Does it matter if more countries have nuclear weapons? Will the weaponization of space make nuclear weapons less of a threat or even obsolete? In this podcast, author Henry D. Sokolski gives an overview of his monograph, Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future, and explores potential future nuclear trends.
Keywords: strategy, drones, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, nuclear energy
Read the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/933/
Episode Transcript
Stephanie Crider (Host)
(Prerecorded Decisive Point intro) Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
The guests in speaking order on this episode are:
(Guest 1: Henry D. Sokolski)
(Host)
Decisive Point welcomes Mr. Henry D. Sokolski, author of Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future, published by the US Army War College Press in 2018. Sokolski is the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, DC. He previously served in the Senate as a nuclear military legislative aide, in the Pentagon as deputy for nonproliferation policy, and as a full-time consultant on proliferation issues in the secretary of defense’s Office of Net Assessment.
Welcome, Henry. Let’s dive right in. In your 2018 book Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future (Second Edition), you cover a lot of ground. Please give our listeners a brief overview of the book.
(Sokolski)
The reason I wrote the book was, you know, any serious social scientific field—economics, demographics, political science—they all use what they know about the past to give you a bird’s-eye view of what they think the future will be. And I noticed that there was really no book that took the matter of nuclear weapons and projected into the future. The military science, if you will, of nuclear proliferation was a blank sheet.
I took it upon myself to try to take a look at maybe, you know, a half-century, a little more than a half-century, and asked, you know, “What trends do we see?” And based on those trends, and assuming they continue, where are we going to be, you know, in 10 or 20 years? So, I focused on, detailed, four trends. And the trends that I found that were interesting is that the difference between the largest and smallest nuclear weapons arsenals has gotten much, much smaller. It used to be that what we had, which was at one point, during the Cuban missile crisis, 25,000 nuclear weapons, was easily an order of magnitude more than what the Russians had, which was 2,500, and what they had was again another order of magnitude more than the British had—actually two orders of magnitude. So there was, like, a thousandfold difference between the largest arsenal and the smallest at the time.
Now the difference is about one order of magnitude. Russia and the United States have thousands. The smallest arsenals that we know of now are about 100 or thereabouts.
Another trend is that the amount of surplus weapons and civilian materials that could be quickly converted into bombs—that’s highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium—there used to be almost zero. Everything that we had and the Russians had went immediately into weapons. There was very little civilian activity in the way of power reactors. And so, there wasn’t a civilian stockpile or any surpluses. Everything went into weapons. Or naval reactors.
Well, that’s changed. Now there’s tens of thousands of bombs’ worth of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium. Not only in military stockpiles on reserve in the United States, Russia, France, and Great Britain, but there is civilian stockpiles of separated plutonium in places like Japan. And you can change or convert this material into weapons reasonably quickly. And you’re talking about thousands of weapons’ worth. Well, that’s different, and that’s new.
The third trend was the ability to make this stuff. It used to be there was only two places: Russia and the United States. Well, three. And Great Britain. Well, now there’s lots of places, comparatively, that are separating plutonium or enriching uranium. The ability to make a large amount of this stuff reasonably quickly with these machines and plans is totally new compared to half-century or so ago.
And then, finally, the number of states that have long-range, nuclear-capable missiles has changed. It used to be Russia and the United States were the only ones that had them. And now 31 nations have them.
And if you take the range yards of these missiles, and you just draw them from where they’re based, it’s very disturbing where they overlap. They overlap in places where there’s a history of war or fear and loathing of wars: Eastern Europe, Middle East, Pakistan, India, and East Asia.
Well, that’s new as well. So reviewing these trends I sort of concluded that it was a mistake to celebrate how relatively fewer nuclear weapons there are, and there are a lot fewer. I mean, we got rid of, and the Russians got rid of, at least for deployed weapons, we had up to, together, something like 70,000 weapons. Well, today that number is several thousand. So there’s a big reduction.
And a lot of people celebrate that, and they should. And people say, “Well, OK, there are a few more nuclear states than there were in 1950.” There are now nine, but that’s not too bad. I think emphasizing those points may be less than a complete thought. The reason why is this could change far more quickly today than at any time previously.
You know those trends that I mentioned suggest that it only takes a few short years for the countries that have nuclear weapons to get a whole lot more, and countries that don’t have nuclear weapons to get not just, like, one or two, but, you know, maybe several score of them relatively quickly.
Let’s add to this. They have a way of delivering these things to trouble spots and getting dragged into wars in trouble spots. And then you can add, there are some trends towards launching on warning, and certainly we’ve read about this recently in the case of China, and I think it’s been our policy in the US for at least a decade or two or three to probably do that ourselves.
There certainly are doctrines for early use of nuclear weapons in places like Russia and Pakistan, possibly North Korea. Now all of this kind of makes you a little worried, I think, or it should, and I thought, “Well, this is an important message.”
Now I don’t think any of the worst nuclear use or spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable. And I made some recommendations in the book principally focused on China, which at the time was considered a little edgy.
I originally wrote this book about a decade ago. When I say, “the book,” or at least those two chapters—I wrote a version of it in an article or two.
What really stunned me is how little attention my arguments had or got. At the time, going to zero was all the rage. So I decided to do another chapter on what other people thought. And there are three categories of thinkers. There are arms controllers who oppose nuclear weapons and see their spread as destabilizing. They want these things to be eliminated. The next group are the supporters of nuclear weapons. I guess you would call these people “hawks.” And they see the weapons, at least in current hands, as somehow stabilizing because deterrence. And they oppose the spread as well, but they say, “Well, if they’re friends, maybe it’s OK.” Then, finally, there’s academics. This group sees the spread of nuclear weapons to all nations either as stabilizing or inconsequential.
The other thing that was odd was that it didn’t matter which group you looked at; none of them really said the commonsensical thing. And I think anyone would say, if they were untutored in these matters, and what would they say? Well, fewer weapons in fewer hands is better, but it’s really risky. You got to know what everyone’s doing. And if you don’t, you might not want to get rid of yours.
(Host)
What in the book has held up well?
(Sokolski)
Well, I guess the short answer is a lot. Quite an extensive discussion in the book about two trends that needed practical policy attention and were focused upon in the recommendation section. One of the trends that I highlight is this spread and the further building of facilities in support of what’s called “a fast reactor.” And these machines are designed to use fast neutrons. It is a terrific machine if you want to make weapons. I noticed that this idea was something that the Chinese were toying with, the Russians had played with a lot. We have put it aside until recently, and it has enormous military applications. You get into this, and the breakout period and the amount of material that you can convert into bombs, in the first instance, will be very short. And there’ll be a lot of material. Do you really want to go down this route unless it’s clearly economic, which it clearly is not. I then focused a little bit on China. If you get the latest copy of China Military Power from the Pentagon—they do this annually—it cites a Western think tank that did a study pointing out just how many nuclear weapons China could have in about eight years if it exploited its civil nuclear program with regard to fast reactors and the recycling of the material.
Well, the numbers were stunning, even under conservative assumptions. And they cited those numbers and took them on and made th...
