Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: international relations

  • Why Waltz is Wrong

    David KriegerThe lead article in the July/August 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs is titled “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb.”  The author, Kenneth Waltz, a former president of the American Political Science Association, argues that the world should stop worrying about Iran getting the bomb.  He sums up his basic argument this way: “If Iran goes nuclear, Israel and Iran will deter each other, as nuclear powers always have.  There has never been a full-scale war between two nuclear-armed states.  Once Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively small.”


    In essence, Waltz puts his faith in nuclear deterrence and justifies this in historical terms.  But the history is short and there have been many close calls.  During the 67-year period since the dawn of the Nuclear Age there have been numerous accidents, miscalculations and threats to use nuclear weapons.  Fifty years ago, the US and Soviet Union stood at the precipice of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Waltz’s faith in nuclear deterrence reflects a belief in rationality, a belief that all leaders will behave rationally at all times, including under conditions of extreme stress.  This defies our understanding of human behavior and the ever-present potential for human fallibility. 


    Another way to view the historical data from which Waltz finds comfort is by an analogy of a man jumping off a hundred-story building.  As he passes floor after floor, he wonders why people on the ground are showing concern for his well-being.  He ignores the approaching ground and focuses his attention on the fact that nothing bad has happened to him yet.  In Waltz’s theory of nuclear deterrence, there is no hard ground below, nor gravity acting upon the jumper.  He argues that “history has shown that where nuclear capabilities emerge, so, too, does stability.  When it comes to nuclear weapons, now as ever, more may be better.”  While having more may be better, it may also be far worse. 


    Martin Hellman, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University and an expert in risk analysis, argues that a child born today has a ten percent or greater chance of having his or her life cut short by nuclear war.  Unlike Waltz’s analysis, risk analysis takes into account the odds of an event occurring and doesn’t base its analysis of the future simply on what the historical record shows at a given point in time.  Ten coin flips may produce ten straight “heads,” but it would be unwise to assume that the results between heads and tails would not even out over time.  With nuclear weapons, the consequences of being wrong in one’s projections are, of course, far more dire than with coin tosses.


    Another analogy that has been used to describe the standoff between nuclear-armed powers, particularly the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War, was of two men standing up to their waists in the same pool of gasoline and each man being ready to strike an unlit match.  If either man struck the match, both men would be consumed by the fire that would result.  With nuclear weapons, the conflagration would not stop at the two men – it would include their families, their communities, their countries and the world. 


    Waltz makes the bet that no leader of a nuclear weapon state will ever strike the match or allow the match to fall into hands that will strike it.  It is a foolish bet to make.  The two men, and the rest of us, would be far safer if the gasoline were drained from the pool.  In the same way, the world would be much safer if nuclear weapons were abolished, rather than shared in the hope they would enhance security in the Middle East or elsewhere.


    Waltz may believe that it is precisely the threat of conflagration that keeps the men from striking the matches.  For many, even most, men he may be correct, but the fact is that neither Waltz nor anyone else can predict human behavior under all conditions.  There may be some leaders in some circumstances for whom striking the match would seem rational.  In addition, even if neither man were to strike a match, lightning may strike the pool of gasoline or other sparks may ignite the pool from unforeseen causes.  Instances of accidents, madness and human fallibility abound.


    Nuclear weapons have brought humankind to the precipice.  These weapons threaten cities, countries, civilization and complex life on the planet.  It is the responsibility of those of us alive on the planet now to abolish these weapons of mass annihilation, not justify their spread, as Waltz would have us do.

  • Kenneth Waltz is not Crazy, but he is Dangerous: Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East

    Richard FalkIt seems surprising that the ultra-establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, would go to the extreme of publishing a lead article by the noted political scientist, Kenneth Waltz, with the title “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb” in its current issue. It is more the reasoning of the article than the eye-catching title that flies in the face of the anti-proliferation ethos that has been the consensus lynchpin of nuclear weapons states, and especially the United States. At the same time, Waltz takes pain to avoid disavowing his mainstream political identity. He echoes without pausing to reflect upon the evidence undergirding the rather wobbly escalating assumption that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons at this time. Waltz does acknowledge that Iran might be only trying to have a ‘breakout’ capability of the sort long possessed by Japan and several other countries, that is, the technological capacity if facing a national emergency to assemble a few bombs in a matter of months. Nowhere does Waltz allude to the recently publicized agreement among the 14 American intelligence agencies that there is no evidence that Iran has decided to resume its military program that had been reportedly abandoned in 2003. In other ways, as well, Waltz signals his general support for the American approach to Israeli security other than in relation to nuclear weapons, and so, it should be clear, Waltz is not a political dissenter, a policy radical, nor even a critic of Israel’s role in the region.


