NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
Usually nuclear proliferation is discussed as a threat to one nation, or to a group of nations that are allies. In this section we shall be concerned with the systemic consequences of proliferation, just as we earlier discussed the systemic effects of other strategic innovations in other eras. But perhaps initially one ought to question whether nuclear weapons did in fact play a decisive role in winning the Long War.
It is evident that the German surrender in 1918 did not destroy fascism. Indeed, owing to the infirmities of the Versailles process, fascism may have been inflamed by the false peace of 1918. What was required was the discrediting of this alternative in the eyes of its most dynamic advocates, Germany and Japan. In Germany's case, nuclear weapons played an important delegitimating role because they were not acquired by the Nazi state. Had the V2s that landed on London in the last year of the European battle been available earlier, none of the decisive engagements in Europe—the Normandy invasion, the tank battle at Kursk, the removal of the Nazis from North Africa and proximity to the Near East—could have taken place. Had they carried nuclear weapons the outcome of the war would surely have been different. Germany had the technical expertise and the technocracy to pursue the development of such weapons and faced the necessity to do so. But Germany lacked capital to divert to nuclear development on the scale of the U.S. Manhattan Project, and its political establishment was unwilling to entrust to non-Party scientists such a commitment of resources and decision making, even if those resources could have been found. When the war in Europe ended, Allied investigators determined that the Germans were still four or five years away from a testable fission weapon. That Germany could be so thoroughly defeated by “races” that were inferior to the warrior Volk of Teutons, and that this defeat could be sealed by the technical achievement of American invention and engineering that exploded over the fascist state of Japan: these facts made the pretensions of fascism seem pathetically inadequate. Had Germany acquired nuclear weapons, the pathos would have lain elsewhere.
In the case of Japan, the issue of the role of nuclear weapons in ending the conflict is still much debated.1 At this remove we are inclined to forget that Japan's land forces were still largely intact in 1945. The bulk of these forces were in China and had never been defeated. A negotiated peace before the atomic attacks, conceding a postwar role to the emperor, would have had the same effect as the German surrender in 1919: infecting the society with the historical claim of a “stab in the back” by politicians and diplomats who betrayed the armed forces, and encouraging a revanchist movement that alone could lay legitimate claim to Japanese nationalism. Whether one believes that credible peace offers were actually available to the United States before the atomic attacks on both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one must consider the strategic goals of the Long War to determine whether such a negotiated surrender would have brought peace. The Japanese people had been bombed on an horrific scale for months. They remained disciplined and intensely loyal to their regime, and showed no signs of giving up. Far from there being any significant political opposition to continuing the war, the only evidence of an internal revolt came after the atomic attacks, when a military coup was attempted to reverse the Japanese offer of surrender. What was required, and what only the second atomic attack seems to have delivered, was the complete discrediting of the regime's promises to win a negotiated peace through stiff resistance to an American invasion. I have never been persuaded of the moral position of those who would have urged continued nonnuclear bombing of the Japanese people for an extended period of months, accepting also the American casualties that would have ensued in an invasion, as preferable to the atomic attacks on the two Japanese cities. The only alternative to this carnage would have been a half-life for fascism, in a kind of negotiated twilight. And that is precisely what the Long War was fought to eliminate.*
In the case of the Soviet Union and the defeat of European communism, nuclear weapons were also decisive. First, American nuclear weapons neutralized the effect of the Red Army in Europe and the geopolitical fact that Europe's strongest ally was an ocean away. Whether or not the USSR would have invaded West Germany—and without the U.S.-backed guarantee of West Germany's defense, one can think of many occasions on which this option might have proved attractive to the Soviet bloc—the fact that this invasion was made unlikely gave the Western states of Europe the time to solidify parliamentary institutions, build prosperous market economies, and unite among themselves rather than renew their traditional conflicts as one state after another was picked off by neutralist, socialist movements. Second, nuclear weapons ultimately created the superpower context of mutual vulnerability, which rendered continuing competition both highly expensive and militarily fraught. This military stalemate gave the political systems of the Warsaw Pact states time to collapse of their own inner inefficiency and self-disgust. These systems would have been far less scrutinized by their publics in the context of warfighting. Third, the nuclear dimension of the conflict kept the United States engaged in Europe, and this engagement provided the engine that drove changes in U.S. strategy in this era, always keeping pressure on the Soviet state and innovating as the Soviet threat changed. But for the vulnerability of the United States to Soviet nuclear weapons, it would have been too tempting to seek refuge in the isolationism that is so much a part of the American political tradition. In the nuclear era, there was nowhere to hide.
