The case against deterrence doctrine

[Today’s edition of the daily NGO newsletter for the NPT Review Conference — News in Review — contained the following article I wrote, which grew out of some online discussions about the NGO paper on deterrence that will be presented to the Conference this afternoon. IPPNW also co-authored the presentation on the Nuclear Weapons Convention, which I will post after it has been delivered.

All of the NGO presentations will be available on the Reaching Critical Will website, where you can also download each issue of News in Review.]

By some accounts, nuclear weapons are like the flu. As long as they exist, we will continue to need the most powerful flu vaccines we can get our hands on; in this case, “effective” nuclear arsenals to prevent an outbreak. According to this analogy, deterrence is a prophylactic against a threat we have no other means to address.

There are two big problems with this viewpoint, which appears to be held in common by all the nuclear-weapon states and by those who aspire to join the club. Nuclear weapons are not our inevitable lot in life; they don’t just happen to exist. And insistence that the nuclear threat can only be fended off by a nuclear deterrent is a tautological trap: “we will need nuclear weapons as long as they exist.”

On Friday May 7, NGOs will make the case to the NPT Member States that abandoning deterrence doctrine is the key to achieving a world in which nuclear weapons do not exist, a world that is safer and more secure than the one we currently inhabit. That case is straightforward and, we believe, irrefutable.

Nuclear weapons are uniquely and obscenely destructive. Threatening such destruction as a basis for security (the bottom line of nuclear deterrence) is morally reprehensible.

Unlike other forms of deterrence, failure of which can have tragic consequences, we cannot afford for nuclear deterrence to fail because the consequences are unthinkable. Therefore, we should not put ourselves in a position where it can fail. The truth deterrence theorists refuse to face is that nuclear deterrence sooner or later will fail; the history of war has taught us that sooner or later desperation trumps rationality.

There is a strong basis in international humanitarian law for the illegality of invoking nuclear deterrence in the first place.

Finally, continued adherence to deterrence doctrine fuels proliferation and undermines alternative pathways to security, including the pathway to a nuclear-weapons-free world, which is now the declared goal of the US government, echoed by a growing chorus of international leaders.

Despite that goal, the nuclear-weapon-states have continued to rationalize deterrence and to sell that rationalization to willing buyers.  Some non-nuclear-weapon states are convincing themselves that they need nuclear weapons to deter others. The virus appears to be unresponsive to the vaccine.

If nuclear weapons were, in fact, as endemic as the flu or the common cold, our only resort might well be to keep reformulating the deterrence “vaccine” in an attempt to stay one step ahead of a devastating outbreak. But we actually have an alternative. We have the option and the means to rid the world of nuclear weapons and, in the process, to see nuclear deterrence in terms of a more appropriate medical analogy: snake oil.