America Is Preventing Nuclear Attacks in All the Wrong Ways | Barry Posen | Big Think

[Music] Now the present American grand strategy basically says nuclear weapons can only be possessed by countries that we like, and they cannot be possessed by countries that we don't like.

So, if countries we don't like try and get nuclear weapons, we will move heaven and earth to stop them. That's the basic story. As a console to that, we basically would prefer that no other countries get nuclear weapons either because it just complicates our lives.

Right now, in a perfect world, it would be nice if there were no other nuclear weapon states except the United States. But there are already several other nuclear weapon states other than the United States. We've learned how to live with other nuclear weapon states, right?

And if you look at the kinds of policies that it takes to keep other powers from doing in their national security interests inside their own borders with their own money what it is they conceive as being necessary for their national security, to try and dictate to them what they can and cannot do is a big job.

You need a hegemonic position to be able to do that. You need decisive, crushing military superiority, and you may even need to be able to invade them. Right?

And if you look at the arguments about Iran and about North Korea, as they've unfolded over the last 10 years and as are being discussed today, right, the question lurking in the background all the time is, if you can't get them to negotiate away these capabilities, which they seem to want for their own reasons, you should be willing to fight a preventive war.

Not a pre-emptive war—not attacking them before they attack you when you think they're getting ready to attack you—but attacking them now because you think there might be a problem later, and you'd rather not deal with it.

So you're gonna have war now to avoid some kind of war later, right? And it seems pretty good if the war is cheap. But the wars are not cheap, right?

Because rubbing out in other countries' nuclear weapons turns out to be a big deal. You've got to destroy factories, laboratories; you've got to wreck their economy; you've got to keep the economy squeezed; you have to kill people or kidnap their scientists, engineers, right?

If you want to prevent a moderately technologically advanced country—and here we're talking North Korea, which is really nothing special—from getting this old technology of nuclear weapons, it's now an old technology—it's not a mystery, right?

You really need to be able to get your hands around their neck and squeeze it and keep squeezing, right? So the question is: how many times, with how many places, are you willing to do this?

How many often are you willing to wage preventive wars? How many countries do you want to be in a constant this kind of relationship with? Right? These are the questions you have to ask.

Now, if we have it, I'd like to have an honest debate about this—the United States, right? I don't even think we have an honest debate because the way this—the way the debate has happened is it will be very bad if they got nuclear weapons. We have to do something about it.

All options are on the table. What kind of euphemism is "all options are on the table"? War is on the table. Well, what kind of war is on the table? How many wars are on the table?

What are the likelihood of success? What are the unintended consequences of wars to prevent nuclear proliferation? All right, these are questions we should debate; we should ask; we should answer.

Right now, my problem with nuclear weapons is rather different. I believe that America knows how to deter countries that have nuclear weapons. Countries that have nuclear weapons are not gonna attack the United States because if they do, we're going to annihilate them.

We'll be very sad for us; it will be even sadder for them, right? They're mostly small nuclear powers; we are a great large nuclear power, right? The whole thing would be very, very, very sad and tragic.

And it's easy for the other side to know how tragic it's going to be because our nuclear forces are not a secret, right? We have fifteen hundred warheads on a variety of delivery systems, and we can wreck pretty much any country in the world, right?

That's the residual of our Cold War force, and we are getting ready to spend a trillion dollars modernizing that force to keep it in tip-top shape. I think deterrence we can do.

So what do I worry about? I worry about not nuclear weapons in the hands of states, but nuclear weapons that are not in the hands of states. I worry about nuclear weapons that are lost, nuclear weapons that are stolen, nuclear weapons that are poorly aligned, right?

Nuclear weapons are sold off the back of trucks, right? So what do you do about that? Well, people who believe in the non-proliferation story will say, well, this is just another reason to prevent more states from getting nuclear weapons.

I say yes, but what about all the states that already have nuclear weapons, including some that I'm guessing don't really have very great, can really terrific controls?

So my view is our nuclear proliferation policy is directed at the wrong thing and the wrong problem. What we want to do is make sure that nuclear weapons are in the hands of states, remain in the hands of states.

Any state that has nuclear weapons, we should be talking to them about best practices to ensure that nobody sells, nobody steals, nobody loses, nobody breaks, right?

This requires a lot of application, a lot of organization, right? To be a responsible nuclear power is hard work. It took us a long time to learn how to do it.

Right? We've actually, in the past, taught others how to do it. This should be the thing that we focus on in the world from the nuclear weapons problem, right?

Because once nuclear weapons are not in the hands of states, in the hands of individuals or groups, then deterrence becomes hard.

Because a radical group, a terrorist group, a millennial group—and I don't mean the generation, I mean people who imagine some, you know, magic moment where history is gonna be transformed—right? They, you can't deter.

They've got nothing that they value that you can threaten to retaliate against; countries have many things they value that you could threaten.

It's all our aid against these groups may have nothing that you can retaliate against. So, it's very important to keep nuclear weapons out of their hands. [Music]