Be skeptical of defense---the same safeguards of the past won’t apply to new proliferants

Will the Asian nuclear powers of the twenty-first century have similar political and institutional controls over military operations in time of crisis or conventional war with the possibility of nuclear escalation? We know distressingly little about the command and control systems for nuclear weapons among existing, and possible future, post-Cold War proliferators. For the duration of the Cold War and most of the post-Cold War, until very recently, North Korea was an opaque target for intelligence collection and net assessment. Iran, although located in the Middle East, has potential geostrategic reach into Asia with its expanding ballistic missile program. Iran’s future nuclear weapons could presumably be held under the political control of its supreme religious council and/or its government— with its military, intelligence and other security organs mostly controlled by the former.8 Both Iran and Pakistan could be torn by political rivalries within their security and defense establishments that cut across bureaucratic lines of authority and responsibility. Conflict between Islamic fundamentalists and political reformers in both states could raise uncertainties about the crisis management of nuclear force and might leave commanders with de facto authority to fire or withhold weapons.

Unstable command and control over nuclear forces could be joined at the hip to nationalist or religious hostility in Asia.

During the Cold War, the Americans and Soviets competed on the basis of political ideology: communism versus capitalism. Both of these ideologies were rooted in Western philosophy and history and neither, with the exception of lunatic fringes on both sides, anticipated an inevitable final day of judgment between the two systems. Despite significant differences in militarystrategic doctrine, the United States and the Soviet Union established an ongoing process of nuclear arms control that helped to stabilize their political relationship and to avoid conflicts based on misinformation and mistaken assumptions about one another’s intentions. In a sense, more than four decades of “nuclear learning” occurred as between the two nuclear superpowers that lasted to the very end of the Cold War and even beyond the demise of the USSR.9

In Asia, the next decade or two may witness the combination of absolute weapons in the hands of leaders with apocalyptic motivations or regionally hegemonic objectives. To be clear: it is not asserted here that the leaders of nuclear powers in Asia will be less “rational” than their European counterparts. Rationality is a loaded, and a subjective, term: in politics, it implies a logical or logically intended connection between political ends and means.10 Leaders in Asia will have political objectives that differ from those of the Cold War Americans and Soviets: not illogical in their own terms, but less road tested against accidental, inadvertent or deliberate escalation to nuclear war under the stress of political crisis and ambiguous intelligence.