Thus I think it can be demonstrated that the strategic innovation represented by the development and deployment of nuclear weapons played a decisive role in ending the Long War and that, as we saw in Book I, this will have important constitutional effects on each of the states that fought that war. For the society composed of these states, the most profound impact is the restructuring required to deal with such weapons, for they cannot now be uninvented.
The problems that nuclear proliferation pose for the society of market-states arise from this question: is the possession of whatever weapons a state can acquire and deploy an attribute of sovereignty? For if it is not, then by what right do certain states possess weapons of such awful magnitude? And if it is, how can there ever be measures both appropriate and practical to limit the deployment of such weapons? And finally, even if having a nuclear weapons capability is a condition to which any state may aspire, does the possibility of a widespread nuclear proliferation pose such a threat to the peace and survival of the society of states that what hitherto was a state's sovereign right—the right to deploy the weapons of its own choosing—must now be rethought?
Nuclear weapons made a decisive contribution to the end of the Long War because their staggering ratio of destruction to attrition makes them virtually impossible to defend against. There are some targets of nuclear attack that can be defended against ballistic missiles—missile silos or underwater vessels, for example—but the nuclear weapon itself is so devastating that thus far methods of defense against its delivery to most targets are rendered absurd. Thermonuclear weapons can inflict such damage that even if virtually all the delivery systems used in an attack on a city were deflected, a single warhead arriving at its target would make further defense pointless. The enormity of this threat has obvious implications for individual states: the security of the United States is, on the one hand, at an all-time high, given its dominant economy and the pre-eminence of its armed forces, and on the other hand, at an historic low because the detonation of a handful of weapons launched from anywhere on the globe could utterly destroy it. “Counterproliferation” is at the top of the U.S. security agenda today, having moved from the periphery of the national security consciousness, along with the protection of the environment and of human rights, to the center of American concerns. What, however, is the importance of counterproliferation to the society of states, when some members may gain from acquiring such weapons, and none currently possessing such technology seem eager to give those weapons up?
A state's deployment of nuclear weapons can be either stabilizing or destabilizing for the international system. This is largely a function of the mechanics of deterrence, and thus it ought to be the policy of the international state system to deny nuclear weapons to some states, just as certain unstable geological regions are unsuitable for nuclear reactors. A nuclear weapons state can be reinforcing for the security of the society of states when its capabilities do not introduce multipolarity into the system, when its intentions do not threaten the legitimate constitutional sovereignty of other states* (unless it is attacked), and when its political culture is stable enough to ensure the endurance of such benign intentions. A nuclear weapons state imposes unacceptable risks on the system of deterrence when it threatens to make other states nuclear targets for geopolitical objectives that are incompatible with the maintenance of the current state system† or for geostrategic goals that are incompatible with the stability of the system of nuclear deterrence.‡ In either case, the unpredictability of nuclear attack increases, with potentially devastating consequences for populations and states.
This observation helps us answer the sovereignty question: no state that does not derive its authority from representative institutions that coexist with fundamental human rights can legitimately argue that it can subject its own people to the threat of nuclear pre-emption or retaliation on the basis of its alleged rights of sovereignty because the people it thus makes into nuclear targets have not consented to bear such risks. At a minimum, the Peace of Paris stands for this. One inference from this rule is that no such state therefore has a sovereign right to impose such threats on other peoples either.
For the same reason, such a state has no sovereign right to develop weapons of mass destruction generally. This argument turns around the usual rationale for the acquisition of nuclear weapons. States claim that they must deploy these weapons in order to deter attacks on their peoples. And there is a good deal of truth to this: the United States would doubtless not have bombed Japan with nuclear weapons if Tokyo could have retaliated in kind. But the acquisition of nuclear weapons also increases the risk of attack by pre-emption or by a disguised attack (so that the threat of retaliation cannot successfully deter). Each state must decide for itself how to resolve this calculus of risks. A state without representative institutions and effective guarantees of basic human rights has no way to win consent to such a decision.
A state that derives its legitimacy from representative institutions free of coercion can demand that other states recognize its right to acquire nuclear weapons, but though a state has this right, it ought to be dissuaded from acquiring these weapons when their deployment is destabilizing for the international system. When does this occur, and just how can this dissuasion be accomplished?
