Weapons of Mass Destruction

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 which everybody lost. 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 or military point that involved suicide; certainly not on a large scale. Deterrence may only have worked in the Cold War because the United States had actually used nuclear weapons on a prior occasion. Waltz's assumption that deterrence was a success during the Cold War because neither the U.S. Nor the Soviet Union used nuclear weapons simply cannot be proven. In light of the September 11th attacks and what they teach us about precedents there is nothing to say we weren't just lucky. Conversely, Sagan's view only renders the world safe if everyone subscribes, voluntarily or otherwise. If anti-proliferation succeeds in getting all nuclear weapons destroyed, then every country in the world is at the mercy of the first one to renege on the anti-proliferation doctrine and successfully build and possess a nuclear weapon.

The principles of the justice of war are commonly held to be: having just cause, being declared by a proper authority, possessing right intention, having a reasonable chance of success, and the end being proportional to the means used." The terrorist attacks left the U.S. feeling that its approach to defense had been ineffective and that new measures were required to avoid future vulnerability. The U.S. has now been forced to tackle the morally delicate ground of the justice of preemption in spite of the fact that "most theorists hold that initiating acts of aggression is unjust..." And that "the consensus is that an initiation of physical force is wrong...."

The United States has taken on a position of preemption on the grounds that self-defense is considered just in Just War Theory. Consider that "the principle of self-defense can be extrapolated to anticipate probable acts of aggression, as well as assisting others against an oppressive government...[and] it is commonly held that aggressive war is only permissible if its purpose is to... pre-empt an anticipated attack."