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THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS



Military strength has traditionally been one of the attributes distinguishing the so-called great powers from the small powers. Since World War II, this distinction has tended to give way to that between the nuclear powers and those not so armed. The high cost of developing and procuring nuclear capabilities initially prohibited all but a few industrial powers from developing them. The period of Soviet and American nuclear monopoly immediately after World War II coin­cided with a tendency of nations within the international system to group them­selves into opposing alliances led by the two nuclear powers. Paradoxically, however, in the long run, nuclear weapons may have contributed to loosening of a bipolar system. The diffusion of nuclear knowledge, reactors, and materials has dramatically reduced the cost and difficulty of developing nuclear military capabilities. At the same time, as the potential destructiveness of war has risen, junior members of alliances have become more skeptical that other nations will risk devastation to honor treaty commitments. Charles DeGaulle put the question most succinctly: "Will Washington commit suicide to save Paris?" Hence, there is the incentive to develop and rely on one's own nuclear forces. Less than two decades after the first atomic explosion, it was authoritatively estimated that nations economically and technologically capable of supporting a nuclear military program numbered as high as twenty, including Canada, Japan, West Germany, Sweden, Egypt, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, and Israel. De­spite some belated efforts by the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union to delay expansion of the nuclear club—indirectly by the Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and directly by the Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970—the decision of whether or not to acquire nuclear weapons now lies beyond the effective control of leaders in Moscow or Washington; and such decisions are as likely to reflect regional security problems as they are those of the cold war. India's successful nuclear test has increased the motivation for Pakistan to follow suit, and that nation may well be the next to join the nuclear club. Acquisition of nuclear weapons by one of the Middle Eastern nations would almost certainly trigger a local arms race, and that is not the only region in which this might occur.

In a world that faces a growing gap between burgeoning demands for energy and diminishing conventional sources of it, pressures to exploit nuclear power will increase. As India's experience has made dramatically evident, a nation with the capacity to use nuclear technology for "peaceful" purposes also has within its grasp the ability to produce weapons.

At present, nuclear technology has tended to create two classes of inter­national citizenship. In the long run, however, nuclear capabilities may tend

275 Weapons, War, and Political Influence

to dilute the importance of traditional bases of power—population, territory, industrial capacity, and the like—and therefore reduce rather than expand the differential between large and small nations. To be sure, a nation with a large population, vast territory, and widely dispersed industrial capacity may be in a better position to survive a nuclear attack—and is thus capable of employing threats more effectively—than is a nation with limited population and territory. In the prenuclear era it was unlikely that a minor power could inflict an unaccepta­ble level of damage on one of its large neighbors, much less threaten its existence; it is not inconceivable, however, that in the not too distant future, a small nation armed with nuclear weapons may be in a position to inflict such damage. This is precisely the reasoning that underlies the French nuclear "force de dissuasion. " The ability to "tear off an arm" is assumed to be sufficient to deter even a much more powerful adversary.

However, for most nations, nuclear power is currently only indirectly relevant to the conduct of their foreign policies. Although possessed of weak and crude military capabilities in comparison to those of the nuclear nations, these countries also enjoy the advantage of being unlikely direct targets of any nuclear exchange. It is thus one of many paradoxes of the nuclear age that the threat of destruction hangs most heavily over those states with the greatest military power; in some respects, then, security is inversely rather than directly related to military capabilities.

 




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