Prolif good – War

Bad c and c makes prolif a war risk.

The book opens with an assessment of the "optimist" and "pessimist" interpretations of nuclear proliferation. Essentially, the optimist perspective iterates that nuclear proliferation can be a positive force for international stability, predicated on the idea that states with nuclear arms will be more reluctant to engage in conventional conflicts for fear of escalation. The pessimist perspective asserts a contrary position predicated on a lack of credible evidence supporting the optimist standpoint. Busch offers examples--primarily that of India and Pakistan, two nuclear powers--who have engaged in several conventional engagements, undermining the optimist interpretation. Busch asserts, through case studies of the overt nuclear powers (e.g. the U.S., Russia, China, India, and Pakistan; omitting the UK and France for their assumed similarity to the U.S., and Israel, based on the ultra-secretive nature of their nuclear weapons program), that the optimist interpretation of nuclear proliferation is fundamentally fallacious. One of the cornerstones of this argument is that the U.S., assumed to be the most stable of the nuclear powers, has faced a number of near-crises throughout its period of nuclear weapons possession. The author also examines nuclear proliferation in the "newly proliferating states" of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. He also offers some theories on the assumed development of nuclear weapons programs in those states. The author strings together his arguments cogently and effectively. Based on the idea that even the U.S. has had problems with command and control, he maintains that less stable polities would have even more troubles. This becomes most obvious in his case study of Russia's travails with the other former Soviet republics and their legacy of nuclear weapons. Additionally, Busch maintains that a newly proliferating state may be the most unstable for the purposes of nuclear command and control and materiel security.

AT Nuclear Irrelevancy

Nuclear irrelevancy doesn’t accurately depict the world

Cimbala 96 – Professor of Political Science at Pennsylvania State University, author of books and articles in professional journals on topics related to national security, he has served as a consultant on arms control to the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, US Department of State, and private defense contractors (Stephen J., Armed Forces & Society, “Proliferation and peace: An agnostic view,” vol. 22, issue 1, , 1996, http://dl2af5jf3e.search.serialssolutions.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF-8&rfr_id=info:sid/summon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Proliferation+and+peace%3A+An+agnostic+view&rft.jtitle=ARMED+FORCES+%26+SOCIETY&rft.au=Cimbala%2C+SJ&rft.date=1996-02-01&rft.pub=TRANSACTION+PERIOD+CONSORTIUM&rft.issn=0095-327X&rft.volume=22&rft.issue=2&rft.spage=211&rft.epage=211&rft.externalDBID=GARM&rft.externalDocID=9302139 /mr)

