The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution

Power Politics in the Atomic Age

Keir A. Lieber, Daryl G. Press

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501749292
  9781501749292
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501749308
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Leading analysts have predicted for decades that nuclear weapons would help pacify international politics. The core notion is that countries protected by these fearsome weapons can stop competing so intensely with their adversaries: they can end their arms races, scale back their alliances, and stop jockeying for strategic territory. But rarely have theory and practice been so opposed. Why do international relations in the nuclear age remain so competitive? Indeed, why are today's major geopolitical rivalries intensifying?

In The Myth of the Nuclear Revolution, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press tackle the central puzzle of the nuclear age: the persistence of intense geopolitical competition in the shadow of nuclear weapons. They explain why the Cold War superpowers raced so feverishly against each other; why the creation of "mutual assured destruction" does not ensure peace; and why the rapid technological changes of the 21st century will weaken deterrence in critical hotspots around the world.

By explaining how the nuclear revolution falls short, Lieber and Press discover answers to the most pressing questions about deterrence in the coming decades: how much capability is required for a reliable nuclear deterrent, how conventional conflicts may become nuclear wars, and how great care is required now to prevent new technology from ushering in an age of nuclear instability.

CHAPTER 1

Power Politics in the Nuclear Age

The history of world politics is filled with accounts of powerful groups using their military might to conquer and dominate their neighbors. The weak lived in fear of the strong. Yet, this pattern appears to have changed abruptly with the invention of nuclear weapons, which appear to make war prohibitively costly and futile. Even otherwise weak defenders, if armed with nuclear weapons, seem able to deter the strongest aggressors—since the benefits of any attack would likely be greatly outweighed by the costs of nuclear retaliation.¹

This logic of deterrence suggests not only that countries armed with nuclear weapons can no longer fight each other but also that they can abandon all sorts of other competitive behaviors that have long defined world history. If nuclear weapons make conquest impossible, then nuclear-armed countries can feel fundamentally secure. If they are secure from foreign threats, then these countries no longer need to worry about the economic or military growth of rivals, nor do they need to build powerful alliances, engage in arms races, or compete over strategic territory. Those traditional, balance-of-power strategies aimed at ensuring national survival are no longer necessary when survival is supposedly guaranteed by nuclear weapons. In short, the nuclear era should not merely have fewer major wars, it should be a markedly more peaceful world, free of intense international hostility and competition.

Yet, any observer today can see that nuclear-armed countries have not abandoned security competition. Political tensions and preparations for military conflict continue to exist among all of the nuclear powers: the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. The absence of great power war in the nuclear age is certainly consistent with the logic of nuclear deterrence, but the peaceful transformation of international politics—built on the security provided by nuclear weapons—has failed to materialize.

Given that nuclear weapons are uniquely effective instruments of deterrence, why have they not transformed international politics? Why do nuclear-armed countries continue to compete for power, allies, strategic territory, and military superiority in an era in which nuclear weapons provide their core security? Why do power politics endure in the nuclear age?

In this chapter, we analyze the two main explanations for why nuclear weapons deter war so effectively: the immense destructiveness of these weapons and their propensity to create stalemate. Differentiating those two explanations is crucial for understanding the main puzzle of the nuclear age: why geopolitical competition remains so intense. Specifically, a careful analysis of the foundations of nuclear deterrence points to the need to investigate the nature of stalemate: how stalemate is created, how it is maintained, and what behaviors are actually checked by nuclear stalemate.

We then examine the historical record of the nuclear age. We show that the patterns of international relations since 1945 largely contradict the idea that nuclear weapons transform geopolitics. Finally, we outline our explanation for why intense security competition endures despite the shadow of nuclear weapons. The answer stems from the inherent challenge countries face in establishing and maintaining deterrence under nuclear stalemate.

The Logics of Nuclear Deterrence

Throughout history—and to this day—the primary effect of new military technologies has been to make soldiers more effective in battle. But nuclear weapons, it is widely believed, have had a fundamentally different impact on international politics. Rather than offer combatants a better way to fight, nuclear weapons have greatly enhanced deterrence. What is it about nuclear weapons that makes deterrence so robust? Why are nuclear weapons the ultimate instruments of deterrence, rather than just the most potent tools of war?

