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

America Is Preventing Nuclear Attacks in All the Wrong Ways

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nuclear weapons are an odd conundrum for the world (and indeed the human species) as of late. Remnants of WW2 and indeed the Cold War, they're mostly used now as a kind of insurance policy for the safety of a country. It's like keeping a loaded gun. And like guns, America (no surprises here) has a whole lot of them and (just like a gun) they don't want anyone they don't like to have them. America is even willing to have preventative wars so that other countries don't develop nuclear weapons; which in turn breeds resentment and even more countries that resent us... who then in turn develop more nukes. It's a vicious cycle. And it may not end well. The Charles Koch Foundation aims to further understanding of how US foreign policy affects American people and societal well-being. Through grants, events, and collaborative partnerships, the Foundation is working to stretch the boundaries of foreign policy research and debate by discussing ideas in strategy, trade, and diplomacy that often go unheeded in the US capital. For more information, visit charleskochfoundation.org.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BARRY POSEN:

Barry R. Posen is Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Security Studies Program, and serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI. He has written three books, Restraint-A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks and The Sources of Military Doctrine. The latter won two awards: The American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University's Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. He is also the author of numerous articles, including "The Case for Restraint," The American Interest, (November/December 2007) and "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony," International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow; Smithsonian Institution; Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and most recently Visiting Fellow at the John Sloan Dickey Center at Dartmouth College.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Barry Posen: 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 codicil to that we basically would prefer that no other countries get nuclear weapons either because it just complicates our lives.

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. And if you look at the kinds of policies that it takes to keep other powers from doing in their national security interest 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 and 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. And if you look at the arguments about Iran and about North Korea as they’ve unfolded over the last ten years and as they’re being discussed today, 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 preemptive 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 would rather not deal with it so you’re going to have war now to avoid some kind of war later. And this seems pretty good if the war is cheap, but the wars are not cheap because rubbing out another countries nuclear weapons turns out to be a big job. You’ve got to destroy factories, laboratories, you’ve got to wreck their economy, you’ve got to keep the economy squee...

For the full transcript, check out