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My impression is that there has been a lot of both theoretical and empirical research on arms races in the field of international relations, and that this claim is still contested. I therefore find it hard to be confident in this claim.
For example, Siverson and Diehl (p. 214 in Midlarsky, ed., 1989) sardonically note that “[i]f there is any consensus among arms race studies, it is that some arms races lead to war and some do not.” Fifteen years later, Glaser (2004) still opens with:
On one hand, there are several theoretical models that posit mechanisms how arms buildups could causally contribute to wars.
Security dilemma/spiral model: If states can’t distinguish offensive from defensive military capabilities and have incomplete information about each other’s goals—in particular, whether they face a “revisionist” state that would seize an opportunity to attack because it wants to acquire more territory -, their desire for security will compel them to engage in a spiral of arming (e.g. Jervis 1978, 2017[1976]). [While commonly cited as a way how arms races could cause wars, I think this idea is somewhat muddy, and in particular it often remains unclear whether the posited mechanism is an irrational stimulus-response cascade or some reason why rational actors would engage in an arms race culminating in a situation where war is a rational response to an external threat. See e.g. Glaser 2000, 2004. Similarly, it’s unclear whether even in this model the arms race is a cause of war or rather a mere symptom of underlying structural causes such as incomplete information or states’ inability to commit to more cooperative policies; see Fearon 1995 and Diehl & Crescenzi 1998.] A different approach of explaining escalation dynamics culminating in war is Vasquez’s (1993) “steps-to-war” theory.
Costly deterrence: If the opportunity cost of military expenditures required for deterrence becomes too large, and if military spending could be reduced after a successful war, then it can be rational to take one’s chances and attack (e.g. Powell 1993, Fearon 2018).
Preventive war: If a state anticipates that the balance of power would change in an adversary’s favor, they might want to attack now (e.g. Levy 1987). Allison (2017) has popularized this idea as Thucidydes’s trap and applied it to current US-China relations. The worry that an adversary could acquire a new weapons technology arguably is a special case; as you suggest, the 2003 Iraq War is often seen as an instance, which has inspired a wave of recent scholarship (e.g. Bas & Coe 2012).
On the other hand, there has been extensive empirical research on the arms race-conflict relationship. Stoll (2017) and Mitchell & Pickering (2017) provide good surveys. My takeaway is that the conclusions of early research (e.g. Wallace 1979) should be discarded due to methodological flaws [1], but that some more recent research is interesting. For example, several studies suggest a change in the arms race-war relationship post-WW2, contra your suggestion that the relationship has been similar since at least WW1. Of course, a major limitation is that conclusions are mostly about correlations rather than causation. Some examples (emphases mine):
Endnotes:
[1] E.g. Stoll (2017), emphasis mine:
References:
Thanks!
Were there a lot of new unknown or underappreciated facts in this book? From the summary, it sounds mostly like a reinterpretation of the standard history, which hinges on questions of historical determinism.
This claim strikes me as particularly dubious intuitively. I don’t have specific evidence in favor of my intuition, but I think I would want to see quite substantial evidence for Mueller’s claim to believe it, as I think my prior is driven by the following considerations:
At first glance, it seems that Iran’s adversaries are also concerned about the prospect of Iran acquiring nukes. For example, the US seems to be willing to pay a substantial cost in terms of tensions with European allies in order to take a tougher stance toward Iran, e.g. the Trump administration cancelling the nuclear deal. Similarly, there clearly were risks involved in deploying the Stuxnet cyber weapon against Iran. (This is an interesting case because Stuxnet was targeted specifically at Iran’s nuclear program; so the potential response “Iran’s adversaries are using the prospect of a nuclear Iran merely as a pretext to push through policies that hurt Iran more generally, e.g. economically” does not work in this case.)
More broadly, Mueller essentially seems to claim that there is some very widespread delusion: While in fact nuclear weapons are just a waste of money, all of the following actors are making the same epistemic error of believing the opposite (as indicated by their revealed preferences): most Democrats in the US; most Republicans in the US; most people across the political spectrum in Israel; the government of Saudi Arabia; both “moderate” and conservative politicians in Iran; the government of Russia, etc. What is more, incentives to correct this epistemic error surely aren’t super great, but they are not zero either: If, say, a Democratic US President is making a big foreign policy blunder by accepting considerable cost to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, why aren’t there more Republicans who jump onto this opportunity to embarrass the government? Why is the prospect of a nuclear Iran able to—at least to some extent—unite a diverse set of actors such as the US, the EU, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Russia behind a common foreign policy objective, i.e., to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons?