The most obvious explanation for the unique deterring power of nuclear weapons lies in their vast destructiveness.² But this explanation is insufficient. Although the immense destructiveness of nuclear weapons undoubtedly gives leaders pause in a way no military innovation ever has, the fundamental difference between nuclear weapons and all other instruments of war is rooted in their propensity to cause stalemate.

The splitting of the atom marked a dramatic increase in the level of destruction that could be inflicted by a single weapon. At the dawn of the nuclear era, a large conventional bomb could destroy a single building, bunker, or bridge. In contrast, even the most basic atomic weapon—like the one used by the United States against the Japanese city of Hiroshima at the end of World War II—could do vastly greater damage. That “Little Boy” fission bomb destroyed 3 square miles of the city. By the mid-1950s, a typical “thermonuclear” weapon could destroy roughly 75 square miles, an area larger than most cities.³ Not surprisingly, when analysts seek to understand the unique deterring power of nuclear weapons, they are often drawn to the enormous leap in destructiveness.

The destructiveness logic faces a significant limitation, however, in that war was often staggeringly destructive before the nuclear age—yet war was endemic. Kenneth Waltz, in distinguishing the nuclear from the prenuclear era, wrote that “countries armed with conventional weapons [know] that even in defeat their suffering will be limited.”⁴ But that claim is simply wrong. For most of human history, defeat on the battlefield was often total because it was a prelude to mass enslavement, torture, and slaughter.

Massacres have been an integral part of warfare throughout history.⁵ For example, accounts of the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century BC are filled with episodes of brutality against defeated populations. Thucydides’s description of the Athenian siege of Melos is notable for the matter-of-fact tone used to describe the final outcome: “The Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age … and sold the women and children as slaves.”⁶ For the people of Melos (and those of Aegina and Scione, who were also massacred by Athens) there was nothing limited about defeat. Even in cases in which the Athenians showed mercy after military victory, they still typically sold the women and children of defeated cities into slavery.⁷

The brutality of the Peloponnesian War was unexceptional. Genocide was common in the ancient world.⁸ Even when total annihilation did not occur, enslavement often did. Alexander the Great’s armies either massacred or enslaved the citizens of defeated cities like Persepolis, Tyre, and Thebes. Rome defeated Carthage, slaughtered its men, burned the city to the ground, and enslaved its women and children. Roman legions routinely massacred the inhabitants of the cities they conquered, a practice that declined only when Rome began to allow its soldiers to keep the proceeds from the sale of seized slaves. The Mongols and other great conquerors broke their enemies’ will to resist through relentless brutality, annihilating all the inhabitants of any city that resisted in order to terrorize neighboring peoples into acquiescence.

The crucial point is that although defeat in war was often total, wars continued. Over and over again, risk-acceptant leaders marched their soldiers off to war, knowing that if they failed the consequence could be their total destruction.

In more modern times, war remained staggeringly destructive, yet it continued. In terms of economic costs and lives lost, World War I was the most destructive war in European history, until it was superseded only twenty years later. The horrors of World War II are well known. Nazi Germany carried out mass murder and genocide at home and abroad. Imperial Japan brutalized millions of Chinese, Koreans, and other occupied populations. But then the instigators of war paid for their aggression. The United States and United Kingdom firebombed German cities, and the United States burned down sixty-four of the sixty-six largest cities in Japan—before dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union unleashed mass vengeance against German civilians in the war’s final stages, as the Red Army drove to Berlin and sacked the city. In short, the costs of fighting and losing in the prenuclear era were often horrific. Yet the possibility of suffering such terrible losses did not deter the combatants from going to war.

