Iran and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
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The repercussions of an Israeli or American strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities are shrouded in fog and uncertainty. But we can be sure that the aftermath will be unpleasant. The United States has already ruled out “containment,” but would an Iranian bomb truly destabilize the region?
The answer isn’t simple. I recently read a classic book, “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons,” by Scott Sagan and Kenneth Waltz, and it provides some systematic thinking on the question. Both Waltz and Sagan are eminent scholars of international relations, and they have starkly differing opinions about what a world with more nuclear weapons states looks like.
Waltz views the spread of nuclear weapons as a good thing. And his arguments are disturbingly coherent. At the outset, he makes a distinction between the rapid vertical proliferation of nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the major powers, and the comparatively slow horizontal spread of the Bomb across states. The Federation of American Scientists estimates that the world’s current inventory of nuclear weapons is comprised of about twenty thousand nuclear warheads. But in the first fifty years of the nuclear age, only twelve countries acquired nuclear weapons capability, including three that were “born nuclear” after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nine countries possess nuclear weapons today: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.
Waltz, guided by rational deterrence theory, contends that the massive destructive capability of nuclear weapons raises the costs and risks of war to the point where states treat each other with extreme caution. This makes war from aggression or miscalculation improbable. If war does break out, the hazard of atomic weapons makes states wary of threatening an opponent’s homeland or core interests, reducing the chances of escalation. Waltz argues that the possibility of even a small number of warheads being cast upon an adversary’s cities is enough to deter him.
Although second-strike capability is a prerequisite for deterrence, the relatively compact, mobile nature of atomic bombs makes this is a straightforward requirement that security seeking states will fulfill. Once second-strike capability is achieved, “not only is a small second-strike force equivalent to a large second-strike force, but small conventional forces are equivalent to a large conventional force because large forces cannot be used against a nuclear power.” Nuclear weapons deter all states equally. Therefore, Waltz believes that nuclear weapons are a force for tranquility.
Sagan disagrees. His critique centers on Waltz’s assumption that states behave in a basically rational manner. He draws attention to two themes that emerge from organization theory. First, large organizations function within a severely bounded form of rationality. They have inherent limits on calculation and coordination, and use simplifying mechanisms to respond to uncertainty in the world. Second, complex organizations have multiple, conflicting goals and the process by which objectives are pursued is intensely political. Thus, government leaders might seek to behave rationally, but their beliefs, options, and implementation are influenced by powerful forces within the country. Consequently, new proliferators will fail to achieve the basic operational requirements of rational deterrence, even if it is in their national interest. Sagan provides three main reasons for this view.
First, for reasons of self-selection, socialization, and training, military officers view preventive war favorably. In the absence of robust civilian control, this worldview raises the likelihood of war during the transition period when one state has nuclear weapons and another is still acquiring them.
Second, professional militaries may not develop an adequate second-strike capability due to incentives to preserve resources for non-nuclear weapons projects, resistance to change from existing structures, inflexible routines, and a lack of organizational learning in the absence of major failures.
Third, “normal accidents theory” suggests that the integrity and safety of nuclear may be compromised due to the interactive complexity and tight coupling of systems used to manage large arsenals, the existence of conflicting, political objectives within large organizations, and organizations’ focus on unproductive redundancy.
New nuclear weapons states lack the financial and organizational resources to safeguard weapons against accidental or unauthorized use. This risk is compounded by the secrecy surrounding atomic programs, the geographic proximity of new nuclear powers, the delegation of authority to lower levels to avoid a decapitating strike, and the social unrest prevalent in many nations. Sagan argues that the emergence of new nuclear weapons states will be a destabilizing force in international politics.
Both Waltz and Sagan present cogent arguments. How are these apparently opposed theories so convincing? Part of the answer is that both are insightful, clearly outlined, and plausible. But an equally important piece is that they largely operate on different levels of analysis. Waltz analyzes interactions between states, while Sagan primarily assesses bureaucratic phenomena within states.
Of course, Waltz considers the effects of domestic politics, and Sagan agrees that nuclear weapons have a powerful deterrent effect. Still, Waltz writes, “Whatever the identity of rulers, and whatever the characteristics of their states, the national behaviors they produce are strongly conditioned by the world outside.” Sagan replies that “between the desire and the deed lies the shadow of organizations.” Since the authors focus on different elements of the problem, ascertaining whether nuclear weapons are an agent of international stability becomes an empirical question rather than a deductive one.
“Never in modern history,” Waltz writes, “have great powers enjoyed a longer period of peace than we have known since the Second World War. One can scarcely believe that the presence of nuclear weapons does not greatly help to explain this happy condition.” Not only did the United States and Soviet Union not fight direct engagements during the Cold War, Waltz points out, but India and Pakistan have not waged a full-fledged war since they became nuclear powers, despite bloody conflicts in 1948, 1965, and 1971. Recent conflicts have been isolated temporally and geographically, in the face of the countries’ history of hostile nationalism, close proximity, unstable domestic politics, and enduring dispute over Kashmir. Waltz draws the lesson that nuclear deterrence works as well in practice as it does in theory.
Sagan disputes this characterization, and argues that the “biases, routines, and parochial interests” of large military organizations prevent states from meeting the operational criteria of rational deterrence. He cites historical evidence to show that military officers in the United States lobbied intensively in favor of preventive strikes on the Soviet Union to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons; their counterparts in the Soviet Union, China, and Iran acted in a similar fashion. Israel even carried out a successful preemptive strike on Iraq.
