Nuclear Zero?

Lessons from the Last Time We Were There

George H. Quester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351502658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"George H. Quester argues that the possibility of nuclear war continues to loom despite the reduction in stockpiles by the major powers. Supporters of total nuclear disarmament often dismiss pessimistic objections to the possibility of reaching nuclear zero as being hypothetical, but this book looks at real illustrations for this possibility, taken from the years that gave the world the Manhattan Project.Any advocate of total nuclear disarmament must deal with the challenge of ""realist"" analysts of international relations, those who worry that being at zero nuclear weapons, or even close to zero, would be unstable and dangerous. Mutual fears could be self-confirming, leading to cheating on disarmament, and even nuclear war. While such fears are often dismissed as theoretical or hypothetical, this book attempts to test them against the real-life experience of the last time we were at nuclear zero. The years from 1933 to 1945 saw many such self-confirming fears, leading to the Manhattan Project and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Optimism about the future cannot be ruled out totally, but the history of our experience with nuclear disarmament must be examined carefully to identify the crucial prerequisites for elimination of such weapons of mass destruction. This book is required reading for courses on arms control, defense policy, and international relations, or for readers looking for historical background on a critical global issue."

1

Introduction

 

 

Nuclear weapons are indeed important, in a most terrible way. The possibilities of a nuclear war hover over us, perhaps always to mar any anticipation of the future, as we contemplate opportunities for our family, or plans for urban renewal, or any other prospect for a happier world. In less than an hour the globe could experience a thermonuclear World War III that kills hundreds of millions. In a matter of seconds, a terrorist attack employing a nuclear weapon could make a national capital uninhabitable.

It would thus be wonderful to rid the world of all nuclear weapons, just as it might be wonderful to wake up to discover that Einstein and the other physicists had been wrong and that such weapons of mass destruction had just been a bad dream. But such weapons are real, and the important question for the future is whether they indeed can be eliminated.

Pessimists about nuclear disarmament worry that an attempt to get back to “nuclear zero” that almost succeeded might be worse than what we are living with now. A failed attempt to eliminate all nuclear weapons might greatly increase the chances that, for the first time since the 1945 destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, such weapons would again be used.

Proponents of a total elimination of nuclear weapons, when responding to such pessimism, sometimes dismiss these concerns as too hypothetical, as the products of an excessive political science “realism_” This book will examine whether such pessimism is really so hypothetical.

The first and most general and immediate of the pessimistic concerns is that a “prisoners’ dilemma” situation would emerge if “nuclear zero” were achieved, or even approached; where everyone feared the worst about everyone else, and thus would feel driven into the very behavior that was feared in others.¹ Messages that were intended to reassure would thus be seen as tricks. Countries fearing that others were cheating on the nuclear weapons ban, or fearing that they themselves would be falsely accused of cheating, would thus feel driven, themselves, to cheat.

Second, related to this concern (and also dismissed as too hypothetically pessimistic by proponents of a move toward global zero) is the assumption that someone else’s move toward an illegal nuclear weapons stockpile would require the development and use of nuclear weapons on our side, to counter this force and perhaps to dig it out. Advocates of nuclear zero sometimes argue that a North Korean or Iranian nuclear program can be dug out and destroyed simply by conventional bombing attacks.² If the pessimists insist that American nuclear weapons would also have to be resurrected and deployed in face of such “rogue” nuclear threats, it will be interesting to see which version of a “common sense” approach to this issue can be unearthed from the historical record prior to 1945.

Third, there may be false alarms in a future world about whether someone else is cheating and producing nuclear weapons. If a nuclear weapons program of our own is reconstituted in response to such an alarm, and then over time the alarm proves false, would there be a great temptation to retain and use the nuclear monopoly we had thus stumbled into? Optimists about a move toward zero may argue that there is no reason for such temptations to be overwhelming. But this is again something to be tested against the historical record.

