Nuclear Weapons

NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Deterrence, Survival, or Peace?

Dr. A. PRASANNA KUMAR
Professor of Politics, Andhra University, Waltair

This paper attempts to study the impact of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction on the stability of the world system, survival of humankind and global peace.

Deterrence and Security
In both the advanced and developing countries, decisions relating to nuclear weapons are taken without public consultation. The ‘structural necessities’ of deterrence, as Michael Walzer points out, “militate against public debate and democratic choice, both among the people at large and among the representatives. We live in what might be called a nuclear autocracy.” There has been a steady drift “toward specialized, secret, technically complex and esoteric doctrine.” The dilemma confronting scholars and statesmen is how to check proliferation which might perpetuate an international status quo and how to condone proliferation that would amount to an abdication to responsibility for minimizing nuclear conflict. Nuclear proliferation, therefore, raises “certain fundamental normative issues that no amount of theorizing can erase.” David C. Gompert refers to the inherent inequity of the non-proliferation norm which is “compounded by the fact that non-nuclear weapon states are not only deprived but in fact penalised for their deprivation”. The fears and concerns arising from the spectre of proliferation have been classified as specific and general such as: 1) the spread of nuclear weapons will make nuclear war – sometimes, somewhere – more likely; (2) fears about the consequences of particular proliferation contingencies on one’s own security; and (3) proliferation will have a debilitating effect on prudential arrangement of East West security relation­ships, particularly the Soviet-American nuclear equilibrium,

The equilibrium based on the concept of deterrence has passed through many stages of which the three major phases have been balance of terror, propounded by Churchill, the doctrine of massive retaliation of the times of John Foster Dulles and the later day theory of MAD, i.e., Mutual Assured Destruction. Now the equation is Strategic Defense Initiative vs. Ballistic Missile Defence system or Star Wars vs. BMD, the former being called by President Reagan as realistic deterrent strategy. As Gregory Tverton pointed out, “the central concept of deterrence is awful–­that neither side will use the nuclear weapons because both know that the other could wreak damage without precedent in relation.” Yet, many statesmen and scholars have sought to give deterrence a rationality and credibility that seem to find increasing acceptance in many parts of the world. If President Carter, who was less emphatic in his assertion than his successor, Ronald Reagan, felt that “the possibility of mutual annihilation makes a strategy of peace the only rational choice for both sides” a leading academic like John Lewis Gaddis opined that “the development of nuclear weapons has had, on balance, a stabilizing effect on the post war international system.” The American perception is based on the doctrine “the greater the fear, the less probable the outbreak of war” – a fear that is shared by both the superpowers about which Herman Kahn remarked that “the only thing they had to fear from each other was fear itself.” Thus, concepts of deterrence “finely spun”, as I. F. Stone remarked, give a “rational appearance” to an irrational theory.

Contrary perception of threat and discrepancies in the percep­tions of threat have added a new dimension to the problem of security. The greatest security threat of all, observed Richard J. Barnett, is the fatalistic belief that the war no one wants cannot be avoided. That explains the proliferation of “a great variety and enormous number of nuclear weapons” and “nuclear arsenals or varying sizes and capabilities” accentuating the great divide between the nuclear haves and have-nots. David Gompert had obviously this problem in mind when he said that “if non-proliferation were to be a major criterion in the future management of the central balance, two objectives would have to be reconciled: enhance­ment of the security of non-nuclear states and progress in constraining the nuclear appetites and prerogatives of the super powers.” In an age of “bipolar mutual deterrence” strategic relationship between super powers is based on a nuclear balance of terror. But the security phobia is no longer confined to this two nuclear giants only. The “national security phobia” fuelling the evolution of a permanent war economy, as an expert remarked, has resulted in a global escalation of arms race both nuclear and conventional. As the Final Document of the Tenth Session of the UN General Assembly stated enduring international peace and security cannot be built on the accumulation of weaponry by military alliances nor be sustained by a precarious balance of deterrence or doctrines of strategic superiority. Nor do the non-nuclear states accept the assumption that “mature nuclear stats” are more trustworthy than the others. Randy Forsberg, founder of the Nuclear Freeze Movement, commented sharply on “he hubris, the arrogance, the almost criminal carelessness of men who pursue the policy in their confidence that they can play ‘nuclear chicken’ forever without losing control of the situation once.”

