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ABSTRACT
The claim that the spread of nuclear weapons leads to interstate conflict and nuclear war has become very influential. However, proliferation pessimists have failed to specify how and when nuclear proliferation precipitates conflict. I make four arguments for an optimistic pessimism. (1) The few preventive strikes against nuclear facilities that have occurred would have occurred absent of the target's nuclear program, and these rare strikes did not lead to conflict escalation. (2) The problem of nonsurvivable arsenals is, properly understood, a problem of preventive-war motivations where subjective uncertainty reduces the dangers of arsenal survivability. (3) Claims that bias within nuclear organizations may lead to accidental nuclear detonations suffer from omitted variable bias: leaders' decisions to revise the status quo after developing nuclear weapons tend to give rise to the most dangerous nuclear accidents. Accidents that have not occurred during a nuclear crisis pose substantially less risk of nuclear escalation. (4) Leaders of nuclear states have tended to engage in conventional aggression, but experience with nuclear weapons moderates their conflict propensity. Ultimately, I argue that while nuclear weapons have led to conflict through one causal mechanism and for a limited time, the dangers are substantially weaker than usually assumed.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the editors and external reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.
Notes
1 For arguments that nuclear proliferation reduces state conflict, see Kenneth N. Waltz, “More May Be Better,” in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (New York: Norton, 2013) pp. 3–40; John J. Mearsheimer, “The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent,” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993), pp. 50–66; John Lewis Gaddis, “The Long Peace,” International Security 10 (Spring 1986), pp. 99–142; Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and William H. Riker, “An Assessment of the Merits of Selective Nuclear Proliferation,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 26 (June 1982), pp. 283–306; David J. Karl, “Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers,” International Security 21, (Winter 1996–97), pp. 87–119; Jordan Seng, “Less is More: Command and Control Advantages of Minor Nuclear States,” Security Studies 6 (Summer 1997), pp. 50–92; and Devin T. Hagerty, The Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation: Lessons from South Asia (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998).
2 James R. Clapper, “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,” Statement for the Record, US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, January 29, 2014, <www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/testimonies/203-congressional-testimonies-2014/1005-statement-for-the-record-worldwide-threat-assessment-of-the-us-intelligence-community>.
3 Matthew Kaminski, “The Hillary Doctrine: The secretary of state takes an optimistic view of human nature, not to mention Vladimir Putin,” Wall Street Journal, August 14, 2009, <http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203863204574348843585706178>.
4 Scott D. Sagan, “The Reasons to Worry,” in Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 200–214, 210.
5 Albert Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror,” RAND Paper P-1472, November 6, 1958, <http://www.rand.org/about/history/wohlstetter/P1472/P1472.html>; Herman Kahn, On Thermonuclear War (New York: Greenwood Press, 1978); Scott D. Sagan, “More Will Be Worse,” in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (New York: Norton, 2013) pp. 41–81; Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Bruce G. Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993); Bruce G. Blair, “Nuclear Inadvertence: Theory and Evidence,” Security Studies 3 (Spring 1994), pp. 494–500; Peter D. Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Peter Feaver, “The Politics of Inadvertence,” Security Studies 3 (Spring 1994), pp. 501–08; Steven E. Miller, “The Case against a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent,” Foreign Affairs 73 (Summer 1993), pp. 67–80; Peter R. Lavoy, “The Strategic Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation,” Security Studies 4 (Summer 1995), pp. 695–753 and Peter D. Feaver, “Neooptimists and the Enduring Problem of Nuclear Proliferation,” Security Studies 6 (Summer 1997), pp. 126–36; S. Paul Kapur, “Revisionist Ambitions, Capabilities, and Nuclear Instability: Why Nuclear South Asia is Not Like Cold War Europe,” in Scott D. Sagan (ed.), Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) pp. 184–218. I do not address the threat posed by non-state group development, acquisition, and use of nuclear weapons, but others have argued that this threat is exaggerated. See Keir A. Leiber and Daryl Press, “Why States Won’t Give Nuclear Weapons to Terrorists,” International Security 38 (Summer 2013), pp. 80–104 and John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
6 Matthew Kroenig, “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option,” Foreign Affairs (January/February 2012); Kroenig, “Still Time to Attack Iran: The Illusion of a Comprehensive Nuclear Deal,” Foreign Affairs (January 7, 2014), <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/middle-east/2014-01-07/still-time-attack-iran>.
