THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (113 page)

NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

Usually nuclear proliferation is discussed as a threat to one nation, or to a group of nations that are allies. In this section we shall be concerned with the
systemic
consequences of proliferation, just as we earlier discussed the systemic effects of other strategic innovations in other eras. But perhaps initially one ought to question whether nuclear weapons did in fact play a decisive role in winning the Long War.

It is evident that the German surrender in 1918 did not destroy fascism. Indeed, owing to the infirmities of the Versailles process, fascism may have been inflamed by the false peace of 1918. What was required was the discrediting of this alternative in the eyes of its most dynamic advocates, Germany and Japan. In Germany's case, nuclear weapons played an important delegitimating role because they were
not
acquired by the Nazi state. Had the V2s that landed on London in the last year of the European battle been available earlier, none of the decisive engagements in Europe—the Normandy invasion, the tank battle at Kursk, the removal of the Nazis from North Africa and proximity to the Near East—could have taken place. Had they carried nuclear weapons the outcome of the war would surely have been different. Germany had the technical expertise and the technocracy to pursue the development of such weapons and faced the necessity to do so. But Germany lacked capital to divert to nuclear development on the scale of the U.S. Manhattan Project, and its political establishment was unwilling to entrust to non-Party scientists such a commitment of resources and decision making, even if those resources could have been found. When the war in Europe ended, Allied investigators determined that the Germans were still four or five years away from a testable fission weapon. That Germany could be so thoroughly defeated by “races” that were inferior to the warrior
Volk
of Teutons, and that this defeat could be sealed by the technical achievement of American invention and engineering that exploded over the fascist state of Japan: these facts made the pretensions of fascism seem pathetically inadequate. Had Germany acquired nuclear weapons, the pathos would have lain elsewhere.

In the case of Japan, the issue of the role of nuclear weapons in ending the conflict is still much debated.
¹
At this remove we are inclined to forget that Japan's land forces were still largely intact in 1945. The bulk of these forces were in China and had never been defeated. A negotiated peace before the atomic attacks, conceding a postwar role to the emperor, would have had the same effect as the German surrender in 1919: infecting the society with the historical claim of a “stab in the back” by politicians and diplomats who betrayed the armed forces, and encouraging a revanchist movement that alone could lay legitimate claim to Japanese nationalism.
Whether one believes that credible peace offers were actually available to the United States before the atomic attacks on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one must consider the strategic goals of the Long War to determine whether such a negotiated surrender would have brought peace. The Japanese people had been bombed on an horrific scale for months. They remained disciplined and intensely loyal to their regime, and showed no signs of giving up. Far from there being any significant political opposition to continuing the war, the only evidence of an internal revolt came after the atomic attacks, when a military coup was attempted to
reverse
the Japanese offer of surrender. What was required, and what only the second atomic attack seems to have delivered, was the complete discrediting of the regime's promises to win a negotiated peace through stiff resistance to an American invasion. I have never been persuaded of the moral position of those who would have urged continued nonnuclear bombing of the Japanese people for an extended period of months, accepting also the American casualties that would have ensued in an invasion, as preferable to the atomic attacks on the two Japanese cities. The only alternative to this carnage would have been a half-life for fascism, in a kind of negotiated twilight. And that is precisely what the Long War was fought to eliminate.
*