Rikbe Jaipal sums up that the doctrine of nuclear deterrence threatens the very survival of mankind and quotes the Nobel Peace Prize winner Alfonso Garcia Robles: “It is morally and politically inadmissible that the survival of mankind should be made hostage to the peculiar perception of security of a few states.” The spread of nuclear weapons both vertically and horizontally has escalated tension all over the world and increased the possibility of “low level nuclear conflicts in many parts of the world.” Arms race and high military expenditures have become “national addictions.” In a way, real armaments race, as Geoffrey Blainey warned, is a substitute for war. UK Labour Party’s Shadow Foreign Secretary Denis Healey cautioning against proliferation, remarked that “Pendundant and superfluous as they are, the existing arsenals of nuclear forces are in themselves not likely to produce a war, but the weapons on the way could well destabilise the situation.” George Kennan once wrote that the nuclear bomb “is the most useless weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose. It is not even an effective defence against itself.” Every year the UN General Assembly appeals to nations, though in vain, to reduce military expenditures. Renouncing the threat of war, said a UN resolution, is the most acute and urgent task of the present day. Yet, as John G. Stoes­singer pointed out not a single weapon has been scrapped. The only way to disarm, as he crisply put it, is to disarm. The dilemma facing the scholar and statesman is how to make nations which perhaps without exception, believe in Frederick the Great’s dictum that diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments, accept disarmament, particularly nuclear disarmament as the first and most vital step for world peace. This indeed is no ordinary dilemma and as the theologian says “everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Cost of Survival

Liberty of the weak, wrote Tawney, depends on the restraint of the strong. The survival of more than two-thirds of mankind is largely determined by the policies of the affluent and developed nations. The endless misery of most of the third world countries speaks of the callousness of the advanced countries whose military budgets continue to soar. As Stoessinger pointed out, the money spent on military expenditure each year far exceeds the total income of all peoples of Africa, South and South-­East Asia. It is three times the money that is spent on education and nearly thirty times what industrialised nations give as aid to the developing countries. The annual budget of the United Nations amounts to less than a third of the total cost of cat and dog food sold in American super-markets. WMSE (World Military and Social Expenditure) says that in today’s world one in three adults cannot write or read and one in four persons is hungry. Yet, there is one soldier for every forty-three persons as against one doctor for every l,030 persons. The amount annually spent on military research is more than six times the amount allotted to medical research. World military spending is nearly 900 billions a year and there is enough nuclear power to kill everyone 12 times over. Forty years of arms race has cost the world $ 3.4 trillions to produce over 16,000 megatons of explosive nuclear energy as against 11 megatons which had killed 39 million people in the Second World War and elsewhere, The world’s weapon system has increased by 200 times. The 135 conflicts or regional wars that have taken place since 1945 have killed over 20 million people.

Despite this enormous military spending by nations, parti­cularly the big and rich nations, world security hangs precariously on the razor’s edge. Scientists and strategists know that “faulty computer chips, fouled up communications in the midst of international crises, crazy orders issued by overly and zealous military commandos” are some of the “images of nuclear night­mares.” Added to these will be the new forces like “population pressure, the cruel and inhumane facts of starvation” that may trigger violence anywhere, anytime.

