A New Proposal for Nuclear Arms Control:

...What obligations would the former have to accept and what compensations and guarantees should the latter be given...

...They are suitable for maintaining a posture of stable deterrence based on an assured capacity to survive a surprise attack...

...The question is not whether a sophisticated analysis would support such revulsion on the basis of weapon effects but whether an even more sophisticated analysis would support it as a practical political necessity...

...The world-wide revulsion against nuclear weapons, strengthened and focused by an agreement, will reinforce the pressures to comply with it...

...The distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons provides the unambiguous language in which to phrase the agreement...

...Distinctions may be important for traditional, symbolic or psychological reasons even when they correspond to no inherent physical differences...

...General Maxwell Taylor has pointed out that the United States and its allies have more manpower of military age than the entire Communist bloc...

...But such a position says, in effect, that no effort should be made to banish the nightmare of nuclear war until a peaceful international community has been established...

...Thornton Read, who here makes his first contribution to The New Leader, is at the Center of International Studies at Princeton University...

...To say that nuclear weapons should be outlawed misses the point...

...But is it essential that a politically useful distinction between weapons coincide with a discontinuity in the single physical dimension of yield...

...The success of an agreement between the nuclear and the non-nuclear clubs will depend on our ability to strengthen the feeling of moral revulsion against nuclear weapons—by codifying it in international law, by putting the moral authority of the United Nations behind it and by acting as though we took it seriously by building up our conventional forces to the level where we can wean ourselves from a nuclear strategy...

...But the sacrifices required to· realize the great Western conventional military potential will not be forthcoming if the public's attention is directed mainly toward a dialogue between the advocates of cheap security (through reliance on nuclear weapons) and the apostles of a cheap morality (of irresponsible protest against nuclear weapons...

...We cannot ignore it...

...but we can, at any time, announce that our conventional rearmament is intended as a step not only toward a rational policy for national security but also toward an international agreement which would neutralize nuclear weapons politically so long as they cannot be eliminated physically or brought under the control of an international authority...

...An international agreement expressing and codifying the moral revulsion against nuclear weapons would help to raise these political deterrents to the level where they would be disregarded only by a nation playing for such high stakes that the other nuclear nation would necessarily be drawn in...

...The crucial question is one of phasing, of distinguishing between objectives and immediately applicable policies...

...We cannot ask nations voluntarily to renounce weapons which are acclaimed as an economical substitute for soldiers and a symbol of national prestige and technological progress...

...Among those who have seriously considered this prospect, there is wide, but not unanimous, agreement that the proliferation of nuclear capabilities is undesirable...

...What weapons will be developed and used depends not only on technological possibilities but also on psychological pressures...

...There are several points to be made here: First, the possession of its own nuclear weapons would not necessarily protect a small nation from a nuclear attack by one of the large nuclear powers...

...World-wide revulsion against nuclear weapons is a political fact of life...

...This strategy is well suited to enforcing an international agreement because the punishment can be made to fit the crime...

...There is no great rush to join the "bacteriological club" or the "poison gas" club and no sense of inferiority in being left out...

...Building up our conventional forces and strengthening the moral revulsion against nuclear weapons would shift prestige from nuclear forces to the conventional forces which can act as international police...

...Our common interest in preventing nuclear war and the spread of nuclear weapons provides a political basis for agreement...

...The deterrent value of this fear could be enhanced by a private understanding that, in case the agreement broke down, the nuclear nations would give to their non-nuclear allies a better nuclear capability than the latter could have achieved for themselves...

...The European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) nations alone are roughly equal to the Soviet Union in manpower and industrial potential...

...A second major reason for wanting nuclear weapons is increased security...

...Nuclear weapons cannot be removed from international conflict through an agreement expressed in terms such as "aggression," "injustice" or "freedom," whose very meaning is at issue in the conflict...

...There is also a great difference between basing our security on nuclear weapons as a long-range policy or as a stopgap to tide us over while we put our conventional forces in order...

...Outlawing all use of nuclear weapons would not prevent their use...

...To be useful as a basis for an international agreement, a proposal must be compatible with the divergent interests of the great powers...

...By Thornton Read A New Proposal for Nuclear Arms Control IN THE ABSENCE of arms control, new nations can be expected to acquire nuclear weapons at a rate limited mainly by their technological abilities...

...One strong emotion which should be considered is the moral revulsion against nuclear weapons, the feeling that they are not superior weapons of defense but efficient instruments of mass destruction...

...However, as Julius Stone has argued, aggression is an ambiguous concept which, in specific cases, means different things to different people...

...Since moral fervor cannot solve the complex problem of eliminating nuclear weapons, it tends to burn itself out in futile protest against the fact that the problem exists...

...It will be politically stable if nuclear deterrence can be insulated from the unstable realm of political-territorial conflict...

...At present, world government is not politically feasible and the detection of hidden stocks of weapons is not technically feasible...

...The deterrent force of an agreement would come not so much from the obligation the Soviets would be under not to initiate the use of nuclear weapons, but from the obligation we would have to punish them if they did...

...But if retaliatory forces are secure (as hopefully will be the case for missiles), neither side needs to launch or to fear a sudden massive attack...