I also think the claim flies in the face of common sense. In particular, Israel is a tiny country in a vulnerable geographic position, it has been attacked several times since its inception, and Iran has consistently taken a very hostile stance toward it (and not just via cheap talk, but also by e.g. sponsoring insurgent groups in Lebanon). At first glance, I find the suggestion that the additional option of (explicit or implicit) nuclear threats against Israel would not hurt Israel’s interests hard to believe. Similarly, the US has a history of recent interference in Middle Eastern countries via conventional wars, see Afghanistan and Iraq. I think an American attack on Iran with the objective of regime change within the next decade is at least plausible, and everyone knows this. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone has ever tried to attack a nuclear weapons state with a regime change objective. (AFAIK the only direct military conflicts between nuclear weapons states were a 1969 border conflict between China and the USSR, and the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan—both cases in which all sides clearly had much more limited objectives.) Again, I think the idea that the US would invade an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is on its face implausible. If this is true, then possessing nuclear weapons would decrease one of the arguably major risks to Iranian sovereignty—so how can they be a “considerable waste of money and effort”?
Re direct military conflicts between nuclear weapons states: this might not exactly fit the definition of “direct” but I enjoyed skimming the mentions of nuclear weapons in this wikipedia on the yom kippur war, which saw a standoff between Israel (nuclear) and Egypt (not nuclear, but had reportedly been delivered warheads by USSR). There is some mention of Israel “threatening to go nuclear” possibly as a way of forcing the US to intervene with conventional military resources.
Interesting, thank you! I hadn’t been aware of this case.
I understand that you mostly just provide a summary rather than giving reasons to believe the claims in the book, but FWIW I find some of the claims hard to believe. I’ll give more detail in other comments.
For now, some general questions:
What kind of evidence is the book based on? (E.g. archival research, interviews with decision-makers, theoretical models, …)
Does Mueller have a credible debunking explanation for why most people in the national security community (as well as fields such as international relations, nuclear strategy etc., AFAICT) disagree with him?
This squares well with my weakly held prior, based on crude beliefs such that most dangers around terrorism are exaggerated.
However, I’m wondering how Mueller treats the question of whether we would know. E.g., during a 2007 incident in the US, several nuclear weapons were mistakenly loaded onto a bomber that was unguarded for hours at both its start and target locations; no-one realized the weapons were missing for about 36 hours, and the whole problem was only discovered once someone discovered the nukes in the bomber.
My guess is that nuclear weapons handling procedures would probably have uncovered eventually that some warheads were missing at the storage location. But as this incident illustrates it’s (i) unclear when, and (ii) there is room for human error (according to Schlosser’s Command and Control, the incident was only possible because four different crews failed to check whether the relevant missiles were loaded with nuclear warheads, even though all of them were supposed to).
Also note that there were a very small number (2-5 based on a loose memory) of accidents in which nuclear weapons were lost and, as far as we know, never recovered. E.g., over Canada in 1950, and in the sea near Japan in 1965. Of course, most likely these weapons haven’t been discovered by anyone, and thus are not “available for purchase”.
So while “likely” seems plausible to me, I find it hard to have extreme confidence in there being no “loose nukes”.
More relevantly, I’d hope that Mueller discusses all of these cases, or else I’d decrease my confidence in his claims.
On the deterrence effect of nuclear weapons, I think the following empirical finding is interesting. (Though not conclusive, as this kind of research design cannot establish causality.)
Quote from Mitchell and Pickering, 2017, an encyclopedia article reviewing work on arms races (emphasis mine). On the impact of nukes, they continue (emphasis mine):
I haven’t read this book and I’m also not an expert, so my confidence on this comment is low.
But-
As a relative layman, I find claims like these puzzling. This is primarily because the “agonies and obsessions … desperate rhetoric, extravagant theorizing, wasteful expenditure, and frenetic diplomatic posturing” that Mueller apparently dismisses drove the course of history for the half-century following the Second World War.
