Strategic Value of Nuclear Weapons

Strategic Value of Nuclear Weapons in International Relations

Throughout history, international relations have been shaped by military power. Traditionally, this power has come in the form of the conventional weaponry possessed by sea, land, and later, air forces. The Second World War was decided largely on the basis of a massive deployment of these weapons, backed up by enormous industrial might. Yet, the Second World War also introduced an entirely new force - the nuclear weapon. The two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in a new age in both warfare and international relations. In 1945, the United States was the only nation on Earth that possessed these new super weapons. For a brief moment in time, it enjoyed unchallenged primacy across the globe. Nevertheless, the immediate aftermath of the war brought with it a different kind of fight - the fight to prevent the development of nuclear technology by other powers. Faced with the possibility that these horrible new weapons might fall into the hands of the unscrupulous, President Truman's advisor, Bernard Baruch, offered, in June 1946, to give over the new technology to a United Nations agency, that it might be used only for benign civilian purposes, and for the good of all the peoples of the world. (Lefever 77) Unfortunately, the Soviet Union soon developed its own version of the bomb with the help of stolen information passed to it by American spy Julius Rosenberg. The age of nuclear confrontation, or the potential for nuclear confrontation, had begun. From this point forward, a balance of nuclear forces would be instrumental in shaping international affairs.

The first major conflict of the post-World War II period revolved around precisely this need to prevent the spread of influences hostile to the United States and its allies. In 1949, the bulk of China fell under communist control as the People's Republic became the world's second major communist power. Stalin's Soviet Union quickly adopted China as an ally, and both sought to expand the influence and power of the Communist world. Communists tried to take over Korea, and the peninsula soon became the first real military test of the Truman Doctrine. Formulated as a defense of "free peoples everywhere," the Truman Doctrine represented an attempt to present a newly nuclear world in the light of a classic struggle between good and evil,

Fashioning a world order rooted in both a traditional balance of power and a set of forward-looking civilizational values

Truman's proclamation came at a moment when U.S. leaders understood that foreign policy making had become a modern, culture-producing activity

Truman addressed the meaning of America in a globalized world.

Merrill)

And that meaning was based on America's role as a morally superior nation capable of bearing the burdens of nuclear power. The attempt to role back the communist advance in Korea was an attempt to keep the "evil" powers contained. Korea marked the earliest appearance, thus, of the "Domino Theory." According to this theory, one communist nation would cause other nations in its region to become communist - the ideology spreading like a contagion from country to country. That communism was somehow illicit, and communist states incapable of handling nuclear weapons in a humane and civilized manner, was clearly implicit in these beliefs. Still, the United States was not above using the threat of nuclear attack as a means of deterring the still greater threat of a nuclear-armed communist power. In response to the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, the United States had already stated, in the United Nations Security Council, that the Soviet Union should not be given any reason to believe that nuclear weapons would not be used against it if it launched an attack on Europe. (Hilsman 19-20) the threat of nuclear action became a real option in Korea, NSC 147 explicitly advocating the use of all necessary weapons "including 'strategic and tactical operations of nuclear weapons.'" (Korea Institute of Military History 544)

Much as it had been deployed in Japan in 1945, the nuclear threat was coming to be seen as the last resort - an ultimate weapon if all else failed. A nuclear armed communist world would have to be contained at all costs, even if that meant threatening to use nuclear weapons to contain that nuclear threat.

After Korea, the tropics became the next battleground between the Democratic West and Communist East. President Kennedy debated what to do as communist forces gained strength in Laos. Eisenhower again advocated the use of tactical nuclear weapons if all else failed. Nonetheless, Kennedy took no direct military action at that time. (Botti 236) at almost the same moment, a seemingly real nuclear threat emerged in Cuba. Khrushchev installed missiles on the newly-communist island only a short distance from the United States. Indeed, the weapons' proximity to the United States played a critical role in shaping the American response. For the first time, almost the United States lay in range of hostile nuclear forces, together with large parts of Central and South America. www.questiaschool.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=113603214" (Weldes 43) Used to threatening a nuclear response, the United States and its neighbors now faced the threat of wholesale destruction. Yet Kennedy's own massive nuclear arms build-up may have helped to create the Soviet threat. New intelligence in 1961 proved the fallacy of Kennedy's 1960 campaign about a U.S.-Soviet missile gap, but Kennedy acquiesced to congressional fears of American nuclear inferiority and overwhelming public support for a missile-building program. In reality, the Soviet missile stock was tiny, and Khrushchev was fearful. (Nash) Both the American "threat" to the Soviet Union, and Khrushchev's reaction to that threat, revealed the inherently psychological nature of the nuclear deterrent. It was not really whether one used, or threatened the use of such weapons, but rather whether there existed the potential for such a threat. The greater the imagined threat, the greater the necessary response... And the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba represented an enormous possible danger to the United States. The situation played directly into well-established American and NATO policy - that for the purposes of self-defense the United States must preserve first-strike capability. (McNamara) but the Cuban Missile Crisis presented an almost unforeseen circumstance - a choice between nuclear stalemate and mutually assured destruction. President Kennedy chose initially to preempt the nuclear threat by declaring a "quarantine" of the Island of Cuba, an indisputable act of belligerence under international law, but one that served to preempt the greater catastrophe of nuclear holocaust. (Rivkin) the quarantine stated, in effect, that the Soviet placement of missiles in Cuba was, on the face of the matter, unacceptable. America's real nuclear deterrent would be its ability to use the threat of nuclear attack to prevent the creation of a similar threat on the part of its chief rival. Nuclear power backed up an argument that nuclear force itself was illegitimate.

Khrushchev backed down, and the shell game moved back to Southeast Asia. Unable to deploy forces directly against each other, the two blocs faced off through a kind of proxy war. Once again, matters turned on the relative legitimacy of the two systems. Vietnam was presented to the public as a moral war, with a virtuous nuclear-armed power against its sinister Communist rivals. The decision whether to use or not to use nuclear weapons rested ultimately with persons of high moral standing - those within the American system who held what amounted to a "priestly knowledge" of these weapons' real capabilities, "Political leaders in the United States have failed throughout the nuclear age to consult with, or disclose to, the public the occasions on which the use of nuclear weapons was seriously contemplated." (Taylor) Nuclear strategy, like the decision to go to war was reserved for an elite few. The shadowy atmosphere that hung over America's nuclear strategy was reflected in the full daylight of the public controversy over the Vietnam Conflict. The public saw what America's elite could not - that the war was not winnable because American nuclear weapons could not protect America from foreign nuclear weapons. The military and civilian administrations could not define victory because there could be no victory. (Hirschbein 37) the destruction of communism in a particular region did nothing to stop the threat of nuclear destruction. Nuclear weapons deterred themselves - at least in the hands of major powers.

Notwithstanding, nuclear strategy continues to insert itself into the current international scheme. Though no conventional war has yet turned nuclear, recent American policymakers have threatened nuclear action on more than one occasion - and this against a variety of non-state, as well as, national actors. The Bush doctrine that was adopted in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, was presented to the public as a reformulation of America's traditional moral mission; a way to preserve American values in the face of the new threat of global terrorism much as John Foster Dulles saw deterrence and containment as essential tools of the Cold War. (Laver) George W. Bush would deter and contain the "evildoers" by threatening them and their supporters with an American nuclear first strike.