THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (114 page)

Or should one say it is the second time? For there is an historic link between proliferation and the prevailing system of deterrence, and it is this link that principally accounts for the enormous success of nonproliferation efforts since the coming of nuclear weapons. The most important thing to be said about nuclear proliferation is not that it did happen in Israel, or India, or even France, but rather that it didn't happen in Japan or Germany; and the main reason it failed to take place in those two states was that the American nuclear guarantee to those countries provided a measure of deterrence sufficient to make it unnecessary for them to deter other states.

This is a controversial assertion. Sometimes it is claimed that Japan, because it had been the subject of nuclear attack, would never acquire such weapons. This may be, but it is equally possible that, precisely because it felt aggrieved over the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Japan might consider itself uniquely privileged to deploy the one weapon that would best ensure that this would never happen again. From time to time Japan has confirmed its pledge to forgo the development of nuclear weapons; the Japan Defense Agency has steadfastly maintained, however, that the bar against aggression in the Japanese constitution does not proscribe nuclear weapons so long as these do not exceed the minimum needed for defense.
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The Indians have shown the world how a single election can quickly be translated into a policy of nuclear weapons acquisition and deployment. The election in Japan of a similarly nationalistic party could have similarly fateful consequences.

The Germans are also said to be unlikely candidates for nuclear proliferation. They, like the Japanese, are supposed to be acutely sensitive to the anxieties they arouse in their neighbors, and it is true that, in the late 1950s, when the Germans discussed the option of a nuclear weapons program, French and British sensitivities were sufficiently aroused to head off this idea. It was ultimately the American role in German defense that dissuaded the Germans, however, who doubtless appreciated the fact that French and British forces in Germany could hardly have withstood a Warsaw Pact assault
without
using nuclear weapons. Absent the American nuclear guarantee, it is even doubtful that West Germany would have remained in the Western Alliance, with consequences that we can easily imagine.

What has kept Japan and Germany from going nuclear, when proximate states like China and France did so; when they possessed the wealth, ambition, and skill to do so; when they faced the threat of mortal attack on the front lines of the Cold War? It was the assurance provided by the American nuclear umbrella and the positioning of American troops in forward bases such that any invasion would quickly engage them and thus would immediately commit the United States and in all likelihood involve the use of nuclear weapons to protect her forces. Reviewing the period since 1945, Lawrence Freedman has concluded that “the critical variable [that accounts for nonproliferation to Germany and Japan and the acquisition of weapons by India, China and France] is the prevailing alliance structure… Drawing on the deterrent power of another may carry fewer risks as well as lower costs than a drive for a national capability. The incentives for proliferation grow with the lack of a reliable superpower protector.”
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How can this lesson be applied to stem the proliferation of these weapons in the era we are now entering?

If deterrence is a key to nonproliferation, then what regime of weapons deployment might lend the most stability to the international system? Perhaps the most famous proposal that links deterrence to proliferation was made by Kenneth Waltz. In “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better” Waltz suggested that widespread nuclear proliferation would in fact enhance stability, as various nuclear armed states paired off, just as the United States and the USSR had done.
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This would result in a profusion of bipolar systems—India/Pakistan, Israel/Iraq, Ukraine/Russia—rather than a multipolar world. Waltz well recognized the acute danger posed by multipolarity. In “a
multipolar
world there are too many powers to permit any of them to draw clear and fixed lines between allies and adversaries” while at the same time there are so few (not every state can afford a superpower's arsenal) that the action of any single power is likely to engage the security of others. In a world of dancing partners, each conflict twirling
around the international ballroom, however, it is perfectly clear who is to be embraced and who ignored. Multipolarity is neatly avoided.

But is this description entirely plausible? If it is true for India/Pakistan, what about India/China/Pakistan? Or Israel/Iraq/Iran? Or even Japan/ Russia/China? Waltz must assume that each new nuclear state has but a single nuclear-armed adversary, and also that each such state actually has such an adversary, because otherwise the temptation to coerce nonnuclear states would potentially upset the stability of the proliferated international regime. And if Waltz is proved wrong (once we have brought a heavily dispersed and proliferated nuclear world into being), how would we go back to the position we are in today, which might then appear to have been a golden age?

A second suggestion follows directly from Freedman's observation that “nuclear proliferation is most likely to occur where external guarantees have come to be doubted, as in the Middle East, or barely exist, as in South Asia. Acquiring a nuclear capability is a statement of a lack of confidence in all alternative security arrangements.”
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Recognizing this, some commentators have proposed extending the U.S. nuclear guarantee to those former states of the Soviet Union, or former members of the Warsaw Pact, that might otherwise become nuclear powers. In the absence of such a guarantee these states might acquire nuclear weapons in response to the Russian nuclear capability, and then, in response to each other, much as Pakistan developed weapons in response to India, once India had itself responded to the nuclear weapons of China, which initially was reacting to the nuclear capability of the United States and the USSR.

