Scott D. Sagan

The Perils of Proliferation: Organization Theory, Deterrence Theory, and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons

A n apparent contradiction lies at the center of our understandings about nuclear weapons and deterrence. On the one hand, it is widely believed that nuclear weapons were an important factor in maintaining the ”long peace” between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The two superpowers avoided war despite a deep geopolitical rivalry, repeated crises, and a prolonged arms race. On the other hand, it is also widely believed that the continuing spread of nuclear weapons will greatly increase the risks of nuclear war. New nuclear powers, with similar characteristics of rivalry, are considered unlikely to maintain stable deterrence. A prominent group of political scientists have pointed to the apparent contradiction between a peaceful nuclear past and a fearful nuclear future and argue that the further spread of nuclear weapons will be a stabilizing factor in international relations. Kenneth Waltz’s 1981 monograph-The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better-presented the first detailed and forceful set of arguments in favor of proliferation.’ Since that time, however, a significant number of rational choice and neorealist political scientists have jumped onto the pro-proliferation bandwagon. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and William Riker advocate spreading nuclear weapons into areas where non-nuclear states face nuclear-armed adversaries since ”the chance of bilateral conflict becoming nuclear . . . decreases to zero when all nations are nuclear armed. ‘ ’2 John Mearsheimer believes that ”nuclear weapons are

Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons

How strong are normative prohibitions on state behavior? We examine this question by analyzing anti-nuclear norms, sometimes called the “nuclear taboo,” using an original survey experiment to evaluate American attitudes regarding nuclear use. We find that the public has only a weak aversion to using nuclear weapons and that this aversion has few characteristics of an “unthinkable” behavior or taboo. Instead, public attitudes about whether to use nuclear weapons are driven largely by consequentialist considerations of military utility. Americans’ willingness to use nuclear weapons increases dramatically when nuclear weapons provide advantages over conventional weapons in destroying critical targets. Americans who oppose the use of nuclear weapons seem to do so primarily for fear of setting a negative precedent that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons by other states against the United States or its allies in the future.

The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars: The Origins of the Pacific War

“Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad,” declared Congressman Hamilton Fish on December 8, 1941, the day after infamy. Minutes before, Franklin D. Roosevelt had asked Congress to declare war on the nation that had just launched the “unprovoked and dastardly” attack on Pearl Harbor, and Fish, an ardent isolationist, rose to support the presidents request. “The Japanese,” he said, “have gone stark, raving mad, and have, by their unprovoked attack committed military, naval, and national suicide.” Although others did not quote the classics, this madness theme was echoed throughout American newspapers that day: “sublime insanity” declared the New York Times ; “the act of a mad dog” the Les Angeles Times announced; “an insane adventure that for fatalistic abandon is unsurpassed in the history of the world” argued the Philadelphia Inquirer . In December 1941, most observers agreed with Winston Churchills statement that, since American military potential vastly outweighed Japans, the Tokyo governments decision to go to war was “difficult to reconcile… with prudence, or even sanity.” This belief that the Japanese must have been irrational to attack the United States continues to plague our understanding of the origins of the Pacific War and the lessons that modern strategists draw from that tragic occurrence. In the Pentagon, for example, the events of 1941 have inspired the dominant scenario for nuclear war: a lingering concern that can be described as hormephobia , the fear of shock or surprise, has haunted American strategic planning since Pearl Harbor.

Living With Nuclear Weapons

At Harvard President Derek Boks request, six Harvard professors explain nuclear arms issues to help citizens understand all sides of the national security debates. The goal is to encourage public participation in policy formulation. The book emphasizes that escapism will not improve security; that idealistic plans to eliminate nuclear weapons are a form of escapism. Learning to live with nuclear weapons, they suggest, requires an understanding of the current nuclear predicament and the implications of alternative weapons and policy choices. After reviewing these matters, they emphasize that informed persons will continue to disagree, but that knowledge will improve understanding and appreciation of their differences and improve the quality of policy debates. 54 references, 5 figures, 2 tables. (DCK)

