Politics, History and the Ivory Tower-Policy Gap in the Nuclear Proliferation Debate

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Notes

¹Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W.W. Norton 1995).

²Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W.W. Norton 2002).

³Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (New York: W.W. Norton 2012).

⁴Ibid., 42.

⁵Ibid., 43.

⁶One organization that is doing extraordinary work to identify, declassify, and make accessible declassified documents on nuclear statecraft from around the world is the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, an effort led by Christian Ostermann and Leopoldo Nuti, <www.wilsoncenter.org/program/npihp>. This project is part of the Woodrow Wilson's Cold War International History Project, which has produced countless documents, briefs, and reports on nuclear issues over the past 20 years. Two other notable organizations declassifying and publishing important documents on nuclear statecraft include the Parallel History Project, <www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/index.cfm> and the National Security Archive, <www.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/index.html>. Two recent international conferences give just a small sample of the work being done – one hosted by the Nobel Institute in Oskarsborg, Norway, in June 2009 and another hosted by Center for Security Studies in Zurich in June 2010, <www.css.ethz.ch/events/archive/academic_research/Uncovering_Sources_EN>. Each hosted over a dozen scholars using new archival materials to analyze the origins, developments, and consequences of nuclear programs around the world, including Pakistan, India, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Yugoslavia, and Italy, among many others. The papers from the CSS conference have not yet been published, but some of the papers from the Nobel Conference can be found in Olav Njolstad (ed.), Nuclear Proliferation and International Order: Challenges to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (New York: Routledge 2011).

⁷Sagan and Waltz, Enduring Debate, xi.

⁸Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Waltzing to Armageddon?’, The National Interest (Fall 2002), 144–52.

⁹Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1966), 176.

¹⁰Trachtenberg, ‘Waltzing to Armageddon’, 149.

¹¹The Cuban Missile Crisis should also be an easy test, and others have revealed how nuclear weapons made it far more dangerous and unstable than it was. In fact, in a non-nuclear world, there may not have been any crisis, and hence, no instability. For a recent account using new evidence that reveals just how unstable and dangerous the crisis was, see Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Knopf 2008).

¹²Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, 24 May 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, [hereafter FRUS] Volume XIV (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office 1998), 67.

¹³Sagan and Waltz, Enduring Debate, 6.

¹⁴‘Memorandum of Conversation’, FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume V, 218.

¹⁵Kennedy clearly appreciated the high stakes for the Soviet leader. ‘Khrushchev is losing East Germany. He cannot let that happen. If East Germany goes, so will Poland and all of Eastern Europe.’ Frederick Kempe, Berlin 1961 (New York: Putnam 2011), 293.

¹⁶Memorandum of Conversation with President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, 30 Nov. 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume VIII, 143. At another point, President Eisenhower stated, ‘we should not have committed ourselves as deeply as we had to Berlin, where he said the situation was basically untenable, as in the case of Quemoy and Matsu.’ Memorandum of Conversation Between President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles, 18 Nov. 1958, FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume VIII, 85.

¹⁷Kempe, Berlin 1961, 220. ‘God knows I am not an isolationist, but it seems particularly stupid to risk killing a million Americans over an argument about access rights on an Autobahn in the Soviet zone of Germany, or because the Germans want Germany reunified.’ W.R. Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2009), 75.

¹⁸Alexsandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: W.W. Norton 2007), 243–4.

¹⁹Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989 (New York: Harper 2007), 105.

²⁰Ibid., 116.

²¹Telegram From the Embassy in the Soviet Union to the Department of State, 27 May 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume XIV, 77.

²²Position Paper Prepared in the Department of State, ‘Berlin and Germany’, 25 May 1961, FRUS, 1961–1963, Volume XIV, 74.

²³Memorandum from the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, 24 Jan. 1969, FRUS: 1969–1976, Volume XL, 9.

²⁴Draft Memorandum of Conversation, Bonn, 2 Feb. 1969, FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume XL, 44.

²⁵Telegram from the Mission in Berlin to the Department of State, 8 Jan. 1969, FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume XL, 5.

²⁶Editorial Note, 3 March 1969, FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume XL, 49.

²⁷Editorial Note, 22 Oct. 1970, FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume XL, 377.

²⁸Memorandum from the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) to President Nixon, 25 Jan. 1971, FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume XL, 495.

²⁹Conversation among President Nixon, German Chancellor Brandt, the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, and the German State Secretary for Foreign, Defense, and German Policy, 15 June 1971, FRUS, 1969–1976, Volume XL, 741–8.

³⁰M. Taylor Fravel and Evan S. Medeiros, ‘China's Search for Assured Retaliation: The Evolution of Chinese Nuclear Strategy and Force Structure’, International Security 35/2 (Fall 2010), 48–87.

