How I learned to stop worrying and live with the bomb

By Michael Lind Salon

President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize has been justified by some because it draws attention to the goal he endorses of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. I share that goal, but not because nuclear weapons are uniquely horrible — if you’re a victim, it makes little difference whether you’re killed or maimed by nuclear weapons or conventional weapons, which sometimes can create lingering illnesses and poison the landscape, too. I support the abolition of nuclear weapons because, if it were successful, it would lock in the advantages of the small number of great powers like the U.S. that are capable of building and maintaining first-class conventional militaries.

The goal of American liberal internationalism, since the days of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, has been what Wilson called "a community of power" — a great power concert whose members collaborate to keep the peace. This is different from the conservative vision of unilateral U.S. hegemony. But whether you think the law should be enforced by a posse or a single sheriff, you want the law officers to be better armed than the law-breakers.

Superior conventional forces are the weapons of the rich. Only the most advanced industrial states can afford to build world-class conventional military forces, and paying for them is much easier if an economy is large and dynamic. This is good news. Countries with large and dynamic economies tend to have relatively rational if not necessarily democratic governments and to be committed to the geopolitical status quo. Nazi Germany, rich but irrational, committed suicide in a short period of time, and the Soviet Union eventually fell apart because its economy could not support its massive conventional and nuclear forces. Today’s rapidly developing China is far more prudent and responsible than Mao’s China.

Nuclear weapons, by contrast, are weapons of the weak. They can be acquired by regimes that, because of poverty or ideology, are incapable of developing the world-class economy needed to support world-class conventional forces. It is easier for North Korea to build an atomic bomb than a fleet of aircraft carriers.

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