Ongoing Nuclear Dilemmas
President Obama in speech after speech during his recent overseas visits has been hammering on the dual themes of arresting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and also advocating, as an eventual but nonetheless desirable objective, the reduction, deactivation - and eventually total elimination -- of nuclear arsenals around the planet.
Nuclear weapons were employed in war by the United States on August 6 and 9, 1945, destroying the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This ended the war in the Pacific abruptly and avoided a costly invasion of the Japanese home islands, but also proved to the Soviet Union that the US had, and was willing to use, a nuclear bomb.
Nuclear proliferation began as the Cold War was casting its global shadow. In 1949 the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapons, arguably giving Stalin the courage to approve North Korea's invasion of South Korea by creating uncertainty for the US about how the Soviets would respond to US action to block the North. It was followed by Great Britain (1952), France (1960), China (1964), and India (1974). Israel, according to conventional wisdom, has been nuclear since 1979, but its government neither confirms nor denies possession of nuclear weapons. All these seemed to acquire nuclear weapons to deter action against them and their allies, rather than as a method of compelling other states to follow specific courses of action.
As the Cold War ended, fears of rapid proliferation multiplied. South Africa tested a nuclear weapon but then decided to join the nonproliferation treaty and destroyed its weapons-making facilities. Brazil is thought to have explored the possibility of going nuclear but has not so far done so. Pakistan, always concerned about balancing India, joined the nuclear club in 1998. The father of the Pakistani bomb, A.Q. Khan, supplied nuclear technology to other states, including North Korea, which tested a weapon in 2006. That created major regional concerns in South Korea, Japan and elsewhere that gradually mobilized a multi-power group to isolate and pressure North Korea to end its nuclear weapons program. Now the world is focused on whether Iran is headed in the same direction as North Korea, raising major concerns in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, which may be tempted to balance Iranian nuclear efforts with their own.
Cold War thinking about nuclear weapons eventually devolved into a "balance of terror" or "mutually assured destruction" which assumed that the prospect of obliterating much of Europe, Soviet Russia and the United States would stay the hand of potential aggressors. The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis ratified this view as both sides backed away from nuclear conflagration, setting the stage for President Kennedy's nuclear weapons test-ban initiative the next year. Later recommendations to "bomb Vietnam into the Stone Age" and strike preemptively against the Chinese nuclear facilities in Lop Nor were rejected by cooler heads. The paralyzing fear of "unacceptable damage" led, according to most analysts, to the long years of armed peace between the United States and the former Soviet Union, and prevented the "proxy wars" elsewhere from escalating to direct superpower confrontations. Nuclear weapons, it seemed, could deter but not compel.
During the 1980s, however, defense strategists began questioning the assumption of mutual vulnerability and rationality among decision-makers. They recommended, and the US started developing, anti-missile systems to defend major American cities from incoming warheads. What a suicidal Adolf Hitler might have done -- had he been armed with nuclear weapons -- continues to haunt defense analysts
Is the US-Soviet experience of the Cold War generalizable to other states? Does possession of nuclear weapons result in a measure of caution and in the realization that they can be used only to deter an enemy from invading, but not to compel him to change his aggressive or revisionist behavior? To some extent, this is validated by the behavior of India, Pakistan, China, and Israel. Yet the legitimate fear remains that the more fingers there are on nuclear triggers, the greater the chance that through accident or miscalculation the world will experience a nuclear holocaust. This fear clearly led Russia and the US to cooperate on the largely successful program to recover, control, or destroy the nuclear weapons and fissile material that had been deployed in the states of the former Soviet Union. And it is driving the pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and to persuade Iran not to develop them.
Given the reality of proliferation of weapons technologies to rogue states such as North Korea and the rise of well-financed non-state revisionist actors, such as Al Qaeda and other extremist groups, how can nuclear states deter fanatic groups and organizations, armed with nuclear, chemical or biological devices, given that such groups act clandestinely and may not be traceable to a regime or a state? How do they apply the equation of mutual deterrence to asymmetric situations where a powerful state is facing suicidal extremists who have acquired weapons of mass destruction? Massive retaliation becomes meaningless when such groups are not governments or are not territorially or geographically organized or even identifiable. The "nightmare scenario" of a "suitcase bomb" destroys the previous calculus of nuclear deterrence.
This means that the major powers, all similarly threatened by the extremist nightmare scenario, need to collaborate on control of the materials and technologies enabling any weapons of mass destruction, not just nuclear weaponry. Deterrence does not suffice, and may not even apply to extremist groups. There must be concerted, aggressive action by the major powers, led by the nuclear powers, to prevent such organizations as well as rogue states from acquiring the ability to build and deliver any weapons of mass destruction. But it also means that defensive capabilities, such as anti-missile shields and cargo screening, assume new importance.
Nonproliferation of all weapons of mass destruction now is a matter more for intelligence services and specialized military groups that can find and destroy both the materials and technologies and the groups that will employ them. Action by the major nuclear powers to further reduce and limit their nuclear arsenals -- as announced at the recent Obama-Medvedev meeting -- while at the same time offering powerful economic and security incentives, such as nuclear free zones, for those countries that opt to avoid the temptation of developing such weapons sends a powerful message to the entire globe.
President Obama's well-reasoned wish for a world free of nuclear weapons, as outlined in his Prague speech, echoes President Reagan's similar vision, which he and Mikhail Gorbachev explored at their Reykjavik Summit in 1986. That led directly to the dramatic reduction of both American and Russian nuclear arsenals, an effort now renewed by Presidents Obama and Medvedev at their July Moscow meetings.
