Being an old lefty, whose wife was once publisher of the late Nuclear Times, I have trouble accepting the Nukes-maintain-order line from realists. It goes against my ideological training. Nukes scare me. I think about minutes before midnight, the test ban treaty my mother worked for, and, now, how many minutes before someone shows up with a dirty bomb in an American subway… I'm for non-proliferation. I'm not big on the Second Amendment either. But realist Mike Desch makes a compelling counter-argument for "nuclear optimism" in the new American Conservative:
The
first two nuclear adversaries the United States faced—Stalin’s Soviet
Union and Mao’s China—were hardly democratic regimes. Indeed, they rank
among history’s most totalitarian political systems. Yet neither of
these totalitarian regimes risked nuclear war.
Both regimes engaged in mass murder of their own citizens. Conservative
estimates of the human cost of Stalin’s rule begin at 20 million
deaths. Mao killed approximately the same number of his countrymen.
Despite these sanguinary tendencies, neither regime was willing to risk
nuclear war with the United States.
Both also indulged in irresponsible nuclear rhetoric. Stalin publicly
pooh-poohed the American atomic bomb when told about it by President
Truman at Potsdam in July 1945. Behind the scenes, however, he
understood that atomic weapons represented a dramatic change in the
nature of warfare and secretly began a crash program. The rhetoric of
cavalier dismissal concealed a deep concern about nuclear weapons that,
in turn, induced caution.
During his 1957 speech at the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers’
Parties, Mao also dismissed the nuclear-armed United States as “a paper
tiger” and remarked elsewhere that a nuclear war with the U.S. would
not be such a catastrophe because “if worse came to worst and half of
mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be
razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.” But in
private conversations with Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery in
September 1961, he argued that nuclear weapons “are not something to
use. The more there are, the harder it will be for nuclear wars to
break out.” This latter view apparently governed Chinese behavior…
One
could go further and suggest that a nuclear Iran might even be
beneficial to the United States. The nuclear stalemate played an
important role in American efforts to contain the Soviet Union, and
containment, in turn, had the effect of “mellowing” the regime, as
George Kennan predicted in his famous Foreign Affairs
article. Why should we not expect a regional stalemate involving the
United States, Israel, and Iran to have a similar effect by
simultaneously bolstering each nation’s territorial security without
providing any of them with the means of conquest against other states?
Arguing that an Iranian nuclear capability could benefit Israel is
admittedly a more controversial claim. But in addition to the possible
mellowing of the Iranian political system, which would be a long-term
benefit for Israeli security, there could be some immediate payoffs,
too…
