Abstract
The movement to abolish nuclear weapons threatens to consume political capital better spent addressing more immediate threats to international security: conventional weapons such as combat aircraft, naval vessels, and small arms.
So compelling was the idea of eliminating nuclear weapons when their use was plausible that disarmament advocates have held tightly to this aspiration even as the threat of nuclear war has become vanishingly small. Though weary of Cold War strategic arsenals, nuclear abolitionists remain curiously loyal to the intellectual orthodoxy of that era, which held that these weapons should be relinquished as soon as a practical framework for doing so could be conceived. Yet, if excessive nuclear stockpiles are Cold War relics, so, too, is the idea that negotiating reductions in their size, or eliminating them altogether, is the most constructive expression of a nation's commitment to international security.
After decades of concerted intellectual investment in preventing nuclear war, members of the nuclear weapons establishment have been slow to appreciate the irrelevance of these weapons now that the tradition of non-use has become, in part due to their efforts, so deeply entrenched. As Leo Tolstoy observed, the cleverest of men “can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty–conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.” 1 Consequently, nuclear abolitionists continue to advance a disarmament agenda that bears little relation to the most pressing security threat of the day–conventional rather than nuclear arms.
Reflecting on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, James Agee suggested in Time magazine that the first use of the Bomb was an event “so much more enormous that, relative to it, the war itself shrank to minor significance.” 2 Our fascination with nuclear weapons has continued apace ever since, despite these weapons having claimed not a single life in anger since 1945. Meanwhile, no comparable angst surrounds conventional weapons–combat aircraft, naval vessels, small arms–whose death toll during the same period cannot be ascertained to the nearest million. This perverse prioritization resembles the fear of airplane crashes over automobile accidents, in which our preoccupation with low-probability but highly dramatic events distracts us from more frequent but less damaging occurrences of far greater cumulative significance.
Perhaps only the persistent attention paid to nuclear weapons during the Cold War prevented their use, but today it is far out of proportion to the conceivable threat of nuclear war. A more valuable exercise would entail pursuing reductions in the more widely used appliances of war and institutionalizing a global taboo against inter-state conflict similar to the one that has prevented the use of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear weapons: the lesser of two evils.
That nuclear weapons should occupy such a prominent space in our consciousness is unsurprising–their absolute and indiscriminate destructiveness permits none of the classic romanticization of war. Yet, unlike similarly abhorrent chemical and biological weapons, the Bomb has proven difficult to abandon. It is so fearsome, goes the argument, that we cannot relinquish our ability to answer its use in kind. Still, several characteristics peculiar to nuclear weapons appear to make their abolishment especially desirable: Though they have not been used since Nagasaki and thus fare poorly against even the infantryman's rifle in total casualties produced, their potential destructiveness is without peer; unlike destroyers or armored columns, they can be stolen or used without authorization; and the speed of their delivery makes nuclear crisis decision-making uniquely unforgiving of error. However, owing to this terrible potential, powerful mechanisms of self-deterrence inhere to nuclear weapons that conventional arms lack. With few exceptions–and no deterrence failures–national leaders have behaved conservatively in nuclear crises while conventional power has been wielded far more promiscuously.
Arguing at the end of the Cold War that nuclear arms had proven unexpectedly stabilizing, Columbia University scholar Kenneth Waltz attributed this effect to the lack of ambiguity surrounding their use. “The catastrophe promised by nuclear war contrasts sharply with the extreme difficulty of predicting outcomes among conventional competitors,” he wrote. Conventional wars “start more easily because the uncertainties of their outcomes make it easier for the leaders of states to entertain illusions of victory at supportable cost. In contrast, contemplating war when the use of nuclear weapons is possible focuses one's attention not on the probability of victory but on the possibility of annihilation.” 3
That nuclear weapons should occupy such a prominent space in our consciousness is unsurprising–their absolute and indiscriminate destructiveness permits none of the classic romanticization of war. Yet, unlike similarly abhorrent chemical and biological weapons, the Bomb has proven difficult to abandon.
Of course, conventional and nuclear war cannot be distinguished so cleanly, and the possibility that the first may lead to the second is embedded in several nuclear weapon states' declaratory policies, including U.S. nuclear doctrine. Indeed, Washington's refusal to adopt a no-first-use pledge implicitly suggests that conventional attacks on the United States or its allies might produce a nuclear response. The hypothesis that these weapons have prevented great power wars of attrition is thus the last refuge of nuclear weapon defenders. Strangely, this argument is used to justify the retention of nuclear weapons rather than to make the case for disposing of the conventional forces they have supposedly checked. Yet, if nuclear weapons prevent big wars between major powers, they do nothing to stop wars between smaller states. Nor do they prevent powerful countries from attacking weaker ones, or even, in the case of the Falklands War, weaker states from attacking nuclear powers. Further, the international tradition of non-use has become so deeply ingrained that nuclear powers can now go to war with each other, as India and Pakistan did in 1999, with confidence that these weapons will not be used.
