The Return Of Nuclear Proliferation

A recent article in the establishment security journal Foreign Affairs makes the case for nuclear proliferation among America’s allies. Not only are its arguments unsound, but they also understate the willingness of the US’s rivals to respond in kind.

By Emma Claire Foley, Jacobin

On November 19, Foreign Affairs published an article by Moritz S. Graefrath and Mark A. Raymond, two University of Oklahoma professors, arguing that the United States should bestow nuclear weapons on Germany, Japan, and Canada, three of its closest allies. It asserts that possessing nuclear weapons can convey substantial benefits and should be seriously considered for those countries that the United States sees as trustworthy. A dismaying amount of ink has been spilled in recent years trying to make nuclear weapons a more acceptable part of the day-to-day of global politics. An argument for “a modest nuclear deterrent” for three more states is another ill-considered attempt to normalize weapons that still threaten virtually all life on earth.

Even as it makes the case for proliferation, the essay’s argument continues the short-sighted structural condescension of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which formalizes the status of five nuclear-armed states but limits other countries from developing the weapons, obligating those five countries to pursue disarmament on their own terms. That privileged status persists, but without the commitment to eliminating nuclear weapons that would convince countries that don’t have nukes to tolerate a lopsided status quo, at least for a while.

But the Graefrath and Raymond article also makes the disappointingly common mistake of assuming America is the only country with agency when it comes to the type of decision it proposes. Other nuclear-armed countries have duly demonstrated that they are more than willing to make similar judgments. If the United States openly steps into the role of bestower of nuclear privileges, it will more than likely create a situation where other countries see no reason not to do the same. It’s certainly not uncommon to see a lack of realistic consideration of consequences in American foreign policy thinking, but it displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the possibility that other countries have agency, that they take their security as seriously as the United States does, and that they are as willing to consider all the options they may have to defend it. American foreign policy thinking seems not to consider at all what it would take to prevent a broader wave of proliferation that the United States might view as less advantageous.