Sitaraman on Rubin and Stulberg, 'The End of Strategic Stability? Nuclear Weapons and the Challenge of Regional Rivalries'


Lawrence Rubin, Adam N. Stulberg, eds. The End of Strategic Stability? Nuclear Weapons and the Challenge of Regional Rivalries. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2018. 328 pp. $36.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-62616-603-5; $110.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-62616-602-8.

Reviewed by Srinivasan Sitaraman (Clark University)
Published on H-Diplo (March, 2019)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53160

Lawerence Rubin and Adam N. Stulberg’s latest edited volume is a fascinating read, and it is easy to agree with the arguments presented in this very timely, highly analytical, and engaging work. Importantly, this volume examines the conditions under which nuclear weapons undermine or heighten regional rivalries. The authors do a splendid job of threading together a range of factors—cyber warfare, hypersonic weapons, sub-conventional attacks, conventional force posture, asymmetric warfare, precision guided munitions (PMG), and ballistic missile defense (BMD)—that have an impact on major rivalries: United States-Russia, United States-China, India-Pakistan, India-China, and Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. About three decades ago, it seemed like the nuclear age went out of fashion when Russia and the United States began to dismantle their offensive weapons and started a process for reducing their nuclear stockpiles. But now both the academy and the policy community are wrestling with even more complex questions regarding strategic nuclear stability. 

This book is an outgrowth of the Program on Strategic Stability Evaluation (POSSE), which Stulberg of Georgia Institute of Technology coordinated with William C. Potter of the Middlebury Institute. The focus of POSSE is to generate policy-oriented scholarship to fill knowledge gaps in the area of strategic stability, tracing the implications of sub-conventional conflict among nuclear weapons states on escalation dynamics and the nuclear arms race. This book project also received feedback from officials at the United States Department of State, Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The first portion of the book contains a chapter from Evan Montgomery focusing on regional sources of instability and its connections to US foreign policy followed by a critical chapter on Russian perspectives by Andrey Pavlov and Anastasia Malygina. Collectively, these two chapters explore the meaning and value of the concept of strategic stability three decades since the Cold War ended. Initial assessments suggest that such concepts as “parity,” “balance,” and “cross-domain deterrence” play critical roles in defining the modern notions of strategic stability. The third chapter on Pakistan’s views of strategic stability by Sadia Tasleem can be read in combination with chapter 8 by Happymon Jacob on the India-Pakistan nuclear dyad. Similarly, chapters 4, 5, 9, and 10 by Emily Landau, Annie Tracy Samuel, Ilai Saltzman, and Ala’ Alrababa’h concerning the Middle East, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia respectively can be read together. Chapters 6 and 7 are the other two interesting chapters that introduce the non-nuclear calculus—Russian cyber warfare by Dimtry Adamsky and Chinese concerns over hypersonic weapons by Tong Zhao—into the strategic stability equation. Parts 1 and 2 carry separate conclusions authored by Rajesh Basrur and Jeffrey W. Knopf, respectively. Part 3 of the book closes out with an examination of the findings and implications for the American nuclear posture and the implications for the international system with chapters by Matthew Kroening and Adam Mount along with a concluding chapter that pulls together the different points by co-editors Rubin and Stulberg. If there is any criticism of the book, it is that it lacks a much-needed chapter on North Korea and the East Asian nuclear dynamics. Although North Korea is referenced in the chapters, there is no direct treatment of the case.

Focus of this book is on the contemporary meaning and significance of strategic stability when there are several nuclear players. How well has the concept of strategic stability withstood the test of time? Strategic stability is related to the “consequences of reciprocal fears and incentives confronting adversaries.” The editors take pains to distinguish the concept of strategic stability from conflation with deterrence, which is understood as the “efforts to shape the calculus of rival by another” (p. 5). Interestingly, they point out that deterrence and strategic stability can work at cross-purposes. For instance, the introduction of long-range stand-off stealth cruise missiles can upset the strategic balance by provoking fears of a first-strike sneak attack. Induction of such weapons could also spark an arms race. As a consequence, critics argue that the concept of strategic stability disrupts the development of effective national deterrence strategies. Then why worry about strategic stability at all; why bother extending and analyzing this concept? Because strategic stability extends the discussion beyond the central focus on nuclear deterrence to cross-cutting issues, such as cyber warfare, hypersonic weapons, and BMD, that have particular salience in regional contexts.

