It is Not Imperative to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons

By Peter Huessy, President of Geo-Strategic Analysis

Can the US and its allies get to abolition from where the world is today–which is a world of multiple nuclear armed peer adversaries?

No, for at least four reasons.

First, though deterrence has risks, it demonstrably has prevented nuclear war. Even as the number of conflicts over the past seven decades has risen appreciably.

Second, nuclear deterrence has worked to such an extent that average war deaths were 14,000 a day from 1911-1945 but average daily war deaths since have plummeted to 900.

Third, countries go to war most commonly as folks fail to understand the extent to which nations will fight. And here we are in danger of not understanding why China and Russia will fight.

As Keith Payne writes:

“The more significant new condition is that the leaderships of Russia and China have worldviews that conflict sharply with that of the United States. Their quasi-alliance against the United States is designed to realize their goal of overturning the classical liberal world order. Both Russia and China show their willingness to exploit conventional and nuclear forces to pursue their expansionist goals and are challenging long-standing defensive U.S. deterrence redlines. What we now confront is the threatened use of nuclear weapons for revanchist purposes. We are accustomed to thinking of deterrence as serving defensive purposes. But Russia’s and China’s coercive nuclear first-use threats are here and now. (Any move toward abolition must factor this in.)