Two forces that have traditionally dampened the appeal of initiating conventional war–the logistical complexity of massing forces and the sometimes difficult mobilization of public support–have diminished in restraining power, largely as a result of advanced technology. Stealth aircraft, precision-guided munitions, and globe-spanning bombers provide decision makers with the capability (or at least its illusion) to conduct surgical strikes without the untidiness of ground operations. While the Iraq War may have dampened the U.S. public's appetite for full-scale invasions, technologies such as space-based weapons, aerial drones, and nonlethal weapons may nourish the perception that conventional war can be waged without its traditional costs. These capabilities may therefore erode what few inhibitions have restrained states' belligerent tendencies while leaving in place the many uncertainties that accompany human conflict.
Advanced technologies also have closed the gap between the slow-moving nature of conventional conflict and the “hair-trigger” quality of nuclear weapons. At least twice in recent decades the United States has considered military strikes that could have initiated conflicts with death tolls rivaling those of a nuclear detonation. In winter 1993 and spring 1994, after North Korea threatened to convert spent fuel rods into weaponized nuclear material, Clinton administration officials reportedly contemplated an attack on the Yongbyon nuclear facility. Experts differ on the number of casualties that might have resulted if North Korea had responded with an artillery barrage of Seoul, but 100,000 in the first 24 hours has been suggested. 4 Notwithstanding Kim Jong-il's subsequent provocations, his 16 years of containment since the crisis make the mere consideration of this strike appear ghastly in hindsight.
Secondly, before the release of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, which judged that the Islamic Republic had halted its nuclear weapons program, the Bush administration apparently considered air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. 5 Though the NIE's analysis was roundly ridiculed, its publication effectively removed any near-term possibility of an attack. 6 Thus, a third simultaneous war and all its cascading consequences possibly was averted by a single flawed analysis. The question that sprang from this episode–how could such a vast gulf separate the president's rhetoric from the intelligence community's analysis?–was the wrong one. The correct question is: What changes to U.S. defense posture can we enact to minimize the risk that tens of thousands of lives might hang on such an error?
The psychological inertia of arms.
If psychology largely explains our aversion to nuclear weapons, it also accounts for our disregard for conventional disarmament. For millennia military thinkers have repeated the self-affirming mantra that a nation desiring peace should prepare for war. This logic, unscathed by countless conflicts in which arms have been catalytic rather than preventative, has resulted in most nations' unquestioned acceptance of the need for military strength. Consequently, we witness such modernday oddities as Morocco's squadrons of fighter aircraft, Thailand's armored divisions, and Spain's two aircraft carriers–military capabilities that defy all plausible utility. Perhaps the peace most countries enjoy is purchased by some modicum of military power. But it is more likely that states maintain armed forces out of unconsidered tradition, and their occasional use under less than dire circumstances is the unavoidable result. Military planners have traditionally felt the tug between two competing impulses, both rooted in uncritical assumptions of the inevitability of conflict. The first concerns “fighting the last war,” or preparing for military operations according to outdated principles; the second involves what Defense Secretary Robert Gates terms “next war-itis,” or the tendency to favor future combat needs over current ones. 7 Yet, the “need” is more often manufactured to fit the capability than the other way around. The F-22 Raptor, a fifth-generation air combat fighter, is instructive in this regard. Originally designed to dominate Soviet aircraft, the F-22 is now advertised as necessary against China and other potential adversaries that have yet to be identified. This evolution resembles the shifting rationale for ballistic missile defense, a hammer forever in search of a nail. Unveiled as a hedge against a limited Chinese nuclear strike, the system was later envisioned to protect against a massive Soviet attack. As the Cold War ended, “rogue” states became the enemy du jour. Today, advocates quietly suggest the system might one day return to its roots as a defense against China.
For millennia military thinkers have repeated the self-affirming mantra that a nation desiring peace should prepare for war. This logic, unscathed by countless conflicts in which arms have been catalytic rather than preventative, has resulted in most nations' unquestioned acceptance of the need for military strength.
