Nuclear Zero

Can we eliminate nuclear weapons altogether, or does the evolutionary and game theoretic logic of aggression, violence, and deterrence mean we must live with Armageddon hanging over us? Part III

In Part I of this Skeptic 3-part series, Arena, Writ Past, I reviewed the evolutionary logic of aggression and violence, demonstrating that these are emotions built into human nature that direct us to strike back if hit, to retaliate if exploited, and to avenge wrongs committed against us. If we didn’t, free riders, bullies, and psychopaths would exploit us. In Part II of the series, MADness, I outlined the game theoretic logic of deterrence that results in an arms race when both sides have roughly equal level weapons and achieve a Nash Equilibrium—Mutual Assured Destruction—in which neither side has anything to gain by unilaterally changing strategies, such as launching a first strike or using tactical nukes when it could escalate into a full retaliatory response.

This MAD strategy kept the US and USSR in a Cold War nuclear freeze, or a “balance of terror,” for nearly three-quarters of a century. But as I also showed, this is not a rational strategy for a long-term civilization because of the possibility of an accident, a mishap, a false positive on an early-detection warning system, a terrorist organization that believes nuclear martyrdom will be rewarded in heaven, or a dictator whose back is against the wall and sees no path to maintaining power and so decides to take everyone else down with him. As the journalist Annie Jacobsen told me in our conversation, based on her new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, even a moderate exchange of nuclear weapons could produce casualties in the hundreds of millions, and a full-out global thermonuclear war would result in the deaths of billions, likely producing a nuclear winter that would render the planet largely uninhabitable—or at least a miserable place to live for most species (except, perhaps the single celled-organisms making up the deep hot biosphere in the Earth’s crust, and of course cockroaches—for generations). It is an unimaginable scenario too horrific to contemplate, but contemplate it we must in order to push through policy measures that could get the nuclear stockpile to zero, or at least Minimum Sufficiency Deterrence (MSD)—large enough to deter a nuclear first strike, but small enough that a nuclear exchange would not result in nuclear winter.

Challenges to Nuclear Zero

Can we ever realize a world without nuclear weapons? To find out (when I was researching and writing The Moral Arc, from which this essay is excerpted) I audited a class called “Perspectives on War and Peace” at Claremont Graduate University, taught by the political scientist Jacek Kugler. His answer is no, for seven reasons:

(1) Credible deterrence among nations that trust each other is stable and predictable.

(2) Unstable or unpredictable states such as North Korea, who periodically rattle their nuclear swords inside their silo sheaths, require threat of retaliation.

(3) There still exist rogue states such as Iran who need the threat of retaliation because they threaten to join the nuclear club but are not keen on joining the club of nations.

(4) States waging conventional wars that might escalate to using weapons of mass destruction require the threat of retaliation to keep them in check.

(5) Non-state entities such as terrorist groups that we either do not trust or do not know enough about also require the threat of retaliation.

(6) There may be a taboo against using nuclear weapons, but there is no taboo against owning them.

(7) The nuclear genie of how to make an atomic bomb is out of the bottle, so there is always the chance that other nations or terrorists will obtain nuclear weapons and thereby destabilize deterrence as well as increase the probability of an accidental detonation.

Kugler thinks we can get to “Regional Zero”—nuclear free zones such as South America and Australia—provided the major global nuclear powers (the U.S., Russia, China, and perhaps the EU and India) provide a secure non-veto response to any preemptive use of nuclear weapons by potential rogue states or terrorist groups. But because of the trust problem, he says, Global Zero is unattainable. Kugler worries that a Middle East nuclear exchange or a nuclear terrorist attack on Israel is likely if current conditions persist. A major danger, he says, is that fissile material may be (or become) available on the black market at a price that rogue states and terrorists can afford.

Analysts of various stripes make a compelling case that nuclear safety is an illusion and that we’ve come perilously close to a Dr. Strangelove ending of the world. Popular authors such as Richard Rhodes in his nuclear tetralogy (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Dark Sun, Arsenals of Folly, and The Twilight of the Bombs[i]), and Eric Schlosser in Command and Control,[ii] leave readers with vertigo knowing how many close calls there have been: the jettisoning of a Mark IV atomic bomb in British Columbia in 1950, the crash of a B-52 carrying two Mark 39 nuclear bombs in North Carolina, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Able Archer 83 Exercise in Western Europe that the Soviets misread as the buildup to a nuclear strike against them, and the Titan II Missile explosion in Damascus, Arkansas that narrowly avoided eradicating the entire city off the map. As Rhodes noted in reflecting on a career spent researching and writing about nuclear weapons:

