Will More Nuclear Weapons Give Security?
Khaled Ahmed
The Friday Times, January 5-11, 2007
If there is one man who can persuade you into believing anything in international relations, it is Columbia University’s Kenneth Waltz (b.1924). His stance in the 1980s was that a proliferation of nuclear weapons will lead to global security.
The world set him aside and insisted that it was too scared of nuclear weapons getting into everyone’s hands. It signed on a treaty called the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) to block non-nuclear states from going nuclear. And it was the most powerful international treaty in perpetuity.
Today, the world seems to be agreeing with Waltz. At least that is how the nuclear powers of the NPT are behaving. Israel, India and Pakistan stayed out of the treaty and later, despite pressure from the nuclear powers in varying degree they managed to acquire their bombs.
Then the nuclear powers saw NPT members breaking out. North Korea rebelled but could not be punished into obedience. After North Korea, Iran is suspected of taking the nuclear weapons route and the nuclear powers are not in agreement about how to tackle it.
To this situation is added another twist. While the US wants to punish Iran to save the NPT, it has gone and offered nuclear technology to India prohibited by the NPT. Meanwhile, China and Russia do not want Iran punished with real sanctions.
Taking India’s cue many NPT signatories say they want to acquire nuclear technology to make electricity. Since many of them have plenty of oil, their declarations seem unconvincing.
Some nuclear-ambitious states want the bomb to become ‘big powers’, some want them to avoid regime change, and others want deterrence against the bomb the neighbour has acquired or will acquire.
Is it time to go back to Kenneth Waltz? It is much better to accept the inevitable and think how the world can be made safe with proliferation. Let us revisit Waltz to see if he makes sense.
The following are the five reasons why he thought the world will have a ‘promising future’ with more nuclear states.
l International politics is a self-help system, and it can run better by states behaving sensibly rather than preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.
l The nuclear ‘freeze’ achieved between the United States and the Soviet Union was not shaken by cold war events. What can lesser states do to disrupt the nuclear equilibrium? The international equilibrium will endure.
l Nuclear wars will not happen because of proliferation but because of miscalculation.
l Nuclear weaponry makes miscalculation difficult because it is hard not to be aware of how much damage a small number of warheads can do. Among nuclear countries, possible losses in war overwhelm possible gains.
l No one attacks a defence believed to be impregnable. Nuclear weapons may make it possible to approach the defensive ideal. If so, the spread of nuclear weapons will further help to maintain peace.
Waltz wrote during the cold war. He had the bipolar paradigm in front of him. He thought it was firmly in place and rendered the world safe. No world war had taken place after the Second World War because of nuclear deterrence.
It seems that the world will move to his way of thinking. The ‘equilibrium’ nuclear proliferation will provide will do away with ‘pre-emptive’ wars by any big power. The states will be safe from intervention by any means, unilateral or multilateral.
In a way the world will go back to the idea of sovereignty of the state that held sway during the career of the League of Nations but could not be supported by conventional weapons.
If Iran’s bomb threatens the Arabs America will not be required to stage a preventive strike – rendered impossible anyway – but the Arabs will acquire their own bomb to ward off Iranian hegemony.
Japan will not cringe in the face of North Korea’s bomb but will acquire its own. So will South Korea. The world will soon bristle with nuclear arsenals but there will be no unilateral pre-emptive strikes and no regime-changes.
As a result all disputes will be frozen. All movements of protest against past injustices will be called off in favour of the status quo presumably suitable for trade. New injustices will not be created.
Sovereign states will be free to do whatever they want to do internally. Democracy will not be a precondition. The world might forget war under pressure from the necessity to run interconnected economies.
The basis of the new world will be fear. Fear of being struck with a nuclear weapon. Will this fear be deeply educative too, because some problems of proximity will make the nuclear strikes incredible?
In the new nuclear order the next-door neighbours will have bombs that will be suicidal at best and not credible at all because no nation wants to die in the process of annihilating the other.
The world will have to go back to conventional weapons, fighting little Kargils because in most cases their nuclear deterrence will not be credible. This extremely reductive scenario brings us back to the problem of war.
As weapons of imagination, nuclear weapons seem to be losing their promise of security. Their proliferation may actually be quite meaningless, which means deterrence may become a thing of the past.
The world might have to accept nuclear holocaust, and each state hope to survive distant mushrooms, just like global warming.
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