...rather, it would encourage their use by a nation willing to violate the law if it could do so with impunity...

...Would such a guarantee be credible enough to convince a nation to forgo a nuclear capability of its own...

...Nuclear weapons are new and are now confined to only a few nations...

...The objective should not be to remove nuclear weapons physically but to neutralize them politically as a factor in international relations...

...Revive the declining—but far from dead—revulsion against nuclear weapons, embody it in a well-advertised international agreement, mobilize world opinion behind it, and the prestige value of nuclear weapons will decline to that of bacteriological weapons...

...What are the practical prospects for negotiating such an agreement...

...Nuclear weapons, on the other hand, are singularly unfit for any of these purposes...

...and the Soviet Union find that maintaining a second-strike or strike-back capability is not easy...

...Any additional members will only decrease stability and thus undermine their own interests...

...We cannot conclude an agreement banning the first use of nuclear weapons until our conventional forces are stronger than those of the Soviet bloc...

...Conventional forces are essential to the political process, i.e., to the control of territory, the overthrow and establishment of government, the maintenance of order— in short, to the whole business of determining who rules whom...

...Most reactions range from panic to reluctant acceptance of what seems inevitable...

...It will be politically useful to the degree that the revulsion against nuclear weapons is maintained and strengthened...

...If the revulsion against nuclear weapons is potentially useful, in the past it has been largely ineffective, and even harmful, because there has been no policy to focus these feelings on a realistic objective...

...Who can say what would happen if Western leaders spelled out the problem and demanded sacrifices as a matter of both moral principle and national survival...

...Smaller nations will probably find it impossible...

...The urgency of the problem is matched by the political and technical difficulties of solving it...

...Such a demand would challenge responsible idealism and transform the moral fervor now manifest in revulsion against nuclear weapons into positive action...

...and the prospects for this depend on finding a basis for the division which would be acceptable to both the nuclear and the non-nuclear nations...

...To be useful as a basis for agreement a distinction must have two properties: (1) it must be unambiguous, and (2) it must be a focus for strong feelings...

...The nuclear and the non-nuclear parts of the spectrum of conflict are connected through the threat to use nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear provocation...

...Perhaps there is no more urgently needed negotiation today than that between the nuclear and the non-nuclear nations to search for the terms of a viable political agreement which would safeguard the security of the non-nuclear club and make the possession of nuclear weapons seem more a distasteful obligation than a sign of national prestige...

...The recent literature on military strategy and arms control offers a rich variety of ideas...

...We and the Soviets have conflicting interests in the outcome of our bitter competition but we also have a common interest in keeping the conflict within bounds...

...The two crucial questions are Russia's ability to induce China to accept it and the West's willingness to build up its conventional forces to the level where it can renounce a nuclear strategy...

...If there is ever to be a world order supported by an international security force, surely it will come into being not overnight by a dramatic global conversion to world government, but gradually as national armies are used more and more under international auspices...

...As long as the world contains both nuclear weapons and sovereign states, the only hope of restraining the spread of nuclear weapons is the voluntary division of nations into a nuclear and a non-nuclear club through a negotiated political settlement...

...For the present we are committed to a nuclear strategy...

...To be sure, limited reprisals confined to property damage would not be adequate punishment for a massive nuclear attack, but a massive attack would hardly be launched except in the context of a general all-out war, in which case retaliation is not in question...

...e.g., the limited use of nuclear weapons could be deterred by the entirely credible threat to destroy a naval base, an isolated power plant or an evacuated city in the offending country...

...we can only decide whether to work with it or against it, whether to break it down as an inconvenience or build it up as the basis for an agreement...

...Yet if the only function of nuclear weapons is to stabilize nuclear deterrence, then membership in the nuclear club should be confined to the two nations who maintain a bipolar stalemate...

...The threat of reprisal is essential to make an agreement self-enforcing...

...It has been proposed that the use of nuclear weapons should be allowed even against conventional forces but only to resist aggression...

...Third, the threat of retaliation for a nuclear attack on another nation is by no means unrealistic...

...There is a big difference between saying that we should renounce nuclear weapons at once, thus handing the Soviets complete military superiority, and saying that we should build up our conventional forces to the level where we are able to negotiate the removal of nuclear weapons from international relations, including even wartime relations between enemies...

...What is needed is not a choice between rational analysis and moral revulsion but a rational analysis of how moral revulsion can be mobilized and focused to support a viable arms control policy...

...If the latter are to command moral as well as military authority, their conventional weapons must be regarded as a badge of legitimacy rather than a sign of obsolescence...

...Second, there are strong political deterrents against a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear nation...

...Prohibiting the first use of nuclear weapons breaks this connection and splits the spectrum of conflict into a self-contained realm of nuclear deterrence on the one hand and a self-contained realm of political-conventional conflict on the other...

...How stable strategic nuclear deterrence will be depends both on military technology and on the political question of what actions are to be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation...

...The terms which are most deeply meaningful to us are the least useful in negotiating with our adversaries...

...Thus they actually decrease security...

