AT Cold War Proves Deterrence Solves

AT Cold War Proves Deterrence Solves

Finally, an increase in the number of nuclear weapon states raises the issue of stability. Some argue that the spread of nuclear weapons is destabilizing, whileothers argue that it can have stabilizing effects (Knopf 2002; Sagan and WaltzI995). Based largely on deductive reasoning and extrapolating behavior from the Cold War or discarding that experience altogether, the stability-instability debate is unlikely to be resolved. Nevertheless, it draws attention to the possible implica-tions of the spread of nuclear weapons to more states. Although proliferation and stability were also concerns during the Cold War, the present situation is deemed to be different because of the close proximity of the new nuclear weapon states and the intractable conflicts between them (India—Pakistan and Israel-Iran), the totalitarian or theocratic nature and/or fragility of regimes (North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan), their irrational and “roguish” behavior (North Korea, Iran, andPakistan), and because of safety concerns (Buchan et al. 2003: 22-23). The United States and the Soviet Union did not share a politically significant boundary, and their heartlands were separated by thousands of miles, allowing space and time for response in crisis situations. Although China and Russia, and China and India, border each other, their heartlands are also relatively far apart. In other dyads (India-Pakistan, Israel-Iran, North Korea-_]apan, and North Korea-China), how- ever, Asian nuclear powers are neighbors or very close to each other with very short missile flight times between major cities. In nearly every case, political boundaries are sensitive and disputed, or there is a high degree of mistrust and conflict. Some of these states are also fragile, with the potential for regime col- lapse and change. All these considerations have implications for force posture, force security, and crisis stability. The spread of nuclear weapons to more states,along with the multiplicity of threats, also necessitate thinking about nuclearstrategy, and especially deterrence, as a complex multisided enterprise rather thanin the more familiar bilateral mode.

Waltz's argument is overly influenced by the experience of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. He implicitly takes that experience and intellectually overlays it on geopolitics after the Wold War. Those elements that lent stability to the cold war bipolar distribution of power are lacking or missing in contemporary regional competitions for power, contrary to the premise held in Waltz's argument of the stabilizing effects of nuclear weapons spread. As a broad observation, the Soviet Union and the United States did not have clashes of national interest of a magnitude sufficient to warrant a full-scale war between the superpowers. As George Kennan remarked of the Cold War, there were 'no political issues between the Soviet Union and the United States which could conceivably be susceptible of solution by war, even if the state of weaponry had not made any major military conflict between the two powers ~nthinkabl e ' .~' That is certainly not the case in the contemporary security environment in the Middle East and South Asia.

A unique set of circumstances contributed to the stability that characterized the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, but regional rivalries in contemporary and future international relations are unlikely to be as stable. As Eliot Cohen wisely judges: It would be a terrible mistake to think that the elaborate and arid logic of nuclear deterrence that operated between the superpowers will continue to hold elsewhere. The U.S.-Soviet confrontation took place between a stable, pacific, and contented democracy and a highly rational, cautious dictatorship that found nothing inherently shameful a about retreating in the face of superior force. It was, in many ways, an ideal opposition, and one highly unlikely to be repeated.30 Despite a rivalry beset by folly and crises, Soviet and American statesmen were able to keep the superpower relationship within bounds short of war. These fortuitous circumstances, however, are not directly analogous to contemporary security dilemmas in the Middle East and South Asia.

Deterrence theory failed in the Cold War and will continue to fail – incites war

Beebe and Kaldor 10 (Shannon, Adjunct Professor, George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs, and Mary, British academic, currently Professor of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, where she is also the Director of its Centre for the Study of Global Governance, “The Ultimate Weapon is no Weapon”, 2010, Perseus Book Group, Print)

The main argument for continuing to possess nuclear weapons is deterrence. That, after all, was the basis of the case for accumulating large numbers of nuclear weapons during the Cold War; they were supposed to deter an attack, whether conventional or unconventional, by the Soviet Union against the democracies of the West. But did they? It is often argued that deterrence kept the peace during the Cold War. Quite apart from the fact that there were many wars during this period outside of Western Europe and North America, the problem with this argument is that it can only be disproved, not proved. Had the Soviet Union attacked the West, then we would know that deterrence does not work. But we do not know whether the Soviet Union would have attacked the West had the West not possessed nuclear weapons. What we do know is that the arms race kept alive the idea of war – it was not peace but “imaginary war” that was experienced in Europe during the Cold War. Indeed, the arcane arguments about strategic, sub-strategic, and tactical weapons were all about how nuclear weapons might be used in the scenarios dreamed up by military planners. The term arms control has to be understood in the context of deterrence. It was about keeping alive the idea of war while minimizing the risks of such a war becoming real. Hence, arms control was directed against so-called defensive weapons and against sub-strategic or tactical weapons that were thought to be “usable,” while preserving the capacity for “mutually assured destruction.” Since the end of the Cold War, we have plenty of proof that deterrence does not work. The American possession of nuclear weapons did not deter the 9/11 bombers – they inflicted mass destruction even if they did not use what are formally defined as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) – nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons. Likewise, British nuclear weapons did not deter the use of polonium, which could be described as a radiological weapon (i.e., a WMD) according to the formal definition, to poison the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinov repeatedly in a Sushi Bar. A cartoon in the British magazine Private Eye showed Prime Minister Blair saying to Putin, “We need new nuclear weapons,” and Putin replying, “Try Sushi.”

