The War That Must Never Be Fought: Resolving the Nuclear Dilemma - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817918450 ISBN 13: 9780817918453

Verlag: Hoover Institution Press,U.S., 2015

Inhaltsangabe

This book discusses the nuclear dilemma from various countries’ points of view: from Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and others. The final chapter proposes a new solution for the nonproliferation treaty review.

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George P. Shultz has had a distinguished career in government, in academia, and in the world of business. He is one of two individuals who have held four different federal cabinet posts, has taught at three of the country’s great universities, and for eight years he was president of a major engineering and construction company. He is a coauthor of Implications of the Reykjavik Summit on Its Twentieth Anniversary and Nuclear Security and coeditor of Deterrence, Ending Government Bailouts as We Know Them, Game Changers, The Nuclear Enterprise, and Reykjavik Revisited. He lives in San Francisco. James E. Goodby has served in the U.S. Foreign Service, achieving the rank of Career Minister, and was appointed to five ambassadorial-rank positions and taught at Georgetown, Syracuse, and Carnegie Mellon Universities and is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon. He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow with the Center for Northeast Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. He lives in Washington, DC.

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The War That Must Never Be Fought

Dilemmas of Nuclear Deterrence

By George P. Shultz, James E. Goodby

Hoover Institution Press

Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8179-1845-3

Contents

Preface by George P. Shultz, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction to Part One, 
1 A Bet Portrayed as a Certainty: Reassessing the Added Deterrent Value of Nuclear Weapons by Benoît Pelopidas, 
2 The Nuclear Dilemma: Constants and Variables in American Strategic Policies by James E. Goodby, 
3 A Realist's Rationale for a World without Nuclear Weapons by Steven Pifer, 
Introduction to Part Two, 
4 The Debate Over Disarmament within NATO by Isabelle Williams and Steven P. Andreasen, 
5 Russia, Strategic Stability, and Nuclear Weapons by Pavel Podvig, 
6 Comparing German and Polish Post — Cold War Nuclear Policies: A Convergence of European Attitudes on Nuclear Disarmament and Deterrence? by Katarzyna Kubiak and Oliver Meier, 
7 Utility of Nuclear Deterrence in the Middle East by Shlomo Brom, 
8 Proliferation and Deterrence beyond the Nuclear Tipping Point in the Middle East by Karim Haggag, 
9 A Middle East Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Moving beyond the Stalemate by Peter Jones, 
10 Decoupling Nuclear Weapons and Deterrence in South Asia by S. Paul Kapur, 
11 Getting to the Table: Prospects and Challenges for Arms Control with China by Michael S. Gerson, 
12 China and Global Nuclear Arms Control and Disarmament by Li Bin, 
13 Korea: Will South Korea's Non-Nuclear Strategy Defeat North Korea's Nuclear Breakout? by Peter Hayes and Chung-in Moon, 
14 Japan's Disarmament Dilemma: Between the Moral Commitment and the Security Reality by Nobumasa Akiyama, 
Introduction to Part Three, 
15 Creating the Conditions for a World without Nuclear Weapons by James E. Goodby and Steven Pifer, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A Bet Portrayed as a Certainty: Reassessing the Added Deterrent Value of Nuclear Weapons

Benoît Pelopidas

"Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung to often when they make them unintelligible."

William James

The Argument

A world free of nuclear weapons has been seen as an exercise in utopian dreaming. It took the credentials of realists like Secretaries Shultz, Perry, and Kissinger and Senator Nunn to bring this goal back to the front of the US political scene. But framing the discussion in terms of utopia versus reality is deceptive because in actuality both supporters and critics of this goal hold to a vision of the world as they think it ought to be. On the one hand, setting a goal of a world without nuclear weapons while there are still approximately seventeen thousands of them in the world today is clearly ambitious. On the other hand, those who reject this goal and want to continue to rely on the threat of nuclear retaliation have to assume that this strategy will work perfectly until the end of days. There is no third future. Either nuclear weapons remain in numbers higher than necessary to create a global-scale disaster and we have to rely on deterrence and hope for the best or we reach very low numbers or zero and the issue then will be to make sure that they are not rebuilt. Even if a credible missile defense system could be built, it would not constitute a third future; it would just be another parameter in the choice between these two futures.

Proponents of a world without nuclear weapons use the rhetoric of only two possible futures: either getting to zero or nuclear proliferation. But getting to very low numbers versus trusting nuclear deterrence forever reflects a more fundamental truth. This depiction of future choices does not make any assumption about the pace of proliferation or the connection between nuclear disarmament and nuclear proliferation.

If the only two available futures are getting to zero (or very low numbers) and relying on luck forever, which future ought to be realized? This is not a question of realism or utopia. It is a question of political choice: we either wager on perpetual luck or we wager on the ability of people to adjust to new international environments. Which future do you choose as a goal before putting your forces into the battle to "bring the 'is' closer to the 'ought'"? Maybe the proponents of nuclear deterrence assume that a civilization-destroying disaster will happen before nuclear weapons are used, so that their priorities lie elsewhere, but this bet is not made explicit or maybe they imply that future nuclear weapons use is inevitable and can be limited. Those are debatable assumptions which should be made explicit and become part of the conversation. Once this is done and the proponents of nuclear deterrence acknowledge the fundamental problem of global nuclear vulnerability, the burden of proof will be shared more equally and the ethical and political questions about which future we want to strive for will be fruitfully reopened.

The Case for Nuclear Deterrence

In this paper, I address three of the most frequently used arguments for maintaining a significant measure of dependence for international security on nuclear deterrence both globally and regionally:

1. Nuclear weapons have deterred great powers from waging war against each other, so a world without nuclear weapons will lead to, or at least might encourage, great-power war.

2. The US nuclear umbrella has deterred nuclear proliferation, so the reduction of the US nuclear arsenal will undermine the credibility of US extended deterrence and create additional incentives for nuclear proliferation.

3. Nuclear weapons have deterred other powers from invading the territory of those states that possess nuclear weapons and thus leaders of countries with relatively weak conventional capabilities will keep their weapons as an equalizer. A version of this argument focuses on dictatorial regimes or "rogue states" whose very existence depends on their having nuclear weapons.

I argue that none of these arguments holds.

These three arguments for acquiring and keeping nuclear arsenals rest on the power of these weapons to deter an action, whether a great-powers war, nuclear proliferation, or invasion of and regime change in weaker nations. But deterrence of such an action is most often based on the credibility of a set of national capabilities that include all the non-nuclear assets of a nation, including its credibility as an ally. Therefore, deterrence should not be identified with nuclear weapons and defined by them as has become the habit, almost unconsciously. The added deterrent value of nuclear weapons, rather than their deterrent value per se, has to be reexamined, keeping in mind that conventional weapons and other factors (economic, as an example) can have a deterrent effect with a much higher credibility of actual use.

After showing that these arguments are not as convincing as their frequency suggests, I will delineate opportunities which advocates for a nuclear-free world should exploit on their way to advancing their goal, based on the decoupling of nuclear weapons and deterrence.

One cannot state for certain that great-power war will be more likely in a world without nuclear weapons

The most intimidating critique of the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is that it would make the world safe for further war among great powers. Its most eloquent proponent was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hoover Institution Press,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0817918450
• ISBN 13: 9780817918453
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 530
• Herausgeber: Shultz George P., Goodby James E.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar