Possession as insurance against breach of the nuclear taboo

The answers to the first of the above questions are familiar from the literatures on realism and nuclear deterrence, but they have interesting twists. A breach of the nuclear taboo would be catastrophic for the state and society that fell victim to it, given the nuclear weapon's immense destructiveness. This is self-evident unless nuclear weapons are used precisely and tactically to destroy military targets such as missile launch sites. But states have not trusted rivals to honour this restriction. Nor have they considered it plausible that civilian populations would escape terrible injury in a ‘limited nuclear war’. Furthermore, governments have perpetually worried about their and their opponents’ ability to prevent escalation to all-out nuclear war. From time to time, nuclear war planners have convinced themselves that limited nuclear war is feasible and desirable.Footnote ³ However, their views have not carried the day. As Tannenwald observes, the tactical use of nuclear weapons in any conflict became increasingly ‘unthinkable’ for the US, their non-use in the face of numerous setbacks in Vietnam appearing to put a seal on it until the issue resurfaced in the administration of George W. Bush just to be buried again.Footnote ⁴

The arguments about limited war notwithstanding, the standards that have to be set for the nuclear taboo's observance are thus qualitatively different from the standards applying to taboos on, for instance, incest, slavery or duelling. States and societies can survive breaches of those taboos, which have to be frequent and persistent to do other than passing injury. A single breach of the nuclear taboo could, however, result in cataclysm. States, particularly the great powers among them, will therefore require unusual confidence that the taboo on use is universal and will never be contingent if they are to abandon reliance on the deterring effects of nuclear retaliation. No-first-use declarations are unlikely to suffice. Furthermore, their confidence has to extend to the behaviour of states with apparently crazy leaders and regimes. In the case of a Hitler or Stalin, it was not easily believed that a taboo on use could take hold and be trusted. Why should an autocratic regime that was prepared to practice genocide against sections of its own population hesitate to use nuclear weapons to kill others en masse? The Waltzian confidence in restraint in a nuclear-armed world rests primarily on an assumption that fear of devastating retaliation will induce the same rational behaviour in any government and leader, everywhere resulting in caution.Footnote ⁵ It will not result from an internally generated taboo.

With her main focus on the US and on the significance of democratic norms and institutions, Nina Tannenbaum does not provide the sceptical observer with enough reassurance on the taboo's pervasiveness. Indeed, she comes close to denying it when, in the conclusion to her book, she writes that her ‘brief survey of selected nuclear countries raises the question of what explains the variation in the taboo globally. This important topic is beyond the scope of the present work and warrants more extended study. But it should be noted that, as an empirical matter, the variation is not great: the vast majority of states (nuclear and non-nuclear alike) share the taboo’. This may be the case. However, the empirical evidence beyond the US and (perhaps) the Soviet Union is too thin and selective to support a confident generalisation.Footnote ⁶

Even if the ubiquity of strong inhibitions on nuclear use is accepted, it does not therefore obviate the need for exceptional trust in their permanence and comprehensiveness. It follows that nuclear disarmament, especially if incomplete, requires an exceptional common trust in the taboo's persistent hold, including on states whose leaders and systems of government are obviously untrustworthy in other respects. How can that exceptional degree of trust be demonstrated and earned?

The answer given by the Acheson-Lilienthal and many subsequent reports is that sufficient trust can only exist, short of world government, if there are no nuclear weapons in national possession on the planet.Footnote ⁷ For instance, the Canberra Commission in 1996 held that ‘[t]he proposition that nuclear weapons can be retained and never used – accidentally or by decision – defies credibility. The only complete defence is the elimination of nuclear weapons and assurance that they will never be produced again.’Footnote ⁸ That assurance would require erection of formidable regulatory barriers against re-acquisition, and there would have to be certainty that any state breaching the taboo would suffer severe punishment (long an argument for retention of a small nuclear deterrent force by the UN or another actor that could be trusted to use it to serve this common interest alone).Footnote ⁹ It is noteworthy that nuclear disarmament and the journey towards it are routinely envisaged as entailing a deepening and widening of transparency and regulation, within and across all states, implying that there cannot be complete reliance on the normative inclinations that constitute the taboo.Footnote ¹⁰ The need for strong global regulation would apply even if, as seems likely, nuclear weapons were regarded, still more than today, as anathema after their elimination.