A fourth concern of the pessimists is that some rogue state might seize upon nuclear weapons as a reinsurance against being subjected to regime change, particularly if such a state had launched an unsuccessful aggression that resulted in a retreat back to its initial boundaries, or when it had been convicted of massive genocide within the territory it had controlled. Optimists about nuclear disarmament would see such a nuclear-weapon-facilitated veto as a hypothetical abstraction, as the world’s outrage about the rogue regime’s behavior might outweigh any fears of what could be done with atomic bombs. If pessimists instead weigh the deterrent threat posed by nuclear weapons above any outside-world moral outrage, then we again have to explore what the echoes of world historical commentary might have to tell us.

Skeptics about nuclear disarmament often also argue that the presence of nuclear weapons has reduced the likelihood of conventional wars, that “extended nuclear deterrence” has held back the side that might otherwise have been able to execute or threaten conventional conquest.³ As in all discussions of how the Cold War worked, and why it did not become more of a hot war, the case can be made that such deterrent impact is difficult or impossible to prove. This kind of concern, that conventional wars and conventional aggressions will grow in number after global nuclear disarmament, is sometimes dismissed simply as the self-serving speculation of people in the nuclear-weapons laboratories who seek moral justification and continued employment. But is the link between nuclear weapons of mass destruction and a reduced likelihood of conventional war merely a hypothetical artifact of the Cold War?

The intent of this book is to consider each of these objections to the prospect of “nuclear zero,” most particularly the first-noted concern about “prisoners’ dilemma” mutual suspicions, not as hypothetical objections, but in light of the actual comments and analyses that were made as nuclear weapons were first developed.

“The last time we were at nuclear zero” is now some seventy years ago—“so last century” or “history” as many younger students would disparage it. Perhaps human beings have evolved in that time, enough so that patterns of suspicion and mutual fear, or of mutual hatred, do not have to recur. The optimistic possibilities should not be dismissed, if only because a total elimination of nuclear weapons, if it could be achieved, would indeed be wonderful thing.

But a great deal of human nature may not have been so quickly and readily changed, so that the history of what led to the Manhattan Project and the destruction of two Japanese cities thus needs to be reviewed, as we balance optimism and pessimism. The sad possibility remains that what is dismissed as hypothetical here would turn out to be recurrent and quite natural, as countries disagree and regimes contend.

Notes

1. For a major example of such a pessimistic analysis, see Thomas Schelling, “A World without Nuclear Weapons?” Dœdalus, 138, no. 4 (2009): 124–129.

2. On the alleged irrelevance of American nuclear weapons here, see Ward Wilson, “The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence,” Nonproliferation Review 15, no. 3 (2008): 421–430.

3. See John Gaddis, The LongPeace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

2

Some Early History

Many analysts of the historical evolution of strategic reasoning about nuclear weapons would date the beginnings with the moment in 1939 when Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, in the safety of her place of exile in Sweden, interpreted the Berlin laboratory results of her long-time research partner Otto Hahn as having been an instance of nuclear fission.¹

But others would note that this possibility had been hypothetically visible to the nuclear physics community for a longer time, with Hahn’s research findings simply being the first tangible demonstration of it. Some strategic analysts would then go back to 1914 and the publication of a book by H. G. Wells, A World Set Free,² which spoke of massive explosives produced by the energy inside the atom. Wells of course was much more of a science fiction writer than a scientist, and would have to be charged with the guesswork of a wild imagination.

Yet it is interesting to review the strategic and political projections that Wells extrapolated from his vision of nuclear weapons, for in his novel he predicted that the destruction of entire cities by a single bomb would lead to an end to war, as the sheer destructiveness involved would now deter all sides from launching such wars. Such indeed were to be the expectations of many ordinary people after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II.

