One of the
arguments the peace movement is continuously confronted with is that
the reason why “we” — where the “we” could be India, Pakistan, or
the United States — should have nuclear weapons is that others have
it. It almost seems like an argument about why one should buy a
television or a washing machine — because the neighbour has it. One
could, of course, retort with “if they decide to jump into a well,
should we also do it?” And there is a lot of wisdom in that: it is
foolish to invest in anything without examining the utility of it,
be it a television or a nuclear arsenal.
But what people
usually have in mind when they point to the neighbour’s possession
of nuclear weapons is the standard justification: “we” need it to
protect ourselves against attack by the “other”. Well, one goes on,
how does it protect “us” if the other country does launch a nuclear
weapon at “us”. The stock answer one gets is that just because “we”
have nuclear weapons, no one would attack “us”. This, in its
essence, is what the theory of deterrence is all about. It seems
almost common sense.
Indeed, Kenneth Waltz, a prominent
international relations theorist and a strong proponent of nuclear
deterrence, goes so far as to complain “deterrence is not a
theory...a little reasoning leads to the conclusions that to fight
nuclear wars is all but impossible and that to launch an offensive
that might prompt nuclear retaliation is obvious folly. To reach
those conclusions, complicated calculations are not required, only a
little common sense.”
Unfortunately common sense does not
always suffice to understand the world in all its complexity. One
needs the good sense that comes from careful and critical
observation. And when one does observe in that manner, it is
apparent that states — the creatures whose behaviour is supposedly
governed by realist international theories — do not operate
according to Waltz’s notions of what constitutes common sense.
Deterrence for all its pretensions of being merely common
sense is just a theory. And one can test it by comparing its
predictions with actual behaviour in various nuclear weapon states.
After all, that is the process by which scientific theories are
tested. Unfortunately the results of such tests often put the theory
in poor light.
For example, in his famous debate with Scott
Sagan, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, Waltz forecasts that the
“possession of nuclear weapons may slow arms races down, rather than
speed them up.” According to his reasoning in a relationship
dominated by the logic of deterrence, “no state can launch a
disarming attack with high confidence, force comparisons are
irrelevant. Strategic arms races are then pointless.”
Strategic arms races are indeed pointless. On that there can
be no question. But it is also true that they occur. The most
obvious examples are the US and the Soviet Union who piled up more
than seventy thousand nuclear weapons between them. Waltz makes a
bow in that direction by admitting, “[human] error and folly may
lead some parties involved in deterrent balances to spend more on
armaments than is needed, but other parties need not increase their
armaments in response, because such excess spending does not
threaten them.” And yet the Soviet Union spent so much on armaments
that it finally went bust. The “need-not” does not translate to
“do-not”; there is gap between theoretical predictions and real-life
occurrences.
Waltz also adds, “the interesting question
is...whether countries having strategic nuclear weapons can avoid
running conventional [arms] races.” And he goes on to answer it by
pointing out that “large conventional forces neither add to nor
subtract from the credibility of second-strike nuclear forces.
Smaller nuclear states are more likely to understand this more
easily than the United States and the Soviet Union did, if only
because few of them can afford to combine deterrent with large
war-fighting forces.”
This is a point many South Asian
nuclear strategists had also made prior to May 1998: nuclear weapons
were to be made and tested because they would help India and
Pakistan avoid wars and lower their conventional military
expenditure. In poor countries, such an argument has some appeal.
But after 1998, and especially after Kargil, we have Indian Defence
Minister George Fernandes pronouncing that the nuclear tests “simply
imposed another dimension on the way warfare could be conducted”.
Under his leadership, the Indian defence ministry got huge budget
increases (the 2000-2001 budget increase was termed the “biggest
ever” by the finance ministry) and proceeded on a huge arms buying
spree. Pakistan, to the extent it could, has matched this in its own
way.
Clearly India and Pakistan do not seem to be following
Waltz’s predictions or his advice. For that matter, the Kargil war
also violates another cardinal tenet of deterrence theory, i.e.,
nuclear weapon states do not go to war with each other.
With
their enormous destructive capability, nuclear weapons do not allow
us the luxury of putting our faith in dubious theories. The final
frontier, so to say, is the most basic prediction of deterrence
theory — that nuclear weapon states will not use nuclear weapons
against each other. The dilemma is that even if one disagrees with
or disbelieves the theory, one does not want to have this be
demonstrated as false. But as we come closer to the abyss with each
military crisis, deterrence increasingly seems to be, as Zia Mian
put it, “hope masquerading as strategy”.