    Waltz’s Three Options


    Waltz insists that aside from the breakout option, there are two other plausible scenarios worth considering: sanctions and coercive diplomacy to induce Iran “to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons,” which he deems unlikely to overcome a genuine appetite for the bomb, or Iran defies the pressures and acquires nuclear weapons, which he regards as the most desirable of the three options. It seems reasonable to wonder ‘why.’ In essence, Waltz is arguing that experience and logic demonstrate that the relations among states become more stable, less war-prone, when a balance is maintained, and that there is no reason to think that if Iran acquired nuclear weapons it would not behave in accordance with the deterrence regime that has discouraged all uses of nuclear weapons ever since 1945, and especially during the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this regard, Waltz is expressing what I regard to be a wildly exaggerated faith in the rationality and prudence of leaders who make decisions on matters of war and peace.


    He does make a contextual argument that I mostly agree with, namely, that Israel alone possessing a regional nuclear monopoly is more dangerous and undesirable than Iran becoming a second nuclear weapons state in the region. In effect, a regional nuclear monopolist is worse than a regional system of balance that incorporates deterrence logic. For Israel to be deterred would contribute to peace and security in the region, and this seems likely to reduce somewhat, although at a level of risk far short of zero, the prospect of any use of nuclear weapons and other forms of aggression in the Middle East. But to say that A (Iran gets the bomb) is better than B (breakout capability but no bomb) and C (sanctions and coercive diplomacy induce Iran to forego bomb) is to forget about D, which is far better than A, B, and C in relation to sustainable stability, but also because it represents an implicit acknowledgement that the very idea of basing security upon the threat to annihilate hundreds of thousand, if not more, innocent persons is a moral abomination that has already implicated the nuclear weapons states in a security policy, which if ever tested by threat and use, would be genocidal, if not omnicidal, and certainly criminal. This anti-nuclear posture was substantially endorsed by a majority of judges in a groundbreaking Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on 8 July 1996, although these strong findings as to international law were, not surprisingly, cast aside and ignored by the nuclear weapons states, most defiantly by the United States.


    The Case for Option D


    What then is Option D? Option D would involve the negotiation and implementation of a nuclear weapons free zone throughout the Middle East (MENFZ), reinforced by non-aggression commitments, normalization of economic and political relations, and ideally accompanied by genuine progress toward a just and sustainable Palestine/Israel peace accord. Significantly, Waltz does not even pause to consider it as in all likelihood he regards such an approach as completely inconsistent with the hard power realities of global diplomacy, making it foolish and irrelevant to take the possibility of a MENFZ seriously. Needless to say, D is also not in the Netanyahu playbook, and quite likely no future Israeli leader will be prepared to give up the nuclear weapons arsenal that Israel has been consistently acquiring and developing over the last four decades. And it seems fair to conjecture that anyone who proposes a MENFZ would be at odds with the realist camp in international relations, and such a piece would almost certainly be rejected by the editors of Foreign Affairs, among the most ardent guardians of the realist status quo.


    Waltz’s preference for A, favoring an Iranian bomb, is an extension of his long-standing belief that proliferation as actually desirable based on a view of global security that depends on sustaining power balances. In my judgment this carries confidence in the logic of deterrence (that is, the rationality of not using the bomb because of a fear of nuclear retaliation) to absurd degrees that go well beyond even the extreme rationality relied upon by the most influential war thinkers during the Cold War era. In this sense, Waltz is correct to equate the Middle East with the rest of the world, and not engage in the widespread practice of ethno-religious profiling: that is, Israel’s bomb is okay because it is a rational and ‘Western,’ while Iran’s bomb would be a world order disaster as it is irrational and governed by Islamic zealots that have declared their implacable hostility to Israel. If such distinctions are to be made, which is doubtful, it should be appreciated that Israel is the antagonist that has been threatening war and pushing for coercive diplomacy, while it is Iran that has so far peacefully tolerated a variety of severe provocations, acts of war, such as the assassination of several of its nuclear scientists, the infecting of its enrichment centrifuges with the Stuxnet virus, and verified violent covert acts designed to destabilize the Tehran regime. Had such incidents been reversed, it is more than 100% likely that Israel would have immediately gone to war against Iran, quite likely setting the entire region on fire.


    Objections to Option A


    My basic objection to the Waltz position is a disagreement with two of his guiding assumptions: first, with respect to the region, that other countries would not follow Iran across the nuclear threshold, an assessment he bases largely on their failure to acquire nuclear weapons in response to Israel’s acquisition of the capability. Surely Saudi Arabia and Turkey would not, for reasons of international status and perceived security, want to be non-nuclear states in a neighborhood in which both Israel and Iran had the bomb. Such an expansion of the regional nuclear club would become more prone to accident, miscalculation, and the sort of social and political pathology that makes nuclear weaponry generally unfit for human use in a conflict, whatever the region or occasion. In this respect, the more governments possess the bomb, the more likely it becomes that one of those horrible scenarios about a nuclear war will become history.


