After the DPRK's less-than-impressive third try to demonstrate a functional ICBM capability, the President decided to take advantage of the occasion to bring up the ambitious goal of eliminating nuclear arms. It's easy to deride this idea as the kind of naive, ridiculous idealism conservatives love to tag Obama with, and indeed, many have done so. But it's a serious idea that deserves serious consideration - even if those lefties at the Hoover Institution endorsed it.That being said, while cuts to nuclear arms are probably a great idea, I'm not sure I can get behind their total elimination. For one thing, as I mentioned way back, total denuclearization does not mean an end to nuclear proliferation. The idea that new nuclear states could be deterred rests on the assumption that economic sanctions, political pressure and conventional force would be sufficient to overcome the incentive of becoming the new sole nuclear power. I am not confident in this assertion.
For one thing, countries with the capability to develop nuclear weapons are generally countries that are wealthy and powerful enough to make their isolation a risky policy. Trying to shut out India and Pakistan the way we shut out (or would like to shut out) Iraq, Iran, and North Korea would be an incredibly risky policy. Even then, it is unlikely major sanctions would be effective without great power consensus. As the market power of countries like China rises, it will become difficult for sanctions on the part of the US & EU to have the decisive weight they might have once (e.g. the case of South Africa).
For another, who says conventional power is an adequate deterrent to a country's nuclear program? Ultimately, if a country has sufficient technical capacity to develop a nuclear weapon, in most cases it also has the military strength to make the strikes necessary to destroy that nuclear capability prohibitively dangerous except in the early stages (a la Iraq, Syria). But countries have learned from those attacks. Take Iran, a country that has its critical infrastructure widely dispersed enough to deter an attack by Israel, and the capability to wage hybrid/irregular warfare in areas such as Lebanon, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf, deterring the United States from making a "surgical" strike against its nuclear facilities alone. An attack against a minor power with nuclear ambitions would have to eliminate its nuclear capability and its conventional retaliatory capability. This is not an appetizing prospect for the great powers in most cases, either because they will be reluctant or other great powers do not perceive the target country's program as a threat and thus will not accept a counter-proliferation strike as in the interests of the "international community." The end result would be some kind of modus vivendi. Perhaps the new nuclear power might assert that its nuclear arms are purely for defensive purposes.
Ultimately, though, they would enable offensive action in a non-nuclear war. Suppose Saddam had a nuclear device in 1991 (he wasn't that far off from it then, compared to 2003, and by some miracle the nuclear-free-world discussed by Reagan and Gorbachev had achieved. Would an international coalition so quickly have formed against Iraq? Like all counterfactuals, it's hard to tell. After all, US forces in Iraq were put on DEFCON 1 and expected the use of chemical weapons. Without the coalition's nuclear deterrent, though, Saddam might well have used those weapons, as he did against the Iranians. Even a retaliatory escalation of conventional force could have been negated by the use of nuclear weapons. Under their own nuclear umbrellas, great powers might well learn to live with the offensive ambitions of other states. I do not think it is a coincidence that wars of territorial aggrandizement or wars terminating in the outright annexation of a whole country are no longer common in the nuclear age. Such goals are ludicrous in the face of the prospect of nuclear retaliation.
So how do we prevent denuclearization from paving the way towards a re-nuclearizing and perhaps more violent world? Embracing missile defense. As the DPRK demonstrated, developing an effective nuclear capability needs effective delivery systems, not just nuclear warheads. Developing missile defense networks are far less risky than launching counter-proliferation strikes. While missile defense is unlikely to ever achieve the technical capability to deter a nuclear arsenal of American or Russian magnitude, I don't think it is inconceivable that missile defense could be developed to deter those mid-level countries which are weak enough to doubt their conventional power to defend themselves against great powers, but strong enough to field a nuclear arsenal. Of course, there's a lot more investment and development necessary.
Yet critics of missile defense are often those in favor of denuclearization and counterproliferation. If denuclearization is to move beyond simply an idea and become a viable condition for the international system, we will need to develop options short of war to deter against new nuclear powers that can no longer be constrained by the old standby of nuclear arms. Missile defense (perhaps funded for by cuts in great powers' nuclear arms) is a potential option for preventing a new nuclear power from pursuing offensive war or coercing its neighbors, and certainly attractive because it does not involve the moral hazards of preemptive or preventative war.
Of course, I'm skeptical of denuclearization to begin with, which is probably obvious. But if we're going to pursue it, I think there's more we need to think about than arms control and sanctions regimes.
