History Says Hold Fire on Missile Defence

History says hold fire on missile defence
The absence of weapons proliferation is the great success of the 20th century

JIM WALSH

TUESDAY, AUGUST 07, 2001

This week, a little more than half a century ago, an American bomber flying over a Japanese city changed the face of international politics. In an instant, the bomber''s cargo transformed Hiroshima into a city of fire and forced humankind into the nuclear age. This year''s anniversary coincides with a major debate on the future of nuclear policy, so it makes sense to step back, to consider the past and what it suggests about the nuclear future.

In the five decades since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, governments have managed to avoid using nuclear weapons against each other. This remarkable result can be attributed, in part, to the fact that the nuclear age brought with it an obvious truth: there is no defence against nuclear weapons, and in the absence of any defence, the nations of the world had to work together if they were to prevent an atomic holocaust. The results have included the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and a long list of international agreements intended to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

Today, a new American President is convinced that this hard-won wisdom no longer holds. He seeks, instead, to embrace a radical -- and as yet unproven -- nuclear strategy. President George W. Bush has actively worked to kill international agreements on nuclear testing and germ warfare. He wants, instead, to build a vast and elaborate system of missiles that could shoot down other countries'' missiles.

His predilection for this missile defence system is based on three principles: the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction is inevitable; the new owners of these weapons will be "rogue nations" and traditional policy instruments are useless against these fundamentally new threats; and the absence of American missiles to shoot down other missiles encourages rogue states and others to seek such weapons.

Taken together, these principles are rhetorically appealing. They suffer from a nagging problem, however: they are unsupported by the historical record.

Consider the first principle, the notion that proliferation is inevitable, and that the danger is getting worse. After 50 years, the most striking feature of the nuclear age is that there are so few nuclear states -- far fewer than predicted by virtually every expert and policymaker. Back in the 1960s Sir John Cockcroft, a central figure in Britain''s nuclear programme, warned of "a chain reaction in . . . the acquisition of nuclear weapons. If three nations made nuclear weapons for the first time in the 1970s, ten might do so in the 1980s and 30 in the 1990s."

The experts turned out to be wrong, however. Of the 31 nations that started down the nuclear path, 22 changed course and renounced the bomb. More importantly, the rate of proliferation has actually declined. After peaking in the 1960s, the number of new nations joining the nuclear club each decade has gone steadily downwards, and several of the nations that built or inherited nuclear arsenals -- South Africa, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan -- chose to renounce their weapons.

In the ten years since the end of the Cold War, there have been no new nuclear states. (India and Pakistan had acquired their nuclear weapons capabilities in the 1970s and 1980s). Iraq and North Korea were near-misses, but in earlier decades, the rate of near misses was even higher. Indeed, despite all the talk about "the dangers of the post-Cold War era", the past ten years have been marked more by renunciation than proliferation. Simply put, the absence of widespread proliferation may be the greatest policy success of the 20th century.

According to the second principle, one of the dangers of the new post-Cold War environment is the emergence of the rogue proliferator. This will come as a great surprise to students of nuclear history. During the Cold War, a number of countries were viewed as rogue proliferators, most notably China in the 1960s under Mao. South Africa and Israel were also considered rogue proliferators. American Administration officials often cite the examples of Iraq and North Korea, but both countries'' nuclear weapons programmes began decades before the end of the Cold War.

The third principle, that the absence of missile defence encourages countries to seek nuclear weapons, is rather curious. After half a century of research on the motivations of potential proliferators, there is not a single study that cites the relevance of defences. Among those who study the subject, some argue that prestige drives proliferation; others emphasise security threats, bureaucratic politics, or the spread of technical capabilities. There is absolutely no evidence, however, that the presence or absence of a missile defence system affects the calculus of a proliferator.

In short, history suggests that the world has been surprisingly successful at non-proliferation. We do not live in a world of 20, or even ten, nuclear weapons states that policymakers forecast. Strangely, however, policymakers have chosen to ignore that success. Even worse, they propose to abandon the very policies that are responsible for it.

In 1945, an American President pushed the world into the nuclear age. Now, another American President hopes to leave history behind and single-handedly impose a new strategy and new weapons on the world. What will be the result 50 years from now? It is difficult to say, but make no mistake, this new President is playing with fire. The risks are high, the consequences may be enormous, and a President who ignores history does so at his -- and our -- peril.

Jim Walsh is a Research Fellow at Harvard University''s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs