Why nukes are necessary

This spurred generations of officials to worry more about nuclear matters than they should have and to distort foreign and security policies in unfortunate ways. The common feature among all these disasters is that none of them has ever materialized. Either we are the luckiest people in history or the risks have been overstated.

Before the end of the present century, unless something quite unforeseeable occurs, one of three possibilities will have been realized.

These three are: —. A reversion to barbarism after a catastrophic diminution of the population of the globe. A unification of the world under a single government, possessing a monopoly of all the major weapons of war. The novelist and scientist C. Disasters were certainly possible, and a healthy appreciation of the dangers nuclear weapons posed eventually led to the development and spread of best practices in strategy and safety.

Nuclear exchanges were assumed to be easy to start, hard to stop, and certain to end up destroying life on earth. Nuclear proliferation has been a perennial source of fear. During the U. Ever since the dropping of the bomb, in short, Armageddon and apocalypse have been thought to be looming just over the horizon.

Fine, one might concede. In retrospect, perhaps the risks were exaggerated. But at least there is a retrospect — which there might not have been without nuclear weapons, since they staved off a third world war, right? As you investigate the following sources, think about what decision you would have made if faced with the decision of expanding nuclear capabilities. Is control of nuclear weapons necessary to maintain peace? Background Key Question Directions Handouts.

Lesson Procedures opens in a new window. Document Set: Development of the Hydrogen Bomb opens in a new window. And if the number is zero and Egypt can be sure of that, she would still not know how many days are required for assembling components that may be on hand. Preventive strikes against states that have, or may have, nuclear weapons are hard to imagine, but what about pre-emptive ones?

The new worry in a world in which nuclear weapons have spread is that states of limited and roughly similar capabilities will use them against one another. They do not want to risk nuclear devastation anymore than we do. With delicate forces, states are tempted to launch disarming strikes before their own forces can be struck and destroyed. To be effective a deterrent force must meet three requirements. First, a part of the force must appear to be able to survive an attack and launch one of its own.

Second, survival of the force must not require early firing in response to what may be false alarms. Third, weapons must not be susceptible to accidental and unauthorized use. Nobody wants vulnerable. Will new nuclear states find ways to hide their weapons, to deliver them, and to control them? Will they be able to deploy and manage nuclear weapons in ways that meet the physical requirements of deterrent forces? The United States even today worries about the vulnerability of its vast and varied arsenal.

The Soviet Union could not be sure that we would fail to launch on warning or fail to retaliate later. In this respect, as in others, strategic discourse now lacks the clarity and precision it once had. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have strategic nuclear weapons that can destroy some of the other sides strategic nuclear weapons. Deterrent forces are seldom delicate because no state wants delicate forces and nuclear forces can easily be made sturdy. Nuclear weapons are fairly small and light.

They are easy to hide and to move. Early in the nuclear age, people worried about atomic bombs being concealed in packing boxes and placed in holds of ships to be exploded when a signal was given. Now more than ever people worry about terrorists stealing nuclear warheads because various states have so many of them.

Everybody seems to believe that terrorists are capable of hiding bombs. Why should states be unable to do what terrorist gangs are though to be capable of? It is sometimes claimed that the few bombs of a new nuclear state create a greater danger of nuclear war than additional thousands for the United States and the Soviet Union.

Such statements assume that pre-emption of a small force is easy. How can military advisers promise the full success of a disarming first strike when the penalty for slight error may be so heavy?

In the worst case, some survive and can still be delivered. Americans think so because we think in terms of large nuclear arsenals.

Small nuclear powers will neither have them nor need them. Lesser nuclear states might deploy, say, ten real weapons and ten dummies, while permitting other countries to infer that the numbers are larger. The adversary need only believe that some warheads may survive his attack and be visited on him. That belief should not be hard to create without making command and control unreliable.

All nuclear countries must live through a time when their forces are crudely designed. All countries have so far been able to control them. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Even if they buy the weapons, they will have to hire technicians to maintain and control them.

We do not have to wonder whether they will take good care of their weapons. They have every incentive to do so. Hiding nuclear weapons and keeping them under control are tasks for which the ingenuity of numerous states is adequate.

