Weapons of Mass Destruction Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century Security Environment

The apparent anti-proliferation approach of the George W. Bush Administration to nuclear and other Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) seems to coincide with the perspective of Scott Sagan in The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate, as opposed to the deterrence perspective of his co-author, Kenneth Waltz. Security for major nations is currently under greater threat by the destabilizing effects of terrorism than it is by annihilation through conventional warfare. The Cold-War approach of deterrence is not adequate against enemies who are more concerned with their philosophical endurance than their physical survival. The modern landscape of nuclear arms reduction by major world powers, while many quasi-minor countries scramble to attain nuclear status explicitly underscores the delicate problem of securing safety while upholding widely accepted tenets of Just War Theory.

The Spread of Nuclear Weapons is the work of two very accomplished and respected authors representing bipolar views on modern nuclear proliferation. They each offer an essay on their respective positions and follow-up with a series of rebuttal essays.

Oversimplified, Waltz holds to the deterrence view; that is, that if everyone has nuclear weapons, nobody will use them fearing reprisals in kind. Therefore, the more nukes the better and safer the international scene. This doctrine of deterrence by threat of mutually assured destruction is based in the history of the Cold War. During the Cold War, no nuclear weapons were used by one nation against another because each of the two had enough nuclear weapons to annihilate the other, making any nuclear war one in...

This precarious balance extended to smaller non-nuclear nations who, unable to possibly compete with either superpower militarily, allied themselves with one or the other ensuring a semblance of peace. In modern politics, the nations of Europe (including Russia, the holder of the greatest number of nuclear weapons) opposed the United States' Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) based largely on the deterrence argument.
Sagan, who represented the anti-proliferation view, believes that the more nuclear weapons there are in circulation, the greater the chance that someone, possibly a rogue nation, will set one off risking not only massive destruction from the single blast, but potentially compounding it with more nukes detonated in retaliation. Because the precedent for nuclear attacks is limited, the anti-proliferation point-of-view is based on predictions form the science of organizational behavior and international track record in the use of less devastating weapons. The United States support for anti-proliferation of not only nuclear weapons, but Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in general can be seen in the Bush Administration's support for SDI and the recent warfare against the Taliban and Baath regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The difficulty with Waltz's position is that it can only be proven right or wrong if somebody sets off a WMD. Prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States was comfortable that death was a strong deterrent against twenty people organizing to commit suicide while murdering an our citizenry. Now the U.S. isn't so sure. In spite of kamikazes, hunger strikers, and homicide bombers, the world has not had much experience with enemies making a political…