CHAPTER 8: MANAGING NUCLEAR THREATS: STRUCTURES OF GLOBAL NUCLEAR GOVERNANCE

PREVENTING: THE INTERNATIONAL NON-PROLIFERATION REGIME 

• Recognizes the US, Russia, UK, France, and China to legally possess nuclear weapons aka Nuclear Weapons States (NWS)

• All other signatories are known as Non-Nuclear Weapon States 

• Any state acquiring nuclear weapons after 1968 cannot become legally recoginzed NWS under terms of the Treaty

• Establish principles that these 5 NWS must work toward nuclear disarmament in good faith + all states have a right to access the benefits of nuclear energy

• Came about largely as a result of growing fear that nuclear arms race was spiralling out of control and that nuclear weapons would spread to more countries → making the world less safe

• Obligates states party to 4 main principles 

  • NWS prohibited from transferring nuclear weapons or control over such weapons to any recipient, directly or indirectly or to assist NNWS to manufacture or otherwise acquire such weapons or seek control over them

  • NWS required to assist the NNWS in the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes

  • NNWS agree not to build nuclear weapons

  • NWS must actively work towars complete nuclear disarmament

• NPT seen as a central bargain

• Successes of NPT 

  • More countries have signed it more than any other international arms control and disarmament agreement 

  • Only one states has left the treaty (North Korea) 

  • Only 3 countries (India, Pakistan, and North Korea) have acquired a nuclear weapons capability otuside the Treaty

  • Larger number of states have given up nuclear weapons programs (South africa, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus)

•  Problems

  • There has been more focus on non-proliferation and counter proliferation than there has been on genuine disarmament 

  • Allows states to go to the brink of achieving a nuclear weapons capability

  • Does not address states with nuclear weapons outside the NPT

COMPELLING: SANCTIONS, COERCION AND THE USE OF FORCE

• International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) → oversees global nuclear facilities through diplomatic pressure and use of sanctions against states found in contravention of international agreements and law, up to the threat of using military force to coerce or compel a state to change its actions

• Can only report & advise; diplomatic pressure and sanctions aren’t always sufficient against a poweful/determined state seeking nuclear weapons

• NPT doesn’t have permamnent administrative body and relies on UN for day-to-day administration 

• Also relies on IAEA based in Vienna → responsible for monitoring compliance with the Treaty and the implementation of its central articles 

• Primary goal of IAEA → prevent diversion of nuclear programs from non-military purposes to nuclear weapons by monitoring declared nuclear facilities across the globe

• Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA) → all states party to the NPT must sign up to

  • Obliges states to declare the type and quantity of nuclear material they possess and gives the IAEA the authority to independently verify this

• Sanctions → comprehensive or targeted, imposed through the UN or more ad hoc basis and can involve a range of tools 

• Problem with sanctions

  • Worsen public opinion and impact the public most 

  • Only work if the country in question is willing to give up its nuclear program; example→ North Korea

  • Require widespread international support to be credible; they require the backing of major industrial economies

• Compellence → seeks to coerce an opponent into a particular action (forcing them to stop building nuclear weapons)

  • While deterrence seeks to prevent adversary from undertaking a particular action

• Compellence is more active than deterrence and is based TRYING TO FORCE AN ADVERSARY TO ACT DIFFERENTLY

• 3 parts to nuclear compellence 

  • Use nuclear threats to prevent a state from acquiring nuclear weapons

  • Impact of having nuclear weapons on being able to coerce a non-nuclear adversary

  • Ability to coerce a less powerful nuclear armed opponent

• A final option involves threatening and using military force

  • Is highly contentious and has only limited impact in the nuclear realm 

• 3 issues with coercive diplomacy & use of force 

  • Successful coercive diplo must threaten and reassure at the same time and assumes that actions can be change

  • Using military force either pre-emptively or preventively raises considerable questions of legality, legitimacy, and proof

  • Any credible threat of military force by the international community will almost certainly need to involve the US

LIMITING: NEGOTIATING NUCLEAR ARMS CONTROL  

• Nuclear arms control has played a key role in facilitating reductions to US & Russia nuclear stockpiles and stabilizing and reversing the Cold War nuclear arms race 

• Nuclear arms control have been central to managing global nuclear order in the past; start of 2020 there is growing concern that we might have reached the end of the arms control process begun in 1960s 

• Nuclear arms control → process whereby states have sought and continue to seek stability and security through negotiation and agreement to reduce nuclear dangers 

