George H. Quester - Nuclear Zero?: Lessons From the Last Time We Were There

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NUCLEAR ZERO?

NUCLEAR
ZERO?

LESSONS FROM THE LAST
TIME WE WERE THERE

GEORGE H. QUESTER

First published 2015 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2015 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014036797

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Quester, George H.

Nuclear zero? : lessons from the last time we were there / George H. Quester.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-4128-5599-0

1. Nuclear weapons--Government policy. 2. Nuclear disarmament. 3. Nuclear weapons--History. 4. Security, International. 5. Cold War.

I. Title.

U264.Q53 2015

327.1747--dc23

2014036797

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-5599-0 (hbk)

Contents

As always, I must express gratitude to colleagues and seminar participants who reacted at various stages to versions of the analysis presented here, most especially my colleagues in the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics, and the Center for International and Security Studies (CISSM), and then my new colleagues for the two years I spent as a visiting professor at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. The graduate seminar on Nuclear Issues I taught at GWU served as a most valuable test-bed for many of the ideas developed in this book, and the text was largely written while I was at GWU.

Once again, a grant from the Smith Richardson Foundation helped enormously in the research for this study, among other things facilitating more than a dozen seminars around the world testing the books premises and arguments. The colleagues and seminar participants noted above, and the foundation, are of course not responsible for the books conclusions.

Sad to say, this books review of history is basically pessimistic about our ability to get rid of nuclear weapons, albeit that optimism may still be in order about our ability to avoid using these weapons. This suggests that the generation of my grandchildren, Nicolas, Oscar, Brighid, Oliver, and Hugo, will remain saddled with the continuing burden of having these weapons of mass destruction in place.

Enthusiasm for nuclear disarmament sometimes seems to wax and wane with the fashions of policy discussion around Washington or with current events in places like the Ukraine. But, as this book argues, the opportunities and risks may always be with us.

And especial thanks go to my spouse, Aline Olson Quester, whose readiness to postpone her own retirement has been an inspiration and a prod to me.

1
Introduction

Nuclear weapons are indeed important, in a most terrible way. The possibilities of a nuclear war hover over us, perhaps always to mar any anticipation of the future, as we contemplate opportunities for our family, or plans for urban renewal, or any other prospect for a happier world. In less than an hour the globe could experience a thermonuclear World War III that kills hundreds of millions. In a matter of seconds, a terrorist attack employing a nuclear weapon could make a national capital uninhabitable.

It would thus be wonderful to rid the world of all nuclear weapons, just as it might be wonderful to wake up to discover that Einstein and the other physicists had been wrong and that such weapons of mass destruction had just been a bad dream. But such weapons are real, and the important question for the future is whether they indeed can be eliminated.

Pessimists about nuclear disarmament worry that an attempt to get back to nuclear zero that almost succeeded might be worse than what we are living with now. A failed attempt to eliminate all nuclear weapons might greatly increase the chances that, for the first time since the 1945 destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such weapons would again be used.

Proponents of a total elimination of nuclear weapons, when responding to such pessimism, sometimes dismiss these concerns as too hypothetical, as the products of an excessive political science realism_ This book will examine whether such pessimism is really so hypothetical.

The first and most general and immediate of the pessimistic concerns is that a prisoners dilemma situation would emerge if nuclear zero were achieved, or even approached; where everyone feared the worst about everyone else, and thus would feel driven into the very behavior that was feared in others.1 Messages that were intended to reassure would thus be seen as tricks. Countries fearing that others were cheating on the nuclear weapons ban, or fearing that they themselves would be falsely accused of cheating, would thus feel driven, themselves, to cheat.

Second, related to this concern (and also dismissed as too hypothetically pessimistic by proponents of a move toward global zero) is the assumption that someone elses move toward an illegal nuclear weapons stockpile would require the development and use of nuclear weapons on our side, to counter this force and perhaps to dig it out. Advocates of nuclear zero sometimes argue that a North Korean or Iranian nuclear program can be dug out and destroyed simply by conventional bombing attacks.2 If the pessimists insist that American nuclear weapons would also have to be resurrected and deployed in face of such rogue nuclear threats, it will be interesting to see which version of a common sense approach to this issue can be unearthed from the historical record prior to 1945.

Third, there may be false alarms in a future world about whether someone else is cheating and producing nuclear weapons. If a nuclear weapons program of our own is reconstituted in response to such an alarm, and then over time the alarm proves false, would there be a great temptation to retain and use the nuclear monopoly we had thus stumbled into? Optimists about a move toward zero may argue that there is no reason for such temptations to be overwhelming. But this is again something to be tested against the historical record.

A fourth concern of the pessimists is that some rogue state might seize upon nuclear weapons as a reinsurance against being subjected to regime change, particularly if such a state had launched an unsuccessful aggression that resulted in a retreat back to its initial boundaries, or when it had been convicted of massive genocide within the territory it had controlled. Optimists about nuclear disarmament would see such a nuclear-weapon-facilitated veto as a hypothetical abstraction, as the worlds outrage about the rogue regimes behavior might outweigh any fears of what could be done with atomic bombs. If pessimists instead weigh the deterrent threat posed by nuclear weapons above any outside-world moral outrage, then we again have to explore what the echoes of world historical commentary might have to tell us.

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