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With the invention of nuclear arms, we human beings brought ourselves face-to-face with the prospect of extinguishing the human race by our own hand. A decision to abolish nuclear weapons would represent a decision to survive. This quest for survival is the deepest, most important, and most enduring of the imperatives for nuclear abolition. Inseparable from it is the imperative of sparing the Earth’s ecosphere from irreparable damage.


Nuclear war also threatens catastrophes that, although less encompassing than extinction, are still outside all historical comparison. On August 6, 1945, moments after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, a history professor living in the hills of the city turned around, and, in his words, “saw that Hiroshima had disappeared.” In a flash, the city and most of its people had been annihilated. Those who did not die immediately were exposed to unimaginable suffering. A grocer in the city later said of the long lines of the injured filing out of the city that “you couldn’t tell whether you were looking at them from in front or in back.”


The invention of the hydrogen bomb multiplied the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb by a thousandfold. Any city on Earth can be razed to its foundations by a thermonuclear bomb of the appropriate size. Ten bombs can annihilate ten cities; a hundred bombs a hundred cities. A single Trident submarine can carry enough nuclear bombs to level an entire continent.


Even more widely destructive than the explosive power of the weapons is their radioactive fallout, which causes radiation sickness. There is, simply, no meaningful limit on the destructive power of nuclear bombs. They put at mortal risk all that we human beings are, all that we have ever been, and all that we ever will be.


These perils—the destruction of cities, nations, continents, humanity, and Earth’s ecosystem—will be with us as long as nuclear weapons are with us. However, our particular historical moment—the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the new century—has provided new reasons for taking up the challenge of nuclear arms abolition with special urgency.


The first of these reasons is that the end of the Cold War has granted us the greatest opportunity since nuclear weapons were invented to achieve the goal of nuclear abolition. During the Cold War, the obstacles to full nuclear disarmament were daunting. From a Western point of view, the totalitarian character of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) presented what appeared to be insurmountable obstacles. An agreement for nuclear disarmament required on-site inspections, but the secrecy of the Soviet regime seemed to render hope of such inspections entirely unrealistic. The West, in any case, seemed uninterested in abolition and relied on the nuclear threat to prevent an attack by Soviet forces against Western Europe. From the Soviet point of view, the West demonstrated little interest in nuclear disarmament; instead, it seemed bent on extracting the maximum military advantage out of its nuclear arsenals. Given these circumstances, it was not surprising that nuclear disarmament quickly became at best a topic for politicians’ speeches, not the object of any serious negotiation.


With the end of the Soviet Union, the most serious obstacles to nuclear abolition have been removed. No longer does a totalitarian regime stand in the way; no longer does systemic secrecy block the sort of inspection that would be required for nuclear disarmament. At the same time, the end of the Soviet-U.S. conflict removes the reason for nuclear proliferation.


The United States and Russia today have no cause for even the smallest of conventional (nonnuclear) wars, much less a nuclear conflict. The arsenals of thousands of weapons, each deployed to counter the other, are the grotesque and monstrous relics of an age that has passed. What is more, no systemic global ideological rivalry has risen to replace the Cold War. The conditions for peace among the great powers are better than they have been in several hundred years.


A second historical reason for acting quickly to abolish nuclear weapons is to avoid what many fear will become a kind of nuclear anarchy—the untrammeled spread of nuclear weapons, and of biological and chemical weapons as well. In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, new sources of nuclear danger have appeared and are growing. India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in May 1998 and now have apparently embarked on a nuclear arms race. North Korea and Iraq both have built sophisticated nuclear weapon programs.


For these and other reasons, the web of nuclear arms control agreements that modestly constrained nuclear danger in the last years of the Cold War are falling apart. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has been rejected by the United States Senate. The U.S. decision to consider constructing nuclear-missile defenses has impeded progress in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks between Russia and the United States. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which obligates the nuclear powers to eliminate their nuclear arsenals in return for a commitment by 182 nonnuclear powers to renounce nuclear weapons, is under serious strain.


The evident resolve of the United States and the other nuclear powers to hold on to their weapons fatally undercuts their efforts to stop other nations from building nuclear weapons. Possession of nuclear weapons by the existing nuclear powers is the root of proliferation. Only when nations commit themselves to abolition will they have the standing and the resolve to work together to stop proliferation.


A double standard, in which some nations were permitted to have nuclear weapons and others were not, was once tacitly accepted by much of the world. Those days are over, and the world must now move to a single standard, which can only be the abolition of nuclear weapons. The historic opportunity to achieve nuclear disarmament will not last indefinitely. Each year the difficulties multiply, as the roots of nuclear danger grow down into the soil of more countries. In particular, the influence of the United States—already badly compromised by its insistence on keeping nuclear arsenals even in the absence of a global foe—will steadily wane.