War in the prenuclear age was total in another sense as well: defeated leaders often personally suffered terrible consequences when their armies were defeated. Melian statesmen were killed alongside ordinary citizens. At the conclusion of the civil wars that ended the Ming dynasty, the emperor had his palace guards murder his own senior advisors, and then hanged himself to avoid a worse fate at the hands of his enemies. Russia’s tsar Nicholas paid dearly for his defeat in World War I: he was killed, and to eliminate possible successors, his enemies hunted down and murdered his children and extended family, ending the Romanov dynasty. Not surprisingly, murdering a defeated enemy’s children was standard practice among hereditary monarchs. And even when there is no threat of succession, leaders’ children are often drawn into war. As Soviet armies closed in on Berlin at the end of World War II, senior Nazi leaders murdered their own families and then committed suicide to escape the retribution they knew would follow defeat. More recently, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, stripped of power and with his sons already killed, was hanged on the gallows, surrounded by jeering enemies. Libya’s ruler, Muammar Qaddafi, was pulled from a culvert, beaten, reportedly sodomized, and then shot to death.⁹

This ghastly account challenges the notion that nuclear weapons are uniquely effective tools of deterrence because they make war so destructive. In contrast to what Waltz claimed, the consequence of defeat was not “limited” in the prenuclear era; wars were barbaric. And yet—despite these horrors—statesmen sent their legions off to fight, time and again. Compared with the old-fashioned punishment—meted out on the battlefield or on the torture rack—what is worse about a bright flash and a quick death? The Japanese victims at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not worse off than most of those throughout history who endured slavery, torture, execution, and—worst of all—the knowledge that loved ones faced the same fate.¹⁰

The claim that nuclear weapons mark a sea change in history—from the era of limited violence to one of mass destruction—is incorrect. For leaders, as well as their children, friends, and fellow citizens, military defeat has often meant complete catastrophe. Yet, despite such terrible consequences, human history reads like a never-ending parade of wars. The “destructiveness” of nuclear weapons, therefore, cannot adequately explain the unique deterrent power of these weapons. There must be another logic at work. That mechanism—the logic of stalemate—is the key to explaining deterrence, and it constitutes the foundation for arguments about a nuclear revolution.

Nuclear weapons are uniquely deterring because they appear to make victory in war impossible. They are the ultimate tools of stalemate. In the past, war was hell—but primarily for the defeated. Melos was razed; Athens was not. Leaders in the prenuclear world could rationally launch wars, even when they knew the consequences of losing would be terrible, because they had a chance to win, and thus might avoid the worst of war’s consequences. What is unique about the nuclear age is not that war can now be devastating. Rather, it is that both sides—strong and weak, victor and vanquished—can be destroyed if war occurs. As often described, the defining feature of nuclear deterrence is not “overkill” but “mutual kill.”¹¹

In the prenuclear era, leaders could rationally embark upon war, despite the horrors recounted above, because victory was possible and could yield enormous rewards. Popular accounts of warfare often depict aggression as senseless, partly because the longest and most destructive wars are the ones that receive the most attention. But highlighting those famous, long conflicts distorts history; many wars—especially the quick, one-sided affairs between unequal opponents—have led to enormous gains. The Roman empire ruled the region around the Mediterranean because it won a series of lopsided battles over small, weak neighbors. Spain and then Britain ruled much of the world because they, too, easily defeated weaker peoples who inhabited valuable lands. The territory of the United States—stretching from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans—resulted from one of the most successful campaigns of conquest in history. The U.S. expansion is often portrayed as an uncoordinated act, driven by pioneers chasing land, minerals, and markets. It does not seem like a military campaign, even though there were plenty of battles, because the fight against Native Americans was so one-sided. But that is the point: war could pay handsomely in the nonnuclear era when battles were unfair fights. Most campaigns that went extremely well for conquerors are not even remembered as “wars.”

Although many successful wars were waged against vastly weaker parties, even conventional wars between great powers sometimes resulted in low-cost victories. The British defeated the Spanish Armada at the cost of a few ships, granting London naval supremacy for decades. Tokyo prevailed decisively in the Russo-Japanese War, opening the door to its conquests in Korea and China. Even World War II, one of the most destructive wars in history, might have resulted in a low-cost victory for Germany if it had halted its campaign in the summer of 1940, just after occupying Poland, Norway, Denmark, France, and the Low Countries. That would have been one of the most one-sided great power wars in European history, putting Germany in control of the European continent from Poland to the English Channel.¹²

But the creation of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II undermined the logic of conquest. The terrible consequences of war, which in the prenuclear era were principally borne by the defeated, can now be imposed on the victors as well. Specifically, if both adversaries have deliverable nucle...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Power Politics in the Nuclear Age
• 2. Gettting to Stalemate
• 3. Escaping Stalemate
• 4. Deterrence under Stalemate
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index