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M. Troitsky’s article, published, symbolically, on the tragic anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, touches upon an intriguing and highly relevant issue, namely, the possibility of nuclear disarmament. The author argues that fewer nuclear weapons would make the world safer. He makes some interesting remarks to bolster his argument, but I find it hard to agree with some of them. Troitsky asks an interesting question: “Is there a cause-and-effect relationship between the absence of a world war over the past seven decades and the fact that the major world powers possess nuclear weapons?” Like most philosophical questions, there is no clear-cut answer. However, the author ignores the fact that nuclear weapons do not differ from regular weapons in that they have a clear purpose and patterns of use.
M. Troitsky’s article, published, symbolically, on the tragic anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, touches upon an intriguing and highly relevant issue, namely, the possibility of nuclear disarmament. The author argues that fewer nuclear weapons would make the world safer. He makes some interesting remarks to bolster his argument, but I find it hard to agree with some of them.
Why Do We Need Nuclear Weapons?
Troitsky asks an interesting question: “Is there a cause-and-effect relationship between the absence of a world war over the past seven decades and the fact that the major world powers possess nuclear weapons?” Like most philosophical questions, there is no clear-cut answer. However, the author ignores the fact that nuclear weapons do not differ from regular weapons in that they have a clear purpose and patterns of use.
The idea of developing a nuclear weapon grew out of the concept of “air warfare”. Back in 1918, the Italian general Giulio Douhet claimed that in a future war the enemy could be defeated by strategic bombing launched from a distance that was safe for the attacker. Since then, the great powers have developed their air forces in two directions. First, increasing the range and carrying capacity of bombers, which led to the creation of strategic aviation in the 1940s. (It called for the development of other types of aviation and air defence at the same time.) Second, strengthening the capacity of air warheads capable of destroying the adversary’s strategic potential [1]. The logical outcome of the second trend was the creation of the atomic bomb in 1945.
It is unclear how weapons designed to destroy the enemy’s strategic potential could prevent the breakup of states due to internal political causes.
The author cites an interesting example: “The United States decided against delivering a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union in the early 1950s.” But the reason for this was just the opposite: the United States, according to calculations made in the late 1940s, did not have superiority over the USSR [2]. The nuclear warheads of the time could not pierce reinforced concrete structures and were only fit to be delivered to their targets by air carriers, which could be shot down by fighter planes. Fully fledged thermonuclear weapons did not appear until the mid-1950, and nuclear missiles were only developed 5–7 years after that. Be that as it may, by the mid-1960s the United States and the USSR were for the first time in history in possession of weapons that could guarantee the destruction of the enemy’s strategic potential. The weapons of other nuclear powers (Great Britain, France, China), not to mention unrecognized nuclear states, still do not have this capacity.
Tactical nuclear weapons had other functions. The military doctrines of Great Britain and the United States saw them as a way to compensate for the Soviet superiority in conventional forces. The Soviet Union, officially, made no distinction between strategic and tactical nuclear weapons. However, Soviet military journals of the 1960s debated the possibility of using some nuclear weapons to support the conventional forces.
Thousands of union workers and activists
gathered and marched central Tokyo on
International Workers' Day, also known as
Labour Day or May Day, to demand higher pay
and better working conditions, a halt to nuclear
power plants, and protested against war and
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe's administration.
Against this background, Troitsky’s claim that nuclear weapons did not prevent the disintegration of the British Empire and the USSR seems rather odd. It is unclear how weapons designed to destroy the enemy’s strategic potential could prevent the breakup of states due to internal political causes. The nuclear weapon is an instrument intended to perform a certain range of tasks. Its effectiveness (or lack thereof) should be assessed within this frame of reference, without ascribing it tasks for which it had never been intended.
The Required Damage Logic
Troitsky does not mention in his article the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) or its subsequent modification, the concept of strategic parity. And yet they loomed large in the nuclear strategies of the United States and the USSR.
By the middle of the 20th century, conventional wars had become too expensive due to the high cost of weaponry. Nuclear weapons, like other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were created to make warfare cheaper. (To take out the largest number of troops with minimum expenditure on weaponry.) The result turned out to be the reverse. The costs of using strategic nuclear weapons exceeded the possible gains from such action. The most likely costs were:
- the danger of an inevitable retaliation by the enemy (against the armed forces or other assets);
- the long-term side-effects of employing nuclear weapons.
By the beginning of the 1970s, both superpowers were technically capable of inflicting assured damage on the enemy’s strategic potential. This led the United States to embrace the concept of “deterrence”: to discourage the enemy from aggression by threatening to inflict unacceptable retaliatory damage. The Soviet leadership did not officially declare this as an objective. However, judging from the public press, it saw strategic forces as a means of destroying the United States’ strategic potential. After the collapse of the USSR, the Russian leadership adopted the logic of deterrence: the objective of strategic nuclear forces was to inflict enough damage on the enemy to coerce it into peace. The nuclear potentials of Great Britain, France and China technically can only deliver a limited number of strikes on assets to coerce a potential aggressor into peace.