At the same time, however, the ‘credibility’ of nuclear deterrence requires active denial of the nuclear taboo's hold on decision-makers other than in connection with first use where ‘no-first-use’ is a government's declared policy (when it is a choice more than a taboo). States may commit themselves in arms control treaties not to deploy certain types or quantities of nuclear weaponry (the INF and START Treaties), or not to use them against certain targets (the Indo-Pakistani agreement not to target nuclear power stations). Arms controllers will nevertheless always be keen to sustain the other side's belief that the possibility of nuclear war remains. Deterrence is meaningless without freedom to threaten with nuclear attack beyond a certain point. Indeed, within the communities involved in any system of nuclear deterrence, it almost becomes taboo to discuss the nuclear taboo's hold on decision-makers, certainly in the open.Footnote ¹¹ Furthermore, practitioners of nuclear deterrence feel obliged to assert, through statements, military deployments and exercises, that they would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if the state's survival and fundamental interests were threatened, even if they doubted that this would be true. The discourse on deterrence thus relies intrinsically on denial that either the self or the other are subject to any taboo on use, or to any smothering tradition of non-use for that matter.

In addition, ‘credible deterrence’ has been deemed to require constant preparation for use entailing the vivid institutionalised imagination of how to practice nuclear war. One of Mary Kaldor's lesser known books carries the title The Imaginary War which is a telling description of the Cold War, since nuclear war cannot be experienced by its very nature and has to be learned about through feigned exercises on the battlefield and simulated war games.Footnote ¹² In the resulting feverish play of the imagination exploited by parasitic arms industries and war planners, the opposite of a taboo has often been held to operate. A typical refrain has been that if either side gained an advantage in capabilities, thereby upsetting the balance of terror, it would be tempted to launch a surprise attack or, at the very least, use its superiority to force the opponent to submit to its will in whichever political context. The outcome during the Cold War was a supercharged security dilemma leading to extraordinary excesses in armament on either side.Footnote ¹³

If the taboo on use of nuclear weapons is not universally acknowledged and believed to be lasting and universal, and if the taboo is routinely denied, then possession and deployment of nuclear arms by a rival state must be taken to imply threat of use. For the same reason, steps taken to acquire nuclear weapon capabilities, or actions interpreted as having this intent, cannot be regarded with equanimity. Doubts about the taboo on use will therefore constantly thwart a taboo on possession, especially where a ‘rogue state’ like Iran is vigorously constructing a nuclear weapon capability while expressing a desire to destroy a neighbour (Israel). The non-proliferation norm relies heavily on the presumption that the taboo's hold on political elites in states that are newcomers to nuclear weapons are at best uncertain. The same applies to the disarmament norm, as the impulse to eliminate nuclear weapons in both domestic and international politics is fed by anxiety that nuclear weapons ‘will one day be used’, whether by one of the present cast of nuclear weapon states or by a future proliferator, and that the consequences of a single use would be catastrophic for everyone. The discourses on both nuclear armament and disarmament therefore customarily entail denial of the taboo's pervasive existence, lasting influence and the nearly infinite cost of its breach. Indeed, their advocates often claim, when pressing their cases, that the opposite of taboo is present – states of certain kinds and in certain circumstances will feel driven to use nuclear weapons and may relish the prospect.

Shame in use, glory in possession

As noted, Tannenwald focuses attention on the military use of nuclear weapons. However, they are also ascribed important non-military value. They are cherished by some states and peoples for the prestige and self-esteem that they are perceived to convey.