...It is both more urgent and more feasible to remove them from the arena of international conflict than to remove conventional forces, which have for centuries been maintained by all nations and are inextricably implicated in virtually every problem of international relations...

...No one can predict just how stable a nuclear-armed world would be, and this very uncertainty is a source of hope to those who despair of preventing the rapid spread of nuclear weapons...

...The pressure for a nation to join the nuclear club comes to a great extent from the desire for prestige...

...Technologically, it appears that in the missile age mutual deterrence can be made highly stable...

...Whether any terms for such an agreement would prove negotiable can be determined only by putting forward proposals that are both imaginative and realistic...

...The tendency to make a sharp distinction between nuclear and conventional explosives has been criticized on the grounds that the smallest atomic bombs have less explosive yield than the largest chemical bombs used in World War II, and in any case have negligible fallout beyond the area within which blast would be lethal...

...Nevertheless, it would be unwise to· dismiss the aversion to nuclear weapons as mere sentimental nonsense...

...Finally, even if a nation were willing to outrage world opinion and even if it believed it could escape reprisal, it would still be deterred from violating an agreement by the same considerations that led it to make it in the first place—namely, the fear of a world-wide nuclear arms race...

...21 in reprisal for prior use...

...The distinction between nuclear and chemical explosives I like that between Soviet and Iranian territory) satisfies both requirements...

...In the short run, the important thing is the direction in which we are going—whether toward greater or lesser dependence on nuclear weapons...

...And the question is not one of ultimate goals but of practical first steps...

...They should be placed not outside of international law but outside of international politics and under a law restricting their use for reprisal...

...Presumably the threat of nuclear reprisal will deter a nuclear attack on a nuclear nation, but will it also deter a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear nation...

...it must be phrased in unambiguous terms...

...The best solution would be a two-member nuclear club consisting of the United States and Russia—one member from each of the two antagonistic power blocs...

...We already recognize a distinction between legitimate weapons with which nations may defend their interests and illegitimate weapons which may be possessed only to pose the threat of reprisal for their prior use by the enemy...

...By the agreements we make and the example we set we can help these pressures to develop in a healthy direction...

...But weapons which are useful only for striking first are more of a provocation than a deterrent...

...Many sincere people are so overcome by the revulsion against nuclear weapons that they are attracted to irresponsible disarmament proposals which would leave the West defenseless...

...At least some of the non-nuclear nations would demand a guarantee from one or both of the nuclear powers...

...An agreement between the nuclear and the non-nuclear nations must be phrased in terms which are unambiguous, which mean the same thing in any language or ideology...

...and, above all, it must be able to mobilize world-wide feelings and focus them on a realistic objective...

...Here it may be objected that our purpose should be not to prevent nuclear war but to prevent all war, that the best hope for peace is to identify the moral revulsion against nuclear weapons with the opposition to war itself...

...If retaliatory forces are vulnerable to surprise attack, the strategic balance between the great nuclear powers would be so unstable that a nuclear attack on any nation would pose an intolerable risk of triggering a preemptive attack...

...Fortunately, the neutral nations are not anxious at present to join the nuclear club, and this in itself is surely a cogent reason for concluding an agreement before they have a chance to change their minds...

...The weakness of NATO in conventional forces is a matter not of capability but of will...

...The nuclear nations must police one another...

...With no reliable means of detecting hidden stocks of weapons, an international agreement should shift attention away from the effort to eliminate all possession of nuclear weapons and concentrate on the question of their use...

...We cannot introduce nuclear weapons into politicalterritorial issues and at the same time deny them to nations having vital interests in those very issues...

...There are three possible laws governing the use of nuclear weapons: They could be used (1) under no conditions...

...But if there is any chance of preventing it, then the possibility that it might be tolerable is less pertinent than the possibility that it might be an unmitigated disaster...

...This article is adapted from a memorandum entitled "A Proposal to Neutralize Nuclear Weapons," originally published by the Center...

...or (3) in response to a conventional attack...

...The moral revulsion against nuclear weapons focused on a law of no-first-use would sustain the law both by reinforcing the expectation that violations would be punished and by increasing the political deterrent to nuclear blackmail of a non-nuclear nation...

...Thus the only realistic strategy becomes one of limited, or graduated, strategic reprisals...

...The Soviets might well be insensitive to their own moral obligations under an agreement forbidding the first use of nuclear weapons, but they could scarcely disregard the effect of the agreement on world opinion, including opinion in Communist countries, or its effect on the U.S...

...Even the U.S...

...This split is necessary both to stabilize nuclear deterrence and to provide a rationale for dividing nations into nuclear and non-nuclear clubs...

...RENOUNCING THE FIRST use of nuclear weapons introduces no new principle into military policy...

...The proposal I wish to discuss here combines several of these to form a synthesis which is examined in the light of the stringent requirements that have made the problem of nuclear arms control seem hopeless...

...We must put nuclear weapons in the same illegitimate category that we have put poison gas and bacteriological weapons...

...What coercions and sanctions would make the agreement self-enforcing...

...As Thomas Schelling has pointed out, there is little inherent difference between the terrain a few miles north of the Soviet-Iranian border and the terrain a few miles south...