Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era

Regional Powers and International Conflict

Vipin Narang

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400850402
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The world is in a second nuclear age in which regional powers play an increasingly prominent role. These states have small nuclear arsenals, often face multiple active conflicts, and sometimes have weak institutions. How do these nuclear states—and potential future ones—manage their nuclear forces and influence international conflict? Examining the reasoning and deterrence consequences of regional power nuclear strategies, this book demonstrates that these strategies matter greatly to international stability and it provides new insights into conflict dynamics across important areas of the world such as the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia.Vipin Narang identifies the diversity of regional power nuclear strategies and describes in detail the posture each regional power has adopted over time. Developing a theory for the sources of regional power nuclear strategies, he offers the first systematic explanation of why states choose the postures they do and under what conditions they might shift strategies. Narang then analyzes the effects of these choices on a state's ability to deter conflict. Using both quantitative and qualitative analysis, he shows that, contrary to a bedrock article of faith in the canon of nuclear deterrence, the acquisition of nuclear weapons does not produce a uniform deterrent effect against opponents. Rather, some postures deter conflict more successfully than others. Nuclear Strategy in the Modern Era considers the range of nuclear choices made by regional powers and the critical challenges they pose to modern international security.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The world has entered a second nuclear age. This age is not defined by a bipolar global superpower competition involving massive nuclear arsenals with the capability to destroy each other multiple times over. In this new era, regional nuclear powers will define the proliferation and conflict landscape. These states have small nuclear arsenals, are often ensnared in long-standing rivalries, participate in multiple active conflicts, and often have weak domestic political institutions.

However, because scholarly attention has focused largely on the superpowers and the Cold War nuclear competition we presently have a poor understanding of these unfolding nuclear dynamics. The superpower model of nuclear strategy and deterrence does not seem to be applicable, for example, to India and Pakistan, which have small arsenals and where an active and enduring territorial rivalry is punctuated by repeated crises that openly risk nuclear war. In the Middle East, if Iran were to successfully acquire nuclear weapons, a cascade of nuclear weapons states could emerge that would create complicated multipolar competitions very different from the bipolar Cold War arms race. In East Asia, almost nothing is known about North Korea’s nuclear arsenal or the doctrine by which those weapons might be employed. And there are potential proliferators waiting in the wings: Japan, essentially a standby nuclear state, could one day be compelled to weaponize its nuclear capabilities, with significant consequences for East Asian and global security. There is little evidence that these countries’ nuclear arsenals will mirror those of the superpowers, or that their nuclear behavior will follow the same patterns. What strategies and choices will these states make about their nuclear weapons? And how will those decisions about nuclear strategy affect international relations and conflict?

Examining the decisions that regional nuclear powers—such as China, India, Pakistan, Israel, France, and South Africa—have made about their arsenals thus far, and their resulting behavior, helps address these questions. Regional nuclear powers, for systematic and predictable reasons, choose clearly identifiable nuclear postures and these postures matter to a regional power’s ability to deter conflict. These countries’ nuclear choices, therefore, provide valuable insight into the crucial challenges of contemporary nuclear proliferation and international stability. This book thus focuses on the overlooked experiences of the regional nuclear powers. It concentrates on two important questions. First, which nuclear strategies do regional powers adopt, and why? Second, what effect do these choices have on their ability to deter conflict?

REGIONAL POWER NUCLEAR POSTURES

What do scholars and policy makers presently know about the nuclear strategies and postures of regional powers and why they choose them? Unfortunately, very little, for two reasons. First, the bulk of the scholarly literature on nuclear weapons suffers from a Cold War hangover, focusing heavily on the superpower experience of the United States and the Soviet Union.¹ However, seven of the nine current nuclear states, and all those that might emerge, are, by definition, regional powers. Compared to the superpowers, these states face different constraints and opportunities, have arsenals that are orders of magnitude smaller, and must manage different conflict environments. As a result, the Cold War lexicon that was used to describe American and Soviet nuclear strategies cannot simply be superimposed on the regional nuclear states. These states have, in fact, chosen a diverse array of nuclear postures and strategies—the capabilities, envisioned employment modes, and command-and-control procedures that go into operationalizing a nuclear weapons capability—that look very different from those of the superpowers. Yet, the choices of the regional nuclear powers—reflecting many additional decades of thinking on nuclear strategy—that are most relevant to the present and emerging international nuclear landscape have been largely ignored.