The real malady is the assumption that warfare is an irremovable feature of the human condition. Though the “last war”–that is, the current ones in Iraq and Afghanistan–is being waged against implacable religious zealots, the F-22 implicitly designates as potential enemies the handful of states capable of producing advanced fighter aircraft. On what basis must we continuously assume that relations with such nations–by definition sophisticated, industrialized societies–cannot be managed through nonmilitary means even in crises? Herein we witness the central, enduring paradox of arms: States maintain armed forces because they see conflict as inevitable, yet there can be no change in its inevitability as long as armed forces are maintained. Warfare is therefore humankind's most reliably self-fulfilling prophecy.
Conventional disarmament must precede nuclear abolition.
If using nuclear weapons would be unimaginably destructive and using conventional weapons is often irresistible, both instruments must be reduced in size and structure so as to be unrecognizable from their present forms. The choice between nuclear abolition and conventional disarmament cannot be binary. If conventional forces are unavailable for national defense while nuclear weapons remain, a nation facing coercion may be forced to choose between two unacceptably stark outcomes: capitulation or nuclear war. Conversely, if nuclear weapon defenders are to be believed, discarding these weapons while large conventional forces remain could make wars bloodier and more frequent, rendering the abolition movement a de facto engine of global conflict. The order of their elimination is then simply a question of priority.
It seems reasonable that general disarmament should begin with the weapons that have the greatest propensity for use and whose elimination would be most difficult to reverse. Here conventional arms are the clear favorite, and not simply because they are frequently and recklessly wielded. The virtue of conventional disarmament is that the greatest sources of hesitation in eliminating nuclear weapons–the difficulty of verification and the short bridge separating a latent capability from an actual one–are less applicable to conventional arms. The manufacture of warships, aircraft, and armor cannot easily be concealed, nor can these capabilities be reconstituted quickly.
Conventional disarmament should begin with the states whose non-nuclear inventories are most superfluous. Among many such nations the psychological allure of arms is the most formidable obstacle to relinquishing them. The belief that states must field armed forces commensurate with their sense of national self is particularly evident in France, Britain, and Russia, whose military strength is a vestige of diminished power, and China and India, whose growing capabilities symbolize the power to which they aspire. For no country is this truer than the United States, which maintains military capabilities far in excess of its own needs on the basis of perception–specifically, the conviction that U.S. power supplements its allies' modest defenses and underwrites global security writ large.
To argue, as many hawks do, that U.S. military expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product are historically low is to assume the extraordinary conditions that drove less favorable ratios in the last century–World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War–are appropriate bases for comparison in the current one. Why should this be? Serious introspection about the size of the defense budget, long overdue since the demise of the Soviet Union, would consider the appropriateness of Washington spending more on its armed forces than the military outlays of the next 45 nations combined. 8
While conventional reductions are virtuous for their own sake, they are also a necessary step toward nuclear abolition. The international community will resist U.S. leadership in the drive to zero as long as Washington retains conventional advantages that only nuclear weapons can nullify. As Gen. Krishnaswamy Sundarji, India's late chief of army staff, remarked in 1993, “The Persian Gulf War showed that if you are going to take on the United States, you had better have a nuclear weapon.” 9 Pakistan, vastly outgunned by India's conventional strength, appears to have reached the same conclusion. Thus, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has observed that conventional arms stand as an “insurmountable obstacle to ridding the world of nuclear weapons.” Until the major powers reduce military expenditures and commence with the “demilitarization of international politics,” he argues, discussion of nuclear abolition will remain “just rhetorical.” 10
Toward a twenty-first-century security landscape.
Lack of vision characterizes both ends of the spectrum of attitude toward military power. One side looks dreamily to a world where interstate violence has been banished while offering few solutions for getting there. The other's grim view of humanity provides a justification for military strength that is endlessly self-reinforcing; its adherents have little imagination for a world in which warfare is obsolete. Because the risks of indulging the former appear greater than the costs of maintaining the latter, we have deferred to security through strength rather than peace through disarmament.
States maintain armed forces because they see conflict as inevitable, yet there can be no change in its inevitability as long as armed forces are maintained. Warfare is therefore humankind's most reliably self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the second of their two seminal Wall Street Journal op-eds on nuclear disarmament, former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former defense secretary William Perry, and former Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn artfully described the goal of nuclear abolition as resembling the top of a tall mountain whose invisible summit discourages any attempt at ascent. By taking incremental steps between base camp and the peak, they suggest, the ultimate objective will come into sharper view. 11 Fittingly, many of the measures the abolition movement endorses–reducing the U.S. nuclear stockpile, ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and ending fissile material production for nuclear weapons–are eminently achievable.
