Authors: Henry Kissinger
It was in this context that in 1969 President Nixon started formal talks with the Soviets on the limitation of strategic arms (with the acronym SALT). They resulted in a 1972 agreement that established a ceiling for the offensive buildup and limited each superpower’s
antiballistic missile sites to one (in effect turning them into training sites because a full ABM deployment for the United States under an original Nixon proposal in 1969 would have required twelve sites). The reasoning was that since the U.S. Congress refused to approbate missile defense beyond two sites, deterrence needed to be based on mutual assured destruction. For that strategy, the offensive nuclear weapons on each side were sufficient—in fact, more than sufficient—to produce an unacceptable level of casualties. The absence of missile defense would remove any uncertainty from that calculation, guaranteeing mutual deterrence—but also the destruction of the society, should deterrence fail.
At the Reykjavík summit in 1986, Reagan reversed the mutual assured destruction approach. He proposed the abolition of all offensive weapons by both sides and the scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, thereby allowing a defensive system. His intent was to do away with the concept of mutual assured destruction by proscribing offensive systems and keeping defense systems as a hedge against violations. But Gorbachev, believing—mistakenly—that the U.S. missile defense program was well under way while the Soviet Union, lacking an equivalent technological-economic base, could not keep up, insisted on maintaining the ABM Treaty. The Soviets in effect gave up the race in strategic weapons three years later, ending the Cold War.
Since then, the number of strategic nuclear offensive warheads has been reduced, first under President George W. Bush and then under President Obama, by agreement with Russia to about fifteen hundred warheads for each side—approximately 10 percent of the number of warheads that existed at the high point of the mutual assured destruction strategy. (The reduced number is more than enough to implement a mutual assured destruction strategy.)
The nuclear balance has produced a paradoxical impact on the international order. The historic balance of power had facilitated the Western domination of the then-colonial world; by contrast, the
nuclear order—the West’s own creation—had the opposite effect. The margin of military superiority of advanced countries over the developing countries has been incomparably larger than at any previous period in history. But because so much of their military effort has been devoted to nuclear weapons, whose use in anything but the gravest crisis was implicitly discounted, regional powers could redress the overall military balance by a strategy geared to prolonging any war beyond the willingness of the “advanced” country’s public to sustain it—as France experienced in Algeria and Vietnam; the United States in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan; and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. (All except Korea resulted in, in effect, a unilateral withdrawal by the formally much stronger power after protracted conflict with conventional forces.) Asymmetric warfare operated in the interstices of traditional doctrines of linear operations against an enemy’s territory. Guerrilla forces, which defend no territory, could concentrate on inflicting casualties and eroding the public’s political will to continue the conflict. In this sense, technological supremacy turned into geopolitical impotence.
With the end of the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war between the existing nuclear superpowers has essentially disappeared. But the spread of technology—especially the technology to produce peaceful nuclear energy—has vastly increased the feasibility of acquiring a nuclear-weapons capability. The sharpening of ideological dividing lines and the persistence of unresolved regional conflicts have magnified the incentives to acquire nuclear weapons, including for rogue states or non-state actors. The calculations of mutual insecurity that produced restraint during the Cold War do not apply with anything like the same degree—if at all—to the new entrants in the nuclear
field, and even less so to the non-state actors. Proliferation of nuclear weapons has become an overarching strategic problem for the contemporary international order.
In response to these perils, the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom negotiated a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and opened it for signature in 1968. It proposed to prevent any further spread of nuclear weapons (the United States, the U.S.S.R., and the U.K. signed in 1968, and France and China signed in 1992). Non-nuclear-weapons states were to be given assistance by the nuclear states in the peaceful utilization of nuclear technology provided they accepted safeguards to guarantee their nuclear programs remained purely nonmilitary endeavors. At this writing, there are 189 signatories of the nonproliferation agreement.
Yet the global nonproliferation regime has had difficulty embedding itself as a true international norm. Assailed by some as a form of “nuclear apartheid” and treated by many states as a rich-country fixation, the NPT’s restrictions have often functioned as a set of aspirations that countries must be cajoled to implement rather than as a binding legal obligation. Illicit progress toward nuclear weapons has proved difficult to discover and resist, for its initial steps are identical with the development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy specifically authorized by the NPT. The treaty proscribed but did not prevent signatories such as Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Iran from maintaining covert nuclear programs in violation of NPT safeguards or, in the case of North Korea, withdrawing from the NPT in 2003 and testing and proliferating nuclear technology without international control.
Where a state has violated or repudiated the terms of the NPT, hovered on the edge of compliance, or simply declined to recognize the legitimacy of nonproliferation as an international norm, there exists no defined international mechanism for enforcing it. So far preemptive action has been taken by the United States only against Iraq—a
contributing motive for the war against Saddam Hussein—and by Israel against Iraq and Syria; the Soviet Union considered it against China in the 1960s, though ultimately refrained.
The nonproliferation regime has scored a few significant successes in bringing about the negotiated dismantlement of nuclear programs. South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, and several “post-Soviet” republics have abandoned nuclear weapons programs that had either come to fruition or made significant technical progress. At the same time, since the end of the American monopoly in 1949, nuclear weapons have been acquired by the Soviet Union/Russia, Britain, France, Israel, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and at a threshold level by Iran. Moreover, Pakistan and North Korea have proliferated their nuclear know-how widely.