Second, to the extent that scholars have paid attention to the non-superpower nuclear weapons states, they have focused primarily on their initial acquisition of nuclear weapons.² Little systematic thought has been given to what, if anything, regional powers choose to do after they acquire nuclear weapons, largely because deterrence scholarship has convinced itself that the mere existence of nuclear weapons, rather than their strategy and posture, drives patterns of stability and conflict. This “acquisition” or “existential” bias is an untested and dangerous assumption. If regional powers’ thinking on nuclear strategy does not follow the superpower pattern, the effects of their choices are unlikely to be the same either. At present, however, scholars and policy makers lack a vocabulary and common analytical lens with which to categorize and understand regional power nuclear strategy.

I fill this vacuum in the first part of the book by analyzing the experiences of the regional nuclear powers, or the non-superpower states that have developed independent nuclear forces: China, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, and France.³ I discuss these states’ choices about nuclear strategy in terms of nuclear posture. Nuclear posture is the incorporation of some number and type of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles into a state’s overall military structure, the rules and procedures governing how those weapons are deployed, when and under what conditions they might be used, against what targets, and who has the authority to make those decisions.⁴ Nuclear posture is best thought of as the operational, rather than the declaratory, nuclear doctrine of a country; while the two can overlap, it is the operational doctrine that generates deterrent power against an opponent. To put it bluntly, states care more about what an adversary can credibly do with its nuclear weapons than what it says about them. I thus use the term “nuclear posture” to refer to the capabilities (actual nuclear forces), employment doctrine (under what conditions they might be used), and command-and-control procedures (how they are managed, deployed, and potentially released) a state establishes to operationalize its nuclear weapons capability. This can also be thought of as “nuclear strategy,” and I use these terms interchangeably with both referring to the preceding definition. As Tara Kartha colorfully put it, without a nuclear posture or strategy, “a much vaunted [nuclear] test remains simply a loud bang in the ground.”⁵

Thus, I shift the critical variable of interest from simply the possession of nuclear weapons to how a regional power chooses to operationalize those capabilities as a nuclear posture. I identify three analytically distinct and identifiable nuclear postures: a catalytic strategy that attempts to catalyze superpower intervention on the state’s behalf; an assured retaliation strategy that threatens certain nuclear retaliation in the event a state suffers a nuclear attack; and an asymmetric escalation strategy that threatens the first use of nuclear weapons against conventional attacks. Understanding why states choose one of these postures over the others provides novel insights into the nuclear strategies and conflict dynamics across important areas of the world including the Middle East, East Asia, and South Asia.

NUCLEAR STRATEGY AND DETERRENCE IN THE MODERN ERA

The variation in regional power nuclear strategy is only important if it makes a difference to international security and conflict dynamics. So, which of these nuclear postures are required to deter conflict? Scholars and policy makers still do not know, due again to shortcomings related to the twin problems of the Cold War hangover and the acquisition bias. However, this lack of understanding is not because they have always believed that posture is irrelevant. During the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union invested substantial effort and thought into how and whether the nuclear postures they adopted affected the strategic balance. The American vocabulary on nuclear strategy was littered with phrases such as “assured destruction,” “flexible response,” “massive retaliation,” “countervailing strategy,” and “damage limitation.”⁶ Scholars and practitioners believed that these different postures would affect the American ability to deter the Soviet Union, and invested billions of dollars on the basis of those beliefs.

Practitioners of deterrence during the Cold War, and a nontrivial proportion of theorists, believed that it took quite a bit—often maximalist nuclear postures—to deter both conventional and nuclear conflict between the superpowers. As advocated by the likes of Albert Wohlstetter and Herman Kahn, the superpowers developed massive nuclear arsenals.⁷ They did so without ever answering how much of an arsenal, and of what type, it would take to deter conventional conflict. The development of overkill arsenals outpaced thinking on this critical issue. The superpowers were also so much more militarily powerful than the other states in the system that their ability to deter non-superpower states was overdetermined, making it difficult to isolate the deterrent power of their nuclear arsenals.

Because of this overdetermination, the superpower nuclear balance is a poor guide for analyzing the relationship between nuclear weapons and deterrence. Moreover, because of resource constraints and perhaps because the regional powers have learned from the superpower experience, the large arsenals and nuclear architectures of the superpowers have not been, and are unlikely to be, replicated by another state. The superpower balance is thus a methodologically and empirically unreliable guide to identifying the type of nuclear forces required to deter conflict. Despite this, virtually the entire corpus of existing scholarship on nuclear strategy and deterrence focuses on these two globally dominant states with massive nuclear architectures. None of this work addresses the question of whether the smaller arsenals and different strategies of the regional nuclear powers are sufficient to deter nuclear and conventional attack. Nearly seventy years after the advent of nuclear weapons, we still do not know exactly what size and type of nuclear arsenal is sufficient to deter.