You know one of the sad things about nuclear weapons from the beginning is that they’ve been called weapons. They’re vast destructive forces encompassed in this small, portable mechanism. They have no earthly use that I can see except to destroy whole cities full of human beings. This sort of mentality [has policymakers] thinking that nuclear weapons are like guns. There’s a reason why no one has exploded one in anger since 1945. The risk is too great.[iii]

According to a report published by the Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission chaired by the former Joint Chiefs of Staff General James E. Cartwright, the U.S. and Russia could maintain deterrence and still reduce their nuclear arsenals to 900 weapons each, ensuring that only half deploy at any one time and all with 24-72 hour launch lag times to allow for failsafe measures to prevent accidental strikes.[iv] The Global Zero planwas endorsed by such political leaders as President Barack Obama, President Dmitry Medvedev, Prime Minister David Cameron, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.[v] Of course, endorsement is one thing, action is another, but the Global Zero movement is gaining momentum.[vi]

It is a notable fact that of the 194 countries in the world, only 9 have nuclear weapons. That means 185 countries (95 percent) manage just fine without nukes. Some may want them but can’t afford to produce the fissile (and other) materials, but it is noteworthy that since 1964 more nations have started and abandoned nuclear weapons programs than started and completed them, including Italy, West Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, Iraq, Algeria, Romania, South Africa, and Libya.[vii] There are many good reasons not to own nuclear weapons, one of which is that they are very expensive. During the Cold War the U.S. and USSR spent an almost unfathomable $5.5 trillion to build 125,000 nuclear weapons, and the U.S. still spends $35 billion a year on its nuclear program (in 2015 dollars).[viii]

Turning plowshares into swords also makes you a target. A 2012 study by the political scientist David Sobek and his colleagues tested the “conventional wisdom” hypothesis that possession of nuclear weapons confers many benefits to its owner by conducting a cross-national analysis of the relationship between a state initiating a nuclear weapons program and the onset of militarized conflict. They found that between 1945 and 2001 “the closer a state gets to acquiring nuclear weapons, the greater the risk it will be attacked.” Why? “When a state initiates a nuclear weapons program, it signals its intent to fundamentally alter its bargaining environment. States that once had an advantage will now be disadvantaged.”[ix]

In other words, either way it’s better not to possess nuclear weapons.

That was the opinion of the original cold warrior himself—the cowboy president Ronald Reagan—who called for the abolishment of “all nuclear weapons.” Seriously! According to Jack Matlock, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, President Reagan considered nuclear weapons to be “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.” Kenneth Adelman, head of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under Reagan, said that his boss would often “pop out with ‘Let’s abolish all nuclear weapons’.” As Adelman recalled, “I was surprised that for an anti-Communist hawk, how antinuclear he was. He would make comments that seemed to me to come from the far left rather than from the far right. He hated nuclear weapons.” (Especially after Reagan watched the The Day After television drama that depicted the realities of a nuclear exchange.) The whole point of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or “Star Wars”), in fact, was to eliminate the need for MAD. Matlock paraphrased what Reagan told him on the matter: “How can you tell me, the president of the United States, that the only way I can defend my people is by threatening other people and maybe civilization itself? That is unacceptable.”[x]

Not everyone was on board with Reagan’s vision of a nuclear-free world. Reagan’s Secretary of State George Shultz recalled an incident in which he got “handbagged” by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when she found out that his boss suggested to the Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that they abolish nuclear weapons:

When we came back from [the 1986 U.S.-Soviet summit in] Reykjavik with an agreement that it was desirable to get rid of all nuclear weapons, she came over to Washington, and I was summoned to the British Embassy. It was then that I discovered the meaning of the British expression to be “handbagged.” She said: “George, how could you sit there and allow the president to agree to abolish nuclear weapons?” To which I said: “Margaret, he’s the president.” She replied, “But you’re supposed to be the one with the feet on the ground.” My answer was, “But, Margaret, I agreed with him.”[xi]

Subsequently, not only did George Shultz become a nuclear abolitionist, but so too did his cold warrior colleagues, Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, and Senator William Perry. The four of them went on record calling for “a world free of nuclear weapons” in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal.[xii] There (and elsewhere) they outlined the realpolitik difficulties of achieving nuclear zero, which they equated to climbing a mountain: “From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can’t even see the top of the mountain, and it is tempting and easy to say we can’t get there from here. But the risks from continuing to go down the mountain or standing pat are too real to ignore. We must chart a course to higher ground where the mountaintop becomes more visible.”[xiii]

