Originally published on the CGS blog on March 23, 2016.
This article was authored by CGS member and guest contributor Ira Straus.
North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests raise afresh the most troubling and urgent issues of nuclear proliferation. The Obama Administration had hoped the Iran deal would give a 10-year respite from the problem, but it is already back, and even a respite is only a delay within an underlying worsening situation. Here is a fresh look at the problem, based on the question of what would be necessary in order to reverse the trend and start moving toward a gradually improving situation.
The System of Multiple Sovereignties: The Motor for Proliferation
Let’s start with a seeming tautology: the more sovereign independent states, each with its own military, the greater the chances of more countries building nuclear weapons. That tends to get taken for granted by everyone: obvious, but somehow irrelevant. It needs to be brought to full consciousness, for it is the foundation of nuclear proliferation.
Under a world government, there would not be nuclear proliferation among governments. What would remain would be problems of nuclear safety.
The proliferation of sovereignties in the world that began at Westphalia in 1648 was compounded by new independencies from 1776 to 1823, and compounded further by independencies after 1945. The proliferation of states still continues. It is what has made nuclear proliferation inevitable, and creates a good chance that it will be multiplied onto a much larger scale than yet seen.
Each sovereign state with a serious nuclear arsenal has a veto power over the future of humanity, and a veto against establishment of a world government over and above itself. The more of them there are, the more vetoes against our survival, raising the odds against survival.
In addition, sovereign states have an ideological impulsion to go nuclear. Sovereignty is an ideology, not just of independence, but of control of one’s destiny, a kind of absolute security achieved by one’s own devices. Only an absolute weapon, one that held the rest of humanity hostage to secure the survival of one’s state, can provide a sense of having satisfactorily secured sovereignty by one’s own devices. Nuclear weapons were, and still are, the closest thing to such an absolute weapon — in fact, the original theorists of nuclear deterrence called it just that.
A Degenerative Overall Balance, But with Some Regenerative Elements in the System
These systemic pressures, endemic to the international states system, make for proliferation. Against them, that same international system has gradually evolved a non-proliferation regime.
The non-proliferation regime has greatly slowed proliferation. But it has not stopped it. It has been defensive, constantly retreating.
The non-proliferation regime works on two levels, sub-global and global.
Sub-global alliance systems, led by nuclear superpowers (mainly the U.S. alliance system), use extended nuclear deterrence and a set of reassurances and incentives and pressures to keep most allies from going nuclear. This has worked in most cases, although it failed in the case of Gaullist France. Charles De Gaulle argued from various particular doubts about U.S. reliability, but at root was arguing from the ideology of sovereignty and separate control of destiny. This shows that, even in the case of the strongest alliance system with the most organic connection between the allies, the regime has been only partly successful in preventing proliferation. Still, it has kept Germany and Japan from going nuclear — and even with the European nuclear powers, Britain and France, the alliance has kept their and America’s nuclear arsenals coordinated, so they do not function very much as independent operators. (The NATO Nuclear Planning Group has served this function.)
Of course, the U.S. alliances never covered the whole world. What about what lies outside of them?
The Soviet alliance system included China, and helped to set China on the scientific and technical course to its own nuclear capability; too late, the Soviets changed their mind and turned against the idea of a Chinese nuke. Eastern Europeans never wanted nuclear weapons for protection against the West; they might have against Russia, but since the 1990s have accepted the NATO umbrella instead. In the first post-Soviet years, Ukraine held a painful debate over whether or not to give up its nuclear weapons; in 1994 it did give them up, under pressure from both Russia and the West, and with reassurances from both sides. Twenty years later, many Ukrainians felt they had made a tragically wrong choice, as Russia invaded and trashed its reassurances, and the West failed to enforce its own reassurances in any serious way. This reminds us of the severity of the dilemma for countries that don’t have the benefit of the alliance.
Since 1991, the Western alliance system became the only world-spanning one left, and has grown in its global reach and importance. Its role in stopping proliferation to South Korea and Japan has remained indispensable, vis-a-vis both China and North Korea.
However, the arguments of the Western alliance for restraining those two countries from having their own nuclear weapons are wearing thin in the face of North Korea. They are not as thin as in Ukraine, which was not a member of the alliance; but still, less robust than in the past, in light of the difficulty in believing fully in America’s extended deterrence when it is facing a deliberately irrationalist gambling regime in North Korea that is step by step building a capability to incinerate American cities with nuclear weapons. To adequately reassure South Korea and Japan, the alliance may have to take further steps along the lines of NATO’s nuclear policy in Europe during the cold war, or still further steps with dual key systems. This might be along the lines that had been proposed for a NATO MLF, Multilateral Nuclear Force, but rejected by France as an alternative to France’s independent nuclear force. A related version would be a loan of nuclear weapons to Japan and South Korea, so they will have their own deterrent not dependent on American approval for their use and not subject to being withheld if North Korea blackmails America (thereby answering De Gaulle’s objection that an MLF wouldn’t be reliable enough to answer his fears that America wouldn’t sacrifice New York for Paris), but restricted technically to hitting only targets agreed in advance with America, and loaned for a limited time period while the danger persists, so there is not a separate proliferatory national ownership of the weapons.
The global IAEA and NPT regimes exist alongside the sub-global alliance system. They have restrained and slowed nuclear proliferation among the many countries that are not in an alliance that has extended deterrence. And within alliance ranks, they have supplemented and reinforced the alliance in its work of preventing proliferation.
All this is a lot of restraint with a lot of success.
But after all this is said and done, proliferation has continued, slowly, but cumulatively. And each instance of it provides an example and incentive for the others to follow suit. It is a degenerative system.
How Can We Shift the Balance to the Regenerative Side? Read more.