Drawing on Julian Pitt-Rivers’ observation that ‘honour is the value of a person in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of his society’, Richard Ned Lebow suggests that states are perennially concerned with their internal and external honour, the former involving self-esteem, the latter the esteem in which they are held by others.Footnote ¹⁴ Enmity, fear and insecurity are regarded as the primary stimuli of nuclear weapon programmes in realist literature. However, nuclear weapons can also become potent symbols of self-love, leading actors that crave higher status (India and Iran today) or dread the loss of status (France and the UK) to attach exceptionally high value to them. For some, there is even glory in possession of nuclear weapons and in demonstration of the ability to master a difficult science and technology. For others, post-War Germany being an obvious example, nuclear weapons are shunned because self-aggrandizement through the display of armament is tainted for historical or ideological reasons (this has not however prevented Germany from sheltering under the nuclear umbrella of another state, the US).

This links to issues of identity which go wider than esteem. Nick Ritchie has recently written persuasively about how New Labour's decision in 2006–2007 to replace the UK's Trident submarines and missiles rested, more than on any conventional security logic, on a conviction that ‘possession of nuclear weapons […] reaffirms and in part constitutes the collectively held identity of Britain as an interventionist, pivotal world power’.Footnote ¹⁵ Also contributing to this identity has been the value attached by successive British governments to nuclear weapons in reinforcing the ‘special relationship’ with the US and the UK's role as a bridge between the US and continental Europe. In the elite's perception, Trident's abandonment would therefore have reduced Britain's status and security options, and altered its preferred identity.

It is nevertheless notable that, for the UK, inhibitions on actual use of nuclear weapons are as powerfully engrained, to the extent of constituting a taboo, as anywhere else. Other than in an extreme existential emergency which has become increasingly hard to imagine, it would be regarded as shameful to use nuclear weapons in any place or circumstance. In political reality, nuclear usage is close to being unimaginable for the UK, which has not obviated the need for continuing albeit vague statements about its possibility.

The point that I wish to drive home is that a state's and its elite's preoccupation with prestige and identity often play in opposite directions where the use and the possession of nuclear weapons are concerned. Glory in possession can go hand in hand with shame in its use. Political leaders understand that a state's reputation, although buttressed by possession (at least in perception), would be shattered by any devastation of another country that was other than completely unavoidable. Indeed, the acceptance of possession at home and abroad seems contingent on a state's exercise of tremendous caution and responsibility in the handling of its nuclear assets.

India provides a telling example of this dichotomous attitude towards nuclear weapons.Footnote ¹⁶ A long Indian ‘tradition’ of antipathy towards them and advocacy of complete nuclear disarmament jostled with an equally long tradition of yearning for the respect and recognition afforded to China and other NPT nuclear weapon states, and of grievance over the punishments meted out by the US and others for its development of a nuclear weapon capability. Following its nuclear explosive tests in May 1998 and the ensuing expansion of investment in nuclear hardware, it might appear that devotion to nuclear weapons has now totally displaced the previous antipathy. This is not the case in my experience. Antipathy and devotion coexist politically in India precisely because there is widespread trust and belief, however well founded, that any Indian government will refrain from using nuclear weapons other than in retaliation in the very last resort against foreign aggression. The Indian government's no-first-use pledge sends internal comfort signals as well as provides external reassurance.

It follows that two hurdles have to be surmounted if nuclear weapons are to be eliminated: resistance on grounds that disarmament will reduce rather than increase security, and resistance – usually less trumpeted – on grounds that it will injure the nuclear-armed state's prestige and identity. Unless, that is, an event occurs that dramatically changes the political image of nuclear weapons, causing severe reputation costs to be attached to both possession and use.

It should be noted, however, that these observations about prestige may not apply to non-state actors. Terrorist groups that are prepared to inflict mass casualties in pursuit of their aims may glory in the use of nuclear weapons of whatever kind, were they to possess them.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, there would be little point in such groups’ incurring the costs and risks of acquiring nuclear technology if there was no desire to use it to inflict death and injury and to generate an intense fear. Tannenwald acknowledges this uncomfortable reality when she writes that ‘[t]here is thus little reason to assume that terrorists would be restrained by a nuclear taboo. Indeed, they might relish violating it.’Footnote ¹⁸ Abolitionists see this as another reason for prohibiting the possession of nuclear weapons and associated technologies by any actor. If there are groups out in the world that will relish violating the taboo on use, they argue, then it is time to install a universal taboo on possession. This was a central theme in the now famous Wall Street Journal article of January 2007 by Shultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn proposing creation of a nuclear weapon-free world, and in President Obama's Prague speech in April 2009.Footnote ¹⁹