There are, it is true, some arguments against abolition that survive the end of the Cold War. Although they lack the force of the arguments that prevailed during the East-West rivalry, they still have substance. Antiabolitionists argue that abolishing nuclear weapons is reckless because inspection can never be adequate. Even if the hardware is eliminated, they correctly point out, nuclear know-how will remain, enabling irresponsible nations—“rogue states”—to violate an abolition agreement and build nuclear arms, whether secretly or openly. In a world in which all nations have disarmed, they conclude, any nation that comes to possess even a few nuclear weapons will rule. Removal of nuclear danger, they further maintain, will permit conventional war to break out. According to this view, nuclear weapons are a benefit because, through the discipline of the balance of terror, they prevent conventional war—admittedly, no small gain. Some analysts even go as far as to favor nuclear proliferation for this reason. For them, the Cold War was a demonstration that nuclear deterrence works, and they recommend the system to other nations for the future.


These arguments, however, overlook both fundamental historical lessons and fundamental differences between the two-sided, or bipolar, nuclear balance of the Cold War and the multipolar world that has emerged since. They hugely underrate the dangers of living in a world that has not committed itself to abolition while overrating the dangers of an abolition agreement. Although it is true that violation of an abolition agreement is possible, the advantage thus gained appears less formidable in light of the historical record. In several cases, nuclear powers have fought and lost wars with small, conventionally armed adversaries. This was true, for example, of England in the Suez Crisis of 1956; of the United States in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s; of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the late 1970s and 1980s; and of China in its border war with North Vietnam in 1979. In none of these wars was the nuclear-armed giant able to prevent a conventional war or extract the slightest detectable military or political advantage from its overwhelming nuclear monopoly.


If, in the past, great nuclear powers have been unable to bully conventionally armed nations, then how, in a nuclear-weapon-free world, would small nations possessing a few nuclear weapons bully the entire world? Whatever advantage a cheater might have would be brief. The former nuclear powers will not have forgotten how to build nuclear weapons, either, and would likely go into production if their other means, including the massed conventional forces of the world, failed to bring the violator to heel. Great powers that rely on the integrity of an abolition agreement for their own safety would possess a will to enforce it. The more one examines the supposed advantages of violating an abolition agreement, the more they melt away.


The differences between the bipolar nuclear balance of the past and the multipolar future, which already includes eight nuclear powers, are also important. Nuclear deterrence—the doctrine that prevailed during the Cold War—makes sense only when two sides confront one another, if then. Add a powerful nuclear-armed third nation, not to mention a 10th or 15th, and the system is thrown into confusion and disarray. Sudden changes in alliances, of which history shows many examples, would threaten to capsize even the most carefully wrought agreements.


With the advent of what defense analyst Albert Wohlstetter called a nuclear-armed crowd, nuclear deterrence cannot provide stability even in theory. Arms control agreements would be entangled in hopeless complexity. During most of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States were unable to achieve reductions in offensive nuclear arsenals, which consequently grew to preposterous size. What chance is there that a dozen major nuclear powers, arranging themselves in any number of shifting alliances, could achieve lasting agreement on appropriate levels of nuclear arms? In addition, the already great danger that terrorist groups would acquire nuclear bombs and use them could only rise exponentially as nuclear technology spread. Abolition, which would require the tightest feasible controls on nuclear materials and technology, would help eliminate this problem.


It would be wrong to suggest that a world without nuclear arms would be without danger, even nuclear danger. The risk of cheating would be real, as would the risk that a possible conventional war might spin out of control and spur nuclear rearmament. The point, however, is that those perils are lower by several orders of magnitude than the ones in the world of nuclear anarchy toward which our inaction points us now. We are not called to choose between danger and perfect safety but between two species of danger. Reflection shows that the level of risk under an abolition agreement is far lower than that which exists in a world without one.


There are further reasons to abolish nuclear weapons. Since the destruction of Nagasaki, no nuclear weapon has been used in war. In a world of proliferating arsenals no one knows how long this good luck will hold. What we can and do know is that over the long run no civilization can be based on a willingness to kill hundreds of millions of innocent people. As long as the Soviet Union existed, the West could at least argue that it resorted to this extreme means in order to counter the horrific threat posed by an immense totalitarian empire. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that justification disappeared. The nuclear powers are left with their own insistence, unrelated to any particular peril, on preserving these means of annihilation.


