FREE ESSAY ON THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS- A DEBATE

THE SPREAD OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS- A DEBATE

This book is structured as a debate between the authors on the subject of nuclear
proliferation. Waltz argues that because nuclear weapons 'will never the less spread,'
the end result will be stabilizing. His main point is that 'nuclear weapons make wars
hard to start' and that even radical states will act like rational ones because of the
mutually deterrent effort of nuclear weapons. Sagan . . . fears the worst because of
'inherent limits in organizational reliability. He contends that the parochial interests
of professional military leaders in emerging nuclear states, who will tend to see war as
'inevitable' and skeptically view any nonmilitary alternatives, will lead to deterrence
failures or accidental war. In addition, Sagan argues these states will probably lack
'positive mechanisms of civilian control' to restrain militant tendencies. 
Because nuclear weapons are so much more powerful than any armaments previously known,
their introduction at the end of World War II required a rethinking of strategic
principles. State A seeks to prevent state B from attacking, by threatening to respond
forcefully to attack and inflicting retribution on B. If B takes the threat seriously and
refrains from attacking, A's deterrence policy has succeeded. Nuclear weapons lend
themselves particularly well to deterrence because they can impose tremendous damage on
an enemy. Deterrence thus became the principal--indeed, they have argued, the purpose
that nuclear weapons serve. In my opinion, Sagan is right. We should worry about the
spread of nuclear weapons.
Both the United States and the USSR achieved an assured destruction capacity by the
1960s. As a result, Waltz believed that all the countries should have nuclear weapons. No
matter who start the war, the world will be destroyed. Why not add more members to join
the club? She said that ??spread?? rather than ??proliferation??. Someday the world will
be populated by fifteen or eighteen nuclear-weapon states. What the further spread of
nuclear weapons will do the world is therefore a compelling question. 
According to the Times Newspaper, The United States secretly deployed thousands of
nuclear weapons in 27 countries at the height of the Cold War, in some cases without even
the knowledge of the governments involved.1 This issue remained me that Waltz??s point:
It is better to have more countries that own the nuclear weapons than just few powerful
countries. However, Waltz??s point of view is not a major thought of the issue of nuclear
weapon. Almost the entire southern hemisphere is now covered by nuclear-weapon-free
zones. The ones in Latin America and the South Pacific were established during the Cold
War, those in Southeast Asia and Africa after its ending. Zones have also been proposed,
so far without success, for the Middle East, South Asia and Northeast Asia.2 In fact, the
nuclear power is extremely diseqilibrium in the world, and I believe it is almost
impossible for most of the countries to have nuclear power.
In a large-scale nuclear war, each side would suffer such catastrophic destruction that
neither could regard the outcome as a victory. To provide any chance for meaningful
victory, a nuclear war would therefore have to be severely limited. But the prospects for
controlling a nuclear war are at best uncertain. Despite a steep draw down in U.S. and
Russian nuclear forces in the years after 1991, both the United States and Russia
continue to maintain large arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons poised for immediate
launch. Under the most optimistic projections, these arsenals will remain large and
launch-ready for decades.3 This is the point that Sagan talked about. More nuclear
weapons will only product more damage. It is very difficult to control those destructive
weapons. 
As a practical matter the task of defense against large-scale nuclear attack is
difficult, perhaps impossible, when each side has thousands of weapons that can be
launched from different directions, at different speeds, and with decoys to confuse the
defense. To stop all of them is unlikely, and, if only one penetrated a defensive system,
it could cause catastrophic damage.
In United States, public boredom with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would
prohibit all nuclear test explosions worldwide, is depressing but comprehensible. After
all, the cold war is over. The problem is that Senate Republicans don't recognize that
fact, and they are playing with fire in the messy new 21st-century world. The debate over
the treaty, first proposed by President Eisenhower and signed in 1996, tells us plenty
about the rejection of the whole idea of diplomacy in favor of a new, highly partisan
obtuseness in American foreign policy.4 
The U.S. Senate's recent rejection of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)
was a huge disappointment to many Americans. The U.S.'s allies and friends responded to
this vote with universal shock. The situation in the U.S. seems worse, even the cold war
is over. Several times in recent months in Russian, President Boris Yeltsin and other
Russian leaders have warned about the dangers of a world war or reminded Washington that
Moscow still has a huge nuclear arsenal. The warnings have accompanied recent disputes
over Chechnya, Kosovo and Iraq.5 Despite regular disagreements, U.S. and Russian
officials want to maintain their stable, if sometimes acrimonious relations.
