OPINION

No nukes, more war

The winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), fits snugly into the Nobel Committee's pattern of rewarding fuzzy thinking that would actually make war more rather than less likely.

Those who have done the most for world peace over the past century or so--Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan among them--never won the Nobel Peace Prize. Terrorists (Yasser Arafat), communist thugs (Le Duc Tho), and third-world dictators (Anwar Sadat) did.

The award this time around wasn't quite as embarrassing as the one given to Barack Obama eight months into his presidency, for reasons still unclear, but it doesn't fall too far short.

At the heart of the Nobel fecklessness and illogic is the false notion that weapons are the primary cause of war, and that getting rid of them is both possible and conducive to peace. In reality, the same American nuclear arsenal which ICAN wishes to see done away with preserves peace by deterring those who would be tempted to violate it, whether Kim Jong Un, the mullahs of Iran, or Vladimir Putin.

Keeping the powder dry has always been a more reliable formula in that respect than beating swords into ploughshares. To borrow a parallel from the domestic side of the street, ICAN logic suggests disarming the police as a means of reducing crime.

This past summer, in a gesture deliciously reminiscent of the Kellogg-Briand Pact to "outlaw war" just a decade before the worst war in human history (Kellogg and Briand were Peace Prize winners too), ICAN shepherded through the United Nations a treaty banning nuclear weapons, with two-thirds of member states as enthusiastic signatories.

It was an impressive display of virtue signaling, albeit one which accomplished precisely nothing because none of the world's nuclear powers were willing to sign on. The object of ICAN's labors--the global stockpile of roughly 15,000 nuclear warheads--was left blissfully undisturbed.

It would be easy to snicker at such empty gestures, and the Nobel Committee's predictable endorsement thereof, if not for the dangerous logic actually embedded within them.

More specifically, let us imagine a world in which, by some miraculous diplomatic stratagem, we substantially reduce the global stockpile of nuclear weapons, which in practice would mean primarily reducing the stockpiles of the two countries which have the vast majority of them (the Russian arsenal is roughly the size of the American, at around 7,000 warheads, but the operational portion is deployed on mostly obsolete delivery systems).

Alas, at this point, after having unilaterally drawn down the American nuclear arsenal to the undoubted applause of ICAN and its Nobel Committee admirers, we encounter something familiar to anyone who has given anything other than lazy thought to the question of how to prevent nuclear war, what can be called the "deep reduction paradox."

As Sohab Ahmari points out in his dissection of ICAN's logic in Commentary magazine, a world where a generally benign superpower (us) has the overwhelming majority of usable nuclear warheads is one that provides few incentives for countries capable of going nuclear to actually do so, and for countries possessing much smaller nuclear arsenals (such as Britain, France, and India) to increase their size.

Were the American arsenal to somehow be substantially reduced, to as little as 200 or so warheads, those incentives influencing the thinking of other nuclear or nuclear-capable states would abruptly and dangerously change.

There would be little value in adding a thousand warheads to an existing arsenal when America would, as under current circumstances, still have six times more, but a hostile power (China?) adding a thousand warheads to an arsenal of 250 when America only has 200 would give genuine and terrifying meaning to the idea of nuclear superiority.

The members of ICAN might not be able to grasp it, but the huge American nuclear arsenal (although smaller by about half than it was during the late Cold War) not only helps deter war in general, but also nuclear proliferation and the expansion of other nuclear arsenals.

Any genuinely "deep reduction" in the American arsenal to levels possessed by smaller nuclear powers would have the effect of giving each of those powers incentives to add nuclear weapons by increasing the relative value of each added warhead. A world which ostensibly reduced the number of nuclear weapons still further, to the idealized "zero," would further magnify that relative value.

Going beyond all of this, however, is the tendency of ICAN and similarly simple-minded folks to get the independent-dependent variables precisely backwards--countries don't distrust each other because they have arms, they have arms because they distrust each other, usually with good reason.

A few decades ago Congress was debating whether to establish a "United States Institute of Peace," almost certainly with the encouragement of Nobel Peace Prize Committee types.

George Will, no friend of dippy sentiment, demurred by noting that we already had three such institutes of peace, located in Colorado Springs, West Point, and Annapolis, respectively.

Quite so. And they, like the American nuclear arsenal, have done vastly more for world peace than organizations like ICAN or the Nobel Committee ever will.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 10/16/2017

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