Since its inception, the atomic bomb has been accompanied by intense controversy and moral condemnation. Many analysts and scholars have attributed the long period of peace following World War II to the development of nuclear weaponry. However, peace activists and politicians alike continue to emphasise their alleged danger and lack of strategic usefulness. Nuclear weapons, they claim, do not reduce conflict, but are a dangerous threat in a world of potentially irrational leaders.
These assertions, I argue, are flawed and exaggerated; history above all seems to confirm this. On the contrary, nuclear weapons today constitute a fundamental pillar of stability among great powers. This raises a crucial paradox: how can a weapon of mass destruction contribute to the perpetuation of peace?
To begin, it is useful to explain why states go to war and how the nuclear bomb has changed military calculations. Carl von Clausewitz asserted that war is simply the continuation of politics by other means. Implicit in this statement are two vital assumptions. First, war must serve a political objective. Second, hard power must be perceived to be the appropriate tool to achieve these goals. War in its essence is a cost-benefit analysis. What drives states towards war is the expectation of victory (or at least the belief that defeat will incur only limited costs). However, as with everything in life, war involves considerable uncertainty.
In this regard, nuclear weaponry offers its first major advantage: allowing statesmen to peer into the future. In a conventional world, the effectiveness of deterrence remains limited as damage is perceived as both distant and abstract. In a nuclear world, even the consequences of a restricted exchange become perfectly clear. This has been coined as the “Crystal Ball Effect”. Aware of the consequences, leaders are less prone to miscalculation. Nuclear weapons, above all, reduce uncertainty.
More fundamentally, nuclear weapons change the structure of the cost-benefit analysis itself. This is because they function differently to conventional weapons. Rather than repelling advancing armies (i.e. defence), they rely on the credible threat of devastating retaliation (i.e. deterrence).
Given the credible threat of nuclear escalation, even attaining a limited political goal would come at the ultimate price. Victory in such a scenario becomes paradoxical if the consequence of a seemingly successful conquest is self-annihilation.
War as a political tool largely loses its feasibility; the costs of applying military force are not commensurate with any benefits expected. Adversaries are therefore deterred from striking first. Hence, while global tensions certainly continue to exist, states are compelled to seek alternative means of competition before resorting to hard power, particularly against other nuclear-armed great powers.
Furthermore, the stabilising effect of nuclear weaponry does not depend on countries possessing arsenals of roughly equal size. While conventional balances are highly sensitive to relatively small asymmetries, recent research suggests that even “small nuclear arsenals still have significant deterrent power”. Nuclear weapons level power asymmetries, thereby dissuading offensive action even against adversaries with significantly smaller capabilities. A balance of terror can therefore generate greater strategic stability than a conventional balance of power. In such a scenario, even smaller powers are capable of deterring hostilities from a much larger adversary. Hence, while God might have made men, Oppenheimer certainly made them more equal—at least on the international stage.
In short, since the end of the Second World War nuclear weapons have greatly reduced the incentive of great powers to wage war against one another. By clarifying the catastrophic consequences of escalation, nuclear weapons reduce uncertainty and limit miscalculation, while their immense destructive power dramatically raises the costs of applying force to achieve political objectives. Against the backdrop of today’s renewed geopolitical tensions, states must be mindful of this logic and instead of focusing their efforts on conventional military superiority, reaffirm the stabilising principles of nuclear deterrence.
Written by Elias Ritter, Edited by Rosey Holland.
Photo Credit: jplenio1 (2021, February 11) on Magnific.
