Why can't we ban the bomb?

Technology Diffusion and Nuclear Arms Control

Preventing the diffusion of nuclear weapons is a losing battle, but they may lose much of their military appeal.

The world community is attempting to limit and control the spread of nuclear weapons, yet more and more countries are joining

Why don't the legal measures such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty seem to work? The answer is that nuclear technologies are ultimately like other technologies and are governed by the same fundamental laws of transfer and diffusion. Simply put, dangerous technologies that some people want very much to use cannot easily be banned. Instead, these technologies tend to become simpler and more accessible over time. In the absence of effective world government, international restrictions on nuclear development have only limited potential for success.

Nuclear Weapons Today

In 1945, the United States, as sole nuclear power, held a small handful of nuclear weapons, two of which were detonated in the war against Japan. Today, experts estimate, the world has roughly 52,000 nuclear warheads, with destructive power equal to a million Hiroshima-type bombs.

In 1988, when the U.S. arsenal was at its peak with some 13,000 strategic warheads, the Soviet Union had about 11,000 such weapons. In addition, each antagonist had 10,000 to 20,000 tactical theater weapons. While the great bulk of nuclear weapons are held by the United States and the Soviet successor states, an undetermined number are now in the hands of secondary and tertiary nuclear powers, whose number is growing.

The six "official" members of the nuclear club are the United States, the Soviet successor states (Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine), Britain, France, China, and India. Despite official denials, Israel has a substantial stockpile, while its former collaborator, South Africa, claims to have built and later destroyed a number of such weapons. Meanwhile, Pakistan is on the threshold while the two Koreas, Taiwan, Brazil, and Iraq are diligently moving in that direction. Experts estimate that about 30 countries currently have the economic and technological potential to become nuclear states and that this number could grow to 40 by the year 2000.

Some of these potential weapons states (Germany, Italy, and Japan) have renounced this ambition. But what about Iran, Libya, Argentina, or Algeria, countries striving to become great military powers, or at least to match the arsenal of hostile neighbors? No matter who is next to join the "club," the growing and widely dispersed stockpile will increasingly defy management and control by international authorities.

What Can We Expect?

If various political and legal measures to stop the diffusion of nuclear power are ultimately futile, as it now appears, proliferation will continue and the nuclear genie will never be returned to the proverbial bottle. In the words of the Harvard Nuclear Study Group, we will have to "learn to live with nuclear weapons." For decades, well-meaning nuclear opponents had preached that existence of nuclear weapons predicated their deployment and that the only way to avoid global nuclear holocaust would be through total disarmament. In the current situation, the option of total disarmament is out of the question.

Will nuclear weapons ever be used again? Possibly, but only in a limited fashion. Though only two nuclear devices have ever been detonated in war, it should not be forgotten that roughly 2,000 test explosions have taken place at some 35 sites around the world since 1945. Now, with so many weapons in so many hands, some use may be inevitable. Fortunately, we no longer face the prospect of global nuclear war. Paradoxically, the real potential for such a holocaust, involving "mutually assured destruction," constrained the superpowers with their thousands of warheads during the Cold War. Since neither side could escape fatal damage during a nuclear exchange, these huge, lethal arsenals served as deterrents to their actual deployment. Now that the superpowers are calling off the arms race, isolated future use of this weapon, while abhorrent, no longer raises the prospect of annihilation on a global scale.

There are many safeguards to assure that future use of such weapons would be brief and isolated. While nations claim the right to possess nuclear weapons as a defensive strategy, there is also widespread consensus within the international community against using them in any conflict. The continuing hegemony of the leading nuclear powers also serves as a damper to rash, intemperate actions on the part of a new nuclear power.

The reason for current proliferation can be found in the same logic that has defined arms races throughout history. Adversaries attempt to match or top each other's arsenals. Pakistan, for example, was roused into action after India detonated a "peaceful" nuclear explosion; Argentina's nuclear craving can be best explained in terms of Brazilian ambitions.

In the past, countries have had to develop these weapons from scratch, relying on their own resources, friendly allies, and, in some cases, even theft of raw materials, equipment, and know-how to build a bomb. Now, many of these resources can be purchased: Experts warn that individuals in the financially strapped Soviet successor states will find it difficult to resist well-financed buyers seeking expertise, delivery systems, fissionable materials, or even actual weapons from the enormous stockpiles. Thus, secondhand nuclear devices could feed the next round of nuclear proliferation in Asia and the Middle East.

Understanding Nuclear Diffusion

International legal and political measures have had very limited utility in halting nuclear proliferation. Many nonproliferation proponents assume that nuclear weapons differ from other technologies and can be managed through a distinct legal framework. This is definitely not the case. The following observations offer insights into the process of technology transfer:

* Technology transfer is a unidirectional process. Technologies do not get disinvented, and efforts to ban socially or politically undesirable technologies fail. Military historians recount efforts to outlaw crossbows, gunpowder, and other lethal inventions of yesteryear. Today, nuclear weapons fall into the same category.

