II. CATASTROPHIC RISKS

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Notes

¹Bernard Brodie (ed.), The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1946), p. 76.

²For further discussion, see Malcolm Chalmers, ‘Nuclear Weapons and the Prevention of Major War’ in Bruno Tertrais (co-ordinator), Thinking About Strategy: A Tribute to Michael Quinlan (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2011).

³See, for example, the widespread criticism of Waltz's argument that an Iranian bomb would contribute to war prevention. Kenneth Waltz, ‘Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability’, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2012).

⁴This includes North Korea, which tested nuclear devices in 2006 and 2009.

⁵John E Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. xii–xiii.

⁶Jacques E C Hymans, ‘Botching the Bomb: Why Nuclear Weapons Programs Often Fail on Their Own – and Why Iran's Might, Too’, Foreign Affairs (May/June 2012).

⁷For a thoughtful overview, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes (London: Allen Lane, 2011), especially Chapters 5 and 6. Also see Andrew Mack et al., Human Security Report 2009/10: The Causes of Peace and the Shrinking Costs of War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

⁸For an early example of this argument, see Colin S Gray and Keith Payne, ‘Victory is Possible’, Foreign Policy (Summer 1980), pp. 14–27, in which they argued that ‘an intelligent United States offensive [nuclear] strategy, wedded to homeland defenses, should reduce U.S. casualties to approximately 20 million … a combination of counterforce offensive targeting, civil defense, and ballistic missile and air defense should hold U.S. casualties down to a level compatible with national survival and recovery.’

⁹For an early example of this argument, see Colin S Gray and Keith Payne, ‘Victory is Possible’, Foreign Policy (Summer 1980), pp. 212–14. Also see David Owen, In Sickness and In Power: Illness in Heads of Government during the Last 100 Years (London: Methuen Publishing Ltd, 2008), pp. 164–77.

¹⁰Richard Holbrooke, ‘Real W.M.D.s’, New York Times, 22 June 2008, reviewing Michael Dobbs, Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2008).

¹¹Scott Sagan has emphasised the important role that organisational and bureaucratic factors (for example, in relation to the transmission and distortion of information) can play in increasing the possibility of nuclear escalation in a crisis. Scott D Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

¹²Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (London: Penguin Books, 2008). ‘Black swan theory’ refers to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Taleb argues that such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.

¹³Malcolm Chalmers, ‘Nuclear Narratives: Reflections on Declaratory Policy’, RUSI Whitehall Report, 1–10, 2010, p. 10.

¹⁴Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 269.

¹⁵Nina Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) argues for the existence of a ‘taboo’ against nuclear use in the US, which includes a perception that only ‘barbarians’ would use them (see p. 16). Others argue that, given continuing preparation for use by nuclear-armed states in some circumstances, non-use can be better characterised as a ‘tradition’. T V Paul, The Tradition of Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 8, also argues that, if non-use were indeed a commonly accepted taboo, one might expect greater support for use to be outlawed in international law (a treatment applied to other taboo activities, such as torture and slavery).

¹⁶NATO, ‘Strategic Concept for the Defence and Security of the Members of the North Atlantic Alliance’, November 2010, para. 17.

¹⁷Colin H Kahl, ‘Before Attacking Iran, Israel Should Learn from its 1981 Strike on Iraq’, Washington Post, 2 March 2012.

¹⁸US Department of Defense, ‘Nuclear Posture Review Report 2010’, April 2010, p. iv.

¹⁹John E Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 69.

²⁰Thérèse Delpech, Nuclear Deterrence in the 21 ^st Century: Lessons from the Cold War for a New Era of Strategic Piracy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2012), p. 37.

²¹Marc Trachtenberg, ‘Proliferation Revisited’, as quoted in Shashank Joshi, ‘Is a Nuclear Iran as Dangerous as We Think?’, RUSI.org, 27 February 2012.

²²Thomas C Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 93.

²³Thomas C Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), pp. 40–42. I am indebted to Shashank Joshi for this reference.

²⁴Scott D Sagan, ‘The Case for No First Use’, Survival (Vol. 51, No. 3, June–July 2009), p. 170.

²⁵Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). Also see Sagan, The Limits of Safety.

²⁶John E Mueller, Atomic Obsession, p. 10.

²⁷Stan Openshaw, Philip Steadman and Owen Greene, Doomsday: Britain after Nuclear Attack (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), especially pp. 92, 214.

²⁸For recent contributions to the nuclear winter literature, see Alan Robock, Luke Roman and Georgiy L Stenchikov, ‘Nuclear Winter Revisited with a Modern Climate Model and Current Nuclear Arsenals: Still Catastrophic Consequences’, Journal of Geophysical Research (Vol. 112, D13107, 2007); Steven Starr, ‘Catastrophic Climate Consequences of Nuclear Conflict’, paper prepared for the International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament, October 2009; Alan Robock, ‘Nuclear Winter is a Real and Present Danger’, Nature (Vol. 473, 19 May 2012), pp. 275–77.

²⁹Alan Robock, ‘Nuclear Winter’, Climate Change (No. 1, May/June 2010).

³⁰US National Academy of Sciences, The Effects on the Atmosphere of a Major Nuclear Exchange (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1985).

³¹Alan Robock, ‘Nuclear Winter is a Real and Present Danger’, p. 276.

³²On the nuclear dimension of Algeria's separation from France, see Bruno Tertrais, ‘A “Nuclear Coup”? France, the Algerian War and the April 1961 Nuclear Test’, <http://www.npolicy.org/article_file/A_Nuclear_Coup-France_the_Algerian_War_and_the_April_1961_Nuclear_Test.pdf>, accessed 26 July 2012.