Nor are means of delivery difficult to devise or procure. Ports can be torpedoed by small boats lying off shore. Moreover, a thriving arms trade in ever more sophisticated military equipment provides ready access to what may be wanted, including planes and missiles suited nuclear warhead delivery.

Lesser nuclear states can pursue deterrent strategies effectively. Deterrence requires the ability to inflict unacceptable damage on another country. To deter, a country need not appear to be able to destroy a fourth to a half of another country, although in some cases that might be easily done.

And what would be left of Israel if Tel Aviv and Haifa were destroyed? The weak can deter one another. But can the weak deter the strong? The population and industry of most States concentrate in a relatively small number of centres. This is true of the Soviet Union. Geoffrey Kemp in concluded that China would probably be able to strike on that scale.

And, I emphasize again, China need only appear to be able to do it. A low probability of carrying a highly destructive attack home is sufficient for deterrence. A force of an imprecisely specifiable minimum capability is nevertheless needed. In a study, Justin Galen pseud. He estimates that China has 60 to 80 medium-range and 60 to 80 intermediate-range missiles of doubtful reliability and accuracy and 80 obsolete bombers.

But surely Russian leaders reason the other way around. Despite inaccuracies, a few Chinese missiles may hit Russian cities, and some bombers may get through. Not much is required to deter. What political-military objective is worth risking Vladivostock, Novosibirsk. Prevention and pre-emption are difficult games because the costs are so high if the games are not perfectly played. Inhibitions against using nuclear forces for such attacks are strong, although one cannot say they are absolute.

Some of the inhibitions are simply human. Can country A find justification for a preventive or pre-emptive strike against B if B, in acquiring nuclear weapons, is imitating A? Awesome acts are hard to perform. Some of the inhibitions are political. The Credibility of Small Deterrent Forces.

The first is physical. Will such countries be able to construct and protect a deliverable force? We have found that they can readily do so.

The second is psychological. Will an adversary believe that retaliation threatened will be carried out? Deterrent threats backed by second-strike nuclear forces raise the expected costs of war to such heights that war becomes unlikely. But deterrent threats may not be credible. In a world where two or more countries can make them, the prospect of mutual devastation makes it difficult, or irrational, to execute threats should the occasion for doing so arise.

Would it not be senseless to risk suffering further destruction once a deterrent force had failed to deter? Why retaliate once a threat to do so has failed? Instead, in retaliating, one may prompt the enemy to unleash more warheads. The Soviet Union, some feared, might believe that the United States would be self-deterred.

One earlier solution to the problem was found in Thomas Sche! No state can know for sure that another state will refrain from retaliating even when retaliation would be irrational. Bernard Brodie put the thought more directly, while avoiding the slippery notion of rationality. To ask why a country should carry out its deterrent threat once deterrence has failed is to ask the wrong question.

The question suggests that an aggressor may attack believing that the attacked country may not retaliate. This invokes the conventional logic that analysts find so hard to forsake. In a conventional world, a country can sensibly attack if it believes that success is probable. In a nuclear world, a country cannot sensibly attack unless it believes that success is assured.

An attacker is deterred even if he believes only that the attacked may retaliate. One may nevertheless wonder, as Americans recently have, whether retaliatory threats remain credible if the strategic forces of the attacker are superior to those of the attacked.

Given second-strike capabilities, it is not the balance of forces but the courage to use them that counts. The balance or imbalance of strategic forces affects neither the calculation of danger nor the question of whose will is the stronger. Second-strike forces have to be seen in absolute terms. In answering these questions, we can learn something from the experience of the last three decades. The United States and the Soviet Union limited and modulated their provocative acts, the more carefully so when major values for one side or the other were at issue.

This can be seen both in what they have and in what they have not done. The United States, to take another example, could fight for years on a large scale in South-East ASia because neither success nor failure mattered much internationally. Victory would not have made the world one of American hegemony.

Defeat would not have made the world one of Russian hegemony. No vital interest of either great power was at stake, as both Kissinger and Brezhnev made clear at the time. One can fight without fearing escalation only where little is at stake. And that is where the deterrent does not deter.

Actions at the periphery can safely be bolder than actions at the centre. In contrast, where much is at stake for one side, the other side moves with care. Trying to win where winning would bring the central balance into question threatens escalation and becomes too risky to contemplate.