The Commitment Trap: Why the United States Should Not Use Nuclear Threats to Deter Biological and Chemical Weapons Attacks

hould the United States threaten to use nuclear weapons in retaliation for an adversary’s use of chemical or biological weapons? The U.S. government has a clear policy on this matter: it is deliberately unclear about its plans. In March 1996, Secretary of Defense William Perry explained: “For obvious reasons, we choose not to specify in detail what responses we would make to a chemical attack. However, as we stated during the Gulf War, if any country were foolish enough to use chemical weapons against the United States, the response will be ‘absolutely overwhelming’ and ‘devastating.’”1 The purpose of this U.S. policy—which has become known as the “calculated ambiguity” doctrine—was underscored by Secretary of Defense William Cohen in November 1998: “We think the ambiguity involved in the issue of nuclear weapons contributes to our own security, keeping any potential adversary who might use either chemical or biological [weapons] unsure of what our response would be.”2 The doctrine’s proponents, both inside and outside the U.S. government, claim that such a threat to respond asymmetrically—retaliating with nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological weapons attack—is an unfortunate necessity. They argue that, because the United States has foresworn the option of retaliating in kind, nuclear weapons threats are the only strong deterrent preventing so-called rogue nations from using their newly acquired chemical or biological arsenals.3 The calculated ambiguity doctrine, however,

Learning from Normal Accidents

Normal Accidents’ growing influence since 1984 on social science scholarship and across academic, business and governmental disciplines was not accidental. Author Charles Perrow intended to shake up the study of safety and bring organization theory into the fore-front. This article examines ongoing debates about the management of technological systems, reviews the book’s important seeds of theory, and discusses the theoretical and practical issues related to a world growing more complex and technologically hazardous.

Nuclear power without nuclear proliferation

I am delighted to see so many of my colleagues, and it is wonderful to have such a diverse audience. There are few seminars that I go to at Stanford that include psychologists, lawyers, linguists, engineers, and historians. Bringing together such a multidisciplinary group is the mark of the American Academy, and it is one of the things we celebrate here, especially when solving challenges like the one we are going to talk about today will increasingly demand cross-disciplinary collaborations.

The Madman Nuclear Alert: Secrecy, Signaling, and Safety in October 1969

On the evening of October 10, 1969, Gen. Earle Wheeler, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), sent a top secret message to major U.S. military commanders around the world informing them that the JCS had been directed “by higher authority” to increase U.S. military readiness “to respond to possible confrontation by the Soviet Union.” The Strategic Air Command (SAC) was ordered to stand down all aircraft combat training missions and to increase the number of nucleararmed B-52 bombers on ground alert. These readiness measures were implemented on October 13. Even more dramatic, on October 27 SAC launched a series of B-52 bombers, armed with thermonuclear weapons, on a “show of force” airborne alert, code-named Giant Lance. During this alert operation, eighteen B-52s took off from bases in California and Washington State. The bombers crossed Alaska, were refueled in midair by KC-135 tanker aircraft, and then oew in oval patterns toward the Soviet Union and back, on eighteenhour “vigils” over the northern polar ice cap. Why did the U.S. military go on a nuclear alert in October 1969? The alert was a loud but secret military signal ordered by President Richard Nixon. Nixon sought to convince Soviet and North Vietnamese leaders that he might do anything to end the war in Vietnam, in accordance with his “madman theory” of coercive diplomacy. The nuclear alert measures were therefore speciacally chosen to be loud enough to be picked up quickly by the Soviet Union’s intelligence agencies. The military operation was also, however, deliberately designed to remain secret from the American public and U.S. allies. InThe Madman Nuclear Alert

The Case for No First Use

The forthcoming US Nuclear Posture Review should broaden the traditional focus of such policy reviews on deterrence requirements and include a thorough analysis of how US nuclear declaratory policy influences the likelihood of nuclear proliferation, the consequences of proliferation, and perceptions of the illegitimacy of nuclear terrorism. Such a broader frame of analysis leads to the conclusion that it would be in the US national interest to adopt a no-first-use declaratory policy, stating clearly that ‘the role of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear weapons use by other nuclear weapons states against the United States, our allies, and our armed forces, and to be able respond, with an appropriate range of second-strike nuclear retaliation options, if necessary, in the event that deterrence fails’.

Shared responsibilities for nuclear disarmament

The Japanese and Austra-lian governments announced the cre-ation of the International Commissionon Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Dis-armament in June 2008. Both SenatorsJohn McCain and Barack Obama explic-itly supported the vision of a world freeof nuclear weapons during the 2008election campaign. In April 2009, at the London Summit, President BarackObama and President Dmitri Medved-ev called for pragmatic U.S. and Rus-sian steps toward nuclear disarmament,and President Obama then dramatical-ly reaf½rmed “clearly and with convic-tion America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world with-out nuclear weapons” in his speech inPrague. There is a simple explanation for thesestatements supporting nuclear disarma-ment: all states that have joined the Nu-clear Non-Proliferation Treaty (