I have now had a better look at the report. It really is great!
Second, this argument [âone argument against studying how to keep nuclear war limited is that doing so would itself make nuclear war seem âwinnableâ and thus weaken the nuclear tabooâ] neglects the possibility that e.g. civil defense interventions increase the attackerâs uncertainty about the effects of their weapons, thus potentially making nuclear use less likely.
Chris argues that social scientists have generated five cogent models of when war can be ârationalâ for both sides of a conflict:
Unchecked interests â such as national leaders who bear few of the costs of launching a war.
Intangible incentives â such as an intrinsic desire for revenge.
Uncertainty â such as both sides underestimating each otherâs resolve to fight.
Commitment problems â such as the inability to credibly promise not to use your growing military might to attack others in future.
Misperceptions â such as our inability to see the world through other peopleâs eyes.
You say that:
According to the bioweapons scholar Malcolm Dando, part of the reason for the Nixon administrationâs abandonment in the late 1960s and early 1970s of biological weapons was not only that biological weapons were less useful than nuclear weapons, but that they were more difficult to monopolize
These reasons continue to hold, so one should expect the subsitute deterrent to have similar properties as nuclear weapons? How about just keeping the nuclear weapons in submarines (supposing that was politically feasible; I guess it would be hard)?
Similar attitudes may have existed in France and Britain; interest in bioweapons declined as capabilities in nuclear weapons increased, as evidenced in a shift in budgetary allocations from the 1950s to the 1970s away from biological and towards nuclear programs.[174]
Is there any concrete evidence about countries with nuclear weapons saying they would have to invest in biological weapons if they decreased their nuclear weapons today (as opposed to 60 years ago)? If biological weapons were a subsitute for nuclear weapons, one would expect greater development of biological weapons as the number of nuclear weapons decreased from 64 k in 1986 to 9.4 k in 2022. Did this happen? Maybe looking into accidents could offer an idea.
Hi Christian,
I have now had a better look at the report. It really is great!
In general, I think uncertainty makes war more likely. It is one of the 5 reasons Chris Blattman gives for wars hapenning:
You say that:
These reasons continue to hold, so one should expect the subsitute deterrent to have similar properties as nuclear weapons? How about just keeping the nuclear weapons in submarines (supposing that was politically feasible; I guess it would be hard)?
Is there any concrete evidence about countries with nuclear weapons saying they would have to invest in biological weapons if they decreased their nuclear weapons today (as opposed to 60 years ago)? If biological weapons were a subsitute for nuclear weapons, one would expect greater development of biological weapons as the number of nuclear weapons decreased from 64 k in 1986 to 9.4 k in 2022. Did this happen? Maybe looking into accidents could offer an idea.