... all states are rational on some basic level. Their leaders may be stupid, petty, venal, even evil, but they tend to do things only when they're pretty sure they can get away with them ... Nuclear weapons change all that. Suddenly, when both sides have the ability to turn the other to ashes with the push of a button, the basic math shifts. Even the craziest tin-pot dictator is forced to accept that war with a nuclear state is unwinnable and thus not worth the effort ... The iron logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction is so compelling, it's led to what's known as the nuclear peace: the virtually unprecedented stretch since the end of World War II in which all the world's major powers have avoided coming to blows.
Are. You. Kidding. Me. What about all the proxy wars and side skirmishes that have pockmarked the entire half-century since the end of WWII? Tepperman does recognize this, but justifies his rationale by saying that "these never matched the furious destruction of full-on, great-power war." I suppose adding up the number of civilian and military casualties in those proxy wars doesn't count for much.
But let's continue reading -- here's point of contention #2:
The record shows the same pattern repeating: nuclear-armed enemies slide toward war, then pull back, always for the same reasons. The best recent example is India and Pakistan, which fought three bloody wars after independence before acquiring their own nukes in 1998. Getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction didn't do anything to lessen their animosity. But it did dramatically mellow their behavior. Since acquiring atomic weapons, the two sides have never fought another war, despite severe provocations (like Pakistani-based terrorist attacks on India in 2001 and 2008).
Now since the author's brought it up, let me address this very clearly: no one can call the 2001 and 2008 attacks "provocations." Those were flat-out attacks. And while I am not determining who carried out those attacks (simply because there is no conclusive proof), one thing is for sure: an armed attack on a major city that yields loss of life and limb is much more than a provocation. To provoke someone is to insult them, question their intelligence, make derogatory remarks regarding their mother, and so on. 2001 and 2008 were not provocations. They were tragedies, disasters and by some accounts acts of war. Provocation, indeed. That's like calling 9/11 a "mishap."
Moreover, using India/Pakistan as a model to justify Tepperman's thinking is gravely short-sighted. There are many more issues between these two nations that need to be resolved. India and Pakistan's inherent mutual mistrust and occasional hatred is nothing like the Cold War rivalry between the US and the USSR, which was based on large-scale geopolitics and was driven by who would have the ultimate bragging rights and the last laugh. Distilling India and Pakistan's "rivalry" to make it seem anything remotely resembling the US/USSR rivalry is dangerous thinking.
Point of contention #3:
... are Kim and Ahmadinejad really scarier and crazier than were Stalin and Mao? It might look that way from Seoul or Tel Aviv, but history says otherwise. Khrushchev, remember, threatened to "bury" the United States, and in 1957, Mao blithely declared that a nuclear war with America wouldn't be so bad because even "if half of mankind died ... the whole world would become socialist." Pyongyang and Tehran support terrorism -- but so did Moscow and Beijing. Yet when push came to shove, their regimes balked at nuclear suicide, and so would today's international bogeymen.
Back up one second. You're telling me that a comparison between today's Kim/Ahmadinejad and yesteryear's Stalin/Mao is historically accurate? Mr Tepperman, are you taking into account all the historical, social, economic and cultural nuances that are absolutely IMPERATIVE if you are going to attempt such comparison? Again, oversimplification. Extremely dangerous and highly inaccurate.
Unfortunately, the rest of the article is filled with equally misleading ideas, poorly formed thoughts and conclusions based on dubious facts. At the end of the day, writing like this makes me extremely nervous, because Tepperman thinks he's doing the public a favor by distilling what must be extremely hard-to-grasp concepts into simplified logic and kindergarten logic. In reality, however, he's creating a set of misled and misleading arguments that certainly would make for a foolproof case for the uninformed, unaware masses. There is so much more to this debate!
Finally, Tepperman fails to address something I've discussed in the past: a world without nuclear weapons won't prevent conflict from taking place. It's still going to happen. Nukes don't really deter anything.
In the end, David Krieger at the New Age Peace Foundation says it best when he responds to Tepperman's conclusion with a very basic and humanistic bottom-line message:
“Nuclear peace,” [Tepperman] tells us, “rests on a scary bargain: you accept a small chance that something extremely bad will happen in exchange for a much bigger chance that something very bad – conventional war – won’t happen.” But the “extremely bad” thing he asks us to accept is the end of the human species.
We simply cannot let that happen.
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