Icons Off the Mark

Abstract

In two landmark articles, longtime scholars Kenneth N. Waltz and Thomas C. Schelling have re-emphasized the utility of nuclear deterrence over nuclear nonproliferation (Waltz) and nuclear disarmament (Schelling). While the thrust of the articles is seemingly different, both are rooted in the same intellectual ground: an epistemology that assumes problem-free inferences, drawn from past experiences, are applicable in future scenarios; a foundational rooting in strategic rationality that entangles them in unsolvable contradictions concerning comparable risks of different nuclear constellations, namely deterrence versus proliferation and disarmament; and a bias in framing the empirical record that makes nuclear deterrence more conducive to security than nuclear disarmament. The common normative-practical denominator, then, is to let a nuclear weapon-free world appear both less desirable and less feasible than it might actually be.

KEYWORDS:

• Nuclear deterrence
• nuclear disarmament
• nuclear nonproliferation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their very useful comments, I thank Thomas Schelling, Sverre Lodgaard, and all the participants at the November 2012 Vienna workshop at which I presented my thoughts for the first time, two anonymous reviewers, and my colleague, Marco Fey, who read and commented on both the first and the final drafts.

Notes

1. Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Paper 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981); Kenneth N. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb,” Foreign Affairs 91 (July/August 2012), pp. 2–4; Thomas C. Schelling, “A World Without Nuclear Weapons?,” Daedalus 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 124–29.

2. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 101.

3. Kenneth N. Waltz, “Waltz Replies,” Foreign Affairs 91 (November/December 2012), pp. 161–62.

4. Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, “From Strategy to Security: Foundations of Critical Security Studies,” in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, eds., Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases (London: UCL Press, 1997), pp. 33–61, especially p. 42.

5. Ken Booth, Theory of World Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 31–36.

6. Richard Ned Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 43–60.

7. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 17.

8. Richard Ashley, “The Poverty of Neorealism,” in Robert O. Keohane, ed., Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 225–300; see also Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 385.

9. For example, Waltz, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons,” pp. 7, 9, 24.

10. Waltz, “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb,” p. 5

11. Waltz uses the same language of unconditional assertions in his debate with Scott Sagan. See Scott Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons. An Enduring Debate, Third Edition (New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012).

12. David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (London: Liberal Arts Press, 1955).

13. Carl Lundgren, “What Are the Odds? Assessing the Probability of Nuclear War,” Nonproliferation Review 20 (July 2013), pp. 361–74.

14. Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 76–78, 89–93, 105–08, 110.

15. Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 15–16.

16. For risk analysis, see Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). For the issue of insurance analysis, see Peter Zweifel and Roland Eisen, Insurance Economics (Heidelberg, New York: Springer, 2012).

17. International Atomic Energy Agency, “International Conventions and Legal Agreements—Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage,” November 15, 2012, <www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Conventions/liability.html>.

18. A useful risk analysis critique is available by M. V. Ramana, “Beyond our imagination: Fukushima and the problem of assessing risk,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 2011, <http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/beyond-our-imagination-fukushima-and-the-problem-of-assessing-risk>. See also John Downer, “Disowning Fukushima: Managing the Credibility of Nuclear Reliability Assessment in the Wake of Disaster,” Regulation & Governance (July 2013), <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rego.12029/abstract>.

19. A useful risk analysis critique is available by M. V. Ramana, “Beyond our imagination: Fukushima and the problem of assessing risk,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 2011, <http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/features/beyond-our-imagination-fukushima-and-the-problem-of-assessing-risk>. See also John Downer, “Disowning Fukushima: Managing the Credibility of Nuclear Reliability Assessment in the Wake of Disaster,” Regulation & Governance (July 2013), <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rego.12029/abstract>.

20. See Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1983); Bruce G. Blair, Strategic Command and Control: Redefining the Nuclear Threat (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1985); Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

21. Paul Bracken has discussed this problem as a cause for deterrence failure. See Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces, pp. 59–65.

22. Carl von Clausewitz, On War [edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret] (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), Chapter 1.

