The campaign to reach “global zero” — the elimination of all nuclear weapons worldwide — has become a cause celebre among an array of retired statesmen, as well as an important policy priority of President Obama himself. But this effort is handicapped by its adoption of several seriously wrong-headed assumptions, positions and ideas that U.S. media outlets have tended to swallow without careful scrutiny.
The first and more egregious problem is the campaign’s radical proposal to eliminate the nearly 500 existing U.S. land-based missiles and their associated launch control facilities. Doing so would reduce American nuclear assets by upward of 98 percent. It would also give adversaries of the United States added incentive to try challenging American nuclear primacy.
Then there is the assumption that further nuclear reductions by the United States (even unilateral ones) will induce other aspiring or existing nuclear powers to do the same. However, the historical record supports no such conclusion. Since the Reagan administration, four successive arms control agreements — the INF treaty, START I, the Moscow treaty and New START — have reduced our nuclear arsenal by close to 90 percent. Yet, over that same period, China has multiplied its nuclear force, Pakistan and India have produced hundreds of nuclear weapons, North Korea has amassed a stockpile of roughly a dozen nuclear devices, while Iran continues to seek nuclear weapons (despite its protestations to the contrary). And the fond hope that our allies would help us push back on such proliferation has turned out to be more dream than reality.
There is no reason to believe, then, that further strategic cuts in Washington will precipitate the same in Beijing, Pyongyang or elsewhere. To the contrary, they are very likely to prompt the opposite.
Wrong, too, is the assumption, relied on by many, that because nuclear weapons did not deter the attacks of 9/11 they are not useful tools for protecting the United States in the security environment that has emerged thereafter. This reasoning contains a core fallacy. While our nuclear deterrent can stop conventional and other military conflicts from getting out of hand, it is not designed to stop all attacks, especially those of a surreptitious nature not tied to a nation state (like the attacks on New York and Washington perpetrated by al-Qaida). But that does not in the least invalidate the importance of possessing a robust nuclear arsenal when confronting strategic competitors like Russia and China and hostile states such as Iran and North Korea, which rely on their own strategic capabilities in times of warfare.
Most crucially, advocates of “global zero” assume that the security of our allies won’t be affected if the U.S. nuclear deterrent is significantly curtailed. In reality, as former Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole explained last year in a Capitol Hill speech, some 31 countries now depend upon our nuclear umbrella for their security. If that shield appears flimsy or dented, these states will seek their own nuclear weapons. In fact, recent debates in places like Japan and Saudi Arabia underscore that, absent a credible U.S. strategic guarantee — one backed up by a robust nuclear arsenal — emerging nuclear threats could well precipitate a run on the atom, with disastrous consequences for global security.
It stands to reason, then, that for all of its lofty goals “global zero” could very well exacerbate the very problems that it aims to curtail. A logical corollary is that America, in pursuit of the perceived security of fewer nuclear weapons, is actually making both itself and its allies a great deal less secure.
Peter Huessy is senior fellow for national security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
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