Although the physical threat of a full-scale nuclear holocaust has declined since the end of the Cold War, the cultural and spiritual threat has grown. The exploded bomb can end human life on Earth. The unexploded bomb—the incarnation of the worst impulses of human beings—spreads moral devastation within. We are brought face to face with ourselves—with the character and proclivities of the liberal civilization that now bids to dominate the world’s affairs. Can we preserve this civilization without menacing it and all life on earth with annihilation? Or has our idea of civilization come, by some twisted logic, to incorporate the threat of annihilation into its essence? Surely an acceptance of annihilation contradicts the avowed principles of our civilization at every point and, even in the continued absence of nuclear war, darkens its future. Freeing the world from this burden is yet another reason to abolish nuclear arms.


About the author: Journalist Jonathan Schell is the author of The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons (1998). He has written for The Nation, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post. He is a former writer and editor with The New Yorker.

Nuclear Weapons Should Not Be Abolished

By Richard N. Haass


Should nuclear weapons be abolished? To many, the answer might seem obvious given the economic cost and, more important, the destructive power of these weapons. The use of just a small percentage of the tens of thousands of weapons that exist could kill millions of people and leave large areas of the Earth uninhabitable for generations.


For better or worse, however, the question of abolishing nuclear weapons is actually quite complicated. Nevertheless, the best answer to the question of whether they should be abolished in the foreseeable future turns out to be “no.”


History bolsters this perspective. The Cold War waged by the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the latter half of the 20th century remained “cold” in large part because of nuclear weapons. Although there were some close calls, such as the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, each side correctly calculated that no gain was worth the risk of a nuclear war that would have left both countries and much of the world completely demolished. This fear of nuclear war led the leadership of the two superpowers to act with great caution and avoid direct confrontation lest it escalate into nuclear catastrophe. The Cold War thus proved to be different in fundamental ways from other eras of history in which war between the dominant powers of the period was the norm.


However, the utility of nuclear weapons did not end with the demise of the Soviet Union and the fading of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons, which for decades helped keep the peace on the Korean Peninsula, continue to contribute to stability. North Korea, despite its massive conventional military might, has not launched an attack on South Korea. One reason for this apparent restraint is the knowledge that the United States has not ruled out using nuclear weapons on behalf of its ally if troops from the North were to threaten to overrun the South.


Nuclear weapons and the possibility that they might be used may also have contributed to Iraqi restraint during the 1991 Persian Gulf War triggered by Iraq’s August 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait. In January 1991 U.S. president George Bush sent a letter to Iraqi president Saddam Hussein warning that any Iraqi use of chemical or biological weapons could prompt the United States to respond in the most powerful ways imaginable, a warning the Iraqis took to mean nuclear weapons. It is highly possible that because of this reason Iraq never used its chemical or biological weapons against troops from the international coalition, which included the United States. Iraq had used chemical weapons in a previous war against Iran in the 1980s.


The experience with Iraq during Operation Desert Storm points out that nuclear weapons have increasingly taken on an additional role: to deter the use of chemical and biological weapons. The United States no longer has the option of deterring the use of chemical or biological weapons by threatening to retaliate in kind, because it no longer possesses such weapons. The threat of nuclear retaliation could discourage the use of these other terrible weapons. At the same time the actual use of nuclear weapons in response to a chemical or biological weapons attack could dissuade others from following suit.


Israel provides another example of nuclear weapon possession used successfully as a deterrent. Israel is widely known to possess nuclear weapons, although its government does not acknowledge this fact. It is plausible that Israel’s de facto nuclear weapons status may have helped convince people and governments throughout the Arab world that the Jewish state was here to stay and could not be eliminated even if Arab armies proved victorious on the conventional, nonnuclear battlefield. Negotiations began to gain momentum once it became clear there would be no military solution to the challenge posed by Israel.


A last possible example of a situation in which nuclear weapons may have contributed to stability involves India and Pakistan. India first exploded what it described as a “peaceful nuclear device” in 1974; Pakistan, while avoiding a test at the time, also developed a nuclear weapon. Both countries tested nuclear devices in 1998. It is noteworthy that the Indo-Pakistani rivalry (which often includes small conventional clashes) has not spilled over into all-out war, something that did occur several times in the pre-nuclear weapons era. As was the case between the United States and the Soviet Union and between the Soviet Union and China, nuclear weapons appear to be useful as a means of deterring not simply nuclear war but all forms of war between nuclear-armed countries.


None of these claims is meant to suggest there are no risks or costs associated with the possession of nuclear weapons. One direct cost, the financial one, is considerable. A 1999 study published by the Brookings Institution notes that the United States alone spent approximately $5.5 trillion (measured in 1996 dollars) on nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons-related programs from 1940 to 1996. This adds up to nearly $100 billion a year on average.