Cold War is the exception, not the rule

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)

Exceptionality of Cold War Realist arguments for the possibility of a stable nuclear multipolar world are based on the Cold War experiences of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The supposition is that, just as the U.S. and the Soviet political and military leaderships worked out, over time, rules of the road for crisis management and the avoidance of inadvertent war or escalation, so too would aspiring nuclear powers among the current non-nuclear states. However, there are reasons to doubt whether the U.S. and Soviet experiences can be repeated after the Cold War. First, the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship between 1945 and 1990 was also supported by bipolarity and by an approximate equality, although an asymmetrical one, in overall U.S. and Soviet military power. Neither bipolarity nor, obviously, U.S.-Russian global military equity is available to support stable relations in the post-Cold war world: in fact, both are irrelevant so long as Russia evolves in a democratic, capitalist direction and prefers cooperative U.S: Russian foreign relations. A second reason why the U.S. and Soviet Cold War experiences are unlikely to be repeated by future proliferators is that the relationship between political legitimacy and military control was solid in Moscow and in Washington, but uncertain for many nuclear powers outside of Europe.(7) The issue here is not whether democracies are less warlike than dictatorships are. The question is whether the regime can impose either assertive or delegative military control over its armed forces, and, if it does, the consequences for its crisis management and normal nuclear operations. Assertive control implies a great deal of civilian intervention in military operations and management; delegative control, more willingness to let the military have their own way on operational and organizational issues. Assertive control ensures against "never" types of failure in a nuclear command and control system, at the expense of "always" failures (responding promptly to authorized commands). Delegative control has the reverse emphasis.(8) A third reason why the U.S: Soviet experience may not be normative for newer nuclear powers is that there were no pieces of territory or other vital interests for which one of the sides was committed to go to war rather than to suffer defeat or stalemate. The two sides were generally satisfied by bloc consolidation and by internal power balancing instead of external adventurism and zero sum competition for territory or resources. The preceding observation does not imply that Cold War crises, such as those that occurred over Berlin and Cuba, were not dangerous. They were dangerous, but the danger was mitigated by the awareness that neither state had to sacrifice a vital piece of its own territory or its own national values (allies were another matter) in order to avoid war. What was at stake in the most dangerous U.S.-Soviet Cold War confrontations was "extended" deterrence, or the credibility of nuclear protection extended to allies, and not defense of the homeland per se.
Even in the context of the Cold war, nuclear weapons dragged on the conflict

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)

Although arguing for paradigm pluralism, Gaddis leans more toward the perspective of nuclear realists than he does toward those who would contend that nuclear weapons were irrelevant during the Cold War. According to Gaddis, nuclear weapons have influenced post-World War 11 international relations in at least four ways. First, nuclear weapons helped to support an already existing reluctance of the great powers to wage war against one another. Second, states that possessed nuclear weapons became more risk averse. Third, nuclear weapons did not create bipolarity after World War 11, but they did prolong its life, and so, too, helped to prolong stability. Fourth, nuclear weapons helped to perpetuate the Cold War by saving the U.S., the Soviet Union, and their allies military expenditures on conventional forces, expenditures which if necessary might have forced rethinking of Cold War assumptions sooner.(35) All four of these arguments go against the grain of nuclear irrelevancy, but only the first three are necessarily supportive of the case for nuclear stability. The fourth acknowledges that political relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union remained adversarial longer than necessary, in part due to ingrained habits of military hangover. Nuclear weapons helped to freeze a political glacis that became its own worst enemy until a new Soviet leader in 1985 began to take dramatic steps to melt the ice. To the nuclear positivists' contention that nuclear weapons made war less likely because war became more dangerous, Gaddis' fourth argument for nuclear relevancy points to the downside of that contention. The very weapons of mass destruction that some would contend were instruments of deterrence or peace were also causes of U.S. and Soviet leaders' fears of devastating surprise attack. The capabilities of these weapons were so unprecedented that the very fact of their being targeted at your state made a relationship hostile in military-operational terms even when it had passed into a stage of nonhostility in policy.

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