Asal & Beardsley Methodology Good

Nuclear weapons prevent and deescalate war.

Waltz 95

States coexist in a condition of anarchy. Self-help is the principle of action in an anarchic order, and the most important way in which states must help themselves is by providing for their own security. Therefore, in weighing the chances for peace, the first questions to ask are questions about the ends for which states use force and about the strategies and weapons they employ. The chances of peace rise if states can achieve their most important ends without using force. War becomes less likely as the costs of war rise in relation to possible gains, Strategies bring ends and means together. How nuclear weapons affect the chances for peace is seen by examining the different implications of defense and deterrence. How can one state dissuade another state from attacking? ln either or in some combination of two ways. One way to counter an intended attack is to build fortifications and to muster forces that look forbiddingly strong. To build defenses so patently strong that no one will try to destroy or overcome them would make international life perfectly tranquil. I call this the defensive ideal. The other way to counter an intended attack is to build retaliatory forces able to threaten unacceptable punishment upon a would-be aggressor. 'To deter" literally means to stop people from doing something by frightening them. ln contrast to dissuasion by defense, dissuasion by deterrence operates by frightening a state out of attacking, not because of the difficulty of launching an attack and carrying it home, but because the expected reaction of the opponent may result in one's own severe punishment. Defense and deterrence are often confused. One used to hear statements like this: "A strong defense in Europe will deter a Soviet attack." What was meant was that a strong defense would dissuade the Soviet Union from attacking. Deterrence is achieved not through the ability to defend but through the ability to punish. Purely deterrent forces provide no defense. The message of the strategy is this: "Although we are defenseless, if you attack we may punish you to an extent that more than cancels your gains." Secondstrike nuclear forces serve that kind of strategy. Purely defensive forces provide no deterrence. They offer no means of punishment, The message of the strategy is this: "Although we cannot strike back at you, you will find our defenses so difficult to overcome that you will dash yourself to pieces against them." 'Ihe Maginot Line was to serve that kind of strategy

Nuclear weapons are the best means of deterring conflict; the world before them was wrought with war

Forsyth et. al, 10 (James, B. Saltzman, Gary Schaub, “Remembrance of Things Past The Enduring Value of Nuclear Weapons,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, Forsyth: professor of strategy at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Saltzman: chief of the Air Force Strategic Plans and Policy Division, Schaub: assistant professor of strategy at the Air War College, JPL)

A key goal of any national security policy should be to enhance stability, where stability is defined as the absence of war or major crisis. Assuming the absence of a sudden change in the anarchic nature of the international system, any such policy should rely upon deterring potential aggressors at its base. Nuclear weapons enhance “general deterrence,” a concept defined by Patrick Morgan. “General deterrence relates to opponents who maintain armed forces to regulate their relationship even though neither is anywhere near mounting an attack” (emphasis in original).15 The goal of a general deterrent policy would be to ensure that incentives for aggression never outweigh the disincentives. In theory, nuclear weapons are better than conventional forces in terms of enhancing general deterrence. This is so because deterrence succeeds when the costs—or, more appropriately, the risks of costs—exceed any probable gains that are to be had through armed aggression. War has been such a common international phenomenon throughout the centuries because some decision makers have concluded that the benefits of aggression would outweigh its costs.16 Such a conclusion can be reached all the more easily when it is believed that victory on the battlefield can be attained quickly and decisively, and there are many historical examples from which decision makers can choose in order to bolster their confidence—from Bismarck’s wars against Denmark, the Austrian Empire, and France to Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait and its eviction by UN coalition forces. Injecting the possible use of nuclear weapons by the defending state into the equation, however, can alter these calculations considerably. The possession of a sizable nuclear arsenal by a defender, as well as the means to deliver these weapons to the battlefield or the aggressor’s homeland, makes the risks of aggression much greater and the potential costs much starker. This is because the possession of nuclear weapons tends to equalize the power of states, although not to the absolute degree that some would argue—attributes of national power such as geographic size, population, industrial capacity, GNP, and others still weigh heavily in any assessment of national power. Nonetheless, this equalizing tendency objectively manifests itself in two ways. On the battlefield, nuclear weapons can enhance the power of a smaller conventional force considerably. And in terms of absolute destructive power, only a finite amount of damage is necessary to destroy a modern state as a functioning entity.17 Provided that two states are capable of developing the means to reliably deliver at least “enough” nuclear weapons to their adversary’s homeland to “assure” its destruction, then, in a relative way, the two states can be considered equally powerful.

Prolif good -- creates stability through state survival and deters conventional and nuclear conflict through balancing.

Monteiro 11 - Nuno P., Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University (June 13, 2011, “BALANCING ACT WHY UNIPOLARITY MAY BE DURABLE,” http://www.nunomonteiro.org/wp-content/uploads/Nuno-Monteiro-Balancing-Act-20110613.pdf)

In a nuclear world, the primary end of states (survival) can be achieved through means (developing a nuclear arsenal) that require no push for a shift in the systemic balance of power. In fact, the pursuit of an overall (i.e., nuclear and conventional) balance of power between nuclear states for the purposes of guaranteeing state survival is futile at best and dangerous at worst. Since two nuclear states are unlikely to go to war with each other and, in any case, such a war would threaten the survival of both regardless of the conventional balance of power between them, further conventional balancing efforts between them would be futile. They could also be dangerous because the acquisition of conventional forces capable of being used against another nuclear state could be perceived by the latter as indicative of aggressive intentions, triggering preemptive action. This line of reasoning highlights the theoretical contradiction underlying mechanistic understandings of the formation of systemic balances of power. In Craig’s words, the balance-of-power logic “is based ultimately upon a great power’s readiness to wage major war.” 26 The logical steps entailed in this assertion are: states care about their survival, therefore they must be able credibly to threaten potential predators with high costs in case of a major war, and the only way of doing so is to balance until they possess as much or more power than any such potentially predatory state. In a nuclear world, however, no greatpower war is winnable. As Robert Jervis showed, survivable nuclear weapons make all-out great-power war unwinnable. 27 This means that major war in a nuclear world endangers a state’s existence, jeopardizing the initial premise -- a preeminent interest in state survival -- of the argument that led to balancing in the first place. Consequently, any threat of major war issued by a nuclear state against another nuclear state is itself a threat to the threatening state’s survival -- no less of a threat than any threat a predatory state might pose to its existence. In sum, as Craig points out, nuclear technology makes the ultima ratio of international politics -- the ability to wage major war rather than allow an adversary to threaten a state’s existence -- absurd. It is, as Bismarck would put it, suicide for fear of death. Furthermore, as Jervis has also argued, invulnerable nuclear arsenals make it very difficult to prevent any war between great powers from escalating into a total nuclear war. In my view, Jervis is right in eschewing the effects of the so-called “stability-instability paradox.” 28 As Jervis explains, the stability-instability paradox is less valid than usually argued because all-out war is the result of “a dynamic process in which both sides get more and more deeply involved, more and more expectant, more and more concerned not to be a slow second in case the war starts.” 29 For a nuclear war to remain limited, and therefore winnable, “one side must accept defeat while it still possesses the military capability to destroy its opponents easily.” 30 This violates proposition (1) -- the only that remains unaltered in my revised logic of balancing -- that states care first and foremost about their own survival. Nuclear weapons therefore give paramount practical import to the distinction Nexon established between theories of balancing and balance-of-power theories. For him, the extant literature often conflates the two, despite their lack of logical coherence. As Nexon sees it, and I concur, theories that explain the conditions that lead states to adopt a strategy of balancing and the ways in which they implement such a strategy (i.e., theories of balancing) are logically independent from theories that explain the formation of systemic balance of power (i.e., balance-of-power theories). 31 In his own words, “[e]ven theories that posit the ubiquity of balancing strategies need not imply that these strategies aggregate into systemic power balances.” 32 Such is the case with the theory laid out in this article. Balancing may be a common strategy of states and still the international system as a whole might be persistently out of balance. Nuclear weapons bring this disjunction into bold relief. Craig pointed in this direction in his Glimmer of a New Leviathan. His work attempts to update realist thinking for the nuclear age. Rather than proclaiming that nuclear weapons have made the nation-state obsolete 33 , Craig argues that, faced with the omnicidal potential of thermonuclear weapons, realists were led “to glimpse -- not to design, to glimpse -- a new, that is, unforeseen, political process whereby a condition of anarchy evolves into a new Leviathan: a world state that comes into being merely because of the prospect of a nuclear war of all against all.” 34 My view is that Niebuhr and Morgenthau, the realists who, to use Craig’s phrase, glimpsed this new leviathan, got it wrong. Nuclear weapons do indeed provide the “glimmer of a new leviathan,” but this leviathan does not come in the form of a world state. Rather, it comes in a transformation of the structure of the international system that attenuates the impact of anarchy in the affairs of great (and major) powers. Specifically, nuclear weapons guarantee that no state that values first and foremost its own survival will threaten the survival of a nuclear state. Rather than producing the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a global state, nuclear weapons, then, attenuate the conditions that, from the point of view of state survival, led to the prescription of a global state as the solution. Nuclear weapons are therefore an element of the structure of (international) politics that increase the odds of peace (at least among the nuclear states). They are, in this sense, the new leviathan: the (granted, partial) solution to the problems created by international anarchy. 3 More problematic, though, is what Craig’s argument means for the structural balance-of power theory of Kenneth Waltz. Craig’s work illuminates the tension between Waltz’s 1979 and 1981 works. In the former, his Theory of International Politics, Waltz lays out how the ever present ultima ratio of international politics -- the specter of total war -- leads to the recurrence of balances of power. 36 Wars among great powers are unlikely, yet they are made possible by the anarchical system. In the latter, his argument in “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: Why More May Be Better,” Waltz makes the case for how the spread of nuclear weapons, with their insurmountable defensive advantage, would have a pacifying effect on the international system. 37 Wars among great powers become all but impossible, despite the anarchical international system. Craig is cognizant of the devastating effect of this latter argument on Waltz’s earlier theory: The spread of nuclear weapons would create defensive, conservative, and secure states, assured of their long-term survival and mindful of the extreme risks associated with aggression and conquest. International politics could thereby approach the ‘defensive ideal’: a condition in which anarchy is not eliminated but rather adapted to by defensive-minded states so thoroughly as to make offensive wars exceedingly irrational and hence extremely unlikely. 38 Interestingly for the issue at hand, Waltz’s argument on the benefits of the spread of nuclear weapons can also serve as an adjudicator between the two factors Waltz pointed to as pillars of “bipolar stability” -- bipolarity and nuclear weapons. If one takes his argument on nuclear weapons seriously, it appears that nuclear weapons, not bipolarity, were doing most of the work in the so-called “bipolar stability” era. 39 As Craig notes, in a world of secure nuclear states, “bipolarity, multipolarity -- any kind of balance of power -- would become much less important.” 4

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