In the case of the Soviet Union and the defeat of European communism, nuclear weapons were also decisive. First, American nuclear weapons neutralized the effect of the Red Army in Europe and the geopolitical fact that Europe's strongest ally was an ocean away. Whether or not the USSR would have invaded West Germany—and without the U.S.-backed guarantee of West Germany's defense, one can think of many occasions on which this option might have proved attractive to the Soviet bloc—the fact that this invasion was made unlikely gave the Western states of Europe the time to solidify parliamentary institutions, build prosperous market economies, and unite among themselves rather than renew their traditional conflicts as one state after another was picked off by neutralist, socialist movements. Second, nuclear weapons ultimately created the superpower context of mutual vulnerability, which rendered continuing competition both highly expensive and militarily fraught. This military stalemate gave the political systems of the Warsaw Pact states time to collapse of their own inner inefficiency and self-disgust. These systems would have been far less scrutinized by their publics in the context of warfighting. Third, the nuclear dimension of the conflict kept the United States engaged in Europe, and this engagement provided the engine that drove changes in U.S. strategy in this era, always keeping pressure on the Soviet state and innovating as the Soviet threat changed. But for the vulnerability of the United States to
Soviet nuclear weapons, it would have been too tempting to seek refuge in the isolationism that is so much a part of the American political tradition. In the nuclear era, there was nowhere to hide.

Thus I think it can be demonstrated that the strategic innovation represented by the development and deployment of nuclear weapons played a decisive role in ending the Long War and that, as we saw in Book I, this will have important constitutional effects on each of the states that fought that war. For the
society
composed of these states, the most profound impact is the restructuring required to deal with such weapons, for they cannot now be uninvented.

The problems that nuclear proliferation pose for the society of market-states arise from this question: is the possession of whatever weapons a state can acquire and deploy an attribute of sovereignty? For if it is not, then by what right do certain states possess weapons of such awful magnitude? And if it is, how can there ever be measures both appropriate and practical to limit the deployment of such weapons? And finally, even if having a nuclear weapons capability is a condition to which any state may aspire, does the possibility of a widespread nuclear proliferation pose such a threat to the peace and survival of the society of states that what hitherto was a state's sovereign right—the right to deploy the weapons of its own choosing—must now be rethought?

Nuclear weapons made a decisive contribution to the end of the Long War because their staggering ratio of destruction to attrition makes them virtually impossible to defend against. There are some targets of nuclear attack that can be defended against ballistic missiles—missile silos or underwater vessels, for example—but the nuclear weapon itself is so devastating that thus far methods of defense against its delivery to most targets are rendered absurd. Thermonuclear weapons can inflict such damage that even if virtually all the delivery systems used in an attack on a city were deflected, a single warhead arriving at its target would make further defense pointless. The enormity of this threat has obvious implications for individual states: the security of the United States is, on the one hand, at an all-time high, given its dominant economy and the pre-eminence of its armed forces, and on the other hand, at an historic low because the detonation of a handful of weapons launched from anywhere on the globe could utterly destroy it. “Counterproliferation” is at the top of the U.S. security agenda today, having moved from the periphery of the national security consciousness, along with the protection of the environment and of human rights, to the center of American concerns. What, however, is the importance of counterproliferation to the
society of states
, when some members may gain from acquiring such weapons, and none currently possessing such technology seem eager to give those weapons up?

A state's deployment of nuclear weapons can be either stabilizing or
destabilizing for the international system. This is largely a function of the mechanics of deterrence, and thus it ought to be the policy of the international state system to deny nuclear weapons to some states, just as certain unstable geological regions are unsuitable for nuclear reactors. A nuclear weapons state can be reinforcing for the security of the society of states when its
capabilities
do not introduce multipolarity into the system, when its intentions do not threaten the legitimate constitutional sovereignty of other states
*
(unless it is attacked), and when its political
culture
is stable enough to ensure the endurance of such benign intentions. A nuclear weapons state imposes unacceptable risks on the system of deterrence when it threatens to make other states nuclear targets for geopolitical objectives that are incompatible with the maintenance of the current state system
†
or for geostrategic goals that are incompatible with the stability of the system of nuclear deterrence.
‡
In either case, the unpredictability of nuclear attack increases, with potentially devastating consequences for populations and states.

This observation helps us answer the sovereignty question: no state that does not derive its authority from representative institutions that coexist with fundamental human rights can legitimately argue that it can subject its own people to the threat of nuclear pre-emption or retaliation on the basis of its alleged rights of sovereignty because the people it thus makes into nuclear targets have not consented to bear such risks. At a minimum, the Peace of Paris stands for this. One inference from this rule is that no such state therefore has a
sovereign
right to impose such threats on other peoples either.

