Nuclear Arms and the New Free World

The nuclear pendulum, which had swung towards disarmament for thirty years, has begun to swing back. Russia threatens Ukraine and her allies with nuclear weapons frequently to attempt to scare us from coming to Ukraine’s aid. In 2022 Russia, facing a surprise conventional defeat, threatened to use “tactical” nuclear weapons on Ukrainian military targets. The frequent use of dual-capable weapons such as the Oreshnik ballistic missile is a reminder to the European democracies that Russia has these weapons and could strike Berlin or Helsinki as easily as Kyiv.^[1] The People’s Republic of China makes fewer overt nuclear threats, but is fully aware that a nuclear cudgel backs its belligerent claims against Taiwanese, Philippine, and Japanese sovereignty.

Nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence never really left international politics, but they are now returning from the democracies’ mental margins. This is not a state of affairs that liberals and social democrats tried to create, but it is the one with which increasingly aggressive authoritarian powers have presented us. This is not solely an American problem, a British or French problem, a Japanese or South Korean problem, or even a NATO problem. It is a problem for all the open and egalitarian societies on all continents, whether they are more liberal or more democratic-socialist—the free world, if you will.

It is also a problem that the rest of the free world must be prepared to confront with or without America. The challenge will not go away in 2029 no matter who wins the election. The stakes of the challenge are, as France’s World War I prime minister Clemenceau is said to have warned, too great to leave the matter to the generals. The stakes of deterrence are now too great to leave to the generals or the politicians alone. These stakes are not “vital national interests,” “the rules based international order,” or anything else you're likely to find in a white paper. The stakes of nuclear deterrence are the survival of the free societies we live in and the ideals we live by.

Why are the stakes so high? Why must we study these most terrible of weapons? No country has fired a nuclear weapon in anger since the end of World War II, but countries use nuclear weapons every day—and not just bullies. NATO nuclear threats against the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation have shielded liberal Europe for 75 years. American promises to protect Japan and South Korea, including with nuclear weapons, play a similar role in East Asia. French nuclear weapons may prove to be a vital balance and guarantor as the American relationship with Europe teeters.

Those threats and counter-threats are the meat of deterrence. As Dr. Strangelove put it, deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack. A threat, either implied or clearly stated, drives this fear. “If you do A, I’ll do B, and B is going to hurt you so bad that I’ll bet you don’t want to do A anymore.” Deterrence can be conventional or nuclear, but nuclear weapons are uniquely destructive and have a special ability to dissuade even very powerful states from military aggression. Academic sources like Robert Jervis’ The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, Brendan Green’s The Revolution That Failed, and any history of the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrate this truth. The 1995 “Hines Report,” released as “Soviet Intentions 1965–1985: Soviet Post-Cold War Testimonial Evidence” features remarkably candid discussion of several nuclear crises by former Soviet military and political leaders.

The deterrent effect of nuclear arms is not abstract, but it is also not automatic. It is not enough to have a nuclear weapon or five thousand nuclear weapons. Societies and the governments they erect must make sober decisions about what the weapons are for—what kinds of threats to make in defense of which causes.

Liberals and social democrats have historically been skeptical of nuclear weapons and deterrence, not without reason. Nuclear weapons are expensive. Their production and testing in the 20th century created real harms to the environment and to indigenous societies. Their use would be incredibly destructive. I am not here to ask liberals to stop worrying and love the bomb. But if we are the committed internationalists we say we are, and if we are to be honest with ourselves about the security arrangements under which most Liberal Currents readers live, we have little right to put on blinders. If liberals are serious about peace and prosperity around the world, we must know the sources of and challenges to both.

Most importantly, the choice has already been made for us. Anti-liberal regimes threaten liberal countries and alliances with nuclear weapons every day. As longtime Liberal Currents readers know, there is an anti-liberal Internationale—an Axis, you might call it. At least two of the neo-Axis powers are nuclear weapon states. They boast of a “partnership with no limits” in their “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on International Relations Entering a New Era and Global Sustainable Development”, released February 4, 2022, immediately before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. In addition to the assertion (emphasis added) that “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no forbidden areas of cooperation”—by which we are meant to understand nuclear cooperation—the 2022 Joint Statement reaffirms Russian support for PRC ownership of Taiwan, Chinese support for Russia’s control of a so-called sphere of influence without regard for national sovereignty, and mutual hostility towards NATO and similar alliances around the world.

Their nuclear threats backstop their bullying and invasion of neighboring countries. Free societies cannot survive long in this shadow even if they escape invasion. The nuclear arsenals of the liberal alliances are the only effective counterweight against anti-liberal nuclear aggression around the world. It is time for liberals, social democrats, and their allies to shake off the optimistic amnesia which has governed our approach to nuclear weapons for the last thirty years and reengage with clear eyes.