The modern advocates of a “non-nuclear world” have failed to come up with any plausible argument in favour of resuming the debate on deep nuclear disarmament.
Strategic nuclear weapons make it possible to inflict unacceptable damage on the enemy, or at least increase the cost of possible aggression. By contrast, deep nuclear disarmament would diminish the potential to cause unacceptable damage to the aggressor. The cost inflicted by aggression would plummet, which naturally would make it less expensive.
Why is Arms Control Necessary?
Troitsky’s interpretation of the aim of classical arms control is somewhat skewed. He writes: “Similarly, a nuclear state begins to suspect its potential opponents of wanting to take this weapon away from it… From this perspective, arms control, proposals that mutual inspections be carried out or stockpiles of fissile materials be cut appear to be treacherous attempts of external forces to disarm us.” That is not so. The task of U.S.–Soviet, and later U.S.–Russian arms control agreements was not nuclear disarmament, but the mutual reduction of counter-force potentials.
The arms control agreements between the United States and the USSR/Russia pursued three goals:
- to limit the “destabilizing” components of the strategic triad, for example, multiple independently targetable warheads;
- to eliminate nuclear weapons carriers, which could be used for counter-strikes against forces or elites (medium and short-range ballistic missiles);
- agreed decommissioning of outdated warheads and their carriers.
None of these tasks questioned the logic of strategic parity. Doubts appeared in the 1990s, when high-precision non-nuclear weapons and missile defence systems appeared. Against this background arms control began to lose its stabilizing role. Russia was confronted with a dangerous prospect: a small quantity of nuclear weapons may not survive a disarming enemy strike and the interdicting actions of its missile defence systems. Or, if it did survive, it would be unable to inflict unacceptable damage on the enemy.
Things Come Full Circle
Unfortunately, Troitsky does not mention the fact that the concept of “deep nuclear disarmament” was discussed by both superpowers in the 1960s. There were two schools of thought on that. Some argued that fewer nuclear weapons meant that fewer targets could be hit. Others noted that this was only true if alternative counter-force weapons were not being developed. The discussion died down in the 1970s, when high-precision non-nuclear weapons began to be developed. Today, when modelling the “optimum” size of strategic nuclear forces, one has to take into account not only the enemy’s counter-force potential, but also its non-nuclear weapons and its missile defence systems.
Troitsky also fails to mention interesting work by U.S. expert Michael MacGuire, who looked into the issue of the cost of aggression if nuclear weapons were liquidated. His analysis focused on the 1977 initiative of Leonid Brezhnev to renounce the use of nuclear weapons in warfare [3]. MacGuire comes to the conclusion that if nuclear weapons were to be eliminated, the USSR would most likely start a full-scale non-nuclear war to drive the Americans out of Eurasia. Whether it would have chosen to do so remains unknown, but it is a scenario that should not be dismissed. “How would the U.S. protect its European allies given Soviet conventional arms superiority?” the U.S. scholar asked with some reason. Today, Russian critics of nuclear disarmament rightly advance a similar argument.
Unfortunately, the modern advocates of a “non-nuclear world” have failed to come up with any plausible argument in favour of resuming the debate on deep nuclear disarmament. The horror scenario of terrorist networks that are about to get hold of nuclear weapons prompts a sceptical response: “What has prevented them from doing it over the past 20 years?” Another argument is the fact that the media reports which surfaced from time to time about the U.S. or Soviet missile attack warning systems apparently malfunctioning have never been confirmed. The use of strategic nuclear weapons calls for a political solution, followed by the overcoming of a sophisticated system of positive and negative codes. Is it worth risking the “nuclear shield” to overcome hypothetical and unconfirmed threats?
* * *
The above comments do not make Troitsky’s article any less interesting. It kindles interest in the problems of nuclear disarmament. The author’s call on Russia to lead the way in nuclear disarmament hardly chimes with the latest trends in world politics. It is hard to say how the United States and its allies would have talked to Russia during the Georgian and Ukrainian crises if Russia did not have its strategic nuclear capability. At the end of the day, a “nuclear-free” world is a world in which carrying out acts of aggression would be much cheaper for the aggressor than in a world with nuclear weapons.
1. Overy R.J. Air Power and the Origins of Deterrence theory before 1939 // Journal of Strategic Studies. Vol. 15. №1. March 1992. P. 73–101.
2. To learn more see: Brown A C. Drop Shot. The United States Plan for War with the Soviet Union in 1957. — New York: Dial Press/J. Wade, 1978; Holloway D. Stalin and the Bomb. The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy. 1939–1956. New Haven – London: Yale University Press, 1994.
3. MccGwire M. Perestroika and Soviet National Security. Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1991.
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