10nfl1-Nukes-Cover
NUCLEAR ACQUISITION PREVENTS CONFLICT AMONGST
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| NUCLEAR ACQUISITION PREVENTS CONFLICT AMONGST PROLIFERATING NATIONS (Todd Sechser, Dept of Politics @ UVA, 2009 (Should The United States or the International Community Aggressively Pursue Nuclear Nonproliferation Policies No. In Haas et al Controversies in Globalization Contending Approaches to International Relations, CQ Press, http://faculty.virginia.edu/tsechser/Sechser-Haas-2009.pdf) The optimist camps first and most important claim is that the presence of nuclear weapons suppresses international conflicts. Nuclear weapons, in this view, differ from conventional military tools in two central ways. First, nuclear weapons carry enormous destructive power. Whereas the targets of conventional weapons necessarily tend to be small in size (for instance, an airfield, communications center, or ammunition depot, the most powerful nuclear weapons can place entire cities at risk. The use of even a few nuclear weapons could destroy hundreds of thousands if not millions) of human lives in a short span of time. Second, defenders have little control over the level of destruction they endure during a nuclear conflict. Without a reliable means to destroy incoming ballistic missiles or to shield cities from nuclear attack neither of which exists today— nuclear combatants must rely on an enemyʼs restraint to limit the amount of damage they suffer. These two characteristics—colossal destructive capacity and the lack of an effective defense combine to induce caution among leaders facing the prospect of nuclear retaliation. Leaders will behave less aggressively and will more eagerly seek peaceful solutions to crises, the logic goes, since they do not want to endure even a small risk that a conventional war might become nuclear. These propositions can be evaluated empirically by comparing the rates at which proliferators have participated in interstate conflicts both before and after their acquisition of nuclear weapons. If the optimists are correct, nuclear states should experience fewer conflicts after they acquire nuclear weapons. One way to measure the turbulence of a states foreign affairs is to calculate its participation in militarized interstate disputes, defined here as conflicts involving at least one military fatality. Figure 1 considers five proliferators and charts how much their involvement in military conflicts changed after they became nuclear states. Israel, for instance, participated in an average of 1.21 conflicts per year as a nonnuclear state, but entered into only 0.33 conflicts per year after becoming a nuclear state in 1972, so its bar in figure 1 drops below zero to illustrate that Israel has been involved in fewer interstate conflicts since acquiring nuclear weapons. Optimists predict that states will participate in fewer conflicts after going nuclear, since they expect nuclear weapons to deter aggression and dissuade opposing leaders from escalating crises. And indeed, four of the five states examined here participated in fewer interstate conflicts, on average, once they became nuclear states. For example, Israel fought four interstate wars against its neighbors before acquiring nuclear weapons, but just two afterward. India and Pakistan have gone to war against one another four times since achieving independence, but only one of those wars occurred after the two rivals acquired nuclear weapons. Indeed, India and Pakistan saw the average incidence of militarized disputes between them decline by half(from 0.55 disputes per year to 0.27) once both states had acquired nuclear weapons. Only South Africa experienced an increase in its conflict participation rate after achieving nuclear status, although the magnitude of this change (+0.06) was the smallest of the five proliferators considered here. These data tell us that proliferation optimists are right to expect a decline in the frequency of interstate wars as more states acquire nuclear weapons. 10NFL1-Nuclear Weapons Page 143 of 199 www.victorybriefs.com Download 1.23 Mb. Share with your friends:
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