THE ORACLES OF PROLIFERATION

Abstract

By examining via a case study the political authority of US proliferation experts since the 1960s, this article contributes to nuclear weapons proliferation studies and to the growing literature on the role of expertise in democracies. First, it argues that policy choices are determined by an understanding of history and that approaching nuclear history as a history of nuclear weapons proliferation is a presumption shared by both US experts and policy makers. Second, it shows that this understanding of history, relying on the metaphorical use of the term proliferation (which was imported from biology), strongly distorts the facts. Third, the article shows that nuclear experts are plagued by a conservative bias as a result of this use of the proliferation metaphor. Instead of challenging the faulty proliferation narrative, most experts have backed it without question. Fourth, the legitimacy that experts lend to this view of history has important political effects: it provides an authoritative assessment of past policies and limits the possibility of political innovation. Policy initiatives tend to be restricted to changes in speed or intensity. The article suggests three changes that might restore room for informed political innovation in nuclear weapons policies.

Keywords:

• nuclear weapons
• proliferation
• disarmament
• nuclear history and historians
• theory
• experts

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author thanks Cristina Hansell, Anne Harrington de Santana, David Holloway, Nicola Horsburgh, Jacques Hymans, Sverre Lodgaard, Lisa Luscombe, Ido Oren, Halit Mustafa Tagma, Vasileios Savvidis, Fabian Sievert, Ward Wilson, and the judges of the 2010 McElvany Nonproliferation Challenge for their comments and critiques on earlier drafts.

Notes

1. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), p. 390.

2. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), Grégoire Mallard, “Who Shall Keep the Humanity's ‘Sacred Trust’? International Liberals, Cosmopolitans and the Problem of Proliferation,” in Grégoire Mallard, Catherine Paradeise, and Ashveen Perlaye, eds., Global Science and National Security: Studies in Historical Sociology of Science (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 82–119. On the other hand, the post-war scientists’ movement was successful in its first major effort, convincing the US Congress to transfer control of the nascent nuclear weapons program from the military to a new civilian agency.

3. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 112.

4. This article does not ask why the experts stuck to a biased understanding of history. It merely focuses on how and what follows. For an analysis of why, see Benoît Pelopidas, La séduction de l'impossible. Etude sur le renoncement à l'arme nucléaire et l'autorité politique des experts [The seduction of the impossible: A study on the renunciation of nuclear weapons and the political authority of experts] (Paris: Sciences Po University Press, forthcoming 2011).

5. William Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzanova, “Introduction,” in William Potter and Gaukhar Mukhatzanova, eds., Forecasting Nuclear Proliferation in the 21 ^st Century—Volume 1: The Role of Theory (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 2.

6. In his attempt at going beyond optimism and pessimism, Matthew Kroenig focuses on which states will be more affected than others by proliferation and why. In doing so, he remains inside the proliferation paradigm as a direction of history. Matthew Kroenig, “Beyond Optimism and Pessimism: The Differential Effects of Nuclear Proliferation,” Managing the Atom Project, Working Paper 2009-14, November 2009.

7. The most prominent attempts at challenging the proliferation paradigm are Jacques Hymans, Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identities, Emotions and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Etel Solingen, Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); and Maria Rost Rublee, Nonproliferation Norms: Why States Choose Nuclear Restraint (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

8. The first authoritative study was Gordon Correra, Shopping for Bombs: Nuclear Proliferation, Global Insecurity, and the Rise and Fall of the A.Q. Khan Network (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

9. Among many others, see Charles D. Ferguson and William C. Potter, with Amy Sands, Leonard S. Spector, and Fred L. Wehling, The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2005); and Michael Levi, On Nuclear Terrorism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

10. This is true to the extent that an increase in the number of actors with nuclear weapons is a factor in the rise in the number of nuclear weapons in the world; separate aspects of nuclear security are climate change and biosecurity. See “Doomsday Clock Overview,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, undated, <www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/overview>.

11. Juha A. Vuori, “A Timely Prophet? The Doomsday Clock as an Aesthetisation of Securitization Moves with a Global Referent Object,” paper presented to the Fiftieth Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, New York, February 15–18, 2009, p. 22.

12. Potter and Mukhatzanova, “Introduction,” p. 2.

13. The classic statements of Waltz's arguments are Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper No. 171 (London: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Kenneth N. Waltz in Kenneth N. Waltz and Scott D. Sagan, eds. The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), chapters 1 and 3. His point that a theory of international relations cannot predict proliferation is made in Kenneth N. Waltz, “A Reply,” Security Studies 4 (1995), p. 803.

14. For an example of criticism, see Robert S. Norris, Jeremy Bernstein, and Peter D. Zimmerman, “An Uncertain Train of Nuclear Events,” Nonproliferation Review 16 (2009), pp. 293–301.

