Nuclear Age Peace Foundation

Tag: Kenneth Waltz

  • 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.

  • Still Loving the Bomb After All These Years

    Still Loving the Bomb After All These Years

    Jonathan Tepperman’s article in the September 7, 2009 issue of Newsweek, “Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb,” provides a novel but frivolous argument that nuclear weapons “may not, in fact, make the world more dangerous….” Rather, in Tepperman’s world, “The bomb may actually make us safer.” Tepperman shares this world with Kenneth Waltz, a University of California professor emeritus of political science, who Tepperman describes as “the leading ‘nuclear optimist.’”

    Waltz expresses his optimism in this way: “We’ve now had 64 years of experience since Hiroshima. It’s striking and against all historical precedent that for that substantial period, there has not been any war among nuclear states.” Actually, there were a number of proxy wars between nuclear weapons states, such as those in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, and some near disasters, the most notable being the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Waltz’s logic is akin to observing a man falling from a high rise building, and noting that he had already fallen for 64 floors without anything bad happening to him, and concluding that so far it looked so good that others should try it. Dangerous logic!

    Tepperman builds upon Waltz’s logic, and concludes “that all states are rational,” even though their leaders may have a lot of bad qualities, including being “stupid, petty, venal, even evil….” He asks us to trust that rationality will always prevail when there is a risk of nuclear retaliation, because these weapons make “the costs of war obvious, inevitable, and unacceptable.” Actually, he is asking us to do more than trust in the rationality of leaders; he is asking us to gamble the future on this proposition. “The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling,” Tepperman argues, “it’s led to what’s known as the nuclear peace….” But if this is a peace worthy of the name, which it isn’t, it certainly is not one on which to risk the future of civilization. One irrational leader with control over a nuclear arsenal could start a nuclear conflagration, resulting in a global Hiroshima.

    Tepperman celebrates “the iron logic of deterrence,” but deterrence is a theory that is far from rooted in “iron logic.” It is a theory based upon threats that must be effectively communicated and believed. Leaders of Country A with nuclear weapons must communicate to other countries (B, C, etc.) the conditions under which A will retaliate with nuclear weapons. The leaders of the other countries must understand and believe the threat from Country A will, in fact, be carried out. The longer that nuclear weapons are not used, the more other countries may come to believe that they can challenge Country A with impunity from nuclear retaliation. The more that Country A bullies other countries, the greater the incentive for these countries to develop their own nuclear arsenals. Deterrence is unstable and therefore precarious.

    Most of the countries in the world reject the argument, made most prominently by Kenneth Waltz, that the spread of nuclear weapons makes the world safer. These countries joined together in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, but they never agreed to maintain indefinitely a system of nuclear apartheid in which some states possess nuclear weapons and others are prohibited from doing so. The principal bargain of the NPT requires the five NPT nuclear weapons states (US, Russia, UK, France and China) to engage in good faith negotiations for nuclear disarmament, and the International Court of Justice interpreted this to mean complete nuclear disarmament in all its aspects.

    Tepperman seems to be arguing that seeking to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons is bad policy, and that nuclear weapons, because of their threat, make efforts at non-proliferation unnecessary and even unwise. If some additional states, including Iran, developed nuclear arsenals, he concludes that wouldn’t be so bad “given the way that bombs tend to mellow behavior.” Those who oppose Tepperman’s favorable disposition toward the bomb, he refers to as “nuclear pessimists.” These would be the people, and I would certainly be one of them, who see nuclear weapons as presenting an urgent danger to our security, our species and our future.

    Tepperman finds that when viewed from his “nuclear optimist” perspective, “nuclear weapons start to seem a lot less frightening.” “Nuclear peace,” he tells us, “rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad – conventional war – won’t happen.” But the “extremely bad” thing he asks us to accept is the end of the human species. Yes, that would be serious. He also doesn’t make the case that in a world without nuclear weapons, the prospects of conventional war would increase dramatically. After all, it is only an unproven supposition that nuclear weapons have prevented wars, or would do so in the future. We have certainly come far too close to the precipice of catastrophic nuclear war.

    As an ultimate celebration of the faulty logic of deterrence, Tepperman calls for providing any nuclear weapons state with a “survivable second strike option.” Thus, he not only favors nuclear weapons, but finds the security of these weapons to trump human security. Presumably he would have President Obama providing new and secure nuclear weapons to North Korea, Pakistan and any other nuclear weapons states that come along so that they will feel secure enough not to use their weapons in a first-strike attack. Do we really want to bet the human future that Kim Jong-Il and his successors are more rational than Mr. Tepperman?

    David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org) and a Councilor on the World Future Council. To read the Hiroshima Peace Declaration, click here.