7 For partial exceptions, see Daryl Press and Keir Leiber, “The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy,” International Security 30 (Spring 2006), pp. 7–44, and Joshua Rovner, “AirSea Battle and Escalation Risks,” UC San Diego Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Policy Brief 12 (January 2012).
8 Insofar as Sagan has made the most influential proliferation pessimist claims, much of the analysis assesses his claims. Much of the earlier literature exclusively addressed the Cold War, whereas more recent research by Sagan and others addresses the Cold War, South Asia, and elsewhere.
9 Jack S. Levy, “Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War,” World Politics 40 (1987), pp. 82–107; Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 48–57.
10 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 49–50.
11 Todd S. Sechser, “Are Soldiers Less War-Prone than Statesmen?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 48 (2004), pp. 746–74; Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen and Cold War Crises (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
12 Matthew Fuhrmann and Sarah E. Kreps, “Targeting Nuclear Programs in War and Peace: A Quantitative Empirical Analysis, 1941-2000,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 54 (2010), pp. 831–59. Fuhrmann and Kreps defined serious consideration to be when a leader or cabinet-level official gives political authorization to use military force but nuclear facilities are not attacked, requests for cooperation from another country to attack a third state's nuclear facilities, and the private advocacy of strikes by leaders and cabinet-level officials during internal deliberations or in discussions with foreign officials who are also considering military action. See “Targeting Nuclear Programs,” pp. 834–36.
13 Fuhrmann and Kreps, “Targeting Nuclear Programs,” p. 837.
14 Ibid, p. 853
15 Levy, Preventive Motivation for War; Dan Reiter, “Exploding the Power Keg Myth: Preemptive Wars Almost Never Happen,” International Security 20 (Fall 1995), pp. 5–34.
16 Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 18–19.
17 Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, “Revisiting Osirak: Preventive Attacks and Nuclear Proliferation Risks,” International Security 36 (Summer 2011), pp. 101–32; Hal Brands and David Palkki, “Saddam, Israel and the Bomb: Nuclear Alarmism Justified?” International Security 36 (Summer 2011), pp. 133–66.
18 Jacques Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians and Proliferation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 79–123.
19 William J. Broad, John Markoff, and David E. Sanger, “Israeli Test on Worm called crucial in Iran nuclear delay,” New York Times, January 15, 2011, <www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/world/middleeast/16stuxnet.html?_r=0>.
20 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 51–54.
21 Ibid, p. 54, fn. 34.
22 Ibid, p. 52, fn. 29.
23 Douglas Selvage, “Khrushchev's November 1958 Berlin Ultimatum: New Evidence from the Polish Archives,” CWIHP Bulletin 11, 1998, pp. 200–203.
24 Matthias Uhl and Vladimir I. Ivkin, “‘Operation Atom’: The Soviet Union's Stationing of Nuclear Missiles in the German Democratic Republic, 1959,” CWIHP Bulletin, issue 12/13 (Winter/Spring 2001), pp. 299–307.
25 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 56.
26 S. Paul Kapur and Sumit Ganguly, “The Jihad Paradox: Pakistan and Islamists Militancy in South Asia,” International Security 37 (2012), pp. 111–41.
27 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 140–42.
28 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 140; Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace: The Secret History of India's Quest to be a Nuclear Power (New Delhi: Harper Collins Publishers, 2000) pp. 322–23; P. N. Hoon, Unmasking Secrets of Turbulence (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2000), p. 102; George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 208.
