Business & Government

For 80 years, nuclear weapons have been the unused threat

In the 80 years since World War II, which ended with the use of two atomic bombs, the world has maintained a tenuous relationship with nuclear weapons.

Philip Potter, professor of public policy at the University of Virginia’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy and director of the National Security Data and Policy Institute, said he worries about the current delicate nuclear balance.

“Eighty years of non-use is the product of both good diplomacy and a recognition of the potential consequences,” Potter said. “The fearsome power of nuclear weapons causes countries pause before they use them, but a great deal of work has also gone into nonproliferation and the management of crises to keep them away from the nuclear brink. In some ways the dynamics of the Cold War made managing the potential for nuclear confrontation easier.”

It’s a very different strategic scenario now, where there are nine nuclear powers and less capacity to manage them.

Philip Potter says he sees current circumstances as very different from those at the end of World War II. (University Communications photo)

Potter said scholars have debated the extent to which the nuclear peace has been the result of deterrence, diplomacy, taboos or inspection regimes. But it is clear that nuclear risks from countries like India, Pakistan, Russia and Iran has grown.

Potter noted as the nuclear club grows, the risk increases.

“More leaders, more confrontations, more mistakes, more everything,” Potter said. “On top of that, there’s a change in the system that’s happened as it’s become more multipolar. There are more countries out there that have these weapons and don’t have the old Cold War dynamics to hold them back. The U.S. and Soviet Union were not interested in having their allies rattling nuclear sabers. That has eroded because the world is a different place.”

In this different place, nuclear weapons can give a country such as Russia or North Korea an otherwise undeserved status.

“Russia, except for nuclear weapons, is not a place that anyone would be taking terribly seriously,” Potter said. “This is not a country that would be in the position it is in vis a vis the West and Ukraine, and so you have a mismatch between modes of power that occurs because the weapons persist.”

He said this way, nuclear weapons become a temptation for weaker nations.

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“If your conventional military capabilities do not match your aspirations but your nuclear capabilities do, I think that’s very dangerous,” Potter said. “That’s not the dynamic we were looking at in the Cold War. This is the reason that there has been concern that, under certain contingencies, Russia might use low-yield nuclear weapons. If they did, would other nations respond, or would they get away with it and break the nuclear taboo that’s held for 80 years?”

The Cold War framework that dominated much of the world for years has fractured, leaving nuclear neighbors, such as India and Pakistan, to settle their own disputes.

“They’re out there on their own,” Potter said, “and either another country can help them defuse tensions, or they can defuse it themselves, but there is clearly the opportunity for escalation to get out of control. Any time that happens with nuclear adversaries, there is an increased potential for use.”

To Potter, Iran represents a more traditional proliferation problem.

“Iran is a theocracy, but their approach to proliferation has followed a pretty standard playbook,” Potter said. “It is the source of a lot of debate whether the ayatollahs have been rational or not. If you take their rhetoric, they seem clearly irrational. If you judge them by their actions, they actually are pretty canny and quite rational. I tend to subscribe to that latter interpretation.”

There is also the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of “non-state actors.”

“The consensus on this is that it would be catastrophic if it happened, but it’s a low-probability event,” Potter said. “Most countries have good controls on weapons and highly enriched uranium. The process of delivering a weapon is beyond the technical capabilities of most non-state actors. Countries have been pretty loathe to share these things because of how other countries might react and the potential to become targets themselves. This is why, when it comes to non-state actors, analysts worry more about ‘dirty bombs,’ biological agents, and other weapons of mass destruction.”