³¹Vipin Narang, ‘Posturing for Peace? Pakistan's Nuclear Postures and South Asian Stability’, International Security 34/3 (Winter 2009–10), 38–78. Narang's analysis does highlight an excellent point: arms control professionals have focused on the number and quality of nuclear weapons, when what might matter much more are the strategies, postures, and deployments of weapons. Pakistan's arsenal may be dangerous not because of its size or quality but because of how Pakistan deploys and may use it.

³²Kier Lieber and Daryl Press, ‘The End of MAD? The Nuclear Dimension of US Primacy’, International Security 30/4 (Spring 2006), 7–44. Presumably, the United States possesses near-primacy against every nuclear (and non-nuclear) country in the world: why are France, Israel, and Great Britain not more alarmed? One might assume it is because the leaders of those states possess almost no conceivable scenario in which they can imagine the United States would use its forces against them. It might be that the passing of the intense geopolitical and ideological competition that followed the end of the Cold War has produced similar feelings in Russia. This is not to say there are not/will not be political disputes, just that it may be hard for decision-makers to imagine them rising to the level where the use of nuclear weapons would be likely.

³³See especially Justin Vaisse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2010).

³⁴Odd Arne Westad, ‘The Fall of Détente and the Turning Tides of History’, in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), The Fall of Détente: Soviet-American Relations during the Carter Years (Oslo, Norway: Scandinavian UP 1997), 15. To see further details of the Soviet reaction, and the theory that Brezhnev may have allowed the SS-20 deployment to placate a Soviet military angry over SALT I and SALT II negotiations, see David Holloway, ‘The Dynamics of the Euromissile Crisis, 1977–1983,’ unpublished paper.

³⁵See especially Leopoldo Nuti (ed.), The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975–1985 (New York: Routledge 2009). On documents relating to the Euromissile crisis, see Timothy McDowell (ed.), The Euromissiles Crisis and the End of the Cold War: 1977–1987 (2009), <www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-euromissiles-crisis-reader>.

³⁶For the idea that obscure debates over nuclear strategies and deployments masked deeper differences in geopolitical outlooks, particularly in the United States, see Francis J. Gavin, ‘Wrestling with Parity: The Nuclear Revolution Revisited’, in Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel J. Sargent (eds), The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2010), 189–204.

³⁷Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Better, Adelphi Paper 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies 1981).

³⁸Two scholars have recently done excellent work examining this question: Jacques Hymans and Etel Solingen. Regardless of what one thinks of his arguments, Hymans in particular is an exemplar of employing the method suggested in this essay: combining theory with extensive use of archival sources. Jacques Hymans, The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identify, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2006); Jacques Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2012); and Etel Solingen, Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2007).

³⁹Shane Maddock also identifies the persistent US goal of atomic supremacy, but ascribes this policy to ideological rather than power political motives. See Shane J. Maddock, Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for Atomic Supremacy from World War II to the Present (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press 2010).

⁴⁰Rusk to State Department, 7 Aug., 1963, National Security File, box 187, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA.

⁴¹See Francis J. Gavin and Mira Rapp-Hooper, ‘The Copenhagen Temptation: Rethinking Prevention and Proliferation in the Age of Deterrence Dominance’, Working Paper, prepared for 2010 Tobin Project conference on Power Through Its Prudent Use, <www.tobinproject.org/sites/tobinproject.org/files/assets/Gavin%26Rapp-Hooper_US_Preventive_War_Thinking.pdf>.

⁴²On West Germany, see Thomas Alan Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2003), and Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1946–1963 (Princeton UP 1999); on Israel, see Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia UP 1998); on the desire of many top US policymakers to get the British out of the nuclear business, see Richard Neustadt, Report to JFK: The Skybolt Crisis in Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 1999).

⁴³Francis J. Gavin, ‘Blasts from the Past: Nuclear Proliferation and Rogue States Before the Bush Doctrine’, International Security 29/3 (Winter 2004–2005), 110.

⁴⁴On Pakistan, see ‘Congressional Consultation on Pakistan’, State Department Cable 235372 to US Embassy, Vienna, 15 Sept. 1978, 3–4, National Security Archive, Pakistan Nuclear Development Collection. On South Korea and Taiwan, see Lewis A. Dunn, ‘Half Past India's Bang’, Foreign Policy 36 (Autumn 1979), and Rebecca K.C. Hersmann and Robert Peters, ‘Nuclear U-Turns: Learning From South Korean and Taiwanese Rollback’, Nonproliferation Review 13/3 (Nov. 2006), 547–8.

⁴⁵‘Arizona Senator's Support Sought for New START Pact’, Global Security Newswire, 20 April 2010, <www.nti.org/gsn/article/arizona-senators-support-sought-for-new-start-pact/>.