Thus far I have implied a link between proliferation and deterrence, suggesting that the society of states as a whole can determine when proliferation poses a systemic threat by asking whether a state's acquisition of nuclear weapons strengthens or weakens the prevailing system of nuclear deterrence. That system is currently underpinned by United States nuclear forces. It rests on the assumption that the United States will not use nuclear weapons as a means of aggression, but that it will actually destroy another state if that state cannot be otherwise dissuaded from attacking a state protected by the American nuclear deterrent. If the United States were to change its policies in either aspect, the current system of deterrence would be difficult to sustain, as formerly protected states raced to arm themselves and formerly deterred states began to explore the rewards of coercion.
This present system would be gravely undermined by multipolarity—the acquisition of a third superpower nuclear arsenal—for two reasons. First, multipolarity introduces a complexity that tends to weaken American commitments by blurring the identity of the states to be deterred: in a tripolar or n-polar world, responsibility is diffused. The persuasiveness of the argument, often heard in the United States during the Cold War, that the United States must act to suppress international violence or parry aggression, because if the United States doesn't, no one else will, fades in a multipolar world. The sheer complexity of deterrence in a multipolar world, coupled with an understandable American willingness to let other powers take up burdens long carried by the United States, creates a situation similar to that of the paralyzed crowds that attend emergencies. Second, the system of deterrence is stressed whenever a crisis triggers the threat of the use of nuclear weapons to deter aggression: such crises call the American bluff and require the United States to run potentially fatal risks to enforce dissuasion. Multipolarity can only increase, perhaps exponentially, the number of nuclear crises. We could have had another system of nuclear deterrence, perhaps managed by other powers, but this is the one we have, and this is the system bequeathed us by the Long War.
The link between nuclear proliferation and nuclear deterrence is too seldom drawn. In part this is a sociological phenomenon: the deterrence theorists tend to be interested in strategic studies and are often from military backgrounds; they are more curious about targeting and weapons development, and more informed about the formerly “central” balance between the superpowers than about “weapons of mass destruction” per se. The nonproliferation experts tend to be more interested in arms control than in strategic options, more conversant with the design of nuclear reactors and the processes of the nuclear fuel cycle than with the design of missiles and nuclear delivery systems, more global in orientation. In part, this disjunction is an intellectual phenomenon: the categories of thought are put in different terms, have different vocabularies. Theories of deterrence do not tell us which restraint agreements, like the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), will slow down proliferation; nonproliferation theories, on the other hand, more or less assume that any deployment of nuclear weapons is necessarily an evil, and that their use can never be justified. This largely unbridged chasm is a costly one because the strategic issues brought to the fore by the end of the Long War are pre-eminently questions of voluntary restraint, and thus the advocates of environmental protection and arms reduction can, perhaps for the first time in this era, realistically expect cooperation from the strategic sector.
Or should one say it is the second time? For there is an historic link between proliferation and the prevailing system of deterrence, and it is this link that principally accounts for the enormous success of nonproliferation efforts since the coming of nuclear weapons. The most important thing to be said about nuclear proliferation is not that it did happen in Israel, or India, or even France, but rather that it didn't happen in Japan or Germany; and the main reason it failed to take place in those two states was that the American nuclear guarantee to those countries provided a measure of deterrence sufficient to make it unnecessary for them to deter other states.
This is a controversial assertion. Sometimes it is claimed that Japan, because it had been the subject of nuclear attack, would never acquire such weapons. This may be, but it is equally possible that, precisely because it felt aggrieved over the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Japan might consider itself uniquely privileged to deploy the one weapon that would best ensure that this would never happen again. From time to time Japan has confirmed its pledge to forgo the development of nuclear weapons; the Japan Defense Agency has steadfastly maintained, however, that the bar against aggression in the Japanese constitution does not proscribe nuclear weapons so long as these do not exceed the minimum needed for defense.2 The Indians have shown the world how a single election can quickly be translated into a policy of nuclear weapons acquisition and deployment. The election in Japan of a similarly nationalistic party could have similarly fateful consequences.