Too much confidence, too much security

How did we let ourselves drift into this parlous state? Since the moment the Berlin Wall fell the American, European, and East Asian democracies took great strides to disarm. We made agreements with the former Soviet Union to shrink arsenals and safely dispose of nuclear materials, we chose to eliminate many types of weapons entirely, and we withdrew huge numbers of weapons from Europe and Asia. Leaders made gestures towards complete disarmament. Weapon factories and laboratories downsized or closed down entirely. We stopped testing weapons. The United States reduced the role of nuclear weapons in its promises to defend European and Asian allies, leaning instead on high-tech conventional weapons and economic threats. The beneficiaries of American extended deterrence had some hesitation on this last item but accepted near-term risk as the price of a future world free of nuclear weapons.

The 2010s and 2020s have done immense violence to this optimism, anchored by three unpleasant facts. One, nuclear weapons are a lot easier to develop than they are to un-develop. Abolition is a politically convenient goal which the nuclear weapon states mostly regard as not possible, rendering all steps taken towards abolition temporary and subject to unilateral reversal. Two, full disarmament has a middling track record at best for the disarmers. It is impossible to ignore the Budapest Memorandum and Ukraine’s surrender of the weapons the Soviet Union left behind. The usability of those weapons, and Ukraine’s desire to keep them at the time the Memorandum was signed, are open for debate. It is harder to debate that nuclear protection of some kind would have made Ukraine a much more daunting target for Russian aggression. Three, the illiberal nuclear powers never saw eye-to-eye about disarmament in the first place. In fact, as the collapse of the Soviet Union catapulted the United States to the status of sole superpower, both Russia and China increased rather than decreased the role of nuclear weapons in their plans.

Russia has violated all but one of the major post-Cold War arms control agreements, including a lengthy farce around compliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The former head of their nuclear weapons program Viktor Mikhailov boasted of a “nuclear scalpel for every problem in Europe” including thousands of small “tactical” nuclear weapons meant for battlefield use. Russian weapons are not just aimed at military targets. Russian strategists threaten civilian economic and cultural sites with the aim of brutalizing European populations into surrender. Russian targeting of churches and hospitals in Ukraine with dual-capable missiles is meant to foreshadow a similar fate for NATO populations.

China, for its part, has never come to the table on arms control and appears to be in the middle of the fastest nuclear build-up any country has embarked on since the 1980s. Although the Chinese government publicly rejects the use of nuclear weapons for any purpose except retaliation in kind, Chinese generals have made veiled threats to the contrary during dialogues with their American and regional counterparts.

None of this is to hold America blameless. The “end of history” showed the world an America which was willing to wage wars of choice and which could not be checked by conventional armies. The George W. Bush administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and invasion of Iraq feature prominently in Russian and Chinese complaints. The balance, however, is best summarized by one Russian diplomat’s answer as to why the Russians kept rejecting the Obama administration’s offers of “confidence and security building measures” in Europe: “You Westerners have too much of both already.”

The alliance is the prize

The authoritarian powers are cooperating ever more with each other. They cooperate in their political attacks on liberal governments and civil society functions, in their social media campaigns, and in their overt military threats against the sovereignty and safety of the free world. The current liberal alliances are necessary but not sufficient for the danger. Grassroots coordination between liberals around the world is one vital pillar that Liberal Currents has championed many times. New industrial ties between the “middle powers” are another avenue. There is, however, no substitute for military power against military aggression. In the past it was enough to either be a NATO member or a major non-NATO ally of the United States. The world of the 2020s and 2030s will require new, broader, and more ideologically aligned alliances if liberal and social democracy are to survive and thrive.

Global authoritarianism will certainly extend its existing nuclear threats against these new alliances. Authoritarians fear the power of the united free countries and know that the easiest way to make us weak is disunion. Nuclear threats are often their first rather than last resort when it comes to dividing their opposition and sowing disunion. The new liberal alliances must be ready to withstand nuclear threats and deter nuclear aggression, which means the alliances must be backstopped by nuclear arms.

Holding these weapons demands the highest measure of civic engagement. The free world no longer has the luxury of regarding nuclear deterrence like a snow globe on a shelf. It is as real as voting rights and tax policy and healthcare reform. Reach up on the shelf and take ownership of it.

[1] A view held by many analysts. Here's one example.

Featured Image is Nuclear Submarine HMS Vanguard Returns to HMNB Clyde, Scotland, by Tam McDonald