15. Thomas C. Reed and Danny Stillman, The Nuclear Express, A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation (New York: Zenith Press, 2009), p. 319.

16. Thomas C. Reed and Danny Stillman, The Nuclear Express, A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation (New York: Zenith Press, 2009), p. 319.

17. For example, see William Langewiesche, The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor (New York: Penguin, 2007); and Sujeet Samaddar, Thinking Proliferation Theoretically,” Nonproliferation Review 12 (November 2005), p. 435.

18. On the origins of the approach in terms of proliferation, see Matthew Woods, “Inventing Proliferation: The Creation and Preservation of the Inevitable Spread of Nuclear Weapons,” Review of International Affairs 3 (March 2004), p. 419. For the wording of the Soviet effort to build nuclear weapons as “proliferation,” see Michael D. Gordin, Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009), pp. 64, 186, 275.

19. For a more detailed analysis of this aspect, see Benoît Pelopidas, “La couleur du cygne sud-africain. Le role des surprises dans l'histoire nucléaire et les effets d'une amnésie partielle” [The color of the South African swan: The role of surprises in nuclear history and the effects of a partial amnesia], Annuaire Français des Relations Internationales [French yearbook of international relations], 2010.

20. For a global assessment of the excessive pessimism of forecasters, see Moeed Yusuf, “Predicting Proliferation: The History of the Future of Nuclear Weapons,” Policy Paper 11, Brookings Institution, January 2009.

21. Jeffrey T. Richelson, Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 373–400.

22. Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq: The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (New York: Pantheon, 2004), p. 256.

23. Harald Müller and Andreas Schmidt, “The Little-Known Story of De-Proliferation,” in Forecasting Proliferation in the 21 ^st Century–Volume 1: The Role of Theory, pp. 124-158. On the difficulty for international security experts to adapt their assumptions to contradicting data, see Richard Hermann and Jong Kun Choi, “From Prediction to Learning: Opening Experts’ Minds to Unfolding History,” International Security 31 (Spring 2007).

24. Benoît Pelopidas, “Critical Thinking about Nuclear Weapons,” Nonproliferation Review 17 (March 2010), pp. 189–96.

25. Albert Wohlstetter, “Nuclear Sharing: NATO and the N + 1 Country,” Foreign Affairs 39 (April 1961), p. 367.

26. Potter and Mukhatzhanova, “Introduction,” p. 2.

27. Max Black, Models and Metaphors (New York: Cornell University Press, 1962), pp. 42, 44–45. On the role of metaphors and the way they shape perceptions, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For an early approach to proliferation as a metaphor, see David Mutimer, “Reimagining Security: The Metaphors of Proliferation,” in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and his further elaboration in David Mutimer, The Weapons State: Proliferation and the Framing of Security (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000).

28. On metaphors in scientific discourse, see for instance Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982). On the need for a reflexive use of metaphors, see Francois Ascher, “La métaphore est un transport. Des idées sur le mouvement au mouvement des idées” [Metaphor is transport: from ideas on movement to movement of ideas], Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 63 (January 2005).

29. David Santoro, “Treating Proliferation: An Oncological Approach to the Spread of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Weapons,” PhD diss., McQuarie University, 2008, pp. 4–7.

30. Mutimer, The Weapons State.

31. Oxford English Dictionary, 1983, p. 1,448.

32. For a critical assessment of the notion, see Scott D. Sagan, “Nuclear Latency and Nuclear Proliferation,” in Forecasting Proliferation in the 21 ^st Century.(Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 80–101.

33. United Nations, “Note by the President of the Security Council,” S/23500, January 31, 1992, <www.francetnp2010.fr/IMG/pdf/Declaration_CSNU_1992.pdf>.

34. For an analysis and a systematic critique of this view that I label capacity determinism, see Pelopidas, La seduction de l'impossible [The seduction of the impossible], ch. 3.

35. Jacques Hymans, “Theories of Nuclear Proliferation: The State of the Field,” Nonproliferation Review 13 (November 2006), p. 456.

36. Dagobert L. Brito and Michael D. Intriligator, “The Economic and Political Incentives to Acquire Nuclear Weapons,” Security Studies 2 (1993), p. 301.

37. Mutimer, “Reimagining Security,” p. 213.

38. Jim Walsh, “Bombs Unbuilt: Power, Ideas and Institutions in International Politics,” PhD diss., MIT, 2001, p. 5.

39. Scott D. Sagan, “Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons? Three Models in Search of a Bomb,” International Security 21 (Winter 1996–97), pp. 58–59; Potter and Mukhatzanova, “Introduction,” p. 1.