Toward the end of the Cold War, moreover, a revisionist line of thinking emerged in the writings of scholars such as Kenneth Waltz and Robert Jervis.⁸ This line of argument veered in the opposite direction, suggesting that deterrence could be achieved with far more minimal nuclear postures than the United States and Soviet Union developed. Indeed, the current thinking on nuclear proliferation evinces a deep “existential deterrence” bias, a concept first coined by McGeorge Bundy positing that the “mere existence of nuclear forces,” even ambiguous or non-weaponized forces, should induce caution in adversaries and deter conflict, both nuclear and conventional.⁹ States are treated as equivalent once they acquire even a single nuclear weapon. This line of thinking has caused scholars and policy makers to worry about emerging nuclear powers such as North Korea. The implication is that with only a handful of nuclear weapons, a state can deter much more powerful actors, like the United States, because even a small risk of escalation to the nuclear level will deter nuclear and conventional attacks. By the end of the Cold War, and with the emergence of new regional nuclear powers, it became almost an article of faith that the mere possession of even a small number of nuclear weapons generated significant deterrent effects.¹⁰

As noted earlier, this belief in existential deterrence resulted in a focus on regional powers’ initial marches toward nuclear weapons capabilities, based on the belief that the decision to acquire nuclear weapons was critical and that the choices that came afterward were largely irrelevant. Little attention was paid to the strategies and forces regional powers developed once they first acquired nuclear weapons—that is, the nuclear postures regional powers adopted—because scholars assumed that these details were not relevant to deterrence or conflict dynamics.

This consensus among scholars and policy makers is wrong. As I show in the second part of the book, regional nuclear powers have achieved widely different deterrence results with their nuclear arsenals. Even during the Cold War, the superpowers’ postures eventually evolved to establish a degree of mutual stability,¹¹ with differential deterrent effects as their postures evolved over time.¹² The effect for regional powers is even more pronounced. All of the regional nuclear powers developed nuclear forces along similar orders of magnitude (less than several hundred), and all faced the constraints and opportunities imposed by having to operate and maneuver below the superpowers. Yet some of them have been more successful in deterring their adversaries than others. Pakistan has successfully deterred Indian conventional attack on numerous occasions, but India has not been able to do likewise, as the 1999 Kargil War demonstrated. Even with nuclear weapons, Israel experienced serious deterrence failures against its Arab opponents in 1973 and 1991. Arguments about existential deterrence have no way to explain this variation in the rates of deterrence success.

These two bodies of literature on nuclear weapons therefore leave a major theoretical gap in our knowledge on deterrence. On the one hand, there is a significant body of work focusing on superpower nuclear strategy during the Cold War and why it was important to deterrence dynamics. On the other hand, since the end of the Cold War the rise of an existential deterrence bias has suggested that everyone else’s nuclear strategy has no impact on their ability to deter conflict—a belief that Cold War superpower deterrence theories and contemporary evidence suggest is fundamentally mistaken.

Why have states with similarly sized arsenals had such differential success in deterring conventional conflict? I return to the intuition that guided early nuclear strategists and practitioners: nuclear posture and strategy, particularly for the regional powers, matters for deterrence and conflict stability. The conflict and deterrence experiences of the regional nuclear powers, which have thus far been overlooked, can provide insight into what kinds of nuclear forces are required to deter conflict. I find that differences in nuclear posture generate variation in a state’s ability to deter different types and intensities of conflict.¹³ There is little evidence that regional powers have reaped systematic deterrence benefits from the mere possession of nuclear weapons. Rather, their deterrence success is a function of their nuclear posture, and some postures fail to deliver on their promise to deter attacks. Nuclear posture, not just nuclear weapons, determines critical patterns of conflict and peace in international relations.

THE ARGUMENT IN BRIEF

Largely forgotten in the scholarly and policy obsession with the Cold War and with nuclear acquisition is the fact that the regional powers have chosen different nuclear strategies. These differences matter greatly to their ability to deter conflict. I take these issues in turn. The first part of the book asks: which nuclear postures have regional powers adopted, and why? I begin in chapter 2 by identifying the diverse nuclear postures adopted by the regional powers, using original data collected from the field, and then develope a new theory for their selection. I classify and characterize three possible regional power nuclear postures, arrayed across a spectrum of capabilities and deployment options.

• A catalytic posture, which consists of only a handful of nuclear weapons, threatens the explicit breakout of nuclear weapons in the event the state’s survival is threatened in order to compel—or catalyze—third-party intervention on the state’s behalf. For example, Israel and South Africa adopted this posture for a significant portion of their nuclear histories.

• An assured retaliation posture involves the development of secure second-strike nuclear capabilities that enable a state to threaten certain nuclear retaliation should it suffer primarily a nuclear attack. This posture has been adopted by India and China.

• An asymmetric escalation posture develops capabilities and procedures that credibly enable the rapid and first use of nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional attack. France and Pakistan have each, at some point, adopted this p...