A critical concept explored in this book is cross-domain deterrence, which is understood as employing “means in one domain to deter threats that would utilize means from a different domain” (p. 279). One such formulation, which has caused much controversy, is the suggestion that the United States could rely on nuclear strikes to deter a large-scale cyber warfare.[1] Questions this book answers well are: how do states respond to reciprocal dangers of nuclear attack and how do they balance against escalatory threats and what does this mean for the concept of strategic stability given that today there are multiple nuclear powers with varying capacities and strategic objectives?

The term “strategic stability” seeks to capture a frame of reference in which rival states reduce the need to rely on arms racing or adopt a posture of first strike. Stability in this context refers to the confidence factor that nuclear weapons possessor states could achieve their retaliatory objectives, and therefore they would not seek to exploit perceived imbalances, which could lead to a nuclear exchange. However, misalignments in nuclear postures, doctrines, or targeting policies, such as during the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan, and again during the 2001 Indian Parliament and 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, produced disconnects that could have been catastrophic for the region.

The main argument of the book is that there is “no consensus on what the term ‘strategic stability’ means, despite its widespread use. It connotes different things to different actors in different contexts” (p. 4). This point is consistent with the mainstream discourse on strategic stability; most scholars view the concept as largely arbitrary and politically driven. Contributors uniformly find that a “common understanding of strategic stability is not universally held” (p. 285). What is considered stable in one environment may not be so in another. During the peak of the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union roughly had 10,000 nuclear weapons. The United States based its nuclear strategy on a fully operational nuclear triad and the ability to deliver a punishing second strike on 80 percent of the Soviet Union after absorbing a first strike, but still both states engaged in competitive arms racing and sought to constantly fill the gaps in balance. After the Cold War, the United States and Russia rely on about 6,500 nuclear weapons each and this is considered sufficient to maintain the strategic balance. What drives the perception that 10,000 weapons were needed during the Cold War and why 6,500 are considered adequate now is entirely a matter of political construction.[2] Military planners are acutely aware that even a single nuclear weapon will have a devastating impact on a country.

Israel believes that an opaque nuclear posture with weapons in the basement is sufficient to maintain a stable military balance in the conflict prone Middle East. Israel considers this strategically acceptable because, Iran’s efforts notwithstanding, in the Middle East there are many nuclear aspirants but none have produced a workable weapon as yet. Hence, the primary focus of Israel has been on enhancing its conventional military capacity and developing successful methods to deter sub-conventional attacks on Israel (see Saltzman, chapter 9). According to Landau, “Israel’s ... policy of ambiguity—underpinning the purely defensive nature of its assumed nuclear capability—helped to establish certain rules of the game in the Middle East at the strategic level that the other players have come to accept, albeit grudgingly” (p. 106). Landau argues that Israel has pursued a deliberate policy of opaqueness and its weapons do not pose a direct threat to any other state in the region.

After this book’s release, the Donald Trump administration rescinded the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) agreement with Iran, reinstated all the sanctions it had waived, and drew up plans to impose additional sanctions.[3] Iran seems to be still operating under the rules of JCPOA because there are five other partner states to the agreement. But there is no guarantee that Iran will not pursue the development of a nuclear weapon because this decision has emboldened the hardliners in Iran who always argued that the United States is untrustworthy. A nuclear bomb in the hands of Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia would completely change the security calculus in the Middle East; it especially would drastically affect Israel’s policy of weapons in the basement.

Tasleem and Jacob, the authors of the Pakistan and India chapters, argue that Pakistan’s population and its nuclear arsenal is vulnerable to Indian strikes, but unlike India, Pakistan’s nuclear program is more robust and it has demonstrated a greater level of urgency in its contingency planning. Jacob claims that Indian planners have not shown such urgency, at least publicly, and they are comfortable with the credible minimum deterrence nuclear posture. Instead, Indian planners, much like Israeli planners, are focused on enhancing conventional military capabilities. However, since this book was published, India revealed that it has now a fully operational nuclear triad with the success of the deterrence patrols made by INS Arihant.[4] This was India’s first nuclear submarine capable of launching nuclear missiles offering significant second-strike capability. But where Pakistan has an upper hand is in the area of sub-conventional attacks (cross-border terror attacks that originate either planned in cooperation with the Pakistani intelligence agencies or are designed and launched independently by non-state actors) for which India has not come up with an effective counter strategy.

Pakistan’s decision to introduce theater nuclear weapons (TNWs) in response to India’s threat to operationalize the Cold Start doctrine (quickly mobilized conventional military strikes against specific targets in Pakistani territory in response to terror attacks) has reintroduced an enormous amount of instability into the region and prompted a significant reexamination of India’s doctrinal position of No-First-Use (NFU). Introduction of TNWs has effectively lowered the nuclear threshold and undermined any shared notions of strategic stability. India’s answer to TNWs is BMD, forcing Pakistan to consider countermeasures.

