ABSTRACT
Thomas Schelling and Manpreet Sethi are powerful and should stimulate further research.
Challenges of building a nuclear-free world About nuclear-free world we know everything – and nothing. Humankind lived in a nuclear-free world for almost the entirety of its history except for the last seven decades. Knowledge about the ‘pre-nuclear’ world does not generate optimism. At any given moment, humankind was either preparing for war, or fighting, or recovering from war – only to begin preparation for the next one. Thomas Schelling makes a valid point when he expresses concern about returning to the status quo ante. On the other hand, fighting did not end with the advent of nuclear weapons: wars at ‘sub-nuclear’ level continued and perhaps even intensified. The only new feature that nuclear weapons (perhaps) have introduced – given that we do not have tools to conclusively determine that this new feature is, indeed, causally related to the emergence of this new variable – is the absence of a global war or, more precisely, wars between major powers. The widespread belief that the presence of nuclear weapons helped to prevent World War III is not difficult to explain: after two world wars, which took place in relatively quick succession (some may even claim that this was one world war with a long interval between two parts), the third was a logical expectation, especially given the intensity of the East-West conflict. That a new major war did not happen had to be attributed to a cause. The intuitively assumed causal chain was straightforward and, in a sense, unavoidable given the state of international relations theory, which until the 1980s was largely dominated by realism with its emphasis on the role of power. The most visible parameter that differentiated the world before and after 1945 is the presence of nuclear weapons; hence, they were attributed the key role in the maintenance of the ‘long peace’. Obviously, the correlation can be – and most likely was – spurious. It is well known that several times during the Cold War the world came close to major war as a result of accidents or miscalculations. Wars practically never stopped during the postWorld War II period either, although they were limited to the periphery – Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan are only the more visible ones. On the other hand, it is known that the spectre of large-scale nuclear use weighed heavily on the minds of policy-makers and could have facilitated greater caution on the part of decision-makers, for example, during the Cuban missile crisis. In the end, the propensity to assign a ‘peace-maintenance’ property to nuclear weapons is an attitude that can be expected on the part of those who had lived through two world wars. Seen within this framework, nuclear disarmament involves the choice between the dangers stemming from the presence of nuclear weapons and the dangers stemming from the risk of sliding into a new conventional world war. Proponents of nuclear disarmament believe things cannot be worse than they are today; opponents say that things could be much worse. There is no rational solution if the choice is framed in these terms.