Such proposals have an air of unreality to those of us who lived through the “decoupling” debates that periodically seized the Atlantic Alliance from the late 1950s until the late 1980s. Briefly, these debates arose from European skepticism that the United States, in the event of an attack on its European allies, really would risk nuclear retaliation directed at the American homeland by fulfilling its nuclear pledges to its allies. The European theatre, it was feared, would be “decoupled” from the continental United States if the United States reneged on its promises, or “uncoupled” if those pledges were fulfilled, making Europe a nuclear battleground, while the American and Soviet homelands were kept as tacitly (or even explicitly) agreed-upon sanctuaries. Regardless of the grounds for such doubt—and one may recall Sir Michael Howard's witty observation that, where nuclear risks are concerned, it takes a great deal more to reassure an ally than to deter an adversary
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—if these doubts were enough to move France to develop its own deterrent, how could they possibly not assail Ukraine or Belarus? Even if the United States could be induced to make such pledges,
how could they be believed in the absence of the kind of American ground forces that underwrote the U.S. pledge to West Germany? And what, in such an event, would be the likely reaction of Russia, whose nuclear attitude remains vastly more significant than even that of the most ambitious potential proliferatee?

Yet a third approach comes from Margaret Thatcher. At a speech in Fulton, Missouri, commemorating Winston Churchill' famous Iron Curtain address there, Lady Thatcher said:

I think we may assume, with Thatcher, that “it is probably unrealistic to expect military intervention to remove” those weapons of mass destruction that are in hostile hands. What, then, about missile defense as a parrying technology to nuclear proliferation? Is it really sensible to think that providing the great states of the West with ballistic missile defenses would actually discourage a “rogue state” to a greater degree than the assurance of nuclear annihilation that would surely follow such an attack already deters them today? To believe this assumes a psychological hypersensitivity to the mere possibility of failure on the part of the leaderships of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that seems incompatible with their characters, insofar as we know them, and an indifference to survival that these leaders, though they may seek it in their recruits, do not prominently display themselves. To the contrary, Martin van Creveld, in his study
Nuclear Proliferation and the Future
of Conflict, concludes:

The real strength of Thatcher's proposal lies, as the last sentence in the passage quoted from her speech discloses, in the hope that a sound defense would
enable
retaliation, thus removing the possibility of successful
extortion by the rogue states. Yet the day in which any states vying for “rogue” status could
disable
retaliation through accurate preemption is, thankfully, far off.

An alternative approach was reflected in the Clinton administration's efforts at “counterproliferation.” This was a multifaceted policy whose central method combined U.S. pledges not to use nuclear weapons with various arms control schemes like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, renewed with great effort, and the Missile Control Technology Regime (MCTR), whose enforcement has so bedeviled American relations with China and other states.

If I am correct in arguing that deterrence is crucial to the successful pursuit of nonproliferation, then the administration's policy could have been at most a partial success. A sincere pledge of no-first-use of nuclear weapons would scarcely reassure those states that feel the need to acquire nuclear weapons to protect themselves
from us
(as to which Iraq's recent experience with American conventional arms is exemplary) nor buck up those states who fear such attacks from others and look
to
us for protection. Israel, to take one case, can hardly be expected to renounce her nuclear weapons in light of a pledge by the American president not to use nuclear weapons first to protect it. Counterproliferation is, rather, the response of a political community that seems to have only the ideas that were in play before the end of the Long War; in that respect, the Clinton administration's nonproliferation strategies were no worse than those of its immediate predecessor.

Let us return to the criteria proposed to enable the international community to determine when nuclear proliferation is unacceptable. Then perhaps we can see which of these proposals, or others, might successfully enforce the rules implicit in those criteria. The first proscription was against multipolarity. This suggests that a principal task of any nonproliferation regime must be to prevent Germany and Japan from “going nuclear.” The second proscription was against the aggressive use of nuclear weapons, and the third, against proliferation to states so unstable that aggression might suddenly become attractive as a means of consolidating domestic power. These suggestions imply that states recently or currently engaged in aggression or threats of aggression against others are unwholesome candidates for the possession of nuclear arsenals—such states as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. And states like Indonesia, owing to its political instability, ought to be on a watch list. As to others, there may be strong reasons to discourage their acquisition of nuclear weapons, but proliferation to such states is not necessarily critical to the system as a whole. It may be unsettling for Peru if Chile begins a nuclear program, or for Turkey if the Greeks do. But these developments do not threaten a systemic collapse of deterrence, even if they are cause
to activate the diplomatic efforts of states that have influence in those regions.

For Germany and Japan the question of reassurance is more problem-tic in some ways now than it was before the end of the Long War. For the Japanese, the prospect of a North Korean nuclear device is no more threatning than a Chinese nuclear capability, with which they have lived for some time. The real anxiety arises from what might ensue if the Americans confronted either North Korea or China. Thus the Americans are in the paradoxical position of having to tread softly where northeast Asian nuclear proliferation is concerned, precisely to avoid a far more dangerous proliferation should the Japanese become alarmed by a turn of events toward crisis. In the case of Germany, the problem is exacerbated by the prospect of an E.U. nuclear capability. If NATO should falter, then such a capability could repolarize the nuclear world—the second Rome, as it were,
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that seems so dear to the hearts of many in Brussels and Paris. Here the American role is not the decisive one. Rather it depends upon E.U. members, especially the British and French, to argue for, paradoxically, the maintenance of independent but modest proliferated deterrents, such as France and the United Kingdom currently deploy, rather than for a specifically E.U. nuclear force. These examples of nuclear proliferation can act as inoculations against an E.U. nuclear virus. French behavior on this matter has thus far not been entirely encouraging. There have been many reports of French efforts, at present quiescent, to seduce the Germans into a nuclear partnership.