Nor will many other countries continue to support a nonproliferation regime that perpetuates the perceived inequity between the nuclear “haves” and “have nots.” Security professionals dismiss such political and moral arguments as strategically irrelevant, but, as democracy spreads, the importance of politics in managing security problems will grow. This heightens the necessity for progress toward reciprocal, verifiable elimination of nuclear weapons on a global basis as the only sustainable way to solve the nuclear threat.

Let’s Make a Deal

The United States induced North Korea to freeze and eventually to suspend its nuclear-weapons program through pressure and, more importantly, through positive incentives, such as a promise to deliver 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil annually. Similarly, financial incentives and security assurances motivated Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to give up nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union. To persuade Japan and Germany not to build nuclear weapons, the United States guaranteed their security with the blood of American soldiers and, through extended deterrence, put the American homeland at risk of nuclear annihilation. This form of inducement has been much more costly than, say, the North Korean framework agreement.

However, the North Korean case prompted outcries in Congress and among many nonproliferation specialists that “paying off” bad actors set a terrible precedent that would prompt other states to build or threaten to build nuclear weapons.

This popular argument suffers a number of flaws. First, only a few potential bad actors exist. Second, in the North Korean case, other alternative responses were either ineffective, expensive, or too risky: The sanctions that North Korea’s neighbors might have accepted were too weak to work, and war entailed unacceptable dangers and costs. Third, for all the talk of setting a bad precedent, no state has ever shown any interest in seeking to build nuclear weapons in order to turn around and sell these assets as part of a nonproliferation deal.

If the handful of states with peaceful nuclear programs that could become bomb makers were willing to forswear the acquisition of reprocessing or enrichment facilities, and/or to dismantle existing ones in exchange for a carefully tailored set of inducements, America should accept the bargain. The United States is spending less than one-tenth of 1 percent of this year’s defense budget of $273 billion to eliminate the North Korean threat. Such an expenditure elsewhere—if needed—would provide more security bang for the buck than our nuclear weapons ever have.

—G.P.

References

David Albright’s “South Africa and the Affordable Bomb” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 1994)

Selig Harrison’s “The North Korean Nuclear Crisis: From Stalemate to Breakthrough” (Arms Control Today, November 1994)

John Redick’sÊ Nuclear Illusions: Argentina and Brazil (Washington: Henry L. Stimson Center, December 1995)

Scott Sagan’s “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons?” (International Security, Winter 1996–97).

Stephen Schwartz, ed., Atomic Audit (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1998)

Stanley Sloane’s “French Defense Policy: Gaullism Meets the Post–Cold War World” (Arms Control Today, April 1997).

Waldo Stumpf’s “South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program: From Deterrence to Dismantlement” (Arms Control Today, December 1995/January 1996)

David Yost’s “France’s Nuclear Dilemma” (Foreign Affairs, January/February 1996)

Endnotes

**: George Perkovich directs the Secure World Program at the W. Alton Jones Foundation and is the author of India’s Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). Back.