Five Questions on the Logic of Nuclear Nonuse

Your paper critiques the existing literature on nuclear nonuse. Can you sum up what the problem is and why you decided to write on this topic?

Colleen Larkin: Ever since nuclear weapons were first created, their destructive potential was clear. During the first nuclear test in 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted Hindu scripture, saying, “now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” When the technology—still very much in its infancy—was used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that year, up to a quarter-of-a-million people were killed. Since then, nuclear weapons have become many times more destructive and have been acquired by many of the world’s most powerful countries. Naturally, the stakes for ensuring that nuclear weapons are never used again are very high.

The world-destroying nature of the atomic bomb makes avoiding nuclear war one of the most monumentally important questions for international relations scholars and policymakers. For the last decade, scholars have measured how members of the public think about nuclear weapons and whether they would press the button. Essentially, this work measured how strong the “taboo” against nuclear use was.

But the literature was getting bogged down in the methods to test this theory instead of thinking more deeply about the theory itself. Since the Cold War, debate has raged between “normativists” who think that nonuse is mostly explained by the nuclear taboo, and “rationalists” who think that self-interest and self-preservation play a bigger role.

While the survey literature was building a record of finding that the nuclear taboo may not always hold, the debate on why nuclear weapons haven’t been used again needs to be reassessed in an age of advanced nuclear technology, where strikes can be delivered with much greater precision. Greater precision––the possibility of a targeted strike that could take out, say, a military command center rather than an entire city with millions of civilians—could change how policymakers could view the escalation risks of using nuclear weapons. That led us to ask questions about the rationalist logic of nonuse, the military effectiveness of nuclear weapons, and the nature of the nuclear taboo. A lot comes down to one question: would decision-makers avoid using nuclear weapons under any circumstance?

In addition, the scholarship on norms more generally has evolved. Many think of norms—including the nuclear taboo—as structural: either they hold or they don’t. But that’s no longer the dominant way of thinking. The literature has moved toward considering the effects of contestation on norms.

Can you explain this “contestation” a bit more, and how it interacts with nuclear norms?

Stacie Goddard: The simplest view of nuclear norms is that there’s one norm out there and it says: don’t use nuclear weapons. Everything else follows from that. That’s a structural view in the sense that people get socialized into the norm and have very little agency beyond accepting it.

But the newer literature on norms presents a different view—that human beings exist within a broad array of norms, many of which are often contradictory. That leaves space for people to negotiate among different norms, and even use them instrumentally. In this view, even when people are thinking strictly morally—rather than strategically—they negotiate among competing norms.

This has important implications for the nuclear world. It suggests there could be a contest between—on the one hand—a norm that says nuclear use is just entirely unacceptable, versus a situation where one could argue that fewer people would be killed if a small, precise nuclear weapon were to be used versus conventional warfighting. That puts two normative types of reasoning—the nuclear taboo versus harm reduction—in direct competition with one another.

You could think about nuclear deterrence as a normative good—that it is good to deter nuclear war—but people realize that that logic rests on threats of extreme civilian punishment. You deter the use of nuclear weapons by your adversary by being ready to destroy that adversary’s cities in response to its use of nuclear weapons. That’s led to debate about whether deterrence is a moral stance or is simply instrumental. Our work tries to capture more of this contestation, rather than saying norms point decisively one way.

Colleen Larkin: I’d add that norm contestation is often most extreme when there’s higher uncertainty. That can include when there’s new technology or actors encounter a new situation. Therefore, the current state of affairs in nuclear weapons—where new technology is upending the traditional rationale of deterrence and China is becoming a third nuclear peer to the United States and Russia—is a situation ripe for contestation. Contestation is not just competition, it’s also trying to find what norms make sense in a given situation.

In other work, we’ve shown how norm contestation took place when air power was first introduced to the military sphere. When we take it all the way to present technology, we see similar dynamics in terms of the trade-offs between norms.

Can you expand on this dichotomy between the normative and rationalistic logics of nuclear nonuse?

Stacie Goddard: There are basically two theories that explain nuclear nonuse. The first, the normative school, can be boiled down to the idea that using nuclear weapons is immoral and that ultimately prevents policymakers from pushing the button—no one wants to have that scale of bloodshed on their hands. The other, the rationalist school, says that we haven’t used nuclear weapons because of the risk of retaliation. This is the logic of mutual assured destruction—we don’t use nuclear weapons because if we did, they’d most likely be used against us.

So that sets up this dichotomy between values and morals on the one hand, strategy and reason on the other. In one, shame and guilt prevent nuclear use, and in the other, it’s about fear and self-preservation. But it might be less of a sharp dichotomy and more of a spectrum between the two.

First, even the most instrumental actor has to work within the boundaries of what’s considered legitimate. People don’t exist in a normative vacuum. And if you decide to do things that are seen as illegitimate, you’re going to bear real consequences for that.