Taboos and the international nuclear order

Two years before 9/11, Ashton Carter and William Perry wrote presciently that:

The same ‘threshold effect’ could be expected to accompany a devastating use of nuclear weapons. Tannenwald refers to the ‘transformative effect’ of infringing a ‘bright line’ norm. Since Nagasaki there has been no accidental or deliberate use of nuclear weapons resulting in mass casualties. Were it to happen, it seems likely that a reluctant tolerance of nuclear weapons would change to an absolute intolerance, installing a strict taboo on both possession and use and compelling states and peoples to embark on a serious project of global elimination. If, that is, they were still around to undertake the task. At the height of the second Cold War, Jonathan Schell chillingly observed that ‘[t]he conscious choice to take responsibility for the continuation of human life is therefore complicated and confused by the fact, which is peculiar to the nuclear peril, that we are able to respond to it only before it happens’.Footnote ²¹ The implication is that, however improbable nuclear war may be considered, the danger of extinction creates an exceptional moral responsibility to follow the precautionary principle by abolishing nuclear weapons. Schell's advice has not been heeded. The Cuban missile crisis, Able Archer and other scares were insufficient to impel action.

This said, whether a use of nuclear weapons were followed by a drive to abolish them would depend on its nature and context. Shocks can have negative as well as positive outcomes.Footnote ²² Following advances in precision guidance, circumstances can now be imagined in which nuclear weapons could be used tactically in small numbers to achieve precise military goals, possibly without mass casualties. American advocates of the ‘bunker-buster’ designed to penetrate underground facilities claimed that this could be achieved. If true, however, its use could increase the attractiveness of nuclear weapons and give a stimulus to proliferation rather than to disarmament. The danger is that states, rather than having to respond to a singular misdemeanour, would find themselves in new territory where the general taboo on nuclear use, or tradition of non-use, had lost its grip. This is why there has been such insistence on treating all nuclear weapons as belonging to a single indivisible class. Governments have generally held to the opinion that lines must in no circumstance be drawn between conventional and unconventional, or usable and unusable, types of nuclear weapon. There could be no confidence that they would be respected.

The consequences of nuclear weapons being used again are therefore uncertain. A grand teleological narrative has nevertheless been woven around them since their inception, involving a journey from non-existence through regrettable existence back to a controlled non-existence – controlled because the knowledge of nuclear weapon design and manufacture cannot be wholly extinguished. This narrative is embedded in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and in its Article VI bargain that gives the non-proliferation norm its fragile legitimacy.Footnote ²³ For it suggests that security and justice can only ultimately reside in universal renunciation of nuclear weapons. The highest purpose is therefore to bring the nuclear-armed states back to the condition of non-possession, which means weaning them off nuclear deterrence and the prestige and identity woven around their nuclear weapons.

Although persistent, this grand narrative has either been rejected as hopelessly idealistic as a guide to action, or accepted yet acknowledged to have no early conclusion given the many obstacles to complete nuclear disarmament and the abiding salience, in the perceptions of some states, of nuclear weapons to security and prestige. Where these views meet is in the commitment to mutual restraint: actors that expect no end to this narrative but recognise the great dangers of laissez-faire are drawn towards the institutional containment of nuclear weapon activity; and actors that are committed to the narrative's conclusion pragmatically join in this containment whilst insisting that it should be progressive, the aim being to cap and then reduce the numbers of deployed weapons and of states possessing them in preparation for complete nuclear disarmament. The result has been a rich array of institutional developments including the arms limitation and reduction treaties (SALT, ABM, INF, START), the non-proliferation regime and its regulatory instruments (notably international safeguards and export controls), the Negative Security Assurances pledging non-use against non-nuclear weapon states (with some caveats), and the grand treaties designed to stem both nuclear arms races and proliferation (such as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, CTBT). This ‘order of restraint’ has been framed by the NPT with its sets of norms, rules and bargains underpinned by the idea of reciprocal obligation.