Even earlier, one might note the speculations advanced by the Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel at the time that he was endowing the Nobel Peace Prize to go along with the other prizes he had funded to recognize scientific advancements. As the inventor of dynamite and other powerful explosives usable in wars, Nobel was driven in his generosity by a personal sense of guilt for what he had made possible.³

Looking ahead, Nobel feared and predicted that much more powerful explosives would soon enough be developed, and/or very deadly biological weapons, any of which would be capable of destroying entire cities and killing large numbers of people. And, as would Wells in his 1914 book, Nobel projected that the emergence of such weapons of mass destruction would make nations abstain from wars thereafter, as all sides would be deterred by the sheer damage that all might suffer. All through the first decades of the twentieth century, one thus saw strategists and political analysts dealing with the background possibilities of such destruction of cities, with the winner on the ground suffering such attacks just as much as the loser on the ground. As demonstrated quite shockingly in a very minor and introductory way in World War I, airships, airplanes, and submarines allowed both sides to circumvent surface barriers giving rise to the basic concept of mutual assured destruction and possible mutual deterrence.⁴

It was against this background that one saw diplomats speculating about substantial disarmament as well as collective security under the League of Nations system, and saw the signature of the Kellog-Briand Pact “outlawing war”

One could raise the challenge today of “how can we talk of going to zero nuclear weapons when we all know about very destructive weapons being possible against a background of international distrust and conflict,” just as the same questions were posed in the 1920s and 1930s, as the world’s elementary knowledge was evolving of the possibilities of a nuclear chain reaction leading to massive explosions.

H. G. Wells may thus merely have been engaged in the entertaining guesswork of science fiction when he wrote A World Set Free, but his prose is nonetheless remarkable, as he wrote of a bomb based on “atomic disintegration.” More probably, he was exploiting the speculation of physicists he had overheard considering some inherent possibilities, the kind of cocktail party chit-chat that touches on all the possibilities of the physical world.

By some accounts, Leo Szilard had just finished reading Wells’ book in London in 1934 when he heard Ernest Rutherford giving a talk somewhat broadly dismissing the possibilities of nuclear physics, while at the same time Szilard had then hit upon the more precise way that fission could induce the chain reaction that would produce enormous explosions. Szilard’s memory of his thoughts at the time would nourish the pessimism of the “realist” about international politics, for he concluded that “a nation that made the connection would not rest until it had a bomb.”⁵

This observation came to Szilard in London, after his departure from Germany following Hitler’s rise to power. His conclusion was much more generic, not tied to the presence of a particular totalitarian dictator, but more to the inherent rivalry of nations. As a Jewish Hungarian, who like Edward Teller and others had been able to find better academic opportunities in Weimar Germany than in a Hungary beset with anti-Semitic quotas and restrictions, Szilard might well have remained in Germany if the Nazis had not come to power.

Szilard actually took out a patent on the process of nuclear fission in 1934 (he had indeed taken out numerous patents in Germany at the end of the 1920s). He was told by his new British colleagues that such patents were somewhat frowned upon by many in the British scientific community, as too “mercenary” and as barriers to full exchange and forward progress of general science. But Szilard defended himself, arguing that nuclear fission was an especially dangerous new scientific realm, and that patents might be one way of slowing down its exploitation until it could be placed into more reliable hands.⁶

Szilard at this early stage inquired whether the patent itself could be shrouded in secrecy, and was told that such secrecy was only possible if the British defense authorities requested it. As a sign of the limited imagination of the officers contacted in the British admiralty, he was told that his patent was not deemed of sufficient military significance to warrant secrecy.

Szilard at the beginning of the 1930s was of course ahead of his time in envisaging nuclear fission as a real and practical possibility, with many of the more senior physicists in Britain and elsewhere remaining uncertain about this entire area of science, and decidedly skeptical about whether any of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Some Early History
• 3 Prisoners’ Dilemma
• 4 No Need to Match Violations of “Nuclear Zero”?
• 5 What if the Rogue State is Not Seeking Nuclear Weapons?
• 6 Nuclear Weapons as a Rogue-State Veto?
• 7 Extended Nuclear Deterrence
• 8 Some Important Differences from the Past?
• 9 The Role of Ethnic Hatred
• 10 The Role of Conventional Wars
• 11 The Role of Democracy
• 12 Assessing the Future
• Index