Second, given that norms are contradictory and multiple, there’s always going to be space for strategic action, of choosing one norm over another. People will move more purposefully between norms than the original literature suggested.

Colleen Larkin: We also point out in the paper that recent literature finds some of the trade-offs that people make in considering whether, hypothetically, to use the bomb, but not necessarily identifying the interactions between the rationalist and normative logics of nuclear nonuse.

For example, scholars have found that when you make more salient to participants the international law consequences of nuclear use—in other words, the normative consequences, where the schools start to overlap—that might trigger a greater consideration of humanitarian, rather than purely instrumental, logics. So, it appears that people weigh these considerations in their minds and the scales may tip one way or another, but they’re definitely not mutually exclusive.

Your paper examines how the state of play between the rationalist and normative logics of nuclear nonuse is changing. Today, new precision weapons are being rolled out, which may challenge the rationale of mutual assured destruction when nuclear bombs can be used tactically to take out military targets. And the international arms control regime is also at its breaking point, creating uncertainty amid renewed great power competition between nuclear-armed adversaries. How does this impact the future of nuclear nonuse?

Stacie Goddard: The honest answer is nobody knows. There’s a lively debate in academia. One side argues that in order to keep deterrence credible against bad actors who might use precision low-yield weapons—which can take out much smaller targets and aren’t the “world-destroying” type of weapons mentioned earlier that traditional deterrence strategy has accounted for—the United States needs to invest heavily in these same kinds of weapons combined with a doctrine that adheres to international law. They argue that’s the only way to make deterrence credible—if you’re going to convince Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un not to use precision weapons, they need to believe the United States will use the same weapons against them in response. And the only way to do that would be to acquire a technology that works proportionally and within the norm of noncombatant immunity, which traditional, world-destroying nuclear weapons do not.

The other side says that if you lower the costs enough and take away that element of civilian punishment, you’re going to end up increasing the chance of nuclear use, because you don’t have that fear of mutual assured destruction built in.

Then there are those that think nuclear weapons, no matter how small, will remain unconventional and unusable. So the development of precision technology, in this view, really shouldn’t matter, because ultimately, as long as you fear that slide towards full-scale nuclear war and that things could psychologically go off the rails, you’re still not going to use even the precision weapons. And likewise, if it’s purely the taboo of nuclear weapons that prevents them from being used, it doesn’t matter how small or precise they are.

Colleen Larkin: The turn to these so-called “tactical nuclear weapons” is not necessarily new—there’s been interest in them since the 1950s. But it’s only since the 1990s that there’s been a precision revolution in terms of conventional and nuclear technology. Today, the United States, Russia, and China have made greater investments in tactical nuclear weapons that are lower yield and more precise. This makes it more pressing to figure out what these weapons would do in various escalation dynamics. We already see Russia threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

This technological revolution raises questions about whether the line is being blurred between nuclear and conventional warfare. Would threatening tactical nuclear use de-escalate crises or would it spiral into the use of nuclear weapons? Those are the questions that neither academics nor policymakers can answer definitively.

Stacie Goddard: Regarding international arms control, this is just generally speaking a nasty time for the nuclear order—really, for order in general. It seems unlikely that New START will be renewed. There’s a really strident nuclear ban movement, but it has little effective sway. And there are nuclear modernization programs underway everywhere.

There’s really no answer to fixing this, but there does need to be an understanding of the amount of uncertainty at this moment. We need to understand that, whatever the rules were coming out of the end of the Cold War, those aren’t the rules right now. We’re in a genuine moment of upheaval.

Colleen Larkin: Arms control is just one of the many guardrails that are no longer in place to prevent nations from going to war. If anything, that heightens the importance of understanding how decisionmakers actually think about the use of nuclear weapons and the consequences of their actions.

In that vein, what do you think should be the biggest takeaways from your paper within the academic and policy communities?

Colleen Larkin: The bottom line here is that the world has changed, and our understanding of why policymakers haven’t used nuclear weapons since World War II has to change with it. That is ultimately the only way that we’ll be able to get through another 80 years of nuclear nonuse as technological change and more dangerous geopolitical dynamics make the risk of nuclear war ever greater.

The academic takeaway is that there needs to be greater investment in the theory behind all these studies of nuclear nonuse. We’re in a new world, and that means the underlying foundations of the field need to be updated. Whether that means digging into norm contestation or something else, in our paper, we tease out a number of pathways illustrating that there are multiple theoretical mechanisms at play in nuclear nonuse and it would be productive to think more deeply about that.

From a policy perspective, the takeaway is about precision weapons specifically. The nature of deterrence is different when we move from the world-destroying strategic weapons of the Cold War to tactical weapons that can take out specific targets while limiting collateral damage. We highlight that the ways people are arguing about precision weapons have the potential to transform the divide between nuclear and conventional weapons, which can challenge the nuclear taboo while making the consequences of using nuclear weapons seem less severe. The key is that we need to proceed with caution.

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