Sagan points out that militaries across the world have been slow in achieving second-strike capability. The US Air Force’s early refusal to induct intercontinental ballistic missiles is but one example of a broader trend. Many mishaps involving nuclear weapons during the Cold War, and beyond, buttress the argument that the safety and integrity of atomic bombs is not assured, particularly in emerging nuclear powers. Sagan finds evidence for all these dangerous trends in the subcontinent. He is particularly concerned by a handful of occasions when the two nations have mated warheads to missiles, during India’s Operation Brasstacks on Pakistan’s border, for instance.
Sagan provides a rich set of examples to show how organizational deficiencies prevent states from efficiently obtaining the requirements of effective second-strike capability. However, Waltz correctly points out several problems with Sagan’s approach. First, militaries are not the only constituencies in favor of preemptive strikes; important civilian actors have been as much in favor of anticipatory attacks. The crucial determinant of the decision to strike has not been the degree of civilian control, but the associated costs and risks of attack, especially because preemptive strikes are unlikely to prevent a state with serious ambitions from pursuing nuclear weapons anew.
Waltz’s criticism must be balanced by an acknowledgement that different states behave differently. For instance, democratic peace theory (of which I'm not an adherent) suggests that regime type plays an important role in whether and when states go to war. Thus, one cannot make an ironclad prediction that authoritarian regimes with limited civilian oversight will act in identical ways to democratic ones simply because they possess nuclear weapons.
Waltz’s second critique, that the task of creating a credible deterrent is relatively simple once a state has the capability to engineer nuclear weapons, is also probably right, especially given the incentives facing states. And it seems unlikely that any statesman would wage war in the uncertain hope that the other side’s weapons will not survive a first strike.
Waltz’s critique should be leavened with Sagan’s observation that “it is puzzling, for a theory that emphasizes the rationality of actors to note that both superpowers during the Cold War believed that they needed much larger forces than the minimum deterrence requirement.” Waltz insists, however, that that belief was the result of “decades of fuzzy thinking.” Unfortunately, this “fuzzy thinking” is shared by China, Israel, India, and Pakistan, all of whom have developed substantial arsenals with more numerous weapons than Waltz envisions as the minimum required for deterrence.
But Waltz argues that none of these factors, nor numerous mishaps over the handling of nuclear weapons, have thus far triggered a full-scale war between nuclear-armed states in over six decades of the Bomb’s existence. On balance, the historical record suggests that nuclear powers have treated each other with caution, and that deterrence has worked in the past.
If states fulfill the requirements of rational deterrence, can we then embrace the spread of nuclear weapons without pessimism? We cannot. The confirmatory evidence that undergirds Waltz’s theory is that of a non-event, the absence of nuclear war. As such, it is difficult to isolate precisely the causes that have thus far prevented all-out war, even if nuclear weapons have played a role. Moreover, nuclear weapons may have played a very different one from the one that Waltz attributes to them. The use of nuclear weapons, far from being unthinkable for leaders in the Cold War, was a strong possibility in the minds and battle plans of policymakers on both sides. The same is true for Pakistan and India.
Waltz would still assert that atomic weapons restrained leaders from engaging in aggressive wars, because of the clarity that they impart to the strategic calculus. He suggests, probably correctly, that even seemingly irrational leaders like Idi Amin and Muammar al-Gaddafi would be unwilling to see their cities consumed in a mushroom cloud, making them cautious in waging aggressive wars. Waltz faults pessimistic analysts for ethnocentrism, and suggests that no leader of any stripe would seriously consider the loss of one or several of his cities.
He also dismisses the idea that new and potential nuclear states are not politically stable enough to ensure control of weapons. The development of nuclear weapons is a long and costly endeavor that requires some social equilibrium. Nor does it make much sense for internal factions jockeying for power to use nuclear weapons on each other. For example in the 10 chaotic years of China’s cultural revolution, nuclear weapons remained unused in the hands of one faction or the other.
But wars need not be started with aggressive intent; they may simply happen without being the preferred outcome of any of the participants. Even within a rationalist framework, war can take place because of commitment problems, private information, and issue indivisibility. Nuclear weapons primarily serve to mitigate the problem of private information (since privately known differences in conventional forces become less salient), while leaving commitment problems and issue indivisibilities intact.
Furthermore, states that are alone in possessing atomic bombs in a region may be emboldened to trample on their neighbors, so long as they believe that a superpower will not become involved. Nuclear weapons might even encourage states at a conventional disadvantage to attempt limited wars for limited ends against states with superior forces, under the assumption that their adversary will limit escalation for fear of nuclear war. Just such a calculation may have been made by Pakistani generals in their 1999 Kargil incursion into Indian-held Kashmir.
If deterrence fails and a localized conflict escalates into general war, Waltz argues that “a few judiciously delivered warheads are likely to produce sobriety in the leaders of all the countries involved and thus bring rapid de-escalation.” Leaving aside the horrific consequences of “a few judiciously delivered warheads,” Waltz has no empirical basis for making this claim. It is just as likely that leaders, faced with strong domestic pressure, will respond with nuclear attacks of their own, rather than seeking de-escalation.
In sum, discussions of the nature of a world populated with many nuclear powers are ultimately speculative. The past is only an imperfect guide to the future, and one can envision many plausible scenarios under which deterrence might not function as Waltz argues it will, with terrifying consequences. Indeed, Waltz and Sagan agree that the vertical proliferation of nuclear weapons and anti-ballistic missile defenses are dangerous, suggesting that both recognize that deterrence can be weakened and fail. The spread of nuclear weapons should be feared, and, if possible arrested. Whether determined states, like Iran, can be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons is, of course, another matter. And where Iran goes, its neighbors will surely follow.