23. I borrow this expression from one of the reviewers of an earlier version of this article.

24. For the number of 15,000 global reactor years, see M.V. Ramana, “Beyond our Imagination.”

25. Colin H. Kahl, “One Step Too Far,” Foreign Affairs 91 (November-December 2012), pp. 157–61.

26. On the Cuban Missile Crisis, see Alexander L. George, “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” in Alexander L. George ed., Avoiding War: Problems of Crisis Management (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 222–68. See also Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 110–45. On the 1983 Able Archer incident, see Peter Vincent Pry, War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999), as well as National Security Archive, “The 1983 Cold War Scare: ‘The Last Paroxysm’ of the Cold War, Part I,’ National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 426, May 16, 2013, <www2.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB426/>; National Security Archive, “The 1983 Cold War Scare: ‘The Last Paroxysm’ of the Cold War, Part II,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 427, May 21, 2013 < www2.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB427/>; and National Security Archive, “The 1983 Cold War Scare: ‘The Last Paroxysm’ of the Cold War, Part III,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 428, May 22, 2013, <www2.gwu.edu/∼nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB428/>. Some would probably add the 1973 Yom Kippur War crisis, but it appears to me that the mutual nuclear signaling during this period was very tightly controlled.

27. See Waltz, “Waltz Replies.”

28. Thérèse Delpech, Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Cold War for a New Era of Strategic Piracy (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2012), pp. 79–80.

29. See Waltz, “Waltz Replies.”

30. A concise account of the episode and a crisp overview of the related literature can be found in Jeffrey W. Knopf, “The Concept of Nuclear Learning,” Nonproliferation Review 19 (Spring 2012), pp. 79–93, and Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons. An Enduring Debate, pp. 142–48.

31. Glenn H. Snyder, “The Balance of Power and the Balance of Terror,” in Paul Seabury ed., The Balance of Power (Scranton: Chandler, 1965), pp. 185–201. The paradox was applied to the Kargil war, inter alia, by S. Paul Kapur, “India and Pakistan's Unstable Peace: Why Nuclear South Asia is Not Like Cold War Europe,” International Security 30 (Fall 2005), pp. 127–52, and Michael Krepon, The Stability-Instability Paradox, Misperception, and Escalation Control in South Asia (Washington: Stimson Center, 2003), <www.stimson.org/images/uploads/research-pdfs/ESCCONTROLCHAPTER1.pdf>.

32. These are the reasons why Rajesh Ragajopalan denies the applicability of the paradox to the Kargil war, see Rajesh Rajagopalan, “What Stability-Instability Paradox? Subnational Conflicts and the Nuclear Risk in South Asia,” Bradford, South Asian Strategic Stability Unit, SASSU Research Paper No. 4, February 2006, <www.sassi.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/RP-4_Rajesh-Rajagopalan-What-Stability-Instability-Paradox-Feb-2006.pdf>.

33. Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, pp. 157–71.

34. In this and the following paragraphs, I pick up some of the observations by Kahl, “One Step Too Far.”

35. The Israeli doctrine and its historical, psychological, and political background is analyzed by Zeev Maoz, Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel's Security and Foreign Policy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).

36. For a well-balanced Israeli critique of Waltz and an assessment of the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran for Israel and the region, see Emily Landau, “When Neorealism Meets the Middle East: Iran's Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons in (Regional) Context,” Strategic Assessment 15 (October 2012), pp. 27–38.

37. Colin Kahl makes these points in his reply to Waltz in Kahl, “One Step Too Far.”

38. Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, p. 194.

39. Most useful insights into the internal fabric of Iran's state and society are Rouzbeh Parsi, ed., Iran: A Revolutionary Republic in Transition (Paris: Institute for Security Studies, 2012); Majd Hooman, The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010).

40. Unlike most other state governments, the Third Reich was sui generis: a regime not dedicated to state survival but to dominance based on a racist ideology of “Aryan supremacy,” blind toward the balance of forces which its own acts brought together into an alliance that would defeat Germany, and oblivious of the immense loss of (war-essential) “human capital” entailed by the Jewish genocide and the expulsion of many high quality scientists, including some who joined the Manhattan project. Examples are Colin S. Gray, Nuclear Strategy and National Style (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Press, 1986); Peter Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Itty Abraham, ed., South Asian Cultures of the Bomb: Atomic Publics and the State in India and Pakistan (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009); and Tanya Ogilvie-White and David Santoro, eds., Slaying the Nuclear Dragon: Disarmament Dynamics in the Twenty-First Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

41. Counterfactual analysis has been largely applied with regard to the empirical analysis of the past. For example, see Richard Ned Lebow, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Giovanni Capoccia and R. Daniel Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures Theory, Narrative, and Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism,” in World Politics 59 (April 2007), pp. 341–69; Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics: Logical, Methodological, and Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Davis Sylvan and Stephen Majeski, “A Methodology for the Study of Historical Counterfactuals,” International Studies Quarterly 42 (1998), pp. 79–108; James D. Fearon, “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science,” World Politics 43 (January 1991), pp. 169–95. But it is worthwhile noting that when we try to develop well-founded assessments of the future (like in prognoses or scenario analysis), we are working with counterfactuals as well and should do so methodologically. See Steven Weber, “Counterfactuals, Past and Future,” in Tetlock and Belkin, Counterfactual Thought Experiments, pp. 268–88.

42. This is a famous expression of Schelling's deterrence theory. It is because of the inherent uncertainties of crisis interaction between two nuclear-armed states that their governments will work to avoid, or at least to early terminate, such crises in the first place

43. Harald Müller, “Enforcement of the Rules in a Nuclear Weapon-Free World,” in Corey Hinderstein, ed., Cultivating Confidence: Verification, Monitoring, and Enforcement for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, DC: Nuclear Threat Initiative, 2010), pp. 33–66.

44. Schelling, “A World Without Nuclear Weapons?,” p. 126.

45. There is a growing literature about such steps, and about elements granting security in a nuclear weapon-free world. For a few examples, see Catherine M. Kelleher and Judith Reppy, eds., Getting to Zero: The Path to Nuclear Disarmament (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); Hinderstein, ed., Cultivating Confidence; Barry M. Blechman and Alexander K. Bollfrass, eds., Elements of a Nuclear Disarmament Treaty: Unblocking the Road to Zero (Washington, DC: Henry L. Stimson Center, 2010); George Perkovich and James M. Acton, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2009); George Perkovich and James M. Acton, Abolishing Nuclear Weapons, Adelphi Paper 396 (London: Routledge, 2008); The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms (Stockholm: WMDC, 2006).

46. John E. Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989). Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially pp. 197–223. See also Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011).

47. Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 187–203; see also Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1965), pp. 92–125.

48. Schelling, “A World Without Nuclear Weapons?,” pp. 128–29.

49. Jacques E. C. Hymans, Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians and Proliferation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 79–123, 255–59.

50. Schelling, “A World Without Nuclear Weapons?,” p. 129.

51. Shannon N. Kile with Vitaly Fedchenko, Phillip Schell, Hans M. Kristensen, Alexander Glaser, and Zia Mian, “World Nuclear Forces,” in Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ed., SIPRI Yearbook 2012 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 307–50; Delpech, Nuclear Deterrence in the 21st Century, pp. 115–40; Delpech underrates the role of the United States in this race, but establishes convincingly that it is under way.

52. Arms Control Association, “Clinton Issues New Guidelines on U.S. Nuclear Weapons Doctrine,” November 15, 2012, <http://www.armscontrol.org/act/1997_11–12/pdd>.

53. International Affairs 83 (May 2007), pp. 427–574.

54. Harold Brown, “New Nuclear Realities,” Washington Quarterly 31 (Winter 2007–08), pp. 7–22.

55. See “New Paradigms Forum,” <www.newparadigmsforum.com/NPFtestsite/>.

56. Michael Rühle, Gute und Schlechte Atombomben [Good and Bad Atomic Bombs], (Hamburg: Körber-Stiftung, 2009). See also Bruno Tertrais, In Defense of Deterrence: The Relevance, Morality and Cost-effectiveness of Nuclear Weapons (Paris: IFRI Security Studies Department, 2011), p. 39.

57. General Goodpaster was chairman of a nuclear abolition project run by the Atlantic Council. See Andrew J. Goodpaster, An American Legacy: Building a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World (The Final Report of the Steering Committee of the Project on Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destructions), (Washington, DC: The Henry L. Stimson Center, 1997). For analyses and proposals, see Regina Cowen Karp, ed., Security Without Nuclear Weapons? Different Perspectives on Non-Nuclear Security (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1992); The Canberra Commission of the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, “Statement,” July 2, 1998, <www.ccnr.org/canberra.html>; Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, “The WMDC Concludes Its Collective Work,” November 15, 2012, <www.un.org/disarmament/education/wmdcommission>.

58. Lebow, A Cultural Theory of International Relations, pp. 505–06, 567–70.

59. Anne Harrington de Santana, “Nuclear Weapons as the Currency of Force: Deconstructing the Fetishism of Force,” in Nonproliferation Review 16 (November 2009), pp. 325–45.

60. Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 382–406. For Waltz, this was already tangible in the defense of his beliefs against the strong evidence accumulated by Scott Sagan in the three debates the two scholars conducted, see Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995); Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003); and Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate.

61. Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, pp. 220–24.

62. Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, p. 223.

63. Like Waltz in his discussion of President Obama's policy, see Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate, pp. 221–24.