It is time the advanced countries realised that “what the third world countries are asking for is global equality of opportu­nity, notglobal equality of opulence.” Otherwise as S. Ramphal warned, “not just the poor but all the world will be the Poorer if there is no peaceful change in the international order.” George Kennan refers to the moral dilemma by asking: “Is there not, whatever the nature of one’s particular God, an element of sacrilege involved in the planning of all this at stake just for the sake of comforts, the fears and the national rivalries of a single generation? Is there not a moral obligation to recognise in this very uniquenesss of habitat and nature of man the greatest of our moral responsibilities and to make ourselves, in our national personification, its guardians and protectors rather than its destroyers?” Willy Brandt too raised his voice against subordinating for too long underdevelopment and human need to East-West strategic issues. Where is the time to bear the voices of sanity and cries of hunger in a world in which, as Lester Pearson said “people prepare for war like precocious giants and for peace like retarded pygmies.”

Weapons and World Peace

The idea of peace, says Richard Smoke, is “clearly a central element in any inspiring and reasonable vision of a superior world order.” But the term “peace” says John Lewis Gaddis is not the first that comes to mind when one recalls the history of the past forty years, a period that has seen “the greatest accumu­lation of armaments the world has ever known, a whole series of protracted and devastating limited wars, an abundance of revolu­tionary ethnic, religious and civil violence, as well as some of the deepest and most intractable ideological rivalries in human experience.” These are in addition to the prevalence or “more ancient scourges” like famine, disease, poverty and injustice· Gaddis asks “Is it not stretching things a bit one might ask, to take the moral and spiritual desert in which the nations of the world conduct their affairs and call it ‘peace’?”

The absence of global war since 1945 has not advanced the cause of peace. The peace that reigns over the earth is “peace through deterrence” or “peace through strength.” It is peace that betrays a lack of mutual trust between the two major power blocs which rely on the nuclear weapon to maintain peace between them. Would the possession of nuclear weapons by both sides, asks Rikhe Jaipal, make a difference to the decision to start a war? The “military mind” may be tempted to use the dreaded weapon if it guarantees victory without the risk of retaliation. Yet most people concede that the international order is living on borrowed time and if proliferation of nuclear weapons is not checked, there could be a chain of events culminating in a cataclysm. The dilemma before humankind is how to remove the threat. As Peter Goodwin remarked “anybody claiming to have a simple solution to the threat of nuclear extermination is a fool.” Thirty years ago Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein and others issued an appeal – “We appeal, as human beings, to human beings” – to avoid the risk of universal death. A hundred years later what will historians say of our period?” asks Gaddis.

A hundred years ago some historians argued that in the nineteenth century great statesmen did much to keep the peace, while others argued that great ideas kept the peace War and peace have “so much in common that neither can be understood without the other.” Blainey records that for every thousand pages published on the causes of wars, there is less than one page on the causes of peace. Most of the great nations of the world spent more time during the last thousand years at war than in peace. In the history of our world there has been just one year of peace to thirteen years of war, according to Jacques Novikov. The past should serve as a guide to the future in assessing the risks of a war. In the years ahead a nuclear war could emerge from “some combination of deliberate choices, accidents and unforeseen consequences.” That is why Philip Noel-Baker emphasised disarmament measures as “the first and indispensable step to a more peaceful world.” As Gandhiji observed, “The personality of a man changes when he acquires a weapon.” Sadly enough, the nuclear bomb has come to hold the key to world peace. Stoessinger aptly remarked that the bomb must not become the earth, nor must the earth become the bomb. The bomb can neither promote nor sustain peace. It can only hold it to ransom. Pope John Paul said that from a new heart is peace born and another pontiff observed that “the new name for peace is development.”

The need of the hour is collective discussion “based on clear unbiased knowledge of the available facts” which could make nuclear war unthinkable. Such a control over a future war is “a continuous process requiring intellectual effort, political skill and moral courage.” That is where scholars should join hands with statesmen and strategists in accelerating the effort for an enduring peace. The task of philosophy, wrote Feurbach, consists not in turning away from real things but in turning towards them. The 15,000 peace organisations of the world and associa­tions of similar hue are crusading for peace and survival of humankind. Part of the work of the peace research movement is said to represent a beginning in the direction of what some call normative theory.