Unfortunately, this collective project of progressive containment has experienced many setbacks since the mid-1990s. No significant bilateral or multilateral treaties in the field of nuclear arms control were negotiated between 1997 and 2010 when the Russian and US governments concluded the New START Treaty that brought modest reductions of nuclear arsenals. Efforts to bring the CTBT into force and negotiate the Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty have been unsuccessful, the ABM Treaty has been abandoned, an unconstrained arms race has developed in South Asia, and Iran and North Korea have defied efforts to bring them into compliance with their NPT and safeguards obligations.

Why all of this happened is beyond this article's scope.Footnote ²⁴ A significant consequence and contributing factor was the shift of US political strategy during its ‘hegemonic moment’ from an emphasis on the political and diplomatic practice of arms control and non-proliferation towards the impatient, unilateral, confrontational practice of counter-proliferation and regime change backed by the threat of preventive war. This shift, elaborated in the US National Security Strategy of September 2002, was justified by the Bush administration partly on grounds that ‘rogue states’ bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction would not abide by the taboos on use, or the traditions of non-use, that had evolved elsewhere. They were ‘irrational actors’ that must be deprived of their capabilities, or their governing regimes must be overthrown, before they could use nuclear weapons to destroy or blackmail other states.

The achievement of regime change was not a departure in US foreign policy since democratisation has been one of its most consistent threads over the years. Nor was it a departure for the US to label states that sought nuclear weapons ‘pariah’ or ‘rogue’ and take punitive measures against them (Argentina, Brazil, India and South Africa were once on the receiving end). What was new was the threat of war against offending states and regimes. For over 40 years, from the mid-1950s to the late-1990s, preventive war formed no part of the US strategy for impeding the spread of nuclear weapons. In an important respect, non-proliferation policy and the enticement of states into the multilateral, law-based non-proliferation regime were a diplomatic alternative to preventive war.

Despite the shift in US strategy, there was no question of returning to the preventive nuclear wars that were contemplated against the Soviet Union in the late 1940s and 1950s. The tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons was therefore upheld. Instead, the US used or threatened to use its now overwhelming conventional military force to impel change. For many onlookers, however, the breach of the tradition of non-use of military force of any kind against a state that was developing – or alleged to be developing – a nuclear weapon capability was deeply unsettling. This was especially so because, in the case of Iraq, the US Government was claiming that prevention was essential when it was inessential and a state's disarmament was being used as pre-text for launching a war that had other main purposes. It is depressing to recall the manner in which the Bush administration justified war on grounds that Saddam Hussein's regime had shown no respect for the NPT's norms and rules (indubitably the case), that it would not respect customary taboos on the use of weapons of mass destruction (a reasonable assumption for chemical weapons after Iraq's use of them against the Kurds and Iran, but not necessarily for nuclear weapons), and that Iraq could not be reliably deterred (an unreasonable assumption given its refrain from using them in the first Gulf War after threats had been levelled against it). The implication was that conduct of a nuclear weapon programme had to be casus belli in the absence of confidence that its pursuer would join the tradition of non-use and could be deterred.

During its last years in office, the Bush administration backed away from its imperious counter-proliferation doctrine not, I would suggest, because it had come to view it as illegitimate, but because it had proved to be inoperable and counterproductive in so many ways. It has since been jettisoned by the Obama administration which has sought to reinstate a cooperative non-proliferation policy founded on the NPT and multilateral diplomacy. Yet the issue of war against a proliferator is still alive, especially in debates over how to respond to Iran's evident assembly of a nuclear weapon capability. Although the US government has retreated from military solutions, they are still being actively considered in Israel.