Both Tasleem and Jacob believe that Pakistan is closer to the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) or BOT (Balance of Terror) models than India is. Official pronouncements on Indian nuclear thinking are highly opaque; unlike Pakistan, India does not maintain hair-trigger alert and it keeps the weapons de-mated in which the delivery mechanism and the actual weapons are stored separately.[5] Tasleem points out that Pakistan believes it has succeeded in deterring India by the very introduction of TNWs because it has increased the cost of retaliation for India. But Jacob wonders about the consequences for strategic stability in the region. He worries that India may not be able to display restraint in every future instance of sub-conventional attacks (terror attacks that emanate from Pakistan). Just because Pakistan has deterred India in the past, it does not necessarily imply that it will deter India in every situation.

Contributors to this volume grapple with the shifting security postures of the newer nuclear entrants Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea, such aspirants as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and the slightly older powers, such as India and Israel, in combination with the established powers, namely, the United States, Russia, and China. They apply new criteria for conceptualizing strategic stability, including regional understanding of security frameworks and the role of emerging weapons technology and non-state actors and their cross-domain impact on nuclear weapons. Collectively the authors in this volume find that the center of gravity of the nuclear competition has shifted from an exclusive US-Russian focus to a more asymmetric multilateral context that is driven by domestic politics and enduring regional rivalries. They also find that in this more permissive environment non-state actors play an outsized role in determining the aspects of strategic stability. Non-state actors are a liability, especially if their actions are difficult to manage, and a situation could easily spin out of control, as the case of India-Pakistan exemplifies.

The chapters in this volume point out how there is no commonly held understanding of strategic stability outside of the United States, Russia, and China, and maintaining strategic stability is not the main objective of the states examined in this book (see chapter 11). Furthermore, there is widespread conceptual confusion and inconsistencies regarding the interpretations of strategic stability. Iran, for instance, views strategic stability as regional stability, as well as the reduction of external influence in the region. States are more concerned with their own national security and fail to adhere to any common understanding of strategic stability. Self-interested security maximization seems to be the primary goal of the states that result in policies aimed at escalation dominance or overwhelming superiority in one particular area of weapons technology. The editors of this book argue that the lack of shared notions of strategic stability will provoke states to take more risks to achieve their security objectives and they urge deeper explorations of this concept to prevent such risk-taking.

Overall, this book makes a very thoughtful contribution to the discussion of new security challenges facing the world when the members of the nuclear club are growing and established members are refining their arsenals. The contributors to this book identify a multitude of security challenges and technological innovations and analyze them through the prism of strategic stability. This book should definitely be on the reading list of every graduate seminar on international security, and both academics and policymakers must grapple with the weighty questions raised in this book.

Notes

[1]. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “Pentagon Suggests Countering Devastating Cyberattacks with Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, January 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/pentagon-nuclear-review-cyberattack-trump.html.

[2]. Pavel Podvig, “The Myth of Strategic Stability,” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, October 31, 2012, https://thebulletin.org/2012/10/the-myth-of-strategic-stability/.

[3]. Mark Landler, “Trump Abandons Iran Nuclear Deal He Long Scorned,” New York Times, May 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/world/middleeast/trump-iran-nuclear-deal.html.

[4]. Tim Fish, “First Nuclear Deterrence Patrol Marks Major Step for Indian Submarine Force,” United States Naval Institute News (USNI News), November 12, 2018, https://news.usni.org/2018/11/12/first-nuclear-deterrence-patrol-marks-major-step-indian-submarine-force.

[5]. Bharat Karnad, India's Nuclear Policy (Westport, CT: Prager International, 2008), 99.

Srini Sitaraman is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and a program faculty in the Asian Studies Program at Clark University. He teaches courses on international relations, international security, Asian politics, and global governance. His work has appeared in the Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs, Journal of South Asian and Middle East Studies, Asian Journal of Peacebuilding, Chinese Journal of Political Science, Human Rights and Human Welfare, Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy, The Diplomat, Foreign Policy in Focus, East Asia Forum, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, and Amsterdam Law Forum. He recently contributed to the volume Power Politics in Asia’s Contested Waters: Territorial Disputes in South China Sea, 2015. His book State Participation in International Treaty Regimes was published in 2009. Currently he is working on a book on the dynamics of South Asian security. Sitaraman also directs the award-winning Clark University Model United Nations Program that is ranked in the top-20 in North America.

Citation: Srinivasan Sitaraman. Review of Rubin, Lawrence; Stulberg, Adam N., eds., The End of Strategic Stability? Nuclear Weapons and the Challenge of Regional Rivalries. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. March, 2019.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53160

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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