The Germans are also said to be unlikely candidates for nuclear proliferation. They, like the Japanese, are supposed to be acutely sensitive to the anxieties they arouse in their neighbors, and it is true that, in the late 1950s, when the Germans discussed the option of a nuclear weapons program, French and British sensitivities were sufficiently aroused to head off this idea. It was ultimately the American role in German defense that dissuaded the Germans, however, who doubtless appreciated the fact that French and British forces in Germany could hardly have withstood a Warsaw Pact assault without using nuclear weapons. Absent the American nuclear guarantee, it is even doubtful that West Germany would have remained in the Western Alliance, with consequences that we can easily imagine.
What has kept Japan and Germany from going nuclear, when proximate states like China and France did so; when they possessed the wealth, ambition, and skill to do so; when they faced the threat of mortal attack on the front lines of the Cold War? It was the assurance provided by the American nuclear umbrella and the positioning of American troops in forward bases such that any invasion would quickly engage them and thus would immediately commit the United States and in all likelihood involve the use of nuclear weapons to protect her forces. Reviewing the period since 1945, Lawrence Freedman has concluded that “the critical variable [that accounts for nonproliferation to Germany and Japan and the acquisition of weapons by India, China and France] is the prevailing alliance structure… Drawing on the deterrent power of another may carry fewer risks as well as lower costs than a drive for a national capability. The incentives for proliferation grow with the lack of a reliable superpower protector.”3 How can this lesson be applied to stem the proliferation of these weapons in the era we are now entering?
If deterrence is a key to nonproliferation, then what regime of weapons deployment might lend the most stability to the international system? Perhaps the most famous proposal that links deterrence to proliferation was made by Kenneth Waltz. In “The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better” Waltz suggested that widespread nuclear proliferation would in fact enhance stability, as various nuclear armed states paired off, just as the United States and the USSR had done.4 This would result in a profusion of bipolar systems—India/Pakistan, Israel/Iraq, Ukraine/Russia—rather than a multipolar world. Waltz well recognized the acute danger posed by multipolarity. In “a multipolar world there are too many powers to permit any of them to draw clear and fixed lines between allies and adversaries” while at the same time there are so few (not every state can afford a superpower's arsenal) that the action of any single power is likely to engage the security of others. In a world of dancing partners, each conflict twirling around the international ballroom, however, it is perfectly clear who is to be embraced and who ignored. Multipolarity is neatly avoided.
But is this description entirely plausible? If it is true for India/Pakistan, what about India/China/Pakistan? Or Israel/Iraq/Iran? Or even Japan/ Russia/China? Waltz must assume that each new nuclear state has but a single nuclear-armed adversary, and also that each such state actually has such an adversary, because otherwise the temptation to coerce nonnuclear states would potentially upset the stability of the proliferated international regime. And if Waltz is proved wrong (once we have brought a heavily dispersed and proliferated nuclear world into being), how would we go back to the position we are in today, which might then appear to have been a golden age?
A second suggestion follows directly from Freedman's observation that “nuclear proliferation is most likely to occur where external guarantees have come to be doubted, as in the Middle East, or barely exist, as in South Asia. Acquiring a nuclear capability is a statement of a lack of confidence in all alternative security arrangements.”5 Recognizing this, some commentators have proposed extending the U.S. nuclear guarantee to those former states of the Soviet Union, or former members of the Warsaw Pact, that might otherwise become nuclear powers. In the absence of such a guarantee these states might acquire nuclear weapons in response to the Russian nuclear capability, and then, in response to each other, much as Pakistan developed weapons in response to India, once India had itself responded to the nuclear weapons of China, which initially was reacting to the nuclear capability of the United States and the USSR.
Such proposals have an air of unreality to those of us who lived through the “decoupling” debates that periodically seized the Atlantic Alliance from the late 1950s until the late 1980s. Briefly, these debates arose from European skepticism that the United States, in the event of an attack on its European allies, really would risk nuclear retaliation directed at the American homeland by fulfilling its nuclear pledges to its allies. The European theatre, it was feared, would be “decoupled” from the continental United States if the United States reneged on its promises, or “uncoupled” if those pledges were fulfilled, making Europe a nuclear battleground, while the American and Soviet homelands were kept as tacitly (or even explicitly) agreed-upon sanctuaries. Regardless of the grounds for such doubt—and one may recall Sir Michael Howard's witty observation that, where nuclear risks are concerned, it takes a great deal more to reassure an ally than to deter an adversary*—if these doubts were enough to move France to develop its own deterrent, how could they possibly not assail Ukraine or Belarus? Even if the United States could be induced to make such pledges, how could they be believed in the absence of the kind of American ground forces that underwrote the U.S. pledge to West Germany? And what, in such an event, would be the likely reaction of Russia, whose nuclear attitude remains vastly more significant than even that of the most ambitious potential proliferatee?
