The United States has not been able to counter global nuclear proliferation because the development of nuclear capabilities is often driven by local considerations and not in response to U.S. policy, according to a recent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) report.
In his report, Rethinking the Road to Zero, Evan Braden Montgomery says there is little reason to believe U.S. nuclear reductions will incentivize other nations to diminish their own reliance on nuclear weapons, decrease the size of their nuclear arsenals or abandon their nuclear aspirations. Instead, Montgomery says major reductions appear much more likely to have the opposite effects, particularly if they provide other nations with an opportunity to reach nuclear parity with the United States. Montgomery said compensating measures that improve the U.S. offensive and defensive conventional military capabilities could encourage other states to increase their reliance on nuclear weapons for deterrence and warfighting.
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| Photo: U.S. Energy Department. |
Past U.S. nuclear reductions have not held global proliferation in check, Montgomery said, because they presuppose that the nuclear strategies, capabilities and posture of other nations are developed largely in response to American actions. Though some, in the case of North Korea and Iran, develop in response to the United States, Montgomery said it’s local considerations, like India counterbalancing China, Pakistan’s drive for parity with rival India and Iraq’s search for an advantage over Iran, that drives these nations to accelerate their quests for nuclear capability and dominance.
Montgomery also said as weaker nations develop or enhance their nuclear capabilities to offset U.S. conventional military advantages (and counter stronger neighbors), the likelihood that nuclear weapons might be used in a conflict or fall into the hands of non-state actors could increase.
Past U.S. nuclear reductions have also not driven intended non-proliferation goals from other nations, Montgomery said, because the destructive power of nuclear weapons is so great, and the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal at its peak was so large, that even considerable reductions achieved to date have not meaningfully diminished Washington’s ability to inflict a devastating attack. Montgomery said because the U.S. still maintains a nuclear arsenal of about 5,000 warheads that is both larger and more sophisticated than any other nation, these efforts could be dismissed as motivated by pragmatism rather than principle–shedding excess weapons that were a legacy of the Cold War but are no longer needed to meet existing or emerging security challenges. Montgomery noted, at its peak in 1967, the United States once had 32,000 nuclear warheads.