Same As It Ever Was: Nuclear Alarmism, Proliferation, and the Cold War
Quicktabs: Citation
Throughout the post–World War II period, analysts worried that proliferation among small or unstable countries could increase the “likelihood of nu- clear war.”31 Such “deterministic” assessments rested on the assumption that these countries “would act less maturely with nuclear weapons under their belt, thus inevitably leading to regional, and in turn global, instability.”32 Yet no nuclear crisis involving a small country has remotely approached the dan- ger and risk levels seen during confrontations between the superpowers dur- ing the Cold War.
More important, contemporary analysts often forget that two of the United States’ communist adversaries whose “rogue” status, by current deanitions, was unparalleled in the atomic age, pursued nuclear weapons: the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The United States dreaded the Soviet Union’s acquisition of the bomb. Joseph Stalin’s Russia was both a murderous and secretive regime; it violated international norms and pursued aggressive foreign policies even before it tested an atomic bomb. The Soviet Union’s behavior after its August 1949 atomic test seemed to realize the worst fears of President Harry Truman’s administration when Moscow’s client, North Korea, attacked South Korea without any apparent concern over the U.S. response. During the winter of 1950–51, the United States was convinced that nuclear weapons had so emboldened the Soviet Union that a third world war might be unavoidable.33 In 1953, however, aghting on the Korean Peninsula ended and tensions with the Soviets eased. Although the Soviet Union’s nuclearization would remain a serious threat, in time, the United States developed policies to cope with this challenge.
In 1964, when the PRC tested its arst nuclear device, China was perhaps the most “rogue” state in modern history. Mao Zedong’s domestic policies caused the death of tens of millions of China’s citizens. Moreover, he had pursued an aggressive foreign policy before the atomic test. Examples include attacking India, aghting the United States directly in Korea and by proxy in Vietnam (where it armed a nonstate actor, the Vietcong), and threatening war over Tai- wan. Mao made a series of highly irresponsible statements about the PRC surviving and even thriving in a nuclear war. No country in the post–World War II period—not Iraq, Iran, or even North Korea—has given U.S. policymak- ers more reason to fear its nuclearization than China.34
Within five years of the PRC’s nuclear test, however, the United States and China initiated a covert dialogue. In less than a decade, they began an anti- Soviet alliance that put great pressure on Russia and helped to bring the Cold War to an end. Nuclear weapons did not make China more hostile. If anything, its foreign policies became less aggressive and more mature over time. Today China has one of the most restrained and most responsible nuclear force postures and deployment policies of any nuclear power; it maintains a mini- mal deterrent under tight command and control while eschewing a arst-use doctrine.35
That Iran—surrounded by rivals with nuclear ambitions and singled out by the United States, the largest military power in the world—has an interest in nuclear weapons is not surprising. Even assessments that view Iranian behavior as a challenge to U.S. interests in the Middle East do not consider the regime as threatening as the PRC was during the 1960s. As Shahram Chubin writes, “It is not overtly confrontational or given to wild swings in behavior or to delusional goals; it has not denounced arms control treaties to which it formally adheres; and there is evidence of pluralism and some debate within the country.”36 Nuclear weapons could make Iran more aggressive. Or, as with China, they could provide international legitimacy and security, making Iran less aggressive than it has been. As one recent analysis put it, “If anything, Iran might and that possession of a nuclear weapon actually diminishes its op- tions in the Middle East and forces it to act with greater restraint.”37 A deeper understanding of nuclear history and the underlying geopolitical circum- stances Iran faces makes the prospect that it would take actions (such as supplying Hamas or Hezbollah with nuclear weapons) that could invite its own destruction highly unlikely.38
Fears of a tipping point were especially acute in the aftermath of China’s 1964 detonation of an atomic bomb: it was predicted that India, Indonesia, and Japan might follow, with consequences worldwide, as “Israel, Sweden, Germany, and other potential nuclear countries far from China and India would be affected by proliferation in Asia.”40 A U.S. government document identiaed “at least eleven nations (India, Japan, Israel, Sweden, West Germany, Italy, Canada, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Rumania, and Yugoslavia)” with the capacity to go nuclear, a number that would soon “grow substantially” to include “South Africa, the United Arab Republic, Spain, Brazil and Mexico.”41 A top-secret, blue-ribbon committee established to craft the U.S. response con- tended that “the [1964] Chinese nuclear explosion has increased the urgency and complexity of this problem by creating strong pressures to develop inde- pendent nuclear forces, which, in turn, could strongly inouence the plans of other potential nuclear powers.”42
These predictions were largely wrong. In 1985 the National Intelligence Council noted that for “almost thirty years the Intelligence Community has been writing about which nations might next get the bomb.” All of these esti- mates based their largely pessimistic and ultimately incorrect estimates on fac- tors such as the increased “access to assile materials,” improved technical capabilities in countries, the likelihood of “chain reactions,” or a “scramble” to proliferation when “even one additional state demonstrates a nuclear capa- bility.” The 1985 report goes on, “The most striking characteristic of the present-day nuclear proliferation scene is that, despite the alarms rung by past Estimates, no additional overt proliferation of nuclear weapons has actually occurred since China tested its bomb in 1964.” Although “some proliferation of nuclear explosive capabilities and other major proliferation-related develop- ments have taken place in the past two decades,” they did not have “the damaging, systemwide impacts that the Intelligence community generally an- ticipated they would.”43
Even if a terrorist group were to acquire a nuclear device, expert Michael Levi demonstrates that effective planning can prevent catastrophe: for nuclear terrorists, what “can go wrong might go wrong, and when it comes to nuclear terrorism, a broader, integrated defense, just like controls at the source of weapons and materials, can multiply, intensify, and compound the possibili- ties of terrorist failure, possibly driving terrorist groups to reject nuclear terrorism altogether.” Warning of the danger of a terrorist acquiring a nuclear weapon, most analyses are based on the inaccurate image of an “infallible ten-foot-tall enemy.” This type of alarmism, writes Levi, impedes the development of thoughtful strategies that could deter, prevent, or mitigate a terrorist attack: “Worst-case estimates have their place, but the possible failure-averse, conser- vative, resource-limited ave-foot-tall nuclear terrorist, who is subject not only to the laws of physics but also to Murphy’s law of nuclear terrorism, needs to become just as central to our evaluations of strategies.”54
Nuclear weapons destabilized international politics in several ways during the Cold War that are often overlooked by contemporary alarmists. They nulliaed the inouence of other, more traditional forms of power, such as con- ventional forces and economic strength, allowing the Soviet Union to minimize the United States’ enormous economic, technological, and even “soft power” advantages.69 Nuclear weapons also changed military calculations in potentially dangerous ways. It has long been understood that in a nuclear environment, the side that strikes arst gains an overwhelming military advantage. This meant that strategies of preemption, and even preventive war, were enormously appealing. It was for this reason that both the United States and the Soviet Union considered attacking China’s nuclear weapons program before China could deploy a strategic nuclear force.70 Throughout the 1950s, NATO explicitly grounded its strategy on the advantages of preemption.71 A military strategy based on a rapid, forceful preemptive strike affords dip- lomats little time or leeway to end a crisis. Even after the establishment of parity, analysts in both the United States and the Soviet Union supported nuclear force structures and strategies grounded in maintaining a arst-strike capability.72
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