• Arms control → designed to regulate the development and spread of nuclear weapons and help to control their possible use and effects 

  • Seeks to manage nuclear relations and enhance stability and deterrence rather than replace it

• Nuclear arms control focuses on 3 things 

  • Limiting the testing of nuclear weapons

  • Limiting the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, and limiting the scope for their use 

• Arms control agreement can be codified by their scope and number of participants 

• Unilateral arms control → measures taken independently by one nation where no reciprocal moves are necessarily required 

  • Example: 1991 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives 

• Bilateral agreements → 2 nations; necessitate reciprocal measures and are often bolstered by inspection and verification regimes 

• Multilateral agreements → b/w more than 2 nations and potentially have regional or global implications 

  • Also bolstered through inspections, monitoring and potential enforcement

  • 2017 Nuclear Ban Treaty

• Problem → how to verify that the other party is complying with what has been agreed and not seeking to cheat 

• Concern about cheating goes back to the security dilemma → key driver for nuclear arms racing 

• Options to ensure verify compliance → use of national technical means (staellite tech), inspections carried out by relevant personnel

• Most nuclear arms control agreements are bilateral specifically b/w US and Russia 

  • Bc these 2 nations had acquired enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons over the preceding decades b/w them accounted for the vast majority of nuclear weapons in existence

• 2 main periods of bilateral nuclear arms → during second half of Cold War (1972-1987) + during the years after the Cold War where agreements were made b/w the US and Russia to reduce these large nuclear stockpiles 

• Some arms control measues have been taken independently

  • 1962 hotline agreement b/w Washington and Moscow in Cuban Missile Crisis

  • September 1991 and Jan 1992→ President Bush announced a number of unilateral arms reductions as part of his presidential nuclear initatives 

  • Involved removal of all tactical nuclear weapons from surface ships, attack sub and land based naval aircraft worldwide

• Biggest challenge in nuclear arms control agenda will be preventing further vertical & horizontal spread of nuclear weapons

• More current nuclear armed states reluctant to disarm the more attractive these weapons may become to other and harder it will be to enforce nuclear non proliferation norms

UNDERSTANDING DETERRENCE 

DEFENDING: ACTIVE AND PASSIVE DEFENCES 

• Can be split b/w active defense → measures to prevent an attack from succeeding (air and missile defences, anti-sub and other counterforce ops)

• Passive defence → attempts to minimise the impact of an attack once it has taken place (hardened missile silos, civilian defence, nuclear bunkers, contingency planning and emergency response)

ACTIVE DEFENCE 

• Military systems designed to impede and possible neuter a nuclear attack by either preventing or intercepting nuclear warheads before they can hit the intended target

• Ballistic missile defence → designed to track, locate and shoot down nuclear armed ballistic missiles when they are in flight 

  • Has different radar and monitoring capabilities to locate and track target

  • Follow ballistic trajectory that they fly up into the atmosphere before falling back to earth to hit their intended targets

  • Can be intercepted at any stage in flight→ boost phase (immediately after launch), mid course phase (while traveling through space), or terminal phase (warhead falls back towards target on earth) 

  • Interception is complicated

• Missile defence → designed & configured in different ways and for different purposes 

  • Key distinction is b/w tactical/battlefield/ theatre missile defences used for limited purposes 

  • Can also be thought of as b/w point defence and population defence 

  • Battlefield and point defences are not seen as being destabilizing bc they do not undermine strategic nuclear deterrents, national and population defences on the other hand do

• Doubts have always been cast over the efficacy of ballistic missile defences and the feeling is that they will always be overwhelmed by a large number of warheads, countermeasures or more sophisticated warhead tech

PASSIVE DEFENCES  

• Taken to minimize the impact of a nuclear attack on society should active defences fail to intercept and destroy the incoming nuclear weapons

• Designed to be of use after an attack happened

• First as measures to protect particular military assets by making them more resilient to attack and as measures to protect broader civilian population from the effects of a nuclear attack 

• Main role of passive military defences it is to protect nuclear retaliatory forces and command and control structures while passive civilian defences are designed to reduce human casualties 

• Hardening of missile silo increases the survivability of nuclear forces and second strike capabilities rather than obvious first strike advantage 

• Civilian defensive → designed to mitigate against and limit the impact of a nuclear strike 

  • Building nuclear bomb shelters, bunkers for general population, having a credible plan for emergency response

UNDERSTANDING DETERRENCE  

• Deterrence and dissuasion must be conceived primarily as an effort to shape the thinking of a potential aggressor 