Some theorists think that the path to peace is more deterrence. The late political scientist Kenneth Waltz, for example, thought that a nuclear Iran would bring stability to the Middle East because “in no other region of the world does a lone, unchecked nuclear state exist. It is Israel’s nuclear arsenal, not Iran’s desire for one, that has contributed most to the current crisis. Power, after all, begs to be balanced.”[xiv] Except for when it doesn’t, as in the post-1991 period after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the unipolar dominance of the United States—no other medium-size power rose to fill the vacuum, no rising power started wars of conquest to consolidate more power, and the only other candidate, China, has remained war-free for almost four decades. Plus, as Jacek Kugler points out, the Islamic Republic of Iran doesn’t play by the rules of the international system, it has no formal diplomatic relations with the United States or Israel (thereby making communication in the event of an emergency problematic), and it is so close to Israel that it lowers the warning time of a missile launch to a few minutes, thereby limiting the effectiveness of countermeasures such as anti-ballistic missiles, and makes sneaking a dirty bomb into the country more likely.[xv]

To that I would add: Iran has a history of training terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, both of whom are opposed to the U.S and Israel, and its leaders have repeatedly and clearly expressed their anti-Semitic views, as happened in 2005 when the new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said that Israel must be “wiped off the map,” a view he expressed before an audience of about 4,000 students at a program starkly titled “The World Without Zionism.”[xvi] Given what unfolded after another state leader proclaimed on numerous occasions in the 1930s that he wanted to rid the world of Jews—and almost did—we can hardly fault Israel for not fully embracing the image of an Allahu Akbar-bellowing imam with his finger on a nuclear trigger.

As the political scientist Christopher Fettweis notes in his book Dangerous Times?, despite the popularity of such intuitive notions as the “balance of power”—based on a small number of non-generalizable cases from the past that are in any case no longer applicable to the present—so-called “clashes of civilization” like the world wars of the 20^th century are extremely unlikely to happen in the highly interdependent world of the 21^st century. In fact, he shows, never in history has such a high percentage of the world’s population lived in peace, conflicts of all forms have been steadily dropping since the early 1990s, and even terrorism can bring states together in international cooperation to combat a common enemy.[xvii]

A Path to Nuclear Zero

The abolition of nuclear weapons is an exceptionally complex and difficult puzzle that has been studied extensively by scholars and scientists for over half a century. The problems and permutations of getting from here to there are legion, and there is no single sure-fire pathway to zero, but the following steps that have been proposed by various experts and organizations seem reasonable and realistic long-term goals.[xviii]

1. Continue nuclear stockpile reduction.

Following the trend lines I documented in Part II, work to reduce the global stockpile of nuclear weapons from over 10,000 now to 1,000 by 2050, and to less than 100 by 2100. This is enough nuclear firepower to maintain Minimum Sufficiency Deterrence to keep the peace among nuclear states, and yet in the event of a mistake or a madman a nuclear war will not result in the annihilation of civilization.[xix] The Global Zero campaign calls for “the phased, verified, proportional reduction of all nuclear arsenals to zero total warheads by 2030,” noting that if this seems unrealistic “the United States and Russia retired and destroyed twice as many nuclear warheads (40,000+) as this action plan proposes (20,000+) over the next twenty years (2009-2030).”[xx] That is encouraging, but it is far easier to go from 70,000 to 10,000 than it is from 10,000 to 1,000, and even harder to go from 1,000 to 100 (or 0) because of the security dilemma that will always exist until and unless the rest of the steps below are met.

2. No First Use and no Launch on Warning.

Make all “first strike” strategies illegal by international law, and eliminate Launch on Warning to avert the risk of false positive warnings. Nuclear weapons should only be used defensively, in a retaliatory function. Any nation that violates the law and initiates a first strike will be subject to global condemnation, economic sanctions, nuclear retaliation, and possible invasion, toppling their government and putting their leaders on trial for crimes against humanity. China and India have both signed on to No First Use (NFU), but NATO, Russia, and the U.S. have not. Russian military doctrine calls for the right to use nukes “in response to a large-scale conventional aggression.”[xxi] France, Pakistan, the UK, and the U.S. have stated that they will only use nukes defensively, although Pakistan said it would strike India even if the latter did not use nuclear weapons first,[xxii] and the UK said it would use nuclear weapons against “rogue states” such as Iraq were the latter to use WMD’s against British troops in the field.[xxiii] For its part, the U.S. reiterated its long-term policy that “The fundamental role of U.S. nuclear weapons, which will continue as long as nuclear weapons exist, is to deter nuclear attack on the United States, our allies, and partners,” adding that it “will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT [Non-Proliferation Treaty] and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.”[xxiv]

