The MAD emperor has no clothes on

We should not congratulate ourselves, if we have not yet wiped ourselves out yet in a nuclear holocaust. The nuclear deterrence theory will not save the world, much less nuclear weapons.    What we can say is that, considering the growing deterioration of the global political situation, those with the power to exterminate life have not […]

We should not congratulate ourselves, if we have not yet wiped ourselves out yet in a nuclear holocaust. The nuclear deterrence theory will not save the world, much less nuclear weapons.   

What we can say is that, considering the growing deterioration of the global political situation, those with the power to exterminate life have not done so. But this is not altogether comforting, and history is no more reassuring. The duration of ‘nuclear peace’, from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War, lasted less than five decades.

More than 20 years separated the First and Second World Wars; before that, there had been more than 40 years of relative peace between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, and 55 years between the Franco-Prussian War and Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. 

Even in war-prone Europe, decades of peace have not been so rare. Each time, when peace ended and the next war began, the war involved weapons available at the time – which, for the next big one, would likely include nuclear weapons. The only way to make sure that nuclear weapons are not used is to make sure that there are no such weapons; not relying on the celebrated Mutually-Assured Destruction (MAD).  

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It is increasingly becoming clear that the mere presence of nuclear weapons will not exactly prevent their use. The first step to ensuring that humans do not unleash nuclear holocaust might be to show that the MAD Emperor has no clothes on and that would then open the possibility of replacing the illusion with something more suitable. 

It is possible that the post-1945 US-Soviet peace came ‘through strength’, but that need not imply nuclear deterrence. It is also undeniable that the presence of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert capable of reaching each other’s homeland in minutes has made both sides edgy. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when by all accounts, the world came closer to nuclear war than at any other time – is not testimony to the effectiveness of deterrence: the crisis occurred because of nuclear weapons. It is more likely that we have been spared nuclear war not because of deterrence but in spite of it. 

Even when possessed by just one side, nuclear weapon has not deterred other forms of war. The Chinese, Cuban, Iranian and Nicaraguan revolutions all took place even though a nuclear-armed US backed the overthrown governments. Similarly, the US lost the Vietnam War, just as the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan, despite both countries not only possessing nuclear weapons, but also more and better conventional arms than their adversaries. Nor did nuclear weapons aid Russia in its unsuccessful war against Chechen rebels in 1994-96, or in 1999-2000, when Russia’s conventional weapons devastated the suffering Chechen Republic. 

Nuclear weapons did not help the US achieve its goals in Iraq or Afghanistan, which have become expensive catastrophic failures for the country with the world’s most advanced nuclear weapons. Moreover, despite its nuclear arsenal, the US remains fearful of domestic terrorist attacks, which are more likely to be made with nuclear weapons than be deterred by them. 

In short, it is not legitimate to argue that nuclear weapons have deterred any sort of war, or that they will do so in the future. During the Cold War, each side engaged in conventional warfare: the Soviets, for example, in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan; the Russians in Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, as well as Syria; and the US in Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq, to mention just a few cases. 

Nor have their weapons deterred attacks upon nuclear-armed states by non-nuclear opponents. In 1950, China stood 14 years from developing and deploying its own nuclear weapons, whereas the US had a well-developed atomic arsenal. Nonetheless, as the Korean War’s tide was shifting dramatically against the North, that US nuclear arsenal did not inhibit China from sending more than 300,000 soldiers across the Yalu River, resulting in the stalemate on the Korean peninsula that divides it to this day, and has resulted in one of the world’s most dangerous unresolved stand-offs. 

In 1956, the nuclear-armed United Kingdom warned non-nuclear Egypt to refrain from nationalising the Suez Canal. To no avail: the UK, France and Israel ended up invading Sinai with conventional forces. In 1982, Argentina attacked the British-held Falkland Islands, even though the UK had nuclear weapons and Argentina did not. 

With the re-emergence of the multipolar geopolitical order, this is suddenly a problem that should give our political leaders sleepless nights. The Ukraine War and the latest flare-up of the Israel/Palestine conflict have brought military superpowers to the brink of war, a war no one will win. These two conflicts should represent the turning point of the global geostrategic consciousness… it is either that, or we are done, because the MAD Emperor is indeed naked.