Yet a third approach comes from Margaret Thatcher. At a speech in Fulton, Missouri, commemorating Winston Churchill' famous Iron Curtain address there, Lady Thatcher said:
The Soviet collapse has aggravated the single most awesome threat of modern times: the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction…. If America and its allies cannot deal with the problem directly by pre-emptive military means, they must at least diminish the incentives for [rogue states] to acquire new weapons in the first place. That means the West must install effective ballistic missile defences that would protect us and our armed forces, reduce or even nullify the rogue state's arsenal, and enable us to retaliate.6
I think we may assume, with Thatcher, that “it is probably unrealistic to expect military intervention to remove” those weapons of mass destruction that are in hostile hands. What, then, about missile defense as a parrying technology to nuclear proliferation? Is it really sensible to think that providing the great states of the West with ballistic missile defenses would actually discourage a “rogue state” to a greater degree than the assurance of nuclear annihilation that would surely follow such an attack already deters them today? To believe this assumes a psychological hypersensitivity to the mere possibility of failure on the part of the leaderships of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea that seems incompatible with their characters, insofar as we know them, and an indifference to survival that these leaders, though they may seek it in their recruits, do not prominently display themselves. To the contrary, Martin van Creveld, in his study Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict, concludes:
There seems to be no factual basis for the claims that regional leaders do not understand the nature and implications of nuclear weapons; or that their attitudes to those weapons are governed by some peculiar cultural biases which make them incapable of rational thought; or that they are more adventurous and less responsible in handling them than anybody else.7
The real strength of Thatcher's proposal lies, as the last sentence in the passage quoted from her speech discloses, in the hope that a sound defense would enable retaliation, thus removing the possibility of successful extortion by the rogue states. Yet the day in which any states vying for “rogue” status could disable retaliation through accurate preemption is, thankfully, far off.
An alternative approach was reflected in the Clinton administration's efforts at “counterproliferation.” This was a multifaceted policy whose central method combined U.S. pledges not to use nuclear weapons with various arms control schemes like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, renewed with great effort, and the Missile Control Technology Regime (MCTR), whose enforcement has so bedeviled American relations with China and other states.
If I am correct in arguing that deterrence is crucial to the successful pursuit of nonproliferation, then the administration's policy could have been at most a partial success. A sincere pledge of no-first-use of nuclear weapons would scarcely reassure those states that feel the need to acquire nuclear weapons to protect themselves from us (as to which Iraq's recent experience with American conventional arms is exemplary) nor buck up those states who fear such attacks from others and look to us for protection. Israel, to take one case, can hardly be expected to renounce her nuclear weapons in light of a pledge by the American president not to use nuclear weapons first to protect it. Counterproliferation is, rather, the response of a political community that seems to have only the ideas that were in play before the end of the Long War; in that respect, the Clinton administration's nonproliferation strategies were no worse than those of its immediate predecessor.
Let us return to the criteria proposed to enable the international community to determine when nuclear proliferation is unacceptable. Then perhaps we can see which of these proposals, or others, might successfully enforce the rules implicit in those criteria. The first proscription was against multipolarity. This suggests that a principal task of any nonproliferation regime must be to prevent Germany and Japan from “going nuclear.” The second proscription was against the aggressive use of nuclear weapons, and the third, against proliferation to states so unstable that aggression might suddenly become attractive as a means of consolidating domestic power. These suggestions imply that states recently or currently engaged in aggression or threats of aggression against others are unwholesome candidates for the possession of nuclear arsenals—such states as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea. And states like Indonesia, owing to its political instability, ought to be on a watch list. As to others, there may be strong reasons to discourage their acquisition of nuclear weapons, but proliferation to such states is not necessarily critical to the system as a whole. It may be unsettling for Peru if Chile begins a nuclear program, or for Turkey if the Greeks do. But these developments do not threaten a systemic collapse of deterrence, even if they are cause to activate the diplomatic efforts of states that have influence in those regions.