For the same reason, such a state has no sovereign right to develop weapons of mass destruction generally. This argument turns around the usual rationale for the acquisition of nuclear weapons. States claim that they must deploy these weapons in order to deter attacks on their peoples. And there is a good deal of truth to this: the United States would doubtless not have bombed Japan with nuclear weapons if Tokyo could have retaliated in kind. But the acquisition of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of attack by pre-emption or by a disguised attack (so that the threat of retaliation cannot successfully deter). Each state must decide for itself how
to resolve this calculus of risks. A state without representative institutions and effective guarantees of basic human rights has no way to win consent to such a decision.

A state that derives its legitimacy from representative institutions free of coercion can demand that other states recognize its right to acquire nuclear weapons, but though a state has this right, it ought to be dissuaded from acquiring these weapons when their deployment is destabilizing for the international system. When does this occur, and just how can this dissuasion be accomplished?

Thus far I have implied a link between proliferation and deterrence, suggesting that the society of states as a whole can determine when proliferation poses a
systemic
threat by asking whether a state's acquisition of nuclear weapons strengthens or weakens the prevailing system of nuclear deterrence. That system is currently underpinned by United States nuclear forces. It rests on the assumption that the United States will not use nuclear weapons as a means of aggression, but that it will actually destroy another state if that state cannot be otherwise dissuaded from attacking a state protected by the American nuclear deterrent. If the United States were to change its policies in either aspect, the current system of deterrence would be difficult to sustain, as formerly protected states raced to arm themselves and formerly deterred states began to explore the rewards of coercion.

This present system would be gravely undermined by multipolarity—the acquisition of a third superpower nuclear arsenal—for two reasons. First, multipolarity introduces a complexity that tends to weaken American commitments by blurring the identity of the states to be deterred: in a tripolar or n-polar world, responsibility is diffused. The persuasiveness of the argument, often heard in the United States during the Cold War, that the United States must act to suppress international violence or parry aggression, because if the United States doesn't, no one else will, fades in a multipolar world. The sheer complexity of deterrence in a multipolar world, coupled with an understandable American willingness to let other powers take up burdens long carried by the United States, creates a situation similar to that of the paralyzed crowds that attend emergencies. Second, the system of deterrence is stressed whenever a crisis triggers the threat of the use of nuclear weapons to deter aggression: such crises call the American bluff and require the United States to run potentially fatal risks to enforce dissuasion. Multipolarity can only increase, perhaps exponentially, the number of nuclear crises. We could have had another system of nuclear deterrence, perhaps managed by other powers, but this is the one we have, and this is the system bequeathed us by the Long War.

The link between nuclear proliferation and nuclear deterrence is too seldom drawn. In part this is a sociological phenomenon: the deterrence
theorists tend to be interested in strategic studies and are often from military backgrounds; they are more curious about targeting and weapons development, and more informed about the formerly “central” balance between the superpowers than about “weapons of mass destruction” per se. The nonproliferation experts tend to be more interested in arms control than in strategic options, more conversant with the design of nuclear reactors and the processes of the nuclear fuel cycle than with the design of missiles and nuclear delivery systems, more global in orientation. In part, this disjunction is an intellectual phenomenon: the categories of thought are put in different terms, have different vocabularies. Theories of deterrence do not tell us which restraint agreements, like the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), will slow down proliferation; nonproliferation theories, on the other hand, more or less assume that any deployment of nuclear weapons is necessarily an evil, and that their use can never be justified. This largely unbridged chasm is a costly one because the strategic issues brought to the fore by the end of the Long War are pre-eminently questions of voluntary restraint, and thus the advocates of environmental protection and arms reduction can, perhaps for the first time in this era, realistically expect cooperation from the strategic sector.