The United States is circumspect when East European crises impend. Thus Secretary of State Dulles assured the Soviet Union when Hungarians rebelled in October of that we would not interfere with efforts to suppress them. Thus her probes in Berlin have been tentative, reversible, and ineffective. Strikingly, the long border between East and West Europe—drawn where borders earlier proved unstable—has been free even of skirmishes in all of the years since the Second World War.

Both of the nuclear great powers become watchful and wary when events occur that may get out of control. The strikes by Polish workmen that began in August of provide the most recent illustration of this. The Problem of Extended Deterrence. How far from the homeland does deterrence extend? One answers that question by defining the conditions that must obtain if deterrent threats are to be credited.

First, the would-be attacker must be made to see that the deterrer considers the interests at stake to be vital ones. Nuclear weapons, however, strongly incline them to grope for de facto agreement on the answer rather than to fight over it.

Second, political stability must prevail in the area that the deterrent is intended to cover. It the threat to a regime is in good part from internal factions, then an outside power may risk supporting g one of them even in the face of deterrent threats. The credibility of a deterrent force requires both that interests be seen to be vital and that it is the attack from outside that threatens them. Given these conditions, the would-be attacker provides both the reason to retaliate and the target for retaliation.

Deterrence gains in credibility the more highly valued the interests covered seem to be. The problem of stretching a deterrent, which has so agitated the western alliance, is not a problem for lesser nuclear states. Their problem is to protect not others but themselves. Many have feared that lesser nuclear states would be the first to break the nuclear taboo and that they would use their nuclear weapons irresponsibly.

I expect just the opposite. Weak states find it easier than strong states to establish their credibility. Not only will they not be trying to stretch their deterrent forces to cover others, but also their vulnerability to conventional attacks lends credence to their nuclear threats. Because in a conventional war they can lose so much so fast, it is easy to believe that they will unleash a deterrent force even at the risk of receiving a nuclear blow in return.

With deterrent forces, the party that is absolutely threatened prevails. Use of nuclear weapons by lesser states will come only if survival is at stake. And this should be called not irresponsible but responsible use. An opponent who attacks what is unambiguously mine risks suffering great distress if they have second-strike forces. This statement has important implications for both the deterrer and the deterred.

Where territorial claims are shadowy and disputed, deterrent writs do not run. As Steven J. Establishing the credibility of a deterrent force requires moderation of territorial claims on the part of the would-be deterrer. For modest states, weapons whose very existence works strongly against their use are just what is wanted. In a nuclear world, conservative would-be attackers will be prudent, but will all would-be attackers be conservative? A new Hitler is not unimaginable.

After all, the western democracies had not come to the aid of a geographically defensible and militarily strong Czechoslovakia. In those years, Hitler would almost surely have been deterred from acting in ways the immediately threatened massive death and widespread destruction in Germany.

And, if Hitler had not been deterred, would his generals have obeyed his commands? In a nuclear world, to act in blatantly offensive ways is madness.

Under the circumstances, how many generals would obey the commands of a madman? One man alone does not make war. To believe that nuclear deterrence would have worked against Germany in is easy. It is also easy to believe that in , given the ability to do so, Hitler and some few around him would have fired nuclear warheads at the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union as their armies advanced, whatever the consequences for Germany.

Two considerations, however, work against this possibility. Early in Hitler apparently ordered the initiation of gas warfare, but no one responded. In the latter, no country will press another to the point of decisive defeat In the desperation of defeat desperate measures may be taken, but the last thing anyone wants to do is to make a nuclear nation feel desperate.

The unconditional surrender of a nuclear nation cannot be demanded. Considering one such scenario is worthwhile because it has achieved some popularity among those who believe that deterrence is difficult. Albert Wohlstetter imagines a situation in which the Soviet Union might strike first. Her leaders might decide to do so in a desperate effort to save a sinking regime.

Imagination places the Soviet Union in a situation where striking first is bad, but presumably not striking first is even worse. One common characteristic of scenarios is that they are compounded of odd elements. How can the Soviet Union suffer disastrous defeat in a peripheral war? Another common characteristic of scenarios is the failure to say how the imagined act will accomplish the end in view. Some rulers will do anything to save themselves and their regimes. That is the assumption.