3. Form a Nuclear Great Power Pact.

Such an alliance would hold strong against small powers and terrorists who either have nuclear weapons or are trying to obtain them with an intent to use them. Jacek Kugler has outlined a model for reducing nuclear stockpiles worldwide while maintaining deterrence that would include, in addition to the No First Use policy, a proviso that “nuclear great powers must guarantee that any first nuclear strike by small nuclear powers will face automatic nuclear devastating retaliation from a member of the nuclear club.” Kugler and his colleague Kyungkook Kang propose a “Nuclear Security Council” composed of the four great powers—the U.S., China, Russia, and the E.U. (France and the UK)—that have enough nuclear weapons for a second strike should any of the smaller nuclear powers, or a terrorist group, launch a first strike against them or anyone else.[xxv] For example, if North Korea attacked either South Korea or Japan, the U.S. would retaliate. Or if Iran acquired nuclear weapons and used them against Israel, the U.S. (and maybe the E.U., or maybe not) would counterstrike.

4. Shift the taboo from using nuclear weapons to owning nuclear weapons.

This is what the Nobel Foundation had in mind in 2009 when they awarded President Barack Obama the Peace Prize: “The Committee has attached special importance to Obama’s vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.”[xxvi] Taboos are effective psychological mechanisms for deterring all sorts of human behaviors, and they worked well in keeping poison gas from being used in the Second World War, although other states (England and Germany) have used them at other times (the First World War), and sometimes even on their own people (Saddam Hussein on the Kurds in Iraq). But across the board and over time, the taboo against using chemical and biological weapons has grown stronger, and their use is considered by most nations and international law to be a crime against humanity (it was one of the crimes for which Saddam Hussein was hanged[xxvii]), although the taboo was not instantaneous.

Nukes began as sexy weapons, as evidenced by the fact that the bikini bathing suit was so named by its French designer Louis Réard because he hoped its revealing design would create an explosive reaction not unlike that of the two atomic bombs detonated earlier that summer of 1946 on the atoll of Bikini in the South Pacific.[xxviii] As the political scientist Nina Tannenwald writes in her history of the origin of the nuclear taboo, throughout the 1950s everyone accepted nuclear weapons as conventional and articulated “a view with a long tradition in the history of weapons and warfare: a weapon once introduced inevitably comes to be widely accepted as legitimate.” But that didn’t happen. Instead, “nuclear weapons have come to be defined as abhorrent and unacceptable weapons of mass destruction, with a taboo on their use. This taboo is associated with a widespread revulsion toward nuclear weapons and broadly held inhibitions on their use. The opprobrium has come to apply to all nuclear weapons, not just to large bombs or to certain types or uses of nuclear weapons.” The taboo developed as a result of three forces, Tannenwald argues: “a global grassroots antinuclear weapons movement, the role of Cold War power politics, and the ongoing efforts of nonnuclear states to delegitimize nuclear weapons.”[xxix]

The psychology behind the taboo against chemical and biological weapons transfers readily to that of nuclear weapons. Deadly heat and radiation—like poison gas and lethal diseases—are invisible killers that are indiscriminate in the carnage they wreak. This is a psychological break from traditional warfare between two armies bearing spears, swords, firearms, grenades, or even cannons and rocket launchers. The moral emotion of moralistic punishment that evolved to deter free riders and bullies brings no satisfaction if one’s enemy simply disappears in a white flash on some other continent.[xxx] Also, the revulsion people feel toward nuclear weapons may be linked in the brain to the emotion of disgust that psychologists have identified as being associated with invisible disease contagions, toxic poisons, and revolting materials (such as vomit and feces) that carry them—reactions that evolved in order to direct organisms away from these substances for survival reasons.[xxxi]

