[Peace-discuss] Give nukes a chance

Mon Mar 21 08:36:31 CST 2005

[The point of this important article appears near the end: the US claims
that other countries can't have nuclear weapons because it's at least as
concerned "about being deterred as being attacked." --CGE]

	Boston.com 	
	The Boston Globe
	Give nukes a chance
	Can the spread of nuclear weapons make us safer?
	By Drake Bennett  |  March 20, 2005

KENNETH N. WALTZ, adjunct professor of political science at Columbia
University, doesn't like the phrase ''nuclear proliferation.'' ''The term
proliferation' is a great misnomer,'' he said in a recent interview. ''It
refers to things that spread like wildfire. But we've had nuclear military
capabilities extant in the world for 50 years and now, even counting North
Korea, we only have nine nuclear countries.''

Strictly speaking, then, Waltz is as against the proliferation of nuclear
weapons as the next sane human being. After all, he argues, ''most
countries don't need them.'' But the eventual acquisition of nuclear
weapons by those few countries that see fit to pursue them, that he's for.
As he sees it, nuclear weapons prevent wars.

''The only thing a country can do with nuclear weapons is use them for a
deterrent,'' Waltz told me. ''And that makes for internal stability, that
makes for peace, and that makes for cautious behavior.''

Especially in a unipolar world, argues Waltz, the possession of nuclear
deterrents by smaller nations can check the disruptive ambitions of a
reckless superpower. As a result, in words Waltz wrote 10 years ago and
has been reiterating ever since, ''The gradual spread of nuclear weapons
is more to be welcomed than feared.''

Waltz is not a crank. He is not a member of an apocalyptic death cult. He
is perhaps the leading living theorist of the foreign policy realists, a
school that sees world politics as an unending, amoral contest between
states driven by the will to power. His 1959 book, ''Man, the State, and
War,'' remains one of the most influential 20th-century works on
international relations.

In recent weeks, however, the spread of nuclear weapons has taken on what
might appear to be a wildfire-like quality. North Korea has just declared
itself a nuclear power. Iran is in negotiations with the United States and
Europe over what is widely suspected to be a secret weapons program of its
own. Each could kick off a regional arms race. And North Korea in the past
has sold nuclear technology to Libya and Pakistan, while Iran sponsors
Hezbollah and Hamas. As the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the backbone
of nonproliferation efforts for the past 35 years, comes up for review
this May, there's an increasing sense that it is failing. In such a
context, Waltz's argument may seem a Panglossian rationalization of the
inevitable.

Still, although heads of state, legislators, intelligence officials, and
opinion columnists are nearly united in their deep concern over the
world's nuclearization, the scholars who spend their time thinking about
the issue are in fact deeply divided over the consequences of the spread
of nuclear weapons, even to so-called ''states of concern'' like Iran and
North Korea. Few among Waltz's colleagues share his unwavering confidence
in the pacifying power of nuclear weapons. But plenty among them see at
least some merit in the picture he paints. In part, the disagreement
between Waltz and his critics is over the meaning and value of nuclear
deterrence in a post-Cold War world. But it's also an argument over the
motives that drive some countries to pursue nuclear weapons and others to
want to keep the nuclear genie to themselves.

. . .

Waltz spells out his theory most thoroughly in the 1995 book ''The Spread
of Nuclear Weapons,'' co-written with the Stanford political scientist
Scott D. Sagan in the form of an extended debate. Updated and republished
two years ago to take into account the nuclearization of India and
Pakistan, it contains the same arguments Waltz makes today in interviews.
Put simply, a war between nuclear powers cannot be decisively won without
the risk of total destruction. Since the risk of escalation in any
conflict is so high, nuclear states grow cautious. ''If states can score
only small gains because large ones risk retaliation,'' Waltz writes,
''they have little incentive to fight.'' When fighting does break out, it
is likely to be a localized proxy conflict like the Korean War instead of,
say, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Nuclear weapons, he adds, even
blunt the urge for territorial expansion, since they contribute far more
to a country's security than any geographical buffer could.

Even Graham Allison, a dean and professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government and one of the country's most visible nonproliferation
crusaders, concedes some of Waltz's argument. ''There's something known in
the literature as a crystal ball effect,''' Allison says. ''With a nuclear
war, probably most of the people living in the capital are going to be
killed, including the leader and his family, so it brings it home. You
have a positive effect, and you can certainly see that in the
India-Pakistan relationship'' since both countries acquired their nuclear
arsenals.