But how a regime can hope to save itself by making a nuclear strike at a superior adversary, or at any adversary having a second-strike force, is not explained. Why is not striking first even worse than doing so, and in what way does it entail a smaller risk?

We are not told. The most important common characteristic of scenarios, and often their fatal flaw, is also present in this one. The scenarist imagines a state in the midst of a terrible crisis in which the alternatives are so bad that launching a first strike supposedly makes some sense, but he does not say how this situation might come about.

How could the Soviet Union get into such a mess, and what would other states be doing in the meantime? Scenarios often feature just one player, keeping others in the background even though two or more states are necessarily involved in melting and in preventing wars. To think that the Soviet Union would strike the United States because of incipient revolt within her borders is silly. To think that the Soviet Union would strike first believing that we were about to do so is not.

It is sometimes surprisingly difficult for strategists to think of the actions and interactions of two or more states at the same time. No country will goad a nuclear adversary that finds itself in sad straits. No one would want to provoke an already desperate country it that country had strategic nuclear weapons. Equally, a regime in crisis would desperately want to avoid calling nuclear warheads down upon itself.

What scenansts imagine seldom has much to do with how governments behave. Three confusions mark many discussions of deterrence. Second, those who are sceptical of deterrence easily slip back from nuclear logic, by which slight risk of great damage deters, to conventional logic, by which states may somewhat sensibly risk war on narrowly calculated advantages.

Thus some Amencans fear that the Soviet Union will strike first—destroying most of our land-based warheads, planes on the ground, submarines in port, and much else besides.

No one can say what the odds might be. They have failed to notice that radical states usually show caution in their foreign policies and to notice that nuclear weapons further moderate the behaviour of such states when vital interests are at issue. Nuclear peace depends not on rulers and those around them being rational but on their aversion to running catastrophic risks. Arms Races among New Nuclear States.

One may easily believe that American and Russian military doctrines have set the pattern that new nuclear states will follow. One may then also believe that they will suffer the fate of the United States and the Soviet Union, that they will compete in building larger and larger nuclear arsenals while continuing to accumulate conventional weapons.

These are doubtful beliefs. One can infer the future from the past only insofar as future situations may be like present ones for the actors involved. First, nuclear weapons alter the dynamics of arms races. In a competition of two or more parties, it may be hard to say who is pushing and who is being pushed, who is leading and who is following.

If one party seeks to increase its capabilities, it may seem that the other s must too. The dynamic may be built into the competition and may unfold despite a mutual wish to resist it.

But need this be the case in a strategic competition between nuclear countries? It need not be if the conditions of competition make deterrent logic dominant.

Deterrent logic dominates if the conditions of competition make it nearly impossible for any of the competing parties to achieve a first-strike capability. Early in the nuclear age, the implications of deterrent strategy were clearly seen. The United States has sometimes designed her forces according to that logic. Donald A. To repeat: If no state can launch a disarming attack with high confidence, force comparisons are irrelevant.

Strategic arms races are then pointless. Those who foresee nuclear arms racing among new nuclear states fail to make the distinction between war-fighting and war-deterring capabilities.

Powerful countries are the ones which do not leave their children to starve to death in a search for a nuclear technology which is harmful to human beings and environment. A technology which places countries in economic isolation and thus sinking them further into poverty.

We are all called to learn from Nagasaki and Hiroshima , that nuclear weapons can produce devastating impacts to human beings and the environment we live in. We do not wish to see any other country subjected to these conditions. I believe it is time the world should learn from Japan, the country which tested the harmfulness of nuclear weapons and emerged from a war to becoming powerful economic country. The economic miracle of this country was not by building the arsenal of nuclear weapons, but by strengthening infrastructure to attract foreign direct investment.

This proves that it is not nuclear weapons that make a country powerful, but good supervision of macro and microeconomic policies. Some countries have argued that they obtain nuclear weapons to deter the possibility of being invaded by another country with nuclear weapons. This was an idea generated during the cold war era however, it is no longer viable. The cold war rivals United states of America and Russian have also signed an agreement to cut down their nuclear arsenals which mean they see them as useless weapons that are threatening the existence of human race.

On top of that to prevent one country from invading another country the United Nations body was built in