Advocates of conventional disarmament, an even more daunting goal than its nuclear counterpart, should likewise focus on intermediate objectives that gradually subtract from our skepticism that interstate war can be eradicated. The following recommendations provide a starting point for grappling with many of the institutional and psychological forces that undergird the world's conventional postures. Divided between U.S. and international initiatives, they tilt heavily toward Washington for precisely the reason the global zero movement requires U.S. leadership–the United States is both a unique moral authority and a reference point from which many other nations measure their behavior.
U.S. initiatives.
To contemplate the $14 billion price tag of one new aircraft carrier, a platform that figures prominently in any potential conflict with China, is to recall President Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1953 speech in which the price of various “guns” was compared to the “butter” sacrificed to buy them: one bomber for 30 brick schools, a fighter for 500,000 bushels of wheat, and so on. 12 One need not be a starry-eyed pacifist to question whether the investment in carriers is worth their extravagant expense. The most potent of U.S. power projection capabilities, these vessels are double-edged swords. Their presence can reassure U.S. allies and cool crises, but they are also massive floating symbols of Washington's often unwelcome interventionism. Having been dispatched to the Taiwan Strait in 1996 following China's missile tests, these platforms may become a flash point in a future crisis there. At the very least, they will spur China to develop reciprocal capabilities. If these investments in turn compel India to respond, the world will again witness the global externalities of a single nation's militarism.
While certain exigencies such as genocide require swift and forceful intervention, the mentality that the clash of heavy weaponry is an appropriate method to resolve disagreements between developed nations should be challenged. Other missions that require agile capabilities but fall short of state-oriented conventional operations include WMD interdiction, peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, and combating piracy. Recognition of the need for such capabilities is reflected in Adm. Mike Mullen's proposal of the “Thousand-Ship Navy,” a voluntary coalition to police the “global maritime commons” and react to disasters with the efficiency that only military enterprises can supply. 14 Long-term planning should also prepare U.S. forces to respond to the low-intensity competition for resources and displacement of people that may accompany climate change.
Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has observed that conventional arms stand as an “insurmountable obstacle to ridding the world of nuclear weapons.” Until the major powers reduce military expenditures and commence with the “demilitarization of international politics,” he argues, discussion of nuclear abolition will remain “just rhetorical.”
The most vexing counterargument to removing conventional operations from the repertoire of U.S. capabilities is that terrorist groups or genocidal regimes may retain weapons that only conventional arms can combat. Indeed, Serbian tanks probably could not have been dislodged from Kosovo absent NATO airpower. This contention would be more persuasive if military forces were consistently used to resolve the crises that supposedly demand their retention. If preventing the deaths of more than five million people in the recent war in Congo was not a sufficient call to action, one wonders what would be. Nonetheless, no easy answer to this dilemma presents itself except to imagine that as responsible powers take steps to disarm, their doing so will make outliers more conspicuous and thus, more manageable. In any case, reservations about this issue cannot serve as an eternal pretext for maintaining robust military postures oriented toward other advanced states.
The Pentagon should adopt an approach to advanced conventional forces similar to that which exists for its nuclear weapons. Sensitive to Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the United States performs maintenance to ensure the readiness of its strategic arsenal but refrains from developing new weapons in contravention of the treaty's spirit. Similarly, the armed services should invest in life-extension programs to ensure the continued viability of existing offensive weapons while eschewing new classes of naval vessels, combat aircraft, and precision ordnance. The United States can maintain its technological edge for decades without research and development efforts that assume potential conflict with major powers a generation or more into the future.
The U.S. public's low tolerance for battlefield casualties has been a central driver behind the development of advanced capabilities, and forfeiting some degree of the nation's high-tech edge would require policy makers to accept a resulting increase in U.S. losses when conflicts do occur. Bloodless operations such as the 1999 Kosovo campaign, in which zero NATO combat deaths occurred in 78 days of sorties, would be less common. However, if the prospect of higher casualties makes decision makers more circumspect about initiating conflict in the first place, the net result will likely favor the individual soldier.
No less obstructive is the influence of the defense industry, which skillfully tethers military production to the self-interest of the political class. Construction of the F-22, for example, is spread across 44 states, a distribution that has no logistical justification. 18 Like a blowfish that inflates its body to appear larger to predators, this case reflects the industry practice of maximizing manufacturing footprint to increase political clout. So harmful is the impact of contractors and lawmakers on the acquisition process that Gates required participants in recent program deliberations to sign nondisclosure agreements to shield their discussions from outside meddling. 19
Swedish howitzers were used extensively in the 1999 India-Pakistan conflict. Germany holds a 10 percent share of the international arms market and is a global leader in the manufacture of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and self-propelled artillery. South Africa's state-supported defense complex produces unmanned aerial vehicles, guided missiles, artillery, and attack helicopters.
