if the would-be attacker knows that the intended victim’s warheads are few
in number, knows their exact number and locations, and knows that they will
not be moved or fired before they are struck. To know all of these things, and
to know that you know them for sure, is exceedingly difficult.^19Far from nuclear weapons emboldening regional adversaries to use force, Waltz
maintained that ‘The probability of major war among states having nuclear weapons
approaches zero.’^20
Once each side has achieved a secure capacity to deliver nuclear weapons against
an opponent’s cities, there is no need, according to Waltz, for states to continue to
accumulate nuclear arms. This proposition led him to contend that the spread of
nuclear weapons would reduce and not intensify competitive pressures between
regional rivals.^21 He did not specify how many weapons were required for nuclear
sufficiency, but predicted: ‘New nuclear states are likely to... aim for a modest
sufficiency rather than vie with each [other] for a meaningless superiority.’^22 Waltz’s
‘minimum deterrent’ thinking challenged those influential US nuclear strategists
who argued that US deterrence policy would be enhanced if Washington developed
nuclear war-fighting capabilities, such that it would be able to wage and even prevail
in a nuclear war. For Waltz, this was foolish thinking, since nuclear weapons have
no ‘war-winning’ ability: their only rational function is deterrence.
Waltz’s proliferation optimism rests on the core assumption that all leaders –
irrespective of the character and values of the state in question – will rationally decide
to avoid war (including conventional war) when faced with the risk of nuclear
devastation. Thus it is not a cause of undue concern to him that the nuclear club
has become enlarged beyond the NPT’s original five NWS to include Israel, India,
Pakistan and North Korea. This is because the Waltzian iron rule is that ‘whoever
gets nuclear weapons behaves with caution and moderation’, and whoever gets
nuclear weapons does not ‘get attacked militarily’.^23 This was the same Waltz who
in 1959 had argued that international anarchy was a perpetual ‘permissive’ cause
of war in the system. How, then, should we explain the new and profound faith
that he came to place in rationality as the key to peace between nuclear-armed
states?
Waltz has accepted that ‘for convenience’ he can be assumed to be relying on an
‘assumption of rationality’.^24 By this he means that nuclear weapons have created a
huge awareness on the part of all decision-makers who possess them that any use of
nuclear weapons against their state would be catastrophic. He has driven this point
home by arguing that, ultimately, ‘Deterrence does not depend on rationality. It
depends on fear. To create fear, nuclear weapons are the best possible means.’^25 In Man, the
State and War, Waltz had argued that world government was the only logical
solution to the violent conflicts generated by an anarchic system, but his later analysis
of nuclear dynamics led him to identify a trumping causal factor – fear – that could
reduce the risks of war between nuclear-armed states to nearly zero.^26
As we learn more about the nuclear dangers of the Cold War, especially how
close the superpowers came to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis,^27 and
Beyond Waltz’s nuclear world 253