* Technologies pass through stages of development. Processes that were once rare and complicated become routine and readily available over time. On a global scale, technological innovation generally takes place in a small group of advanced countries and then diffuses through a descending hierarchy of less-developed areas. Globalization of industrial processes, such as textiles, electronics, and automobiles, bears this out. Nuclear power and weapons are no exception.

* Many technologies have dual uses. The same rockets that launch weather satellites can be used to transport weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear power plants have been converted to bomb production in some countries. However, to ban one means losing the other.

* The pace of technology innovation and diffusion has quickened. It took Marco Polo many years to bring Europe its first glimpses of technological novelties from China in the thirteenth century. Today's communication and transportation capabilities can make the dissemination process almost instantaneous. Advanced countries use official secrecy and export controls to limit foreign access to technologies, but the system is full of leaks and seldom prevents the diffusion process in the long run.

* Personal mobility plays a role. In the quest for development, scientists and engineers from less-developed countries typically come to study and work at the leading technical centers of the industrialized world. Inevitably, much of their expertise will be called upon to serve the ambitions of their home countries. On the other hand, "brain drains" could occur, as in the former Soviet Union. For years, many of the world's best scientists and engineers were kept on a tight leash and worked for low wages under the repressive Soviet government. With the demise of the regime, greater freedom of movement now tempts many of these former Soviet military and defense experts to share their sensitive knowledge with the highest bidder. Efforts have been made to corral leading scientists in the United States and western Europe. However, many appear headed for various regional "hot spots" in Asia and the Middle East.

* There is a psychological dimension to technology diffusion. Advanced technology, particularly the military kind, is perceived to be a measure of power and status. For nearly half a century now, nuclear weapons have been the mark of major powers. With them, even a petty dictator from an otherwise impoverished and backward country feels empowered in the eyes of his citizens, neighboring countries, and the world community. The fact that major powers wish to deny such countries nuclear status is an added incentive. It is ironic that the psychological and symbolic importance of these weapons far outweighs their deployment potential.

Using International Law

In the absence of one supreme, sovereign world authority, international law consists of rules, regulations, and guidelines to which the major powers can agree. Enforcement is largely a do-it-yourself proposition. This explains why international authorities chartered to enforce international law have such a disappointing record of accomplishment.

As can be surmised, major world powers who possess nuclear weapons would prefer keeping these devices out of other countries' hands. Thus, anti-proliferation measures have been enshrined in international law since the dawning of the nuclear age. Currently, there are some 140 signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, but proliferation is accelerating for a number of reasons. First, weapons production has gone underground. Even signatory states such as North Korea and Iraq have camouflaged and hidden facilities from authorities with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Second, technological advances have simplified the engineering problems encountered in building a bomb. Technologies associated with modern nuclear power plants, particularly the reprocessing and enrichment procedures, made the production of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium possible for a larger number of users: There are currently some 850 nuclear generating plants operating in more than 65 countries around the world.

And third, technologically advanced countries, which profit from nuclear exports to the Third World, have been guilty of passing on too many sensitive items.

The end of the Cold War has had a mixed impact on the proliferation process. On the one hand, the remaining military superpowers will no longer have to protect the ambitions of transgressing allies. On the other hand, there are already more nuclear states that have been created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The bipolar Cold War environment seemed to impose structure and discipline within the ranks of the alliances. Now with the folding of the nuclear umbrellas, a more fluid, fragmented international system is emerging where historical hostilities and insecurities force countries to seek unilateral security solutions.

The Good News and the Bad

The good news is that nuclear weapons will eventually be obsolete. Every epoch of history has imagined itself to be working with the final and ultimate technology. Whether it was the water wheel, steam, or even nuclear power, superior technologies eventually supplanted them. This process will continue. Over the past few decades, people have become increasingly disenchanted with nuclear power, on both cost and ecological grounds. The Chernobyl disaster of 1986 reinforced the decline of new reactor construction, which marked the 1980s. The industry has never fully recovered. Current plans call for modernized fossil-fuel facilities, along with the development of commercially viable solar or fusion power in the next century.

At the same time, the utility of nuclear weapons will become questionable. Once a large number of countries have them, the novelty and psychological shock values wear off. These weapons can be impractical and dangerous in actual use. Achieving the desired effect requires costly and complicated delivery systems. This is another technology to be mastered, well beyond assembling a working bomb.

In recent armed conflicts involving members of the nuclear club, such as Britain in the Falkland Islands and the United States in Iraq, nuclear weapons were neither necessary nor appropriate. New conventional weapons like cluster bombs and fuel-air explosives mimic the destructive effects of nuclear devices without such dreaded side effects as lingering radiation.

Unfortunately, the possible use of other weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical or biological agents, cannot be ruled out in the future, for they are certain to follow the same path of technology diffusion that nuclear weapons have. Future generations may well consider today's attempts at nuclear nonproliferation to be as naive and ineffective as attempts to ban gunpowder centuries ago.

Konrad M. Kressley is a professor of political science at the University of South Alabama, Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, Humanities Building, Room 226, Mobile, Alabama 36688. Telephone 334/460-7161; fax 334/460-6567.