40. Solingen, Nuclear Logics, pp. 288–89.

41. Mitchell B. Reiss, Bridled Ambitions: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995), pp. 8–12, 33–35; Jean DuPreez and Thomas Maettig, “From Pariah to Nuclear Poster Boy: How Plausible is a Reversal?” in Potter and Mukhatzanova, eds., Forecasting Nuclear Proliferation in the 21 ^st Century—Volume 1.

42. William C. Potter, “The Politics of Nuclear Renunciation: The Cases of Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine,” Henry L. Stimson Center, Occasional Paper 22, April 1995; William C. Potter, “Back to the Future: The Contemporary Relevance of the Nuclear Renunciation Decisions by Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine,” Paper delivered to the Nobel Symposium: Oscarborg, June 25–27, 2009; and Nikolai Sokov, “Ukraine: A Post-Nuclear Country,” in Potter and Mukhatzanova, Forecasting Nuclear Proliferation in the 21 ^st Century—Volume 1.

43. On Libya's attempts to get nuclear weapons under Qaddafi, see Malfrid Braut-Hegghammer, “Libya's Nuclear Turnabout: Perspectives from Tripoli,” Middle East Journal 62 (Spring 2008), pp. 58–63; Rublee, Nonproliferation Norms, p. 152; and Solingen, Nuclear Logics, p. 213. On the importance of 1992 as a turning point, see Braut-Hegghammer, “Libya's Nuclear Turnabout”; Wyn. Q. Bowen, Libya and Nuclear Proliferation: Stepping Back from the Brink (London: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 3; and Harald Müller, “The Exceptional End to the Extraordinary Libyan Nuclear Quest,” in Morten Bremer Maerli and Sverre Lodgaard, eds., Nuclear Proliferation and International Security (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 77. On how quick and verifiable the Libyan dismantlement was, see Bowen, Libya and Nuclear Proliferation, ch. 4; Joseph Cirincione, Jon B. Wolfsthal, and Miriam Rajkumar, Deadly Arsenals (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2005), p. 317.

44. Peter Lavoy, “Nuclear Proliferation over the Next Decade: Causes, Warning Signs, and PolicyResponses,” Nonproliferation Review 13 (November 2006), p. 440.

45. On Germany, see John Mearsheimer, “Back to the Future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” International Security 15 (1990), p. 38; on, Japan, see Christopher Layne, “The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise,” International Security 17 (Spring 1993), p. 37.

46. For an in-depth analysis of this puzzle, see Jacques Hymans, Implementing Nuclear Ambitions: Politics, Profossionalism, and Technical Achievement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

47. Harald Müller and Andreas Schmidt, “The Little-Known Story of De-Proliferation: Why States Give Up Nuclear Weapons Activities,” paper presented to the Forty-Ninth Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, San Francisco, 2008, p. 25.

48. Solingen, Nuclear Logics, ch. 11; Rublee, Nonproliferation Norms, ch. 4.

49. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres had made up their minds earlier, but formal Israeli decisions to go for the bomb were only taken in 1957–58. Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 137.

50. Rublee, Nonproliferation Norms, p. 108; Solingen, Nuclear Logics, p. 234.

51. Solingen, Nuclear Logics, p. 233–34.

52. Rublee, Nonproliferation Norms, pp. 107, 112.

53. The “Doomsday Clock” displays nuclear risk in general, but I have assumed that proliferation is an essential component in such risk.

54. Ariel Levite identifies thirty-eight proliferators, if the four that he lists as ambiguous are included. See Ariel Levite, “Never Say Never Again: Nuclear Reversal Revisited,” International Security 27 (Winter 2002–3), p. 62. The states are: Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Libya, the Netherlands, North Korea, Norway, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, South Korea, the Soviet Union/Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yugoslavia. I add Syria, in light of the suspicion surrounding the facility that Israel bombed on September 6, 2007. I am reluctant to label Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan as proliferating states because they were not independent when a portion of the Soviet arsenals was set up within their borders. The fact that all three states have had separate seats at the UN General Assembly does not seem sufficient grounds on which to cancel out this fact. These states inherited arsenals that had seen nuclear activity, but they are not proliferators. Harald Müller and Andreas Schmidt, meanwhile, maintain that thirty-six states have undertaken nuclear activities at some point in history, regardless of which states had or had not explicitly decided to make a bomb (see Müller and Schmidt, “The Little-Known Story of De-Proliferation”). It is important to note that some studies put forward a significantly lower total of proliferating states, but Müller and Schmidt argue convincingly against those studies.

55. Müller and Schmidt, “The Little-Known Story of De-Proliferation,” p. 8. They make no mention of Syria, whose military aims remain open to doubt. In the absence of any conclusive evidence, I do not consider Syria to have been a new proliferator during the period in question. Furthermore, some sources suggest that Damascus launched a nuclear program in 1979; that is to say, prior to the period being examined. See “Syria Profile: Nuclear Overview,” Nuclear Threat Initiative, July 2009, <www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Syria/Nuclear/index.html>. This point however needs to be qualified further. Indeed, the fact that Pakistan could react to the Indian tests by detonating six of its own devices within two weeks leads one to wonder whether Pakistan had its weapons ready before its 1998 test. Thanks to Sverre Lodgaard for this remark.