29 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 145.
30 Vipin Narang, “Posturing for Peace? Pakistan's Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability,” International Security 34 (Winter 2010), pp. 38–78, 75–76; Rodney W. Jones, “Pakistan's answer to Cold Start?” The Friday Times, May 13–19, 2011, <www.thefridaytimes.com/13052011/page7.shtml>.
31 Toby J. Rider, Michael G. Findley, and Paul F. Diehl, “Just Part of the Game? Arms Races, Rivalry and War,” Journal of Peace Research 48 (2011), pp. 85–100.
32 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 146; Manoj Joshi, “Pak may have Relocated Nukes to Gilgit,” Times of India, November 14, 2001, <http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Pak-may-have-relocated-nukes-to-Gilgit/articleshow/1435182536.cms>; Molly Moore and Karam Khan, “Pakistan Moves Nuclear Weapons,” Washington Post, November 11, 2001, <www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/11/11/pakistan-moves-nuclear-weapons/f1656801-497f-4ce0-94d9-9283de873584/>.
33 Sagan, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 59.
34 Wohlstetter, “The Delicate Balance of Terror.”
35 Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 20–22, Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 57–58.
36 James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49 (Summer 1995), pp. 379–414.
37 Jeffrey Lewis, The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China's Search for Security in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 64.
38 Keir A. Leiber and Daryl G. Press, “The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of U.S. Primacy,” International Security 30 (Spring 2006), 7–44.
39 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 131–32.
40 Wohlstetter, “Delicate Balance of Terror;” Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 60.
41 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 61–62.
42 Similar problems bedevil Sagan's example of the lagged development of the US ICBM force in the early 1950s.
43 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 62.
44 Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
45 Austin Long and Brendan Rittenhouse Green, “Stalking the Secure Second Strike: Intelligence, Counterforce and Nuclear Strategy,” Journal of Strategic Studies 38 (2015), pp. 38–73.
46 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 148; John Diamond, “Satellite Shows Pakistan's March Toward Nuclear Capability,” Chicago Tribune, March 16, 2000, p. 10.
47 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 66.
48 Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
49 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 69.
50 Sagan, Limits of Safety, p. 9.
51 Ibid, pp. 180–203.
52 Ibid, pp. 228–31.
53 Ibid, pp. 231–33.
54 Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Incident and the Illusion of Safety (New York: Penguin, 2013).
55 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 71.
56 Ibid, pp. 151–52.
57 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 72.
58 Ibid, p. 73.
59 Ibid, p. 73.
60 Barry R. Posen, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
61 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 74–75.
62 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 75.
63 Jacques Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
64 Sagan, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 76.
65 Paul Kapur, “Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia,” International Security 33, No. 2 (2008), pp. 71–94.
66 Kapur's model does not address whether nuclear proliferation causes foreign policy preferences to become revisionist.
67 One might argue that China had revisionist goals against conventionally weaker India after the 1964 nuclear test. Alternatively, conventional superiority, revisionist preferences, and nuclear-weapon development might embolden a state if a conventionally weaker principal adversary already possessed nuclear weapons, but this has not yet occurred.
68 Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
69 Narang, Posturing for Peace.
70 At the time of writing, it is not clear if North Korea has developed a deliverable nuclear weapon. The nuclear arsenals inherited by Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union are generally believed to have been under de facto Russian control.
71 Kapur, “Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia;” M. Taylor Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China's Territorial Disputes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, Imagined Enemies: China Prepares for Uncertain War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 48–59.
72 For a frequently updated overview of North Korea's capability, including timelines of tests, see, “North Korea,” Nuclear Threat Initiative, September 2016, <www.nti.org/learn/countries/north-korea/>; see also Dugald McConnell and Brian Todd, “North Korea may be planning October Surprise, study says,” CNN, October 4, 2016, <www.cnn.com/2016/10/03/politics/north-korea-us-elections-2016/>.
