Time to Bury a Dangerous Legacy – Part III

NEW HAVEN: Policymakers often debate the possibility of getting rid of nuclear weapons and, if so, how. But behind that question lies a more fundamental one: Do we in fact want to be in a world without nuclear weapons? That is, Can we concretely picture a world without nuclear weapons as a place to abide in, for the long haul?

The answer from many of the most adamant opponents of nuclear abolition is “No.” These critics argue that abolishing the weapons, while possible, would impose a new set of problems.

First, they say, conventional war, freed from the constraints imposed by nuclear arms, would revive. Second, nuclear weapons could quickly return to the scene. A Saddam Hussein or a Kim Jong-Il, tempted to fill a power vacuum, would step forward with an atomic bomb and give orders to a helpless world. Third, a chaotic nuclear arms race would ensue, maybe accompanied by conventional or even nuclear war. The name given to these interlocking dangers is breakout.

The conclusion might seem peculiar. How can there be more nuclear danger in a world without such weapons than in one with them? But there’s a logic to the argument: Supposedly nuclear deterrence not only prevents nuclear war, but it also prevents conventional wars, especially great-power wars. So why give up nuclear weapons?

The initial reply is obvious. Human beings are fallible. A single mistake in the nuclear realm can mean the end of cities, nations or all of us. Fallible human nature and instruments of annihilation make bad company, and should be parted. Let’s remember the deterrence formula – a threat to use nuclear weapons that aims to produce non-use. The trouble is that the world is held perpetually on a knife’s edge, uncertain about witnessing the non-use that’s hoped for or the use that’s threatened.

The second, more complicated, reply requires us to recall two root facts of the nuclear age: First, the nuclear danger was born of scientific discovery; therefore, it’s imperishable. Nothing’s more durable than a piece of scientific information – not nations, not empires, not even religious faiths. Once scientific results are acquired, we simply can’t remove them from the collective mind of humanity. That’s why I like to speak of “the bomb in the mind.” This knowledge available over the long run to all competent minds, not any hardware, is the true bedrock of the nuclear dilemma.

Second, the destructive forces made available by this invention are unlimited, exceeding the human substance by far – for there’s no city on earth that cannot be destroyed by just one of these devices, and no civilization that can withstand a few hundred.

The world still has some 25,000 nuclear weapons. In both availability and annihilating power, the bomb is universal.

It is the root of the bomb in science that underlies the fears of breakout, creating an anxiety that abolition would be fraud because the knowledge of how to make nuclear weapons would remain in the hands of nations. Some nations could choose to build bombs again or perhaps hide away old ones.

Those who fear breakout underestimate the scope of their central insight. Their assumptions center on the abolition-agreement cheaters, that they would remember how to build nuclear weapons, while overlooking the fact that intended victims would also possess this knowledge. Some victims could respond in weeks, others in months.

Let’s say that nuclear weapons have been abolished and Kim Jong-Il whips back the veil of secrecy to reveal a small nuclear arsenal. There’s no possibility that he could disarm the latent nuclear capacity of the rest of the earth with his puny force, or its overwhelming conventional forces.

His asset rapidly dwindles in power and he must make a choice. Threaten with the bomb? But by every measure of power, the world knows that it outmatches the tiny state and refuses to accede. Using the bomb is a sure path to suicide. In short, the rogue regime has two hopeless options.

Any way one looks at breakout, the more it turns out that an old lesson of the nuclear age applies: Nuclear arms look powerful – they seem to be “absolute” weapons, as people used to say – but actually detonating them to win political gains has thus far been impossible.

In fact, tiny nations with no nuclear capacity regularly best the great nuclear powers. Strategic theory, which teaches that a nuclear-armed country is irresistible, denies such an outcome, but history shows many examples. Consider the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1980. They had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, yet no evidence suggests that they even dreamed of making the slightest nuclear threat. Likewise, consider the British in Suez in 1956 – their nuclear monopoly failed to give them the smallest shred of an advantage, and they had to cancel their enterprise.

Perhaps the most interesting example is China’s defeat by North Vietnam in 1979. Once again, its nuclear monopoly could not save it from failure.

The merest glance at nuclear strategy over the decades illustrates a related point. In practice, nuclear strategy has been a mental construct – another sort of “bomb in the mind” – consisting of “psychological” moves, appearances, bids for “prestige,” feints and bluffs aimed at “audiences,” not least domestic political audiences. Henry Kissinger was speaking for a generation of strategists when he wrote in 1957, “Until power is used, it is… what people think it is.” No one had used nuclear weapons since Nagasaki. Therefore, Kissinger continued, “the impact of the new weapons on strategy, on policy, indeed on survival, depends on our interpretation of their significance.”

Such examples from history suggest that supposed irresistible influence of a nuclear monopoly shrivels down virtually to nothing. If the superpower Soviet Union could gain no advantage from thousands of nuclear weapons over the Afghan Mujaheddin, are we supposed to imagine that in a nuclear-weapon–free world the entire Earth, including its greatest powers, would quail before some cheater brandishing a tiny nuclear arsenal? The idea that the world could thus be held hostage is ridiculous.

But the point is not to rehearse a list of improbable, bloodthirsty scenarios. The point is that the verdict that nuclear arms have rendered on conventional war would outlast the removal of the hardware. We make a mistake by conceiving the bomb as an object or a collection of objects. Instead, nuclear weaponry is like a magnetic field that now pervades our world and always will. Even where nuclear weapons are not present, the know-how for making them remains active and alive, imposing its restraining influence. Neither great powers nor small can extract an aggressive advantage from a capacity available to all – not today and certainly not in a world free of nuclear weapons.

The conclusion: It may well be easier to ban the bomb than we might think. We’ve already gone far in banishing the thing to this shadow world, this impotent play of psychology and appearances – play whose sole sensible aim is in any case to prevent any use. Would it be so hard, then, to banish this useless phantom?

A world free of nuclear weapons is a good, safe place to be – a decent place, free of the dishonor of threatening to kill tens of millions of our fellow human beings.

We should go there.