Toward an Alternative Security System: Moving beyond the Balance of Power in the Search for World Security *

Abstract

Technological changes and their military consequences have outpaced the capacity of the international system to protect people's security and to meet basic needs. The balance of power system cannot prevent war for long, nor can it reduce to an acceptable level the prospect of nuclear catastrophe. Yet policy makers have excluded from their agendas policies that question this anachronistic system or the basic direction of time-honored diplomacy. Fundamental changes are needed but encounter psychological as well as political and economic resistance, including the belief that the present international order is more or less permanent. Building a more durable peace therefore requires identifying policies that will not jeopardize security in the short run but that will lead to a more effective security system in the long run. Examination of seven policy models—based respectively on a nuclear war-fighting capability, mutual assured destruction, minimum deterrence, conventional defensive weapons, a world peacekeeping federation, civilian resistance, and a global security system—demonstrates that U.S. and Soviet policies are leading to greater insecurity, and that more prudent policy options are available. Scientific studies of war as well as diplomatic history suggest that if a policy is to contribute to security in the long run, it must help demilitarize, depolarize, denationalize, and transnationalize the world system. Policies that will contribute to the establishment of a new international security order and that can be undertaken now include: an international satellite monitoring agency; a ban on all nuclear tests; a freeze on the testing, production, and deployment of all nuclear warheads and delivery systems; a no-first-use pledge; the establishment of a non-intervention regime; and demilitarizing initiatives by the small powers, such as a Nordic nuclear weapons free zone.