For Germany and Japan the question of reassurance is more problem-tic in some ways now than it was before the end of the Long War. For the Japanese, the prospect of a North Korean nuclear device is no more threatning than a Chinese nuclear capability, with which they have lived for some time. The real anxiety arises from what might ensue if the Americans confronted either North Korea or China. Thus the Americans are in the paradoxical position of having to tread softly where northeast Asian nuclear proliferation is concerned, precisely to avoid a far more dangerous proliferation should the Japanese become alarmed by a turn of events toward crisis. In the case of Germany, the problem is exacerbated by the prospect of an E.U. nuclear capability. If NATO should falter, then such a capability could repolarize the nuclear world—the second Rome, as it were,* that seems so dear to the hearts of many in Brussels and Paris. Here the American role is not the decisive one. Rather it depends upon E.U. members, especially the British and French, to argue for, paradoxically, the maintenance of independent but modest proliferated deterrents, such as France and the United Kingdom currently deploy, rather than for a specifically E.U. nuclear force. These examples of nuclear proliferation can act as inoculations against an E.U. nuclear virus. French behavior on this matter has thus far not been entirely encouraging. There have been many reports of French efforts, at present quiescent, to seduce the Germans into a nuclear partnership.
For both Germany and Japan, the utility of antiballistic missile defenses can be very high, both as a hedge against nuclear attacks (or missile attacks with other warheads of mass destruction) and, just as important, as a means of reassuring their respective publics that a national deterrent is not necessary. Thatcher's program of ballistic missile defense development makes a great deal more sense in this antiproliferation role, than as a force for states already possessing nuclear weapons. To the extent that the United States supplies technical assistance for such defenses, this will require a modification of the Antiballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. This is, I believe, well worth the diplomatic cost.8
The contribution of international law to preventing major-state proliferation is limited. Germany and Japan are states with representative institutions that can legitimately claim the rights of sovereignty to choose the means of their own protection. Insofar as the peace and stability of the entire international system is jeopardized by the multipolarity such proliferation brings in its wake, there are grounds for condemnation and perhaps even some sort of sanctions, but these are the sort of steps that isolate rather than reassure a state and thus tend to radicalize the domestic politics of a democratic state with problematic consequences for its security policy. Rather the role of international society, and its rules, is as a benchmark: it tells us what steps are disfavored, but it does not tell us what to do once these fateful steps have been taken. The renewal of the prophylactic Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) must be taken as an important accomplishment, although the treaty doesn't specify effective remedies for its violation. Both Japan and Germany are signatories, and despite hard bargaining to the contrary, no new American nuclear guarantees to other states were extracted as a price for the agreement. Such guarantees—particularly to the former Warsaw Pact states and the states of the former Soviet Union—would have run the risk of undermining the tie that binds Germany to the West, because these guarantees put Germany in the position of an unwilling, and unarmed, co-guarantor who might be dragged into a nuclear conflict. We should not want to put Germany in the situation that Japan now finds itself in with respect to the American guarantee to South Korea.
Major-state proliferation that risks multipolarity is the most important, but not the most intractable, part of a nonproliferation agenda for the society of states. That dubious status is reserved for the medium-size state that is a party to a long-standing dispute and feels the necessity of acquiring nuclear weapons, either for an advantage in that dispute or to protect against its adversary's gaining an advantage by a timely nuclear deployment of its own. India and Pakistan, Israel and Iraq, Brazil and Argentina, China and Taiwan, Iran and its several targets—all either have nuclear weapons or have at one time had active programs to acquire such weapons. Insofar as such states develop a capacity to deter Western intervention, they check the West's power to enforce international norms, as we saw in the Gulf War. This, too, is a threat to the society of states, because the West—and particularly the United States—underwrites the stability of that society.
There are two ways we might approach such a problem: we could expect the great market-state powers to choose sides in each potential conflict, ad hoc, and give those great powers a free hand to resolve matters by mediation or force; or we could set up rules that specify sanctions (including force) whenever the acquisition of nuclear weapons violates international understandings like the NPT and the MTCR, or is done in contemplation of international aggression. The successful Gulf War action was an amalgam of both approaches, but so was the Bosnian debacle. The latter experience suggests that relying on the West to act forcibly outside immediate threats to its well-being is impractical, even when it is clear that such inaction can ultimately reduce the West's ability to deter or to act.
To date, the only successful examples of active counterproliferation are the Israeli and coalition attacks on Iraq in 1981 and 1991, respectively. These can hardly provide a precedent for action generally. It is more likely that the buyout of North Korean nuclear capacity, should it prove successful, will provide a model for the future. Certainly the South African renunciation of its nuclear program seems to fit within a market-state paradigm—exchanging military power of dubious utility for economic relationships that promise development and investment. But what of the “rogue state”? Is it realistic to think that radical states can be bought off?
