Dear Forum Members,

I would grant that there is more than a bit of hypocrisy involved in the NPT regime, and that hypocrisy is undoubtedly having a corrosive effect on the regime. I do have to ask, however, what precisely do Forum members think will replace it?

The notion that if everyone has nuclear weapons the world will become a saner and more rational place (more Nukes less kooks) is an old one, and has been most ably argued by Ken Waltz. I highly recommend his debate with Scott Sagan in this connection. In essence he argues that
1) nuclear weapons has a sobering effect on decision makers, 2) that it makes war between nuclear armed states intolerably risky, and 3) that trying to stop states from acquiring nuclear weapons if they believe it is in their interest to do so is futile and may even be counter-productive - he likens it to King Canute ordering the tide to stay out. All of these arguments I suspect Ronald Dore would subscribe to, and applied to Japan would suggest that it is high time they acquire their own deterrent.

There are a number of problems with this argument.
First, as Colin Gray and others have suggested, we cannot be sure that all states will be rational in the way that we think they should be. It may be true that with more nukes we will have less kooks, but it only takes one kook with nukes to really screw things up (one of my favorite overlooked books in international relations is Dror's The Theory of Crazy States).
Even if a state is not sufficiently crazy to launch a nuclear attack, they might be willing to proliferate wmd weapons to non-state actors, which opens up a whole new world of problems. Possible North Korean involvement in the provision of Sarin gas technology to Aum Shinrikyo might conceivably even be a real world example of this.

Scott Sagan has made very interesting arguments that bureaucratic and organizational politics undermines the pristine logic of nuclear deterrence, which is why many experienced former policy makers, including James Schlesinger, Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger (hardly proto-typical peacenik types) have been urging more movement on nuclear disarmament. The recent performance of Japanese bureaucracy in the area of civilian nuclear power is hardly very encouraging on this score, and I don't think the pathologies of bureaucratic politics are any less severe in China or North Korea.

Finally, the existence of nuclear weapons can have some very perverse effects on security. Glenn Snyder warned decades ago of what he called the stability-instability paradox. Basically, he argued that if two sides had a stable nuclear deterrent, on a strategic level relations between them become more stable. At the same time, it perversely increases the incentive for weaker powers to act recklelssly on local issues, precisely because they know that their ultimate survival is no longer at stake. Many analysts believe that the
1998-1999 Indian-Pakistani Kargil crisis was an example of this logic in action.
The recent behavior of North Korea may be another example. In such situations, what develops are repeated games of chicken, which leads actors to insert elements of uncertainty in their response in order to deter further provocations. Eventually, this leads to the catastrophic situations where a local conflict escalates into an all out exchange.

It may well be that the NPT regime is falling apart, but it is for these reasons that we and other states are trying very hard to revive it - even if it is only for a couple more decades. Japan is quite committed to trying to make a go of it, partly because of their own very real and deeply felt nuclear allergy, but also because they live in a region where the utopian premises of a pax atomica may be very severely tested (although Asia is still a lot better than the Middle East on this score). In this context, their strategic relationship with the United States is of vital importance, for all the problems and complications that it may cause.

Thomas Berger
Boston University