Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers

Pessimismand Emerging Nuclear Powers ~ International concern about nuclear proliferation has rapidly increased since the end of the Cold War. A recent survey found that Americans believe that the nuclear danger facing them is actually worse now than during the Cold War itself.’ Apprehensions over proliferation formed the backdrop for two occasions in the post-Cold War period when U.S. presidents have used or threatened to use large-scalemilitary force. In 1990-91, fear of Iraqi nuclear ambitions and the U.S. justification of its stance against Baghdad made the Persian Gulf War seem as much an effort at forcible counterproliferation as a campaign intended to free Kuwait from foreign military occupation. In late 1993, President Clinton signaled U.S. willingness to thwart North Korea’s nuclear program by means of war, declaring that Pyongyang ”cannot be allowed to develop a nuclear bomb.” His defense secretary shortly thereafter termed the president’s statement an ”ultimatum,” adding “we will not let the North Koreans become a nuclear power. . ..nuclear weapons in the hands of North Korea is not acceptable.”’ The Clinton administration ’s ”bottom-up” review of defense policy concluded that the spread of weapons of mass destruction posed the most direct threat to U.S. post-Cold War security interests. Declaring that the primary threat to US. security now stems from nuclear-armed terrorists and pariah states, U.S. Defense Secretary David 1. Karl received his doctorate iii International Relations from the University of SoUthertl California in August 1996. A version of this paper was presented at a panel on ”PostXold War Security Issues” at the 1996 Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, San Francisco, Calif., March 1416, 1996. I thank the panel’s participants for their helpful comments, and Jeffrey Knopf and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their valuable suggestions on an earlier draft. Research for this paper was generously supported by the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation , the US. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and the University of Southern California Center for International Studies, all of whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged. 1. Hank C. Jenkins-Smith, Kerry C. Herron, and Richard P. Barke, Public Perspectives of Nuclear Weapons in the Post-Cold War Environment, SAND94-1265 (Albuquerque, N.M.: Sandia National Laboratory, April 1994),as cited in Pete V. Domenici, “Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction,” Washington Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 7 (Winter 1995),p. 150. 2. Quotations cited in Marc Dean Millot, ”Facing the Emerging Reality of Regional Nuclear Adversaries,” Washington Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Summer 1994),p. 47. International Security, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Winter 1996/97), pp. 87-119 0 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 87 International Security 21:3 1 8 8 Les Aspin expressed his concern that “the new possessors of nuclear weapons may not be deterrable.” His successor, William Perry, warned that the danger of a ”rogue nation” acquiring nuclear arms was ”one of the most serious threats facing the world t~day.”~ To counter such a prospect, the Pentagon has launched a major effort to protect military forces from nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction and to strengthen its capacity to destroy such weapo n ~ . ~ An additional concern is posed by the spread of nuclear capacities into regions of high tension. A nuclear conflagration between India and Pakistan is so routinely predicted by senior U.S officials that it has become a common example of the dangers of a proliferated world.5 With concerns about the spread of nuclear weapons increasing, scholars and policy analysts have turned in earnest to nonproliferation issues. Debate has renewed on whether nuclear weapons are a stabilizing factor in international politics, and on whether the U.S.-Soviet experience with nuclear deterrence during the Cold War can be taken as the archetype for all cases in which nuclear-armed adversarial states confront each other. A major point at issue concerns the prospects for replicating the Cold War‘s “nuclear peace” among regional nuclear antagonists. Since it is widely conceded that nonproliferation measures will ultimately prove insufficientin preventing the emergenceof new nuclear...