The Only Credible Deterrent

Seth Cropsey

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 1994

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Summary:  America cannot avoid the dangers of small states with big weapons. U.S. policy must shift to deterrence, and only a conventional threat will be believed.

Seth Cropsey is director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation. He served in the Pentagon during the Reagan and Bush administrations.

The success of even an economic cripple like North Korea in building nuclear weapons demonstrates that the Clinton administrations nonproliferation policy is doomed. The policy ignores the obvious: the spread of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them has already advanced so far that the important question is no longer how to stop their proliferation, but rather how to prevent them from being used.

Three options exist for the United States in dealing with emerging nuclear states: to persist in its current policy, which uncertainly presumes that America will extend its nuclear arsenal to regional allies and retaliate in kind against any nuclear attack; to withdraw its nuclear protection and ignore the dangers of regional nuclear conflicts as being of limited strategic interest; or to try to deter a regional nuclear aggressor through Americas new conventional weapon technologies.

Only the third option offers a credible strategy that adheres to American interests. Since the end of the Cold War, the idea that the United States will use nuclear weapons to defend allies in peripheral regions has lost credibility and cannot protect either the United States or its allies from attacks by rogue states. Yet this is a danger, and a responsibility, that the United States cannot shun. As long as it remains the world's greatest economic and military power, America will be a prime target of ambitious tyrants with malignant designs.

Crossing the nuclear threshold no longer raises the prospect of engulfing the world in re as it did when the U.S. and Soviet arsenals faced one another. But a lesser catastrophe, such as the obliteration of a single population center, is now far more likely. This new risk arises both because of the spread of nuclear weapons and also the vulnerability of powerful nations to attack by smaller ones. U.S. policymakers must assume that at least one of the 20 countries now possessing or trying to build nuclear weapons will use them. When this happens, the international strategic landscape will be irrevocably transformed.

The United States must shift its policy focus from nonproliferation to deterring or, if necessary, punishing a lesser nations use of nuclear weapons. But in a proliferated world, it is important that this aim be achieved without using the very force that America rightfully seeks to contain. While the means of deterrence must change, the idea of it does not. Foremost, America must have a credible strategy one that guarantees that the United States will inflict so much pain on an enemy that the certain disadvantages offering a single nuclear weapon against America or its allies far outweigh the possible benefits.

NUCLEAR LIMITATIONS

The weapons of America's still formidable nuclear arsenal are a poor deterrent against the often dictatorial regimes of lesser nations for three reasons.

First is the unwillingness to use them. The utter destruction of, for example, Iraqi or North Korean civilian population centers as a response to a one or two weapon attack on their most likely American targets: military bases or ...

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