• Deterrence → practice of discouraging or restraining someone in world politics from taking unwanted actions such as an armed attack 

  • Involves an effort to stop or prevent an actions

• Deterrence by denial strategies → deter an action by making it infeasible or unlikely to succeed; denies potential aggressor confidence in attaining its objectives

• Deterrence by punishment → threatens severe penalties if an attack occurs 

  • Connected the local fight and the wider world 

  • Focus is not direct defense of the contested commitment but rather threats of wider punishment that would raise the cost of an attack

• Direct deterrence → efforts by a state to prevent attacks on its own territory 

• Extended deterrence → discouraging attacks on 3rd parties such as allies or partners 

• General deterrence → ongoing persistent effort to prevent unwanted actions over the long term and in noncrisis situations

• Immediate deterrence → more short term urgent attempts to prevent a specific, imminent attack, most typically during a crisis 

• Narrow definitions of deterrence → solely to military tools of statecraft-using the threat of military response to prevent a state from taking action

• Broader conception → keeps the focus on threats but expands the scope to nonmilitary actions

  • Both agree that deterrence is dissuasion by means of threat

• 3 factors that should be kept in mind when considering deterrence in US national security 

  • Preventing aggression is not strictly about making threats; deterrence is best accomplished through broad based strategies to dissuade a potential aggressor from seeing the need or opportunity for aggression

  • Perceptions are everything; US must view a situation through the lenses of the potential aggressor’s belief and preconceptions

  • Successful deterrence involves a combination of taking aggressors motivations seriously, being clear about what the defender seeks to deter and what it will do if the threat is challenged, and taking steps to demonstrate both the capability and determination to fulfill a threat 

THE MILITARY ROLE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: PERCEPTIONS AND MISPERCEPTIONS

• Admiral Noel A. Gayler (Commander in Chief of US forces in Pacific) → there is no sensible military use of any of our nuclear forces. There is only reasonable use is to deter our opponent from using his nuclear forces

• Views of military role of nuclear weapons

  • Weapons can be used in a controlled or selective way

  • Any use of nuclear weapons by the US or Soviets is likely to lead to uncontrolled escalation with unacceptable damage to both sides; nuclear weapons have no military use other than to deter first use of such weapons by one’s adversary 

  • Threat of use by NATO acts as a deterrent to both Soviets and nuclear aggression

• Deterring Soviet Aggression

  • Understanding deterrence requires analyzing Soviet leaders' objectives, fears, and risk tolerance.

  • The challenge is predicting their response during a future crisis, not just in peacetime.

• Crisis Situations & Perception of Risks

  • In a crisis, what seems like a reckless gamble in peacetime might appear as a reasonable risk.

  • If war seems inevitable, the incentive for a preemptive strike increases.

• Limits of Strategic Nuclear Deterrence

  • Launching strategic nuclear weapons would lead to mutually assured destruction, making such threats non-credible.

  • A deterrent cannot rely on a threat that is widely seen as unbelievable.

• Role of Tactical Nuclear Weapons

  • Some believe the presence of tactical nuclear weapons near the front lines strengthens deterrence.

  • The risk of escalation from conventional to nuclear war forces Soviet leaders to consider the dangers of an uncontrollable conflict.

• Escalation Dynamics

  • Any initial use of nuclear weapons could create an escalatory spiral leading to a strategic nuclear exchange.

  • NATO's 1979 deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles aimed to reinforce the perception of escalation, tying European-based forces to U.S. strategic forces.

• Diminishing Credibility of Nuclear First Use

  • Leaders increasingly recognize that using battlefield nuclear weapons would harm NATO more than help its defense.

  • There is a decreasing likelihood that NATO would authorize nuclear first use except in response to a Soviet nuclear attack.

• Problems with the First-Use Policy

  • It is a divisive issue among NATO members.

  • It reduces preparedness for conventional war by diverting resources and planning efforts.

  • It raises the overall risk of nuclear war due to the deployment and integration of nuclear weapons in battle plans.

• Potential for Soviet Preemptive Nuclear Strikes

  • If the Soviets believe NATO would use nuclear weapons in a crisis, they may see a first strike as their best option.

  • This could make a preemptive Soviet nuclear attack more likely in a high-tension situation.

• Alternative to Nuclear Reliance

  • Strengthening NATO’s conventional forces could provide equivalent deterrence at a lower risk.

  • Studies suggest that modest increases in defense spending could shift NATO to a "no early use of nuclear weapons" strategy.