5. Nuclear weapons should no longer be seen as a deterrence solution.

The former Foreign Minister of Australia, Gareth Evans, who is also Chair of the Center for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Violence, Disarmament, makes a convincing case that nuclear weapons no longer make sense for the purpose of deterrence. It is not at all clear, Evans argues, that it was nuclear weapons that kept the great powers at a standoff throughout the Cold War, given the fact that prior to their invention in the mid 1940s, the great powers fought in spite of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. “Concern about being on the receiving end of the extreme destructive power of nuclear weapons may simply not be, in itself, as decisive for decision-makers as usually presumed,” says Evans. Instead, the Long Peace since 1945 may be the result of “a realisation, after the experience of World War II and in the light of all the rapid technological advances that followed it, that the damage that would be inflicted by any war would be unbelievably horrific, and far outweighing, in today’s economically interdependent world, any conceivable benefit to be derived.”[xxxii]

6. Evolution instead of revolution.

All of these changes should be implemented gradually and incrementally with “trust but verify” strategy and with as much transparency as possible. Gareth Evans proposes a two-stage process: minimization then elimination, “with some inevitable discontinuity between them.” He uses the target date of 2025 for the achievement of a minimization objective set by The International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament that “would involve reducing the global stockpile of all existing warheads to no more than 2,000 (a maximum of 500 each for the United States and Russia and 1,000 for the other nuclear-armed states combined), with all states being committed by then to ‘No First Use’—and with these doctrinal declarations being given real credibility by dramatically reduced weapons deployments and launch readiness.”[xxxiii]

7. Reduce spending on nuclear weapons and research.

Nuclear weapons are indefensibly costly, with estimates coming in at over $100 billion a year for maintenance by the nine nuclear states, and $1 trillion projected over the next decade.[xxxiv] Building budgets now that wind down monies allocated for all nuclear weapons related agencies over the next 20 years will drive nations to consider other solutions to the problems that nuclear weapons have historically been created to solve.

8. Revise 20^th century nuclear plans and policies for the 21^st century.

In their manifesto “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons,” the aforementioned Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn proposed that we “discard any existing operational plans for massive attacks that still remain from the Cold War days”; “increase the warning and decision times for the launch of all nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, thereby reducing the risks of accidental or unauthorized attacks”; “undertake negotiations toward developing cooperative multilateral ballistic-missile defense and early warning systems”; and “dramatically accelerate work to provide the highest possible standards of security for nuclear weapons…to prevent terrorists from acquiring a nuclear bomb.”[xxxv]

Minimally Dangerous Pathway to Zero

With nuclear weapons there is no easy way out of the game-theoretic security dilemma. Even though Reagan said he wanted to go to zero, in Iceland he refused offers from Gorbachev to reduce nuclear weapons drastically precisely because he did not trust the Russians and was only willing to trust and verify—which is a form of distrust. I am hopeful that we can get to zero before we annihilate ourselves, but it’s going to be a long row to hoe. One place to begin is to apply the principle of interchangeable perspectives when negotiating, for example, a spin down of arms, which is what Gareth Evans recommends as the first step: “In each case the key to progress, as in all diplomacy, is to try to understand the interests and perspectives of the other side, and to find ways of accommodating them by all means short of putting at real risk genuinely vital interests of one’s own.”

There are dozens of such scenarios that are played out in search of what—in the spirit of creative acronyms so common in this field—we might call a Minimally Dangerous Pathway to Zero (MDPZ). I do not believe that the deterrence trap is one from which we can never extricate ourselves, and the remaining threats should direct us to work toward Nuclear Zero sooner rather than later.

Michael Shermer is the Publisher of Skeptic magazine, Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, and the host of The Michael Shermer Show. His many books include Why People Believe Weird Things, The Science of Good and Evil, The Believing Brain, The Moral Arc, and Heavens on Earth. His latest book is Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His next book is: Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Matters, to be published in 2025.

References

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[i] Rhodes, Richard. 2010. Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects of a World Without Nuclear Weapons. New York: Knopf.

[ii] Schlosser, Eric. 2013. Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. New York: Penguin.

[iii] Quoted in: Harris, Amy Julia. 2010. “No More Nukes Books.” Half Moon Bay Review, August 4.

[iv] Shanker, Thom. 2012. “Former Commander of U.S. Nuclear Forces Calls for Large Cut in Warheads.” The New York Times, May 16, A4.

[v] Cartwright, James, et al., 2012. “Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission Report: Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Force Structure and Posture.” Global Zero, May. http://www.globalzero.org/files/gz_us_nuclear_policy_commission_report.pdf

[vi] Walker, Lucy and Lawrence Bender. 2010. Countdown to Zero. Participant Media & Magnolia Pictures.

