Why is nuclear disarmament so complex?

Should we not take advantage of today’s ‘tradition’ of aversion against nuclear weapons to pursue nuclear disarmament? A friend asked me this question. I’m not an expert on this issue, but I can contribute three considerations.

First, a preliminary remark: things have changed. Deterrence has become a ‘three (main) body object’ – a far more unstable condition than it was when nuclear arms were first introduced.

In his Nobel lecture, Prof. Thomas Schelling made a remarkable point. The overall arms race between Cold War participants included both conventional and nuclear weapons. The West initially privileged nuclear weapons, creating a dangerous imbalance that might have forced the USA to resort to their use in the event of a conventional attack. By 1960, both sides had strengthened their conventional capabilities, making such a conventional war credible. Nuclear weapons were no longer a strategic necessity but an option. Prof. Schelling summarised it this way: ‘Arms control is often identified with limitations on the possession or deployment of weapons, but it is often overlooked that this reciprocated investment in non-nuclear capability was a remarkable instance of unacknowledged but reciprocated arms control.’

Secondly, it was a numbers game with tanks then, and all sides had hands-on experience with that kind of conventional warfare. The generals could assess the ‘chances of war’. Meanwhile, conventional warfare has gone ‘smart’ (star-war, cyber-war, toy-war, information dominance). How smart is anyone’s guess, but this novel qualitative aspect makes military planners uneasy. By comparison, nuclear weapons appear dependably destructive and welcome as a ‘safe’ backstop – just the role they had before 1960. It is counterintuitive, but ‘going smart’ may not be a smart idea after all.

Thirdly, focusing on reducing nuclear numbers can be an exercise in strategic blindness. Here is an example: at the Washington Conference in 1921, states agreed to limit the overall tonnage of their capital ships. The Treaty was hailed as a milestone toward peace; ‘no guns, no war’ was the all too easy topos. Few people read the fine print: the USA had promised Japan not to strengthen its defences in Guam and Manila, leaving its Western Pacific possessions vulnerable to Japanese attack. When Japan occupied them in 1941, it was able to complete a ring of outlying defences around Japan – an impregnable position. One may argue that the US concession in 1921 enabled the war between the USA and Japan by strengthening Japan’s strategic position.¹ Context matters.

The road to nuclear disarmament is not a four-lane highway to utopia, where distance from the goal is marked on roadside panels in terms of weapons destroyed. It is a crooked (and highly path-dependent) trail weaving its way past many dangers.

Non-nuclear states may well take the initiative in proposing nuclear disarmament. They’ll get sidelined rapidly by the onslaught of complexities derived from devising the actual path; they may soon be relegated to the role of hapless (possibly clueless) spectators or Monday-night quarterbacks.

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1. Hector C. Bywater, a British journalist, analysed the strategic position in 1925 and predicted the whole course of the Pacific War in a thinly disguised novel. Roosevelt, who had been undersecretary for the Navy during WWI, thought war had become impossible: the two countries would just ‘make faces at each other’ across the unbridgeable expanse of the Pacific Ocean (see Visions of Infamy. The Untold Story of How Journalist Hector C. Bywater Devised the Plans that Led to Pearl Harbor by William H. Honan).

This post was first published on DeepDip.