A second potential cost of nuclear weapons might be described as a copycat effect. Many experts argue that the decision by the five major nuclear powers—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—to hold on to their weapons increases the temptation for others to become weapons states themselves. This is plausible in selected cases such as India, where some officials in that country advocated a nuclear weapons program to deter China. But there is a long list of countries—such as Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Germany, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, and Ukraine—who have either given up nuclear weapons programs or decided not to develop or acquire them. Domestic politics and relations with neighbors and rivals seem to weigh more in this decision than trying to emulate the existing nuclear powers for reasons such as national prestige. What is more, the fact that the United States possesses nuclear weapons and is prepared, in principle, to use them to deter threats to its allies—a phenomenon known as extended deterrence—actually reduces the pressure on certain countries to develop their own nuclear weapons capability.


Still, it would be unwise to assume that such weapons will forever remain unused simply because individuals and governments have exercised restraint to date. If deterrence should break down for any reason, the human toll of any nuclear weapons use would be great. The bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the final days of World War II (1939-1945) demonstrated the awful destructive power of what were two relatively small and primitive weapons. Today’s bombs are far more powerful and, if they were used, would therefore cause damage on a far greater scale.


Some of these risks and costs can be reduced. Inventories of nuclear weapons can and should be reduced. Even during the Cold War, arms control agreements managed to limit and to some extent reduce the levels of nuclear weapons. In the aftermath of the Cold War, it should be possible to reduce U.S. and Russian inventories dramatically. Maintaining smaller forces would not only save money that would otherwise be devoted to modernization and maintenance but would also reduce the chance that weapons might somehow fall into the hands of terrorist organizations. The deployment of limited defensive antimissile systems can supplement arms control and deterrence by providing a measure of insurance against small nuclear attacks triggered by accident, unauthorized persons, or by so-called rogue actors such as North Korea or Iraq.


As several of these points suggest, it is no less important that nuclear weapons inventories, whatever their size, be maintained in a fashion that minimizes the chance for accidental or unauthorized use. This requires good intelligence and warning systems so those in charge of launching nuclear weapons do not react to false or flawed data. In addition, physically separating weapons from launch systems can provide valuable extra time in moments of crisis, to allow tempers to cool or for information to be clarified.


It is also essential that any nuclear weapons arsenal be sufficiently robust so as to discourage intentional use. This is what deterrence, or prevention, is all about. Deterring a nuclear war requires making sure that your adversaries know that they will not benefit from using nuclear weapons first. This, in turn, requires that all parties maintain “second strike” capabilities—that is, the ability to survive a nuclear attack and still retaliate so that the side striking first gains no advantage. Winston Churchill’s statement, “Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation” vividly captures this concept. Indeed, this idea of mutual vulnerability, or mutual assured destruction, is so central to deterrence that it was codified by the then-superpowers in a 1972 treaty that severely limited defense against ballistic missiles.


Would a world without nuclear weapons be more peaceful? Not necessarily. War was commonplace between and within states for the centuries of recorded history before the advent of the nuclear age. There is little reason to believe that human nature has progressed to the point where the traditional sources of conflict—ideology, nationalism, religion, greed, ambition—are even close to being obsolete. A nuclear weapons-free world would be better off in the sense that a cataclysmic conflict was no longer a possibility, but arguably worse off in the sense that lesser but still terrible forms of conflict would become less risky and hence more frequent.


Managing the transition to a world without nuclear weapons would be difficult, as even a small amount of cheating could have significance. In theory, a state that came to possess only a few nuclear weapons would enjoy a tremendous advantage over all others. Efforts aimed at preventing this would involve a degree of intrusive inspections and monitoring that is far beyond what many governments of today would tolerate. Moreover, abolition could not prevent the reemergence of nuclear weapons. Uninventing nuclear weapons is impossible. The knowledge of how to manufacture nuclear devices and advanced delivery systems such as aircraft and missiles cannot be extinguished. A race to reintroduce nuclear weapons would be filled with danger.


What would have to change for it to be both possible and safe to move to a nuclear weapons-free world? Nothing less than a basic transformation of international politics would be required. Tensions between governments would have to fade dramatically; trust between them would have to grow. Abolition of nuclear weapons in and of itself would not bring about an abolition of tension or conflict. To the contrary, it would lead to a world of more frequent violence if the restraining features of nuclear deterrence were removed and not replaced by better political relations.


Such consensus and sense of community is a long way off. For now, nuclear weapons are a condition to be managed rather than a problem to be solved.


About the author: Richard N. Haass is vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He served on the National Security Council staff under the administration of President George Bush.

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