[vii] Sagan, Scott D. 2009. “The Global Nuclear Future.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 62, 21-23.

[viii] Nelson, Craig. 2014. The Age of Radiance: The Epic Rise and Dramatic Fall of the Atomic Era. New York: Scribner, 370.

[ix] Sobek, David, Dennis M. Foster, and Samuel B. Robinson. 2012. “Conventional Wisdom? The Effects of Nuclear Proliferation on Armed Conflict, 1945-2001.” International Studies Quarterly, 56(1), 149-162.

[x] Lettow, Paul. 2005. Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. New York: Random House, 132-133.

[xi] Shultz, George. 2013. “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: The Ultimate ‘80s Power Couple.” The Daily Beast, April 8, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/08/ideological-soulmates.html

[xii] Shultz, George P., William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn. 2007. “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons.” The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 4, http://ow.ly/ttvGN

[xiii] Shultz, George P. William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn. 2008. “Toward a Nuclear-Free World.” The Wall Street Journal, January 15. http://goo.gl/iAGDQX

[xiv] Waltz, Kenneth N. 2012. “Why Iran Should Get the Bomb: Nuclear Balancing Would Mean Stability.” Foreign Affairs, July/August.

[xv] Kugler, Jacek. 2012. “A World Beyond Waltz: Neither Iran nor Israel Should Have the Bomb.” PBS, September 12. http://goo.gl/0drNe5

[xvi] Quoted in: Fathi, Nazila. 2005. “Wipe Israel ‘off the map’ Iranian Says.” The New York Times, October 27, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/26/world/africa/26iht-iran.html

[xvii] Fettweis, Christopher. 2010. Dangerous Times?: The International Politics of Great Power Peace. Georgetown University Press.

[xviii] There are at least 21 international organizations against nuclear weapons, and another 79 anti-nuclear (including nuclear energy) organizations. See: Rudig, Wolfgang. 1990. Anti-Nuclear Movements: A World Survey of Opposition to Nuclear Energy. New York: Longman, 381-403.

[xix] Sagan and Turco, 1990.

[xx] http://www.globalzero.org/get-the-facts/GZAP

[xxi] Fedorov, Yuri. 2002. “Russia’s Doctrine on the Use of Nuclear Weapons.” Pugwash Meeting, London, November 15-17. http://www.pugwash.org/reports/nw/federov.htm

[xxii] Narang, Vipin. 2010. “Pakistan’s Nuclear Posture: Implications for South Asian Stability.” Harvard Kennedy School, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs Policy Brief, January 4, http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Pakistans_Nuclear_Posture_policy_brief.pdf

[xxiii] BBC News. 2003. “UK Restates Nuclear Threat.” February 2. The Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said: “Saddam can be absolutely confident that in the right conditions we would be willing to use nuclear weapons.” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/2717939.stm

[xxiv] Department of Defense. 2010. “Nuclear Posture Review.” April 6, http://www.webcitation.org/6FY0Ol07H

[xxv] Kang, Kyungkook and Jacek Kugler. 2012. “Nuclear Weapons: Stability of Terror.” In Debating a Post-American World. (Sean Clark and Sabrina Hoque, Eds.). New York: Routledge.

[xxvi] http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/press.html

[xxvii] Karouny, Mariam and Ibon Villelabeitia. 2006. “Iraq Court Upholds Saddam Death Sentence.” The Washington Post, December 26.

[xxviii] http://goo.gl/InDEdg

[xxix] Tannenwald, Nina. 2005. “Stigmatizing the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo.” International Security, Spring, 29(4), 5-49.

[xxx] Schelling, Thomas C. 1994. “The Role of Nuclear Weapons.” In L. Benjamin Ederington and Michael J. Mazarr (Eds.) Turning Point: The Gulf War and U.S. Military Strategy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 105-115.

[xxxi] Rozin, Paul, Jonathan Haidt, and C. R. McCauley. 2000. “Digust.” In Handbook of Emotions (M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.)), New York: Guilford Press, 637-653.

[xxxii] Evans, Gareth. 2014. “Nuclear Deterrence in Asia and the Pacific.” Asia & The Pacific Policy Studies, January, 91-111.

[xxxiii] Ibid.

[xxxiv] Blair, B. and M. Brown. 2011. “World Spending on Nuclear Weapons Surpasses $1 Trillion per Decade.” Global Zero. http://www.globalzero.org/files/gz_nuclear_weapons_cost_study.pdf

[xxxv] Shultz, et al., 2007.