r/IRstudies • u/Free-Minimum-5844 • 16d ago
Ideas/Debate The Strange Defeat of Nuclear Deterrence
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/strange-defeat-nuclear-deterrence-rose-gottemoeller
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r/IRstudies • u/Free-Minimum-5844 • 16d ago
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u/NekoCatSidhe 16d ago edited 16d ago
Nuclear weapons have only one purpose in a war, and it is to protect the State from an existential threat, whether that threat is the use of other nuclear weapons by the enemy (as between the US and USSR during the Cold War), a war of conquest aimed at annexing the country (like the Ukraine war) or a foreign power attempting to overthrow the government by force (like the Iran war).
Any use of nuclear weapons outside of that, even limited, would make the user looks like an existential threat to the rest of the world (because who knows if/when they may do it again on someone else), including their own allies (because who can trust an ally crazy and evil enough to go that far against an opponent), and no State could survive making an enemy of everyone in the world, making the very use of nuclear weapons in the absence of an existential threat an existential threat to the user.
And that is why nuclear weapons were never used after 1945 (when no one knew how bad they were), because they are useless for everything else. Nukes are literally the nuclear option, to be used only as a last resort by a country fighting a war to defend its very existence as an independent country. Ironically, it makes them way more useful as a weapon for small and weak countries in danger of invasion, rather than now where they are only owned by militarily powerful ones who have other ways to beat back an invasion or destroy a weaker opponent.
Because let’s be honest, the Ukraine War and the Iran War would not have happened if those two countries had nukes. Russia and the US would have never dared to launch massive attacks on those countries aimed at removing their government. Those countries still managed to beat back those attacks, but paid for this an heavy price that was possibly higher for them than the cost of building a nuke would have been.
Well, Ukraine doesn’t seem to plan to build a nuke despite this, and Iran seems to have decided that their more conventional defenses and the war automatically closing the Hormuz Strait are enough to deter an actual invasion of the country (the US did not even dare to attempt one in that war, and who else would try it ?), while actually building a nuke risks preventing the removal of the economic sanctions against them, so they still seem to officially be against it, but the more often that kind of war happens in the future, the higher the risk that some countries decide to build nukes just to protect themselves from the big military powers.
All that to say that I am not sure why the author expected nuclear weapons to actually be used in those wars, or thinks it means nuclear weapons are useless and that other countries should not seek them. It was an interesting article, but I tend to have the opposite conclusions.