56. Helen Purkitt and Stephen Burgess, South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), chs. 6, 7, and 8.

57. Two questions have yet to be discussed, though I do not have space to go into them in detail here: the matter of launch codes and that of testing sites. Indeed, in order for Ukraine to have been able to acquire a truly independent arsenal, it would have needed access to the launch codes for its missiles and would have had to become able to change the targets of that same arsenal. (Interview with Robert C. Nurick of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Washington, DC, on April 4, 2008.) Ukraine had neither an independent satellite system to monitor missiles nor a testing site. Christopher Stevens argues, on the contrary, that nuclear warheads had lifetimes that did not expire until at least 2010; in this case, computerized tests could have been carried out. He also relies upon Reiss, Bridled Ambitions, p. 105; and John Mearsheimer, “The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent,” Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993), pp. 62–63, to point out that US and Russian experts believed that the Ukrainians had the capacity required to ensure the security of nuclear warheads. Christopher Stevens, “Identity Politics and Nuclear Disarmament: The Case of Ukraine,” Nonproliferation Review 15 (January 2008).

58. Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), p. 19.

59. Neil Cooper, “Putting Disarmament Back in the Frame,” Review of International Studies 32 (Summer 2006), pp. 353–57.

60. Emanuel Adler, “The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control,” International Organization 46 (Winter 1992), p. 101.

61. Henry Sokolski is a prominent voice of this critique of nuclear technology sharing in the name of proliferation concerns. Henry Sokolski, “Towards an NPT-Restrained World that Makes Economic Sense,” International Affairs 83 (May 2007), pp. 531–48; and Henry Sokolski, ed., Falling Behind: International Scrutiny of the Peaceful Atom (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2008).

62. Lauren Mayros, “Multilateral Export Control Regimes: Tools for Non-Proliferation or Instruments of Economic Influence?” in Grégory Boutherin, ed., Europe Facing Nuclear Weapons Challenges (Brussels: Bruylant, 2008), p. 222.

63. Jacques Hymans, “When Does A State Become a ‘Nuclear Weapon State’? An Exercise in Measurement Validation,” Nonproliferation Review 17 (March 2010), pp. 161–80.

64. Lewis Dunn, “Non-Proliferation Epidemiology,” in Paul Bracken, Ian Bremmer, and David Gordon, eds., Managing Strategic Surprises: Lessons from Risk Management and Risk Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 79, fn. 79.

65. Rigorously, one should add a policy of inaction waiting for the sudden death of the head of the regime and father of the nuclear program as relying on a shock as the only factor of change. For more on this understanding of the supposed role of a shock as a nonproliferation policy, including the need to wait for the shock caused by the death of a ruler associated with the program, see Pelopidas, La séduction de l'impossible [The seduction of the impossible], ch. 4.

66. For a critical reassessment, see notably Ken Berry, Patricia Lewis, Benoit Pelopidas, Nikolai Sokov, and Ward Wilson, ‘‘Delegitimizing Nuclear Weapons: Assessing the Validity of Nuclear Deterrence,’’ James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, August 2010, <cns.miis.edu/opapers/pdfs/delegitimizing_nuclear_weapons_may_2010.pdf>.

Kenneth N. Waltz in Richard K. Betts, Scott D. Sagan, and Kenneth N. Waltz, “A Nuclear Iran: Promoting Stability or Courting Disaster?” Journal of International Affairs 60 (February 2007), p. 136.

68. On the US policy vis-à-vis the nuclearization of Pakistan, see notably Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons (New York: Walker and Company, 2007); and Gerald Smith and Helena Corban, “A Blind Eye to Nuclear Proliferation,” Foreign Affairs 68 (Summer 1989). On the US relationship with the Israeli nuclear program, see Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, 1991); Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, ch. 7, on the role of the John F. Kennedy administration; and Avner Cohen, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

69. This implies that policy makers should be open to much less certainty, and we know this is really rarely the case. On this issue, see Robert Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails: Lessons from the Iranian Revolution and the Iraq War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), ch. 4.

70. Stating that the Iraqi case was a failure of intelligence does not necessitate a decision on whether the political outcome would have been different with better intelligence. Even the leading proponents of the idea that intelligence did not matter recognize that there was a failure due to “too much certainty,” “no alternatives considered,” and “lack of imagination.” See Jervis, Why Intelligence Fails, ch. 3. On the Israeli case, see Isaac Ben-Israël, Philosophie du renseignement, logique et morale de l'espionnage [Philosophy of intelligence: logic and morals of espionage] (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2004).