It’s hard to imagine that the Cold War would have occurred at all in the absence of nuclear weapons. While it’s true that the first nukes didn’t pose much more serious a threat than a large-scale firebombing, it was barely more than a decade after the war that much more destructive weapons were being built. A successful conventional Soviet assault on the U.S. mainland was, as far as I know, never a serious possibility. It seems clear that the terror of that period was driven by the nuclear threat, and that the nuclear threat drove U.S. and Soviet strategic posture, which also influenced foreign aid, trade policy, etc. Even if their danger is exaggerated, perception of their danger (in my view an unavoidable perception—even the Joint Chiefs were prepared to nuke Cuba during the missile crisis despite knowing that the strategic situation had not appreciably changed) had serious effects.
Also, and again, not an expert (and I’d like to know if Mueller addresses this specific case) but of course Israel has been a nuclear power since as early as 1979. Before that date, Israel fought three major wars and dozens of smaller engagements with its neighbors. Since then, virtually all of Israel’s military conflicts have been essentially counterinsurgency or against state proxies such as Hezbollah. It’s often argued that Israel’s status as a nuclear power has driven Iran’s efforts in that arena, which has also influenced Saudi belligerence; this conflict has affected oil prices, domestic politics in both countries, the ongoing war in Yemen, etc. This is kind of a long DAG, but I feel like there are other examples like this, and I find it sort of hard to accept the position that the simple existence of nuclear weapons hasn’t been immensely consequential.
My guess is you’re very likely aware of this, but for other readers it might be worth pointing out that the safety record is “perfect” only if the outcome of interest is a nuclear detonation.
There were, however, several accidents where the conventional explosives (that would trigger a nuclear detonation in intended use cases) in a nuclear weapon detonated (but where safety features prevented a nuclear detonation). E.g., accidents involving bombers in 1958 and 1968, the latter also causing radioactive contamination of an uninhabited part of Greenland; and some accidents involving missiles, e.g. in 1980. See also Wikipedia’s list of military nuclear accidents.
More broadly, the sense I got e.g. from Schlosser’s book Command and Control is that within the US government and military it was a contested issue how much to weigh safety versus cost and desired military capabilities such as readiness. The book mentions several individuals working in government or at nuclear weapon manufacturers campaigning for additional safety measures or changes of risky policies, with mixed success—overall it seemed to me that the US arsenal did for decades contain weapons for which we at least couldn’t rule out an accidental nuclear detonation with extreme confidence.
(Similar remarks apply to security. I forgot the details, but it doesn’t inspire confidence that senior US decision-makers on some occasions worried about scenarios in which European allies such as Turkey might seize scarcely guarded US nuclear weapons during a crisis.)
+1 to all of this, and thanks for the other excellent comments.
It’s probably worse than that—there is at least one incident where critical safety features failed, and it was luck that prevented a nuclear explosion
From a declassified report on a 1961 incident, in which a bomber carrying two 4MT warheads broke up over North Carolina [1]:
In other words—the critical safety mechanism that prevented one bomb from detonating failed on the other bomb (and detonation of this bomb was avoided due to contingent features of the crash).
[1] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb475/docs/doc%205%20AEC%20report%20Goldsboro%20accident.pdf
[2] More info on the incident: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb475/
Thanks for mentioning this. I had meant to refer to this accident, but after spending 2 more minutes looking into got the impression that there is less consensus on what happened than I thought.
Specifically, the Wikipedia article says:
One of the Wikipedia references is a blog post by one of the authors mentioned above, with the title Goldsboro- 19 Steps Away from Detonation. Some quotes:
I didn’t attempt to understand the specific technical claims (not even if there is a dispute about technical facts, or just a different interpretation of how to describe the same facts in terms of how far away the bombs was from detonating), and so can’t form my own view.
Do you have any sense what source to trust here?
In any case, my understanding is that nuclear weapons usually had many safety features, and that it’s definitely true that one or a few of them failed in several instances.
Thanks for posting these notes.
In case this is useful to anyone, here’s a 1-hour talk + Q&A the author did about the topic of the book. I found parts of the talk interesting, though to be honest much of the reasoning seemed poor to me.
(I haven’t read the book myself.)
Seems like some form of Pascal’s Wager is valid in this case—it’s hard to know for sure what the impact of nukes will be, especially without the benefit of hindsight, so it’s better to err on the side of caution.
What’s the “side of caution” in this case?