Nuclear deterrence does not create peace. It does not produce stability either. Instead, it is a perpetual gamble with the survival of humankind. Yet these and similar assumptions are widespread among ordinary citizens as well as policymakers. The theory that nuclear weapons ensure peace and stability in the international system is founded on the non-observance of a major war between two or more great powers since 1945, the year nuclear weapons were invented. While factually true, this alone does not support the theory’s conclusions, as it ignores key details and dismisses alternative perspectives from the discourse. Most strikingly, nuclear peace theory rests on one extraordinary assumption: that human beings and highly complex technological systems will indefinitely behave perfectly together.
History tells us otherwise. In fact, the Cold War was characterised by multiple hit-and-misses, occasions where the world was just moments away from nuclear apocalypse.
For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, a Soviet submarine commander prepared to launch a nuclear torpedo against a US Navy ship. He believed that war between the Soviet Union and the United States had already begun. The catastrophe was only prevented by a higher-ranking Soviet officer who overruled the decision to launch a nuclear strike.
In 1983, Soviet early warning systems wrongly indicated an incoming American first strike. Again, the nuclear incineration of billions of people worldwide was prevented by one single actor; lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov, who chose not to report the situation to his supervisors, assuming that it must be a technical error instead of a real nuclear attack. He was right.
In the same year, during the NATO exercise Able Archer, Soviet leadership deemed the massive military drill to be a cover for a real first strike and placed parts of its nuclear forces on high alert.
These are only three of the multiple examples that almost triggered nuclear armageddon despite the supposed nuclear balance of the Cold War. They were not isolated incidents; they revealed the inherent instability in the concept of nuclear deterrence. Furthermore, nuclear weapons did not end armed conflict and instead merely displaced it. Consequently, the struggle between the United States and USSR was waged in a series of proxy wars across Asia, Africa and Latin America, bringing death, injury, and persecution upon millions of people.
Nuclear deterrence is structurally flawed and necessitates several presuppositions. Rational actors, flawless technology, complete information, predictability, and the absence of miscommunication are all accepted as a given, while a single deviation of a variable may cause catastrophe.
The theory requires this perfection not once, but forever, in a world where, due to technological advancements in fields such as hypersonic missiles, AI, cyber warfare, and quantum computing, decision windows available to political leaders are drastically narrowing and the likelihood of miscommunication and misinterpretation consistently increases.
Moreover, and crucially, nuclear deterrence assumes rational perfection in humans. However, this could not be more ill-founded. Human nature is innately flawed, characterised by an inclination to react emotionally instead of rationally in a world where perfect information does not exist. To put it bluntly, humans, who have not fundamentally changed since the times they were hunter-gatherers, are entrusted with God-like destructive powers.
As if the structural fragility and the deterministically flawed assumptions of nuclear deterrence would not suffice, nuclear weapons themselves do not and cannot serve any real political purpose. Clausewitz famously quipped that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Accordingly, war must serve a specific political objective or purpose. Nuclear weapons, however, destroy the very political objects they seek to gain or control. They annihilate everything: territory, peoples and infrastructure, the foundations of existence and governance themselves. The destruction caused by nuclear war is total, indiscriminate, and comprehensive. Once implemented, the destructive effects cannot be limited or contained as every war game and military simulation that has been held to study the effects of nuclear war has yielded the same result: global destruction and nuclear winter.
The true naivety in nuclear weapons and their deterrent effect lies in believing in the possibility to indefinitely maintain a system that has already come close to failure on multiple occasions—while also assuming that it will never fail again. Nuclear weapons do not guarantee peace. Instead, they assure that if peace fails once, and only once, the consequences will be irreversible. It is a system that survives solely because nobody has yet made a fatal mistake. It is not security. It is a postponed catastrophe.
If we want to be serious about long-term global stability in politics, we must move away from the permanent brinkmanship that nuclear weapons provide, and instead pursue a system that reduces, rather than perpetually manages, the risk of existential conflict instead.
Written by Leo Hirnschrodt, Edited by Aleksandra Drozd
Photo Credit: jplenio1 (2021, February 11) on Magnific.