Nuclear Irrelevancy A second school of thought argues that nuclear weapons were really unnecessary for Cold War stability. One can formulate this argument in harder or softer terms. The harder version is that nuclear weapons were irrelevant subjectively as well as objectively: not only did they have no real impact on the likelihood of major war, but, in addition, leaders had little regard for the role of nuclear weapons in preserving stable deterrence. The softer form of the argument would contend that leaders did pay attention to nuclear weapons and spend a great deal of time with nuclear planning, but that all of this was potlatch, not really necessary for a basically stable relationship between the U.S. and NATO, on one side, and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, on the other. Representative of the softer form of the argument, and of the less polemical, is John Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War.(25) Mueller's book really asserts two very different theses. The first is that large-scale, interstate wars had already become obsolete by the turn of the twentieth century. Leaders, having failed to recognize this, plunged foolishly into World War I and paid an unexpectedly drastic price. After World War 1, most European political and military leaders, intellectuals, and publics recognized the dysfunctional character of major war. The world was on a linear path toward the absence of great coalition wars, lining up numbers of major powers on each side. This path toward peaceful progress was interrupted by the unexpected dedication of the German and Japanese regimes in the 1930s to achieving their objectives by conquest. After World War II, in a very new international system, the major powers resumed their linear progression toward the obsolescence of war. Like dueling and slavery, war was simply becoming an idea whose time had run out. The growing obsolescence of major interstate war is related to Mueller's second argument: that nuclear weapons had little to do with Cold War stability. If the first argument by Mueller is largely true, then the second argument can rest in part on a substructure provided by the first: obsolescence of war supports nuclear irrelevancy. The U.S., the Soviet Union, and their major allies had had enough of fighting as a result of World War II. The possibility of a World War III fought, even without nuclear weapons, would have been sufficiently discouraging. Mueller contends that U.S. industrial and economic superiority would have guaranteed victory in a global war waged without nuclear weapons: America could have mobilized for victory and overwhelmed any adversary with military production after World War II, as it did between 1941 and 1945. U.S. mobilization potential and economic capacity were the great deterrent against Soviet adventurism, according to Mueller, not nuclear weapons. Mueller's case for nuclear irrelevancy during the Cold War is supported by Robert S. McNamara, former U.S. Secretary of Defense. McNamara is something of a pardox. As Secretary of Defense he played an essential part in developing U.S. nuclear strategy and force structure, which remained influential to the very end of the Cold War.(26) In February 1963 McNamara testified before a Congressional committee that Khrushchev was forced to back down: Khrushchev "knew without any question whatsoever that he faced the full military power of the United tates, including its nuclear weapons," that U.S. officials had faced "the possibility of launching nuclear weapons and Khrushchev Knew it, and that is the reason, and the only reason, why he withdrew those weapons."(27) McNamara's reflections out of office, on the other hand, run decidedly against the political or military significance of nuclear weapons. Writing in the 1980s, McNamara argued that nuclear weapons "serve no military purpose whatsoever. They are totally useless--except only to deter one's opponent from using them."(28) Reconsidering the U.S. experience in the Cuban missile crisis in 1987, McNamara reaffirmed that "all those fancy nuclear weapons are militarily useless. You can't use them (Original emphasis)."(29) Note that this position is different from the position taken by some nuclear positivists and agnostics, that nuclear superiority is military or politically useless. McNamara would doubtless agree about the futility of nuclear superiority, but his position goes beyond that. Mueller is correct to argue that the Soviet Union and its allies would have been disadvantaged in any global conventional war, compared to the U.S. and its allies. U.S. economic and industrial strength, especially in the first two decades following the end of the World War II, must have seemed very imposing to Soviet leaders. In addition, to the extent that they took their Marxism seriously, Soviet leaders would have believed that military superiority flows from ecomomic poteneial. Therefore, any war against the capitalist west would make long odds for Moscow.(30) However, it does not follow that, if the requirements for deterring the Soviet Union from deliberate attack on NATO could have been met without nuclear weapons, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the prevention of war in Europe obtained. More than deterrence of the Soviet Union from any deliberate aggression that it might have contemplated was involved in maintaining Cold War European stability. The Soviet Union also had to be persuaded that NATO was "deterred." The very statement that NATO required deterring struck Western military experts as oxymoronic during the Cold War years: it was self-evident to them that the U.S. and NATO would never launch an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union. But it was not self-evident to Moscow: what seemed like an unprovoked or unjustified attack to the Soviet leadership might differ from what was defined as an unprovoked attack in Washington, Bonn, or Brussels. Given the large nuclear and conventional weapons arsenals and numbers of troops deployed in Europe by adverse military blocs poised for war, the major risk was not deliberate but inadvertent war.(31) Incidents growing out of border clashes or other apparently minor skirmishes between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces might have escalated into major confrontations between the Cold War superpowers. Recall that nuclear deterrence theorists touted their logic of manipulation of an unknown, but significant, risk of war as a principal component of deterrence. Testimony to this theory as put into practice by NATO was NATO's forward deployment of U.S. and other short range, or tactical, nuclear forces throughout the European theater of operations. These weapons would either be overrun by enemy forces very early or commanders would demand early release from NATO authorities, raising the likelihood of nuclear first use into a near certainty. Tactical nuclear weapons were capable of igniting a series of actionreaction sequences over which the combatants would rapidly lose centralized political and military control. Many wars, not one, would be going on at once: a NATO military command and control system cut into pieces of uneven size and complexity would be reacting to a Soviet system similarly disaggregated and confused. Stopping this kind of war would not necessarily be impossible, but it would be about as difficult an undertaking as theorists of war termination had ever imagined. There was very little likelihood that, had war broken out in Europe at any time between the latter 1950s and the mid-1980s, NATO could have used most of its short range nuclear forces in a controlled and purposive way.(32) The preceding paragraph strengthens Mueller's argument to the extent that it supports the political absurdity of nuclear war fighting doctrines. However, it reminds us that deliberate war was probably not the major risk to stability in post-World War II Europe. The war machines created by the two alliances turned into military museums overstuffed with useless furniture, including superfluous arms and vulnerable command and control systems. These war machines were designed for threatening one another, but in the event of actual war they could not have kept the level of violence proportionate to any meaningful political objective. Even throwing away nuclear weapons would have left NATO and the Warsaw Pact with military pterodactyls: forces larger than necessary for any politically acceptable mission, but forces with sufficient size and putative capability to create serious fears on both sides that the other side might launch a surprise attack. Bernard Brodie's claim about nuclear weapons in 1946, that from the time of their invention, the strategy involving them would mainly be dedicated to the avoidance of major war, was prescient. It also had an ironical destination in Cold War U.S. and Soviet armed forces and military doctrines. The skillful nonuse of military forces turned deterrence into an all encompassing substitute for military preparedness, for usable war fighting skills, and, especially in the U.S. case, for foreign policy in general. Deterrence became the tapeworm which swallowed the host. Forces and doctrines justified in the name of deterrence of Moscow were often perceived by the Soviets as strategic compellents. Instead of viewing U.S. forces and doctrines as defensively motivated policies of the status quo, Soviet leaders from the 1960s through the 1980s interpreted U.S. force modernizations and policy pronouncements as American efforts to force Moscow into military and political retreat.(33)

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