Recounting how the first six frigates of the newly formed U.S. Navy were constructed in six shipyards in six different states, Gates lamented that this phenomenon “has been with us from the beginning of the republic” and expressed doubt he would be able to change it. 20 In fact, policy makers do not give even lip service to confronting the problem–defense acquisition reform appears to be somewhere beneath arresting climate change and curing cancer on the list of distant ambitions. Because Congress's constitutional prerogative to manage the nation's finances is inviolable, perhaps the best that may be hoped for is some sort of mechanism to shame lawmakers from blatant parochial advocacy. One possibility is to impanel a standing body of distinguished public servants on the model of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission to assess the nation's annual defense requirements. Like the moral weight of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations, the counsel of an independent commission would require formidable arguments to disregard.
International initiatives.
Along with its own military transformation, the United States must leverage its unique position as a global leader to initiate a dialogue on conventional disarmament as a global aspiration. Encouraging shifts in attitude, while more nebulous than dismantling weapons systems or reengineering manufacturing plants, can have powerful tangible effects. Two preliminary steps in this process are attractive because they can be initiated not only by governments and international institutions but also by individuals.
Imposing an ethical framework on the sale of systems designed to take human life is a fraught undertaking, and efforts to do so have produced what might charitably be described as elastic restrictions. The nonbinding European Union Code of Conduct on Arms Exports, for example, proscribes weapons sales when there is a “clear risk” they will be used for internal repression, could provoke or prolong armed conflicts, or would be used aggressively against another nation. 23 Because arms cannot have an unalterably benign purpose, the mind searches for a weapon to which at least one of these restrictions would not apply. Further, several European countries' maneuverings to lift the ban on arms exports to China, imposed after the Tiananmen Square crackdown, cast suspicion on the sincerity of their efforts to restrict weapons sales.
In December 2008, the U.N. General Assembly endorsed the eventual adoption of an Arms Trade Treaty to establish “common international standards for the import, export, and transfer of conventional arms.” 24 The United States voted alone in opposition. Washington's resistance is misguided, and not simply for the unflattering optics of standing alone against such a defensible undertaking. The United States has less claim to international cooperation in managing threats to its own security–namely, safeguarding fissile material and policing terrorist activity–as long as it remains aloof from managing the security threats many other nations face.
If curtailing the arms trade is unachievable for the foreseeable future, its existence should nonetheless be stigmatized in symbolic ways. Nongovernmental organizations should apply to conventional arms sales the same moral censure that led to the global taboo on exporting antipersonnel landmines, and private individuals can divest themselves of stock in corporations that manufacture weapon systems. However, to have any legitimacy, such expressions of disapproval must extend beyond the usual activism of the pacifist left. Unless these efforts find purchase among moderate figures and institutions, the disarmament movement will remain in the catalogue of unserious pursuits.
That many responsible nations cling to defense postures of questionable necessity is, of course, their sovereign right. But the mere existence of these forces prevents the establishment of an international norm in which military spending over economic development, hunger prevention, and the treatment of disease is widely accepted as a foolish choice. The example set by future defense drawdowns of the United States and other major powers would make these states' already curious military inventories appear all the more unnecessary. Yet until these reductions are achieved, we should not hesitate to deride excessive military expenditures.
In his Prague speech calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama exhorted the world to “stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the twenty-first century.” 26 Far fewer people live today in fear of nuclear war than in terror of less sophisticated forms of conflict. If Obama is sincere, he will do more than devote his energies to abolishing a single tightly controlled class of weapons. Any disarmament effort worthy of the name will look to the much broader suite of arms we have devised and begin the process of ending what Adm. Hyman Rickover called “this whole nonsense of war.” 27
Footnotes
1.
3.
Kenneth N. Waltz, “Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” American Political Science Review, vol. 84, no. 3, September 1990.
5.
6.
8.
9.
Victor A. Utgoff, ed., The Coming Crisis: Nuclear Proliferation, U.S. Interests, and World Order (MIT Press: 2000), pp. 247-248. See also Proceedings, Defense Nuclear Agency Second Annual Conference on Controlling Arms, Richmond, Virginia, June 1993.
10.
11.
12.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16, 1953.
13.
15.
Tim Weiner, “Air Superiority at $258 Million a Pop; A Fighter in Search of an Adversary (Other Than the Bottom Line),” New York Times, October 27, 2004.
16.
19.
20.
21.
22.
Ibid.
25.
Ronald Reagan, Human Events, 1979.
27.
Hyman Rickover, “Economics of Defense Policy,” Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Congress, 2nd Session, 1982.