18 Briefing The nuclear taboo The Economist June 4th 2022
“People do not dabble in cannibalism
when they are a little hungry; rather they
resist until they are on the verge of starva-
tion,” Dr Sagan and Dr Valentino have writ-
ten. “With nuclear weapons, however, the
uspublic’s preference for nuclear options
seems to grow steadily as a function of per-
ceived utility.”
That utility is not really to do with how
armies fight. For countries with first-rank
conventional forces the need for nuclear
weapons on the battlefield itself is quite
limited. What nuclear weapons offer that
is unique is the ability to put whole cities at
risk and threaten populations in the tens
or hundreds of millions. It is that which
gives them their strategic value.
Yet interest in tactical nuclear weapons
has revived in recent years. Russia is
thought to have as many as 2,000 of them.
The air-dropped bombs which make up the
small nuclear arsenal America keeps in Eu-
rope can have their yields reduced to very
low levels. In 2020 America deployed the
W76-2, a low-yield weapon fitted to sub-
marine-launched ballistic missiles.
America’s justification for this was that
it provided a capability to respond “in
kind” if Russia used a tactical weapon. This
suggests that there are cases where, for
messaging purposes, nuclear weapons
might have to be used simply because they
are nuclear—perhaps because the public
would expect a nuclear response to a nuc-
lear attack and find anything less unforgiv-
able. That is the opposite of a taboo.They’re getting ready to clobber us
It is not just because of their presence that
the war is changing people’s thinking
about nuclear weapons. Their absence
matters too. When the Soviet Union came
apart in 1991 a third of its strategic nuclear
arsenal and much of its nuclear industrial
complex sat on Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine’s politicians did not control the
command systems with which to use those
weapons. Their country could not have
maintained a viable arsenal without con-
siderable investment, says Mariana Bud-
jeryn of Harvard, whose book on the sub-
ject, “Inheriting the Bomb”, is forthcom-
ing. With no enemies halfway around the
world to threaten with icbms, Ukraine gave
up the arsenal, receiving in return assur-
ances from America, Britain and Russia
that it would be safe within its borders.
The war has brought with it a lot of cof-
fee-shop counterfactuals about how
things might have gone if Ukraine had
made a different choice. It would not have
been easy. Ukraine’s economy in the 1990s
was in poor shape, says Dr Budjeryn, and it
needed help from the International Mone-
tary Fund and the World Bank—help which
might not have been forthcoming if the
country had decided to invest heavily in
producing weapons-grade nuclear materi-al for a sovereign nuclear arsenal. Russia
and, in all likelihood, natowould have
been angered.
What is more, nuclear weapons do not
make your territory invulnerable. Egypt
and Syria attacked Israel in 1973, Argentina
seized the Falkland islands in 1982, Paki-
stan mounted an incursion into the Kargil
region of Indian-held Kashmir in 1999. A
developing nuclear capability might not
have deterred Russia from some sort of ac-
tion—indeed it might have seen armed
conflict come about earlier.
But nuclear states are widely assumed
immune to attacks aimed at all-out con-
quest or regime change, rather than pe-
ripheral deserts, islands or mountains.
That is because one of their defining qual-
ities, as Hermann Bondi, a long-ago chief
scientific adviser at Britain’s Ministry of
Defence, once observed, is that no one can
afford to make them desperate.
Some countries afraid of their neigh-
bours will doubtless take note—as they
will have taken note of the deaths of Sad-
dam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, both
of whom abandoned nuclear-weapons
programmes, and the comparative impu-
nity enjoyed by Mr Kim. Those in South Ko-
rea or Japan who want their country to host
or build nuclear weapons will be embold-
ened. It was not by chance that Abe Shinzo,
Japan’s former prime minister, encouraged
his compatriots to consider emulating the
scheme by which European allies host
American nuclear weapons just days after
Russia’s invasion in February.
Meanwhile countries with nuclear
weapons are getting a lesson in the room
for manoeuvre their possessions allow.
What is distinctive about this war is not
that the aggressor has nuclear arms, or that
their use has been threatened. It is the ex-
plicit way in which those threats are being
used to keep third parties out. Seeing that
approach work might encourage China to
apply the same thinking with respect toTaiwan. The extent to which nuclear
haves—and possibly almost-haves, like
Iran—are emboldened in this way could
well further increase incentives for prolif-
eration among the have-nots.Turn the music down, just a little
The hope that arms control might help in
some way seems forlorn. In principle, deli-
vering some of the disarmament promised
under the nptcould reinforce the non-
proliferation norm. But that will not hap-
pen. America is unwilling to limit future
missile defences, which Russia and China
would like it to do. There are no estab-
lished verification regimes for new weap-
ons such as hypersonic gliders and under-
sea drones. China seems intent on narrow-
ing the warhead gap with America. And
Russia is more committed to nuclear
weapons than ever. The damage the war
has done to the material state and reputa-
tion of Russia’s armed forces “takes us back
to the late 1990s,” says Kristin Ven Bruus-
gaard of the University of Oslo. Then “Rus-
sian conventional forces were in a particu-
larly dire state and Russian strategists were
deliberating that Russia would potentially
need to resort to nuclear weapons at a very
early stage in a conflict with nato.”
The question of who wins in Ukraine
thus has a world-changing side-wager run-
ning on it. “The value of nuclear weapons
as a tool of statecraft hinges on the out-
come of this war,” argues Dr Budjeryn. If
Ukraine prevails with Western weaponry
and recovers the territory it has lost since
February 24th, “perhaps the conclusion
will be that these weapons are only good
for terrible dictators who are inflicting
pain—but in the end they’re useless.” That
would be a harder case to make if Ukraine
is defeated and dismembered. “The world
will emerge from this with some deep
questions and very painful understand-
ings about the role nuclear weapons play
in human affairs.”