The United States' nuclear future will be more about proliferation than abolition unless minds in foreign capitals can be changed, according to a fellow at a leading Washington think tank.
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA) Senior Fellow Barry Watts said in his recent report, "Nuclear-Conventional Firebreaks and the Nuclear Taboo," mutually-assured destruction, or the ability of the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the '70s to respond to each other's initial nuclear strike with devastating retaliation, was once enough incentive to avoid all-out nuclear war.
But Watts argues today's nuclear competitions do not appear to be nearly as stable as the U.S.-Soviet deterrent relationship because competing nations, like India and Pakistan, don't understand each other's "red lines," or lines that, if crossed, could risk retaliation. Watts said Indian leaders drawing conclusions from a 1999 conflict that Pakistan was a "reckless, risk-acceptant, untrustworthy" state did not indicate a stable relationship between the two countries.
Watts said, on Pakistan's side, the country's "evident" commitment to continue expanding its nuclear arsenal is also troubling and that it is far from clear that Cold War notions of mutually-assured destruction can be counted upon to extend a nuclear "taboo" indefinitely.
"Changing the incentives of some of these countries will be really hard" short of a nuclear detonation, Watts said after his presentation at the Air Force Association headquarters in Arlington, Va.
Watts, in his report, describes a firebreak as the degree of reluctance of a government from using nuclear weapons. Watts said a "wide" or "robust" firebreak means that a country's leaders are quite reluctant to employ nuclear weapons and that they perceive the nuclear threshold to be relatively high and the psychological taboo against nuclear use strong. On the other hand, a narrow firebreak would mean a more likely deployment of nuclear weapons. The U.S.-Soviet relationship in the Cold War could be described as a wide firebreak while the current India-Pakistan relationship could be described as narrow.
Watts argued, given the questionable assumptions on both sides, it is not difficult to envision a future conventional military conflict between India and Pakistan spinning out of control and escalating to nuclear use. Watts said perhaps the most obvious trigger could be another Mumbai-like terrorist attack that India could simply not ignore. Watts said the lack of great insight into each other's red lines and nuclear proliferation among the countries could also be a trigger. Watts argued the size, character, safety and reliability of the American nuclear arsenal offers Washington little leverage in deterring, or stopping, a nuclear conflict on the Indian subcontinent.
Watts argues that the potential use of a nuclear weapon in the next 10 to 20 years, and its perception that it was strategically successful for the country that used it, could cause the world to go in one of two directions: The first being that international revulsion against breaking the nuclear taboo would be so strong and widespread it would precipitate the necessary transformation of world politics to render nuclear abolition possible. The second would be that limited use of low-yield nuclear weapons would become the "new normal" and give rise to a second nuclear age whose danger and uncertainties will "dwarf" those of the first.