Proliferation has had an impact on the nuclear equilibrium in a differential way, depending on the perceived willingness of the new nuclear country to use its weapons. British and French nuclear capabilities add to the NATO arsenal only marginally. They are conceived primarily as a last resort, as a safety net in case of abandonment by the United States, if some major power were to threaten British and French perceptions of their basic national interest, or as a means to stay apart from a nuclear war between superpowers—all essentially remote contingencies. The Indian and Pakistani nuclear establishments are, in the first instance, directed against each other, affecting the strategic equilibrium in two ways. The risks of escalation may reduce the likelihood of full-scale conventional war on the subcontinent. But because the weapon systems are so vulnerable and technically so difficult to protect against short-range attack, the temptation for preemption is inherent in the technology, especially in situations when emotions are already running high. In short, proliferation generates the classic nuclear dilemma: even when nuclear weapons reduce the likelihood of war, they would gigantically magnify its ferocity were war to occur.
India’s nuclear relations with China are likely to approximate the deterrent posture that existed between the adversaries in the Cold War; that is, they will tend toward preventing their use. Pakistan’s nuclear establishment impinges on wider regional and global issues. Abutting the Middle East and with a significant domestic Islamist presence at home, Pakistan has occasionally hinted at the role of nuclear protector or of nuclear armorer. The impact of the proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran would compound all these issues—as discussed in Chapter 4.
Over time, the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons will affect even the overall nuclear balance between the nuclear superpowers. Leaders of the established nuclear powers are obliged to prepare for the worst contingency. This involves the possibility of nuclear threats posed not only by the other superpower but also by proliferating countries. Their arsenals will reflect the conviction that they need, beyond deterrence of the principal potential adversary, a residual force to cope with the proliferated part of the rest of the world. If each major nuclear power calculates in this manner, proliferation will impel a proportional increase in these residual forces, straining or exceeding existing limits. Further, these overlapping nuclear balances will grow more complicated as proliferation proceeds. The relatively stable nuclear order of the Cold War will be superseded by an international order in which projection by a state possessing nuclear weapons of an image of a willingness to take apocalyptic decisions may offer it a perverse advantage over rivals.
To provide themselves a safety net against nuclear superpowers, even countries with nuclear capabilities have an incentive to nestle under the tacit or overt support of a superpower (examples are Israel, the European nuclear forces, Japan with its threshold nuclear capability, other proliferating or near-proliferating states in the Middle East). So it may transpire that the proliferation of weapons will lead to alliance
systems comparable in their rigidity to the alliances that led to World War I, though far exceeding them in global reach and destructive power.
A particularly serious imbalance may arise if a proliferated country approaches the military offensive capability of the two nuclear superpowers (a task which for both China and India seems attainable). Any major nuclear country, if it succeeds in staying out of a nuclear conflict between the others, would emerge as potentially dominant. In a multipolar nuclear world, that too could occur if such a country aligns with one of the superpowers because the combined forces might then have a strategic advantage. The rough nuclear balance that exists between current superpowers may then tilt away from strategic stability; the lower the agreed level of offensive forces between Russia and the United States, the more this will be true.
Any further spread of nuclear weapons multiplies the possibilities of nuclear confrontation; it magnifies the danger of diversion, deliberate or unauthorized. It will eventually affect the balance between nuclear superpowers. And as the development of nuclear weapons spreads into Iran and continues in North Korea—in defiance of all ongoing negotiations—the incentives for other countries to follow the same path could become overwhelming.
In the face of these trends, the United States needs to constantly review its own technology. During the Cold War, nuclear technology was broadly recognized as the forefront of American scientific achievements—a frontier of knowledge then posing the most important and strategic challenges. Now the best technical minds are encouraged to devote efforts instead to projects seen as more publicly relevant. Perhaps partly as a result, inhibitions on the elaboration of nuclear technology are treated as inexorable even as proliferating countries arm and other countries enhance their technology. The United States must remain at the frontier of nuclear technology, even while it negotiates about restraint in its use.
From the perspective of the past half century’s absence of a major-power conflict, it could be argued that nuclear weapons have made the world less prone to war. But the decrease in the number of wars has been accompanied by a vast increase in violence carried out by non-state groups or by states under some label other than war. A combination of extraordinary risk and ideological radicalism has opened up the possibilities for asymmetric war and for challenges by non-state groups that undermine long-term restraint.
Perhaps the most important challenge to the established nuclear powers is for them to determine their reaction if nuclear weapons were actually used by proliferating countries against each other. First, what must be done to prevent the use of nuclear weapons beyond existing agreements? If they should nonetheless be used, what immediate steps must be taken to stop such a war? How can the human and social damage be addressed? What can be done to prevent retaliatory escalation while still upholding the validity of deterrence and imposing appropriate consequences should deterrence fail? The march of technological progress must not obscure the fearsomeness of the capabilities humanity has invented and the relative fragility of the balances restraining their use. Nuclear weapons must not be permitted to turn into conventional arms. At that juncture, international order will require an understanding between the existing major nuclear countries to insist on nonproliferation, or order will be imposed by the calamities of nuclear war.
For most of history, technological change unfolded over decades and centuries of incremental advances that refined and combined existing technologies. Even radical innovations could over time be fitted within previous tactical and strategic doctrines: tanks were considered in terms of precedents drawn from centuries of cavalry
warfare; airplanes could be conceptualized as another form of artillery, battleships as mobile forts, and aircraft carriers as airstrips. For all their magnification of destructive power, even nuclear weapons are in some respects an extrapolation from previous experience.
What is new in the present era is the rate of change of computing power and the expansion of information technology into every sphere of existence.
Reflecting in the 1960s
on his experiences as an engineer at the Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore concluded that the trend he had observed would continue at regular intervals to double the capacity of computer processing units every two years. “Moore’s Law” has proved astoundingly prophetic. Computers have shrunk in size, declined in cost, and grown exponentially faster to the point where advanced computer processing units can now be embedded in almost any object—phones, watches, cars, home appliances, weapons systems, unmanned aircraft, and the human body itself.