⁴⁶See Jeffrey W. Knopf (ed.), Security Assurances and Nuclear Nonproliferation (Stanford UP 2012). For three excellent unpublished papers that look at this issue, see Matthew Furhmann and Todd S. Sechser, ‘Signalling Alliance Commitments: Hand-Tying and Sunk Costs in Extended Nuclear Deterrence’, presented at the Texas Triangle Security Conference, Austin, Texas, Feb. 2012; Alexander Lanoszka, ‘Protection States Trust? Superpower Patronage, Nuclear Behavior, and Alliance Dynamics’, Princeton University, 23 Jan. 2012; and Dan Reiter, ‘Security Commitments and Nuclear Proliferation’, 27 Jan. 2012. For a terrific article that uses new archival sources to show the link between US extended deterrence and Australia's decision to stay non-nuclear, highlighting the crucial differences between nuclear umbrellas in Asia vs. Europe, see Christine M. Leah, ‘US Extended Nuclear Deterrence and Nuclear Order: An Australian Perspective’, Asian Security 8/2 (Summer 2012), 93–114.

⁴⁷Gavin, ‘Blasts from the Past’, 115–22.

⁴⁸Matthew Kroenig, Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP 2010), 3.

⁴⁹There is some evidence that France, Pakistan, and possibly South Africa have thought about their nuclear forces this way. Relatedly, think how little control the United States has over how Israel deals with Iran's nuclear program; Israel's deterrent gives it both independence from the United States while restricting America's own freedom of action. Far better, from a US perspective, to deal with a nascent nuclear state like North Korea without the pressures and limitations that would be created by a nuclear South Korea or Japan.

⁵⁰Michael C. Horowitz, The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics (Princeton UP 2010), 106.

⁵¹Stanley Kurtz, ‘Why We Must Invade Iraq’, National Review Online, 16 Sept. 2002, <www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/751583/posts>.

⁵²Richard K. Betts, ‘Universal Deterrence or Conceptual Collapse? Liberal Pessimism and Utopian Realism’, in Victor A. Utgoff (ed.), The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, US Interests, and World Order (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2000), 65. In other words, the international system may prefer Waltz, but the United States – and any system leading power – will prefer Sagan, albeit for reasons other than those he laid out.

⁵³Sagan and Waltz, Enduring Debate, 100.

⁵⁴Sagan and Waltz, Enduring Debate, 105.

⁵⁵Sagan and Waltz, Enduring Debate, 106.

⁵⁶In such a world, not only would the other elements of the US's preponderant nonnuclear power provide it with enormous advantages over everyone else in the system; its enormous nuclear infrastructure and technological know-how would make it the power who could most easily reconstitute its nuclear weapons, making it a de facto nuclear power. In a sense, it could be argued this would make the United States what John Mearsheimer calls a hegemon with no great power rivals with which to compete for security. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton 2001), 128.

⁵⁷Sagan and Waltz, Enduring Debate, 224.

⁵⁸Ibid., 221.

⁵⁹‘Les Aspin, when he was chairman of the house Armed Services Committee, put this thought in the following words: “A world without nuclear weapons would not be disadvantageous to the United States. In fact, a world without nuclear weapons would actually be better. Nuclear weapons are still the big equalizer, but now the United States is not the equalizer but the equilizee.”’ Sagan and Waltz, Enduring Debate, 107.

⁶⁰‘In the twenty years dating from 1983, we invaded six of them, beginning and ending with Iraq. Yet since the end of World War II, states with nuclear weapons have never fought one another.’ Sagan and Waltz, Enduring Debate, 220.

⁶¹Francis J. Gavin, ‘Same As It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War’, International Security 34/3 (Winter 2009–2010), 7–37.

⁶²Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: McGraw-Hill 1979), 109.

⁶³Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia UP 1959), 238.

⁶⁴Campbell Craig, Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York: Columbia UP 2003), 118.

⁶⁵Waltz, Theory of International Politics, 180.

⁶⁶Ibid., 181.

⁶⁷Ibid., 182.

⁶⁸Craig, Total War, 161.

⁶⁹I am grateful to Mariana Carpes for this insight, which is the focus of her very promising research project, ‘Bringing the Region in: A Neoclassical Realist Approach for the Study of Rising Powers’ Nuclear Strategies.’ Nor can Waltz's theory explain the Ukraine's decision to give up its nuclear weapons when the Soviet Union collapsed.

⁷⁰The best study of these questions, which combines policy insight and academic rigor, is Colin H. Kahl, Melissa G. Dalton and Mathew Irvine, Risk and Rivalry: Iran, Israel and the Bomb (Washington DC: Center for a New American Security 2012), <www.cnas.org/riskandrivalry>.

⁷¹For a discussion of the challenges decision-makers face weighing risks in the face of radical uncertainty, and lamenting how rarely academics capture these factors, see Francis J. Gavin and James B. Steinberg, ‘Mind the Gap: Why Policymakers and Scholars Ignore Each Other, and What Should be Done About It,’ Carnegie Reporter6/4 (Spring 2012), <http://carnegie.org/publications/carnegie-reporter/single/view/article/item/308/>.

⁷²Kenneth Waltz, ‘Why Iran Should Get the Bomb’, Foreign Affairs 91/4 (July/Aug. 2012), 2–5.

⁷³I am grateful to Leopoldo Nuti to explaining this fascinating story to me.