ABSTRACT
Given the persistent interest in ridding the world of nuclear weapons, we need to ask why the nuclear powers never came close to doing so. Did this failure reflect a lack of policy imagination and international leadership, or instead states’ appreciation of the incentives to maintain nuclear arsenals? This chapter argues the latter. States faced two fundamental barriers to nuclear disarmament. First, a state’s security would be very sensitive to cheating by its adversary. A state without nuclear weapons could be at a huge disadvantage if suddenly facing an adversary that possessed nuclear weapons. A state would therefore have to be confident both that its adversary had destroyed all of its nuclear weapons and that its adversary could not win an arms race out of disarmament. Second, although there are imaginable solutions to these challenges, they would require an extraordinary degree of military-technical cooperation. This cooperation would only be feasible if the countries involved were essentially unconcerned about each other’s cheating, which would require radically improved political relations. If, however, such positive relations were ever achieved, the benefits of disarmament would be small because the countries could already avoid nuclear war for the foreseeable future.
