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The future unlike the past: nuclear proliferation and American security policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Michael Nacht
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Extract

An examination of the past relationships between nuclear proliferation and American security policy substantiates several propositions. First, the political relationship between the United States and each new nuclear weapon state was not fundamentally transformed as a result of nuclear proliferation. Second, with the exception of the Soviet Union, no new nuclear state significantly affected U.S. defense programs or policies. Third, American interest in bilateral nuclear arms control negotiations has been confined to the Soviet Union. Fourth, a conventional conflict involving a nonnuclear ally prompted the United States to intervene in ways it otherwise might not have in order to forestall the use of nuclear weapons.

In all respects, however, the relationship between nuclear proliferation and American security policy is changing. The intensification of the superpower rivalry and specific developments in their nuclear weapons and doctrines, the decline of American power more generally, and the characteristics of nuclear threshold states all serve to stimulate nuclear proliferation. It will be increasingly difficult in the future for American security policy to be as insulated from this process as it has been in the past.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , Winter 1981 , pp. 193 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1981

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References

1 Joseph Nye's essay in this volume examines many of these initiatives and points the way to new developments in American nonproliferation policy.

2 Moscow Embassy Telegram #511: The Long Telegram, 22 February 1946, reprinted in Containment: Documents on American Foreign Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950, Etzold, Thomas H. and Gaddis, John Lewis, eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), p. 61.Google Scholar

3 This judgment is confirmed by the analysis presented in NSC 20/4, a paper approved by President Truman on 24 November 1948 that served as the official articulation of U.S. policy until April 1950. See “U.S. Objectives with Respect to the USSR to Counter Soviet Threats to U.S. Security,” 23 November 1948Google Scholar, reprinted in Etzold, and Gaddis, , Containment, pp. 204–11.Google Scholar

4 These developments are authoritatively reviewed in York, Herbert F., The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1976), pp. 40–74, 114–15.Google Scholar

5 See “NSC 68: A Report to the National Security Council by the Executive Secretary on United States Objectives and Programs for National Security,” 14 April 1950, first published in the Naval War College Review, XXVII, 6/Sequence No. 255 (May–June 1975): 51–108, p. 103.Google Scholar

6 See Margaret Gowing assisted by Arnold, Lorna, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, Volume 1: Policymaking (New York: St. Martins Press, 1974), p. 265. This work is the official history of the British atomic energy project commissioned by the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority.Google Scholar

7 The role of these projections in the U.S. ABM debate is discussed at length in Halperin, Morton H., Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1974), especially pp. 297–310.Google Scholar

8 Indian perspectives and capabilities are described in detail in Marwah, Onkar, “India's Nuclear and Space Programs: Intent and Policy,” International Security 2, 2 (Fall 1977): 96–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Two excellent analyses of this complicated relationship with quite different perspectives are Safran, Nadav, Israel: The Embattled Ally (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar and Quandt, William B., Decade of Decisions: American Policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict, 1967–1976 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).Google Scholar

10 One rather explicit but unconfirmed report of the origins and development of the Israeli capability is contained in “How Israel Got the Bomb,” Time, 12 04 1976, pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

11 Quandt, op. cit., p. 80.Google Scholar

12 Safran, op. Cit, p. 483.Google Scholar

13 This is an example of the so-called “dove's dilemma” treated at length by Lewis Dunn in this volume.

14 These considerations are addressed in detail in U.S. Arms Control Objectives and the Implications for Ballistic Missile Defense, Proceedings of a Symposium held at Harvard University, November 1979.

15 Most proponents of American abrogation of the ABM Treaty, for example, are, to be sure, dominated by concerns about the Soviet threat. But the demonstration of nuclear weapons proliferation by one or more states hostile to the United States would strengthen the argument for abrogation substantially in U.S. domestic political terms, irrespective of its technical or military merits.

16 Recall that the United States and the Soviet Union were important architects of the NPT. And, cooperation was demonstrated as late as October 1979 when the Soviets observed what was thought to be a nuclear weapons explosion in the South Atlantic and relayed the information to American intelligence services.

17 MrVance, 's testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee was summarized in the New York Times, 28 March 1980.Google Scholar

18 An exception are some of the initial efforts by the Carter administration to link human rights policies to military assistance programs.

19 The changes are examined at length in the author's “Toward an American Conception of Regional Security,” Daedalus (Fall 1980).

20 George Quester in this volume argues precisely the opposite—namely, that the pace of nuclear proliferation is likely to slow down in the future.

21 It could be argued, of course, that contiguity would be a deterrent to nuclear weapon use if it was appreciated that destruction of thy neighbor led through radioactive fallout patterns to destruction of thyself.

22 These incentives are well presented in Yehezkel Dror, “Nuclear Weapons in the Third World,” presented at the Annual Conference of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Villars, Switzerland, September 1979.