Have nuclear weapons helped to maintain global peace?

When have nuclear weapons come closest to destabilising world peace – and how close to the brink of nuclear war did the world come?

Benoît Pelopidas: “How close was it?” is a misleading question if asked alone. One also needs to ask: how controllable was it? Indeed, some proponents of nuclear deterrence claim that you need to get close enough to the ‘nuclear abyss’ for the deterrent effect to kick in. But is that true? And can we control how close we get?

A critical moment commonly cited in this regard was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 [see box, opposite]. And that was not fully controllable: the caution of Soviet premier Khrushchev and US president Kennedy alone cannot explain its peaceful outcome, given the limits of their control over their nuclear arsenals, the limits of safety of the weapons, and other factors. The evidence shows we have been lucky. Though the scholarly and policy worlds pay lip service to this finding, they still do not act and plan as if they take it seriously.

Secrecy means that we know very little about cases of near use of nuclear weapons. It’s very likely we overestimate how safe we have been.

Malcolm Craig: There are a number of other examples of times when this has happened. For example, during the first year of the Korean War (1950–53), President Harry Truman’s bluster and outbursts from General Douglas MacArthur provoked international fears about perceived American willingness to use atomic weapons.

Perhaps the most interesting example was the November 1983 Able Archer incident 1, in which a Nato communications exercise was perceived by some in Moscow as preparation for an actual offensive. In this case, nuclear weapons, paranoia and faulty intelligence-gathering could have (a big ‘could have’) led to nuclear war.

In my judgement, the closest nuclear weapons have come to destabilising world peace was during the first decade of the Cold  in Vietnam in 1954 – then today’s situation, in which the non-use of nuclear weapons is seen as normal, might never have been established. It is the taboo nature of nuclear weapons use that helps to stabilise weapons of such appalling power within an anarchic international system.