Russian and U.S. not only compete to each other and maintain their stable but also
prevent other countries to develop nuclear weapons. For example, nuclear physicist Wen Ho
Lee, a central figure in the government's Chinese espionage investigation at Los Alamos
National Laboratory, was arrested yesterday in New Mexico and charged with 59 counts of
mishandling classified information and violating secrecy provisions of the Atomic Energy
Act. His arrest came after a federal grand jury issued a far-reaching indictment that
charged Lee with downloading vast quantities of highly sensitive information related to
the design, construction and testing of nuclear weapons from a classified computing
network at Los Alamos to his unsecured office computer and to 10 portable tapes, seven of
which are missing.6 The case is being prosecuted because Wen Ho Lee has denied the United
States its exclusive dominion and control over some of this nation's most sensitive
nuclear secrets. In Asia the CTBT would make it harder for North Korea to advance a
nuclear-weapons program or for China to develop the technology required to place multiple
warheads atop a single mobile missile. The congressional committee investigating
potential Chinese espionage concluded that it would be more difficult for Beijing to
exploit secrets it may have acquired from the U.S. if it can't conduct nuclear tests. By
the way, this situation is what Sagan wrote about: the powerful countries with nuclear
weapons will try to control forever, and this should be obstructed.
While the U.S. military provides an overwhelming deterrent to any rational adversary, we
must also worry about how to deal with potential threats from sources that are not
rational. And it is against these dangers that the Administration is developing and
testing a limited NMD system, with a decision on deployment possible as early as next
summer. This decision will be based on our overall security interests and will take into
account cost, threat, technological feasibility and effects on arms control.7 This
pointed out that nuclear proliferation is producing some bad effect to the U.S and also
the world. Like Sagan said that not only nonproliferation is necessarily but also the
powerful countries should reduce their nuclear weapons. 
China wants to be a world power on a par with the U.S. This country??s strategic nuclear
arsenal is 300 times as small as that of the U.S. The entire arsenal packs about as much
explosive power as what the U.S. stuffs into one Trident submarine. The process began in
the early 1990s, at the very top of the armed forces, when politicians pushed the
military to streamline its command-and-control structure.8 More than a year after U.N.
arms inspectors left Iraq, the issue of whether Saddam Hussein has used the time to
rebuild his weapons program is vexing U.S. policy makers and stirring debate on the
campaign trail. The Security Council is struggling to forge a new policy that would allow
the inspectors to return, but its members remain divided on the sanctions. It agreed to a
series of short extensions of the oil-for-food program, which lets Iraq to bypass
sanctions and sell oil to buy food and humanitarian goods.9 If those powerful countries
don??t reduce the nuclear weapons, the other countries will not feel securely. It will
produce a vicious circle. Obviously, the real international competitions are not like
Waltz??s thought. The more countries have nuclear power the more this world is in
dangerous. 
After World War II ended in 1945, considerable support again developed for arms control
and for alternatives to military conflict in international relations. The United Nations
Charter was designed to permit a supranational agency to enforce peace, avoiding many of
the weaknesses of the League of Nations covenant. 
After the carnage of World War I, the international climate was more receptive to the
idea of arms control. During the years between the two world wars, many formal
arms-control conferences were held and many treaties were drawn up. One of the most
important agreements on arms control was the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968.
Signatories pledged to restrict the development, deployment, and testing of nuclear
weapons to ensure that weapons, materials, or technology would not be transferred outside
the five countries that had nuclear weapons. Sagan?? idea obviously is the trunk stream,
which the whole world have worked on it.
Perhaps the most pressing nuclear problem since the ending of the cold war is that of
nuclear proliferation. It has become increasingly difficult to prevent advanced Third
World states from developing nuclear weapons if they desire them. Attempts to police the
use of nuclear technologies and fuels through inspections and controls imposed by the
International Atomic Energy Agency have been useful in slowing proliferation, but in the
end nonproliferation is likely to rest on political judgments--for example, can a nation
adequately protect its security without nuclear weapons? Will the political costs of
acquiring them be prohibitive?10
The difficult nonproliferation challenge in the future is not to ensure that the U.S.
government and people are opposed to the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. In
deed, it is not difficult to understand why a large nuclear state, with the most powerful
conventional forces in the world, would want to limit severely the spread of nuclear
weapons to other states in the international system. 
The real challenge is to create a future in which the government leaders, the
organizations under them, and the citizens of nonnuclear states around the globe believe
that it is in their interests to remain nonuclear states.11
The awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons clearly increase the cost of war, and a
statesman??s awareness of this basic fact can be, in theory at least, a positive force
for peace. But nuclear weapons are not controlled by states or statesmen; they are
controlled by organization. These organizations, like all complex organization, will
inevitably have biases and parochial interests, will by necessity develop routines and
standardized procedures, and will occasionally make serious operational errors. The
military??s biases in favor of preventive war, common organizational problems in
producing survivable forces, and inevitable imperfections in the safety of alert nuclear
arsenals produced very serious problems for the superpowers during the cold war. These
kinds of problems are likely to reemerge, sometimes quietly and sometimes with a
vengeance, in new nuclear nations. Nuclear weapons do not produce perfect nuclear
organizations; they only make their inevitable mistakes more deadly. Because of the
inherent limits of organizational reliability, the spread of nuclear weapons is more to
be feared than welcomed.
Bibliography
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