Perhaps not. But in such cases, who is really at risk? Is the system at risk? Libya threatens Chad; it does not really threaten Italy, which is a member of NATO, or the United States, which has evidenced its wiillingness to retaliate and whose means, which once deterred the Soviet Union, ought to be adequate to deter Libya. Iran threatens Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—but Israel and Saudi Arabia are protected by U.S. weapons, including nuclear weapons, which the U.S. administration has stated were in readiness during the Gulf War in case Saddam Hussein resorted to weapons of mass destruction. Only North Korea poses a challenge to the international system as a whole, not because it threatens South Korea— which is also protected by the U.S. nuclear deterrent—but for the ironic reason that it can provoke the United States to reactions that will themselves destabilize the system of deterrence, by overreacting or by withdrawing, either of which could propel Japan into developing its own nuclear option. No set of legal rules can help much here: it is a matter of prudence and wisdom in the formation and execution of policy. Nor can the international society of states do much as a group because so much turns on the policies of one state, the United States, which, after all, committed the first act of nuclear proliferation at Alamogordo.
Perhaps the best argument for a credible, if limited, ballistic missile defense lies not in its impact on “rogue states” so much as in its reassurance to potential proliferatees that fear attacks from such states. Such defenses reduce the extortion value of nuclear threats. The actual operation of missile defense systems, however, will bring new and complex problems of international coordination. These can be greatly eased by the sharing of U.S. air surveillance and early warning capabilities. Indeed, the provision of information by the United States in order to enable missile defense may play as large a role in the twenty-first century as the provision of extended deterrence did in the twentieth. What is needed is an institutional mechanism for sharing and protecting this information.
That brings us to the two other acute threats to a stable security system of market-states, Russia and China. They pose the most signficant concerns in the immediate future precisely because their own constitutional forms are still at issue and because they are both nuclear powers. Insofar as the society of market-states can help bring about a domestic transformation in the constitutional form of these states, it ameliorates the nuclear problem. In the meantime, these proto-market-states are likely to be among the most serious violators of the bans on the sale of missile technology and fissile material. Financial and political assistance to domestic parties in these states that wish to pursue admission and acceptance into the society of market-states is an apt investment for that society.
The market-state will face nuclear threats that are as novel and as market-driven and decentralized as it is. Nuclear terrorism, both on a large scale, involving attacks or threatened extortion against nuclear reactors, and on a micro level, using the nuclear materials commonly found in hospitals, universities, and laboratories, is more likely than an attack using a nuclear warhead. Still, the active international trade in weapons delivery systems and even fissile material will experience the same heady change in the scope of its markets, the speed of its transactions, and the astounding return on investment that the international market has provided other commodities, especially illicit ones. At some point it will simply be impossible to keep up with the nuclear weapons trade, which is at once lucrative and easily concealed. We missed a chance to slow this down when the United States failed to take up a suggestion that Soviet missiles simply be bought intact and destroyed rather than dismantled. This failure led to new opportunities for the diversion of nuclear fissile material, but some dispersion would have taken place at some time in any case. This is a proliferation of a different kind, less statist and all the more difficult to manage for that reason. The society of market-states will find it difficult to police such proliferation because intelligence sharing is as politically and strategically fraught for the market-state at peace as it was for the nation-state at war.
Deterrence and reassurance are the keys to the prevention of nuclear proliferation to states; they offer little in the way of help vis-à-vis transnational, stateless aggressors. This is the most difficult part of a nonproliferation agenda. If such organizations can be denied a state sanctuary, however, it will be difficult for them to assemble and deploy nuclear weapons on any scale that might disturb the system of stable deterrence, though they may be able to wreak a terrible destruction nevertheless. There may be a useful analogy, however: if the contribution of deterrence to nonproliferation is primarily that of reassurance, then the entire battery of market-state mechanisms for reassurance—surveillance, missile defense, redundancy of critical infrastructure, even market programs as mundane as insurance—should prove helpful. Ultimately only a global coalition that shares intelligence and information can hope to forestall terrorist attacks using nuclear weapons. We are in a race against time: can the new society of market-states develop technologies of information collection—like nanosensors, for example, that detect nuclear traces—and habits of cooperation before terrorists deploy nuclear devices in an attack?