After Proliferation: What to Do If More States Go Nuclear

Stephen Peter Rosen

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006

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Summary:  How to prevent nuclear proliferation is once again topping the U.S. security agenda. But few decision-makers are seriously considering what a postproliferation world would look like, even though such a world would inevitably require rethinking many of the policies that the U.S. government and others now take for granted.

Stephen Peter Rosen is Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of National Security and Military Affairs and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.

Spurred by the progress of weapons programs in North Korea and Iran, nuclear proliferation is once again at the top of the U.S. national security agenda. Practically all of the discussion about the issue has centered on how to prevent proliferation. Hawks have pushed for regime change or military strikes, whereas doves have favored arms control and negotiation. Even though none of these measures is likely to solve the problem, few observers have spent much time considering what a postproliferation world would look like.

Those who have done so can be divided into pessimists and optimists. The pessimists assume that the dangers of a nuclear confrontation will increase exponentially as the number of nuclear powers grows and that a future catastrophe is all but certain. Since little can be done to avert such a terrible outcome or mitigate its consequences, the argument goes, efforts to stop proliferation in the first place must be redoubled. The optimists, by contrast, assume that the stability that nuclear weapons seem to have brought to the superpowers' Cold War confrontation will be replicated. Far from being a sure disaster, they argue, the spread of nuclear weapons could be a relatively cheap and easy (albeit nerve-racking) solution to the age-old problem of war.

Actually, however, a postproliferation future is likely to be far more complex than either the pessimists or the optimists believe. In a multipolar nuclear world, international politics will continue but in an environment dominated by fear and uncertainty, with new dangers and new possibilities for miscommunication adding to and complicating familiar ones. As a result, many of the military plans, defense policies, and national security doctrines that officials in the United States and other countries now take for granted are likely to become obsolete and will need to be revised significantly.

WILL DETERRENCE WORK?

Assume, for the sake of argument, that within the next decade Iran manages to acquire a few crude nuclear weapons and that these can be delivered by ballistic missiles within the Middle East and by clandestine means to the United States and Europe. Assume also that Saudi Arabia and Turkey, out of fear or competitive emulation, also develop their own nuclear arsenals. How would strategic interactions in this new world play out?

During the Cold War, the small number of nuclear states meant that the identity of any nuclear attacker would be obvious. Preparations could thus be made for retaliation, and this helped deter first strikes. In a multipolar nuclear Middle East, however, such logic might not hold. For deterrence to work in such an environment, there would have to be detection systems that could unambiguously determine whether a nuclear-armed ballistic missile was launched from, say, Iran, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia. In earlier decades, the United States spent an enormous amount of resources on over-the-horizon radars and satellites that could detect the origin of missile launches in the Soviet Union. But those systems were optimized to monitor the Soviet Union and may not be as effective at identifying ...

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