BackA nuclear world and the domino effect
A nuclear test by China 50 years ago began the drama of nuclear insecurity in Asia
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This month, two significant dates in the planet’s nuclear history went by almost unnoticed. Fifty years ago, on 16 October 1964, China conducted its first nuclear test. Fifty-two years ago, on 23 October, the US and the Soviet Union braced for a showdown over the presence of Soviet nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba.
These are not ordinary dates in history. The Chinese test was carried out roughly 19 years after the first American device was detonated on 16 July 1945. At that time, nuclear weapons were only thought of as a very special class of munitions and no more. They were far more powerful than any other known weapon but that was about it. Only later, much later, did it dawn on strategists that these were no ordinary weapons and that their mere possession by a country had strong destabilizing effects on security.
It has been logically concluded by many strategic analysts and political scientists that there are only two stable possibilities: either the world is totally free of nuclear weapons or most, if not all, countries possess them. Anything in between leads to weapons races and acute insecurities for countries. These effects linger on.
By the time China tested and the Cuban missile crisis arrived, the world was in the middle of its most destabilizing and insecure phase. The US, which began gathering intelligence about nuclear developments in China from the early 1960s, was concerned about the way geopolitics would be shaped once China also took the nuclear plunge. The US state department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the RAND Corporation, a global policy think-tank, among others analysed how a nuclear-armed China would act in conflict situations and how power might be shared in Asia by an already nuclear-armed Soviet Union and the Chinese.
In 1963, a report by US state department official Robert H. Johnson accurately predicted that a nuclear-armed China might induce India and other Asian countries to develop nuclear weapons as well. The report assessed that unless the US stepped up its assurances to Asian countries that it would protect them against aggression from a nuclear China, many others might explore the nuclear option as well. The report estimated that “India, Japan and Australia could produce a first nuclear device by 1969-70".
Japan’s history with nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in a deep aversion to developing them and hence they sought safety in a US security pact which guaranteed protection in case of a military conflict with China.
In 1974, India tested its first nuclear device. Nine years later, it was Pakistan’s turn.
Today, the US is trying its best to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. If it fails, Saudi Arabia, Iran’s rival in the Middle East, will either develop nuclear capability independently, or as has been suspected for long, buy weapons off the shelf from good friend Pakistan.
In March 1967, government physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US conducted the Nth country experiment which sought to assess the risk of nuclear proliferation. The idea was to determine whether a non-nuclear power could develop nuclear weapons from scratch without access to classified information on how to go about designing such weapons. The trigger for the experiment was to judge that if the US was the first to develop nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union the second, which would be the Nth country? The experiment was “successful" in the sense that two young physicists without access to classified information were able to come up with a credible design for a nuclear weapon in three years.
In the real world, the spread of nuclear weapons has been slower. Developing these weapons requires more than designing them. Countries need industrial capabilities and much more. The US and other countries also react at the first signs of a country trying to get nuclear weapons. This has not stopped the spread of these weapons. It is the paradoxical nature of these weapons that total security is possible only when none exist or when every country has them. Globally, there are institutions that try to limit their spread but are unable to do anything meaningful about universal nuclear weapon disarmament. There are, of course, no institutions that promote their spread. So the world is trapped somewhere in between. Until those end points are reached, the world will remain a very insecure place. That