US Foreign Policy and Nuclear Weapons

Ofear and I were born twins” begins the introduction to Thomas Hobbes’ classic of political philosophy, Leviathan . The phrase refers to the coincidence of the author’s birth and the British naval battle against the Spanish Armada in 1588, which created, Hobbes came to believe, the atmosphere of tension and conflict that shaped his vision of political life and the principles he postulated to govern it.

Similarly, the nuclear age and the Cold War were born twins. The global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union shaped the role of nuclear weapons in international politics for four decades. In retrospect, the Cold War was a great ordering principle for the nuclear age and the end of that conflict has thrown the role of these armaments into doubt. The Cold War provided answers to the central questions nuclear weapons raised. The main political purpose they served was to deter the Soviet Union. Deterrence was strongest in Europe, the heart of the conflict between the two nuclear superpowers and the site of each side’s largest military deployments. Furthermore, each superpower was committed by treaty to defend its part of Europe. For the purpose of deterrence, the United States assembled a large nuclear arsenal to guarantee the “assured destruction” of the Soviet Union in the event of a Soviet attack and to avoid any political disadvantage that numerically inferior forces might impose.

Together, those policies comprised what can be called classical deterrence. With the end of the Cold War, classical deterrence is no longer valid. The United States, however, still retains a large nuclear arsenal. In three major post-Cold War issues—relations with Russia and China, relations with Germany and Japan, and relations with countries whose political goals run contrary to American interests and that seek nuclear weapons in pursuit of those goals—the United States’ nuclear arsenal continues to be relevant to American political purposes, although in a less clear-cut way than during the conflict with the Soviet Union.

II

Russia and China were the principal objects of American nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. Russia’s imperial predecessor, the Soviet Union, was, of course, the adversary against which classical deterrence evolved. China never approached the United States in nuclear might, but the American government did make implicit nuclear threats against Beijing. The purpose of those threats was not deterrence but rather “compellance”—not to dissuade China from doing something it was thought to be contemplating, but rather to compel it to stop an activity in which it was already engaged: fighting in Korea and shelling several small islands in the Taiwan Straits. ¹ The threats that helped persuade the Soviet Union to remove its missiles from Cuba also count as an instance of compellance.

With the end of the Cold War, neither country is any longer the object of classical deterrence, let alone compellance. The US nuclear policy towards China has long since ceased to fit either description. In 1972 Beijing and Washington reversed what the Korean War had accomplished. That conflict had made them adversaries. Richard Nixon’s journey to China signaled the formation of a common front against the Soviet Union. The internal changes in China that began in 1979 turned out to be just as important for Sino-American relations. Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms were the undoing of orthodox communism in China. The government relaxed its grip on the Chinese economy, and Chinese society was opened to the outside world. Having been more or less isolated during the three decades of Maoist rule, China, in the 1970s, rejoined the international community. The United States has since gained a growing economic stake in the country. All these changes have made it difficult for Washington, despite sharp ongoing differences with the government in Beijing, to regard China as an adversary to be deterred and contained.

American relations with the Soviet Union changed later, and even more suddenly and dramatically, than those with China. In 1991, the Cold War adversary of the United States embarked on three revolutionary transformations: from an empire to a nation-state; from a centrally...