This leads me to an important missing example in Nina Tannenwald's book. There is only passing reference to Israel. Yet Israel's behaviour is in several respects the ultimate test of her thesis, besides revealing the intricacies of the questions that she raises and of their handling in international politics. Here is a state that has had every reason to mistrust claimed taboos, given the Holocaust, and that acquired nuclear weapons in the 1960s mainly to guarantee protection against any future threats to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people. The state has nevertheless not used nuclear weapons in several wars and has exhibited the greatest hesitancy in threatening their use, to the extent of constantly denying that it possesses them (Avner Cohen's policy of nuclear opacity).Footnote ²⁵ Here also is a state for which counter-proliferation has long been considered to be a necessary guard against failures of non-proliferation. It took preventive military action in 1981 and 2007 to destroy Iraq's Tammuz reactor and Syria's Al-Kibar nuclear facility respectively, and it lent encouragement to the Bush administration's war with Iraq in 2003.Footnote ²⁶

Israel is now faced with the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran that, under present leadership, has openly expressed a desire to destroy Israel and that has long supported violence against it. How will it react if Iran persists in its development of nuclear weapons, if the US and other states do not take effective action against it, and if Israel judges that its own conventional military strike could not do sufficient damage? It would have three options: to acclimatise itself to Iran's possession and sharpen its deterrent force; to seek ways of reframing political and economic relations in its neighbourhood so that weapons of mass destruction lose their salience; or to use its military capabilities, possibly including nuclear capabilities, to destroy Iran's capability after due warning.

It is hard to believe that the last option is plausible, especially if it involved nuclear weapons. The costs to Israel's reputation and self-esteem, and to its relations with the US and other countries, would surely be too great to bear. In which case, the taboo on first use would hold good even in pretty extreme circumstances, a tribute to its entrenchment in contemporary behaviour. But its breach cannot be completely discounted. For this and many other reasons, an enormous amount hangs on the outcome of political efforts to dissuade Iran from continuing to develop its nuclear weapon capability.

Institutional mediation between the taboo and its denial

I am drawn back in conclusion to the enigmatic relationship between the taboo on use or tradition of non-use (whichever one prefers) and its denial. It seems self-evident that a principal goal of policy should be to strengthen, worldwide, inhibitions on the use of nuclear weapons. This follows directly from Gorbachev and Reagan's observation, in their joint communiqué after the 1985 Geneva Conference, that ‘nuclear wars can never be won and should never be fought’. Yet this goal, if too successfully pursued, is inimical to nuclear deterrence and thus, its supporters would contend, to the prevention of war. But nuclear deterrence is itself untrustworthy, and too dangerous to live with, without the accompaniment of strong inhibitions or taboos.

Short of abolition of nuclear weapons, the implication is that the nuclear taboo and nuclear deterrence are both antagonistic and symbiotic, and that security lies – always precariously – in balancing the play of use and non-use, and possession and non-possession, in mind and practice. Arms control and the non-proliferation regime have been important devices for mediating between them, since they institutionalise restraint on the possession and use of nuclear weapons whilst leaving room for some restraint of war, particularly among great powers, through deterrence. How much restraint, exercised by and upon whom, by which means and in return for which benefits, is the unavoidable stuff of international nuclear politics.

In my reading of her book, Nina Tannenwald does not adequately grasp the significance of these institutions in performing this mediating role, and the consequent seriousness of their feared decay. In the concluding paragraphs she discusses three developments that, short of a ban on all possession, ‘could render nuclear weapons largely irrelevant’: ‘an increasingly robust normative prohibition on their use […] a world of democratic states […] or the obsolescence of war in the international system’.Footnote ²⁷ I find her arguments unconvincing here partly because I cannot imagine her ‘virtual abolition of nuclear weapons’ happening without the revival and further development of the international ‘order of restraint’ which involves much more than a taboo on use. Significant movement towards virtual or actual nuclear disarmament is unlikely to happen without the presence of an immensely strong, cooperative, institutional framework.

Even if all states could be relied upon to honour the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons, leading to their increasing irrelevance in politics and war, there would remain anxieties about the behaviour of non-state actors. They alone would require maintenance of a water-tight, global regulatory framework to prevent any access to nuclear weapon materials and technologies. Norms can never be enough in this field.