Yet Allison-whose latest book, the widely noted ''Nuclear Terrorism: The
Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,'' was published last August-dismisses
Waltz's larger linkage between proliferation and security as ''perverse,
but nonetheless interesting.'' In particular, Allison argues, the time
period just after a country goes nuclear-in the case of North Korea, the
present moment-is the most dangerous. This is partly because nascent
nuclear nations don't have the best command and control systems for their
weapons. More troubling is that historically, in every so-called nuclear
''conflict dyad''-US/USSR, USSR/China, India/Pakistan-the first of the two
to go nuclear came close to launching a preemptive attack to profit from
its nuclear advantage. And the precarious hold on power of the government
in a nuclear nation like Pakistan only adds to the volatile mix.

Even today's long-established nuclear powers, Allison points out, may owe
their continued survival as much to luck as logic. John F. Kennedy himself
put the chance of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis at one in
three-odds, Allison notes, that are twice as high as those in Russian
Roulette.

To share Waltz's faith in the pacifying effects of proliferation, says
David Goldfischer of Denver University's Graduate School of International
affairs, is to subscribe to a sort of ''nuclear theology.'' (Goldfischer
is himself a proponent of what he calls Mutual Defense Emphasis-a proposed
treaty regime in which nuclear arsenals would be sharply reduced and
mutually acceptable missile defenses installed by opposing nuclear
powers.) Waltz, Goldfischer charges, ''is utterly convinced that there's a
rational core in every brain similar to his own, which will act somehow at
the critical moment, and that no one will be able to reach a leadership
position in any society who will make the potentially suicidal decision to
launch when a massive retaliation is a certainty.'' And that doesn't begin
to account for the possibility of an accidental launch or an attack by an
Al Qaeda operative whose effective statelessness and hunger for martyrdom
make him undeterrable.

John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago
and another preeminent realist thinker, describes himself as closer to
Waltz than to Allison on the issue. Mearsheimer agrees with Waltz, for
example, that nuclear states, no matter how ''rogue,'' are unlikely to
give their weapons to terrorists. Whatever its sympathies, Mearsheimer
argues, ''Iran is highly unlikely to give nuclear weapons to terrorists,
in large part because they would be putting weapons into the hands of
people who they ultimately did not control, and there's a reasonably good
chance that they would get Iran incinerated'' if the weapon was traced
back to the regime in Tehran.

''Any country that gave [nuclear weapons] to terrorists who would use them
against the US,'' Mearsheimer adds, ''would disappear from the face of the
earth.''

. . .

The problem of ''loose nukes''-in particular, Russia's inability in the
years since the Cold War to keep track of all its nuclear materials-shows
that even a country's strong interest in maintaining control of its
nuclear weapons is no guarantee that some won't fall into the wrong hands,
raising the threat of nuclear terrorism. Nevertheless, thinkers like Waltz
and Mearsheimer, with their dogged focus on the calculus of national
advantage and interest, raise a question that tends to get lost in much of
the news coverage of proliferation: Do nuclear states like the United
States oppose proliferation simply out of concern for their citizens'
safety, or is there something more strategic at work?

In Waltz's formulation, nations acquire nuclear weapons not to menace
their neighbors but to protect themselves. And to the governments of North
Korea and Iran, the primary threat is the United States. ''If you were
making decisions for North Korea or Iran,'' Waltz asks, ''wouldn't you be
deadly determined to get nuclear weapons, given American capability and
American policy?''

Seen this way, the near-term proliferation threat is less to our
homeland-neither North Korea or Iran, for example, has the missile
technology to deliver a warhead to the continental US-than to our ability
to project power and shape world affairs. The United States, in other
words, worries as much about being deterred as being attacked.

''The truth is that countries that have nuclear weapons will be
off-limits,'' says Mearsheimer, ''which is why [those countries] want
them.''

The more nuclear nations, then, the less leverage America has. According
to political scientist Robert Jervis, Waltz's colleague at Columbia, ''We
can't threaten to invade them. We even will have less ability to launch
really heavy covert operations.'' Even our allies, should they go nuclear,
will start to distance themselves, Jervis predicts. ''If proliferation
were to spread to Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia-they will obviously
still need us, but not as much, and it reduces our leverage in that way as
well.''

By this logic, one option for the United States would be to play down the
importance of nuclear weapons. As Jervis notes, Washington's deep and
vocal concern over proliferation only enhances the perceived value of such
weapons. ''But we have overwhelming conventional superiority,'' says
Jervis, ''and we'd be much better off if [nuclear weapons] were abolished.
We should be saying they're not such a big deal. What has France gotten
from its nuclear weapons?''

Ultimately, however, no amount of military might allows a country to wish
away the Bomb. Whether or not nuclear weapons make the world a more
dangerous place, they certainly make it a more humbling one, and their
spread only narrows the options of the world's sole superpower.