    And secondly, Waltz does not single out nuclear weapons for condemnation on either ethical or prudential grounds. In fact, he seems to hold the view that we can be thankful for the bomb as otherwise the Cold War would likely have resulted in a catastrophic World War III. In my view to have sought the bomb and then used it against the helpless Japanese at the end of World War II was certainly one of the worst instances of Promethean excess in human history, angering not only the gods but exhibiting a scary species death wish. Leaders have acknowledged this moral truth from time to time, most recently by Barack Obama in his 2009 Prague speech calling for a world without nuclear weapons, but politicians, including Obama, seem unable and unwilling to take the heat that following through would certainly entail. In the end, anti-nuclearism for leaders seems mainly an exercise in rhetoric, apparently persuasive in Norway where the Nobel Prize committee annually ponders the credentials of candidates, but without any behavioral consequences relating to the weaponry itself.  To be sure nuclear policies are challenged from time to time by a surge of anti-nuclear populism. In this regard, to favor the acquisition of the bomb by any government or political organization is to embrace the nuclearist fallacy relating to security and the absurd hubris of presupposing an impeccable rationality over long stretches of time, which has never been the case in human affairs.


    The secrecy surrounding policy bearing on nuclear weapons, especially the occasions of their possible use, also injects an absolutist virus into the vital organs of a democratic body politic. There is no participation by the people or even their representatives in relation to this most ultimate of political decisions, vesting in a single person, and perhaps including his most intimate advisors, a demonic capability to unleash such a catastrophic capability. We now know that even beyond the devastation and radiation, the smoke released by the use of as few as 50 nuclear bombs would generate so much smoke as to block sunlight from the earth for as long as a decade, dooming much of the agriculture throughout the world, a dynamic that has been called ‘a nuclear famine.’ As disturbing as such a possibility should be to those responsible for the security of society, there is little evidence that such a realization of the secondary effects of nuclear explosions is even present in political consciousness. And certainly the citizenry is largely ignorant of such a dark eventuality bound up with the retention of nuclear weapons.


    It is for these reasons that I would call Kenneth Waltz dangerous, not crazy. Indeed, it is his extreme kind of instrumental rationality that is dominant in many influential venues, and helps explain the development, possession, and apparent readiness to use nuclear weapons under certain conditions despite the risks and the immorality of the undertaking. If human society is ever to be again relatively safe, secure, and morally coherent, a first step is to renounce nuclear weapons unconditionally and proceed with urgency by way of an agreed, phased, monitored, and verified international agreement to ensure their elimination from the face of the earth. It is not only that deterrence depends on perfect rationality over time and across space, it is also that the doctrine and practices of deterrence amounts to a continuing crime against humanity of unprecedented magnitude and clarity!   

  • It’s Still the Same Old Story – From Guns to Nukes

    Lawrence WittnerThe discussion of the Tucson tragedy should be familiar, as we witness similar massacres in U.S. schools, shopping centers, and other public places played out periodically.  Each time, the NRA and other gun apologists tell us that the easy accessibility of firearms, including assault weapons, had nothing to do with it.  Indeed, they argue that the key to our safety is to obtain more guns.


    But does the fact that nearly 100,000 Americans are shot with guns and nearly 10,000 Americans are killed with them each year really have no connection to the remarkable availability of guns in the United States?


    A great deal of evidence suggests otherwise.  For example, according to a recent study, when twenty-three populous, high-income countries were compared for the year 2003, it was found that, among civilians, the United States had more firearms and more handguns per capita than the other countries, as well as the most permissive gun control laws.  Not surprisingly, the firearm homicide rate in the United States was 19.5 times higher than in the other countries.  The U.S. unintentional firearm death rate was 5.2 times higher.


    Although this death toll is bad enough, consider also the fact that the same dynamics operate in international relations.  No nation in recent decades has rivaled the military might of the United States.  Indeed, the U.S. government spends nearly as much on its military forces as the rest of the world combined—presumably, to keep Americans safe.  But are they safe?  Not long ago, the greatest terrorist attack in history occurred in the United States, and more are constantly threatened.  Meanwhile, U.S. military forces have been dying or coming home crippled from two very bloody, seemingly endless wars.  Could a key reason for this disastrous situation be that brandishing more and more weapons not only fails to protect us, but actually pulls us into a deadly cycle of violence?


    Of course, the safety through weapons theory is particularly dangerous when it comes to nuclear weapons.  Like the NRA, nuclear zealots assure us that massive nuclear arsenals will make us safer.  Thus, as the price for approving the recent New START Treaty, they demanded—and received—a hefty payoff:  a commitment from the Obama administration for $180 billion in funding over the next decade for “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex and the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  But this kind of nuclear buildup encourages nuclear nations to do the same thing and helps convince non-nuclear nations to develop their own nuclear arms.  Aren’t we supposed to be working for a world free of nuclear weapons?


    Certainly, that would be a good idea.  The more nuclear weapons that are available, the more likely it is that terrorists will acquire and use them, that embattled governments will employ them in their wars, and that they will be fired or exploded accidentally.  We have had some close scrapes along these lines in recent years.  These include terrorist nuclear plots, nations drawn to the brink of nuclear war, and the collision of nuclear submarines.  Disarmament activists are sometimes accused of naïveté.  But isn’t it far more naive to assume that, in an angry world bristling with nuclear weapons, they will never be used?


    And so we are brought back to the mass murder in Tucson and the question:  Are we safer with more firepower or less?  Despite the propaganda of the gunslingers, the arms manufacturers, and the military enthusiasts, it does seem that the world would be a lot safer with fewer guns and fewer nuclear weapons.