73 Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), pp. 39–40.
74 Ibid, p. 166 and 177.
75 Pavel Podvig, Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 3; Steven Zaloga, The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword, p. 238.
76 Uhl and Ivkin, Operation Atom, p. 302.
77 Podvig, Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces, p. 181; Zaloga, The Kremlin's Nuclear Sword (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002), p. 232; Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, pp. 282–283.
78 Influential examples of the Soviet superiority thesis include Stephen J. Flanagan, NATO's Conventional Defenses (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1988); Richard Smoke, National Security and the Nuclear Dilemma: An Introduction to the American Experience in the Cold War (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993); John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Ronald E. Powaski, The Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1917-1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
79 Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961-1969 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 142.
80 Matthew Evangelista, “Stalin's Postwar Army Reappraised,” International Security 7 (Winter 1982–83), pp. 110–138, 111. He elaborates that (p. 119) when one considers that “Soviet divisional manpower has historically numbered 50 to 60 percent of Western divisional manpower, and that Soviet divisions have far fewer support troops, the picture looks different … an image of rough parity emerges.”
81 Mearsheimer, “Numbers, Strategy and the European Balance,” International Security 12, No. 4 (Spring 1988), pp. 184, 180–181.
82 Barry R. Posen, “Is NATO Decisively Outnumbered?” International Security 12 (Spring 1988), pp. 186–202, 189, 200; Barry R. Posen, “Measuring the European Conventional Balance: Coping with Complexity in Threat Assessment,” in International Security 9 (Winter 1984-1985), pp. 47–88; Mearsheimer, “Numbers, Strategy and the European Balance,” pp. 174–185.
83 Institute for Conflict Management, South Asian Terrorism Portal, <http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/jandk/data_sheets/annual_casualties.htm>.
84 Paul Huth, D. Scott Bennett and Christopher Gelpi, “System Uncertainty, Risk Propensity, and International Conflict among the Great Powers,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 36 (September 1992), pp. 478–517; D. Scott Bennett and Allan C. Stam, The Behavioural Origins of War (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003) pp. 135–136; Erik Gartzke and Dong Joon Jo, “Bargaining, Nuclear Proliferation and Interstate Disputes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, No. 2 (2009), pp. 209–233; David Sobek, Dennis M. Foster, and Samuel B. Robison, “Conventional Wisdom? The Effect of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, 1945-2001,” International Studies Quarterly 56, (March 2012), pp. 149–162; Mark S. Bell and Nicholas L. Miller, “Questioning the Effect of Nuclear Weapons on Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, published online August 19, 2013; Kyle Beardsley and Victor Asal, “Nuclear Weapons as Shields,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 26 (July 2000), pp. 235–255.
85 Gartzke and Jo, “Bargaining, Nuclear Proliferation and Interstate Disputes,” pp. 209–233.
86 Michael Horowitz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons and International Conflict: Does Experience Matter?” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, No. 2, (2009), pp. 234–257, pp. 247–255, 244; Michael C. Horowitz, “Nuclear Power and Militarised Conflict: Is there a Link,” in Adam N. Stulberg and Matthew Fuhrmann (eds.) The Nuclear Renaissance and International Security (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 288–312.
87 Erik Gartzke, “Nuclear Proliferation Dynamics and Conventional Conflict,” UC San Diego, 2010, <http://dss.ucsd.edu/~egartzke/papers/nuketime_05032010.pdf>.
88 Ibid.
89 James M. Lindsay and Ray Takeyh, “After Iran Gets the Bomb: Containment and its Complications,” Foreign Affairs, March-April 2010, pp. 33–50.
90 Scott D. Sagan, “How to Keep the Bomb from Iran,” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2006).
91 Richard K. Betts, “The Lost Logic of Deterrence: What the Strategy that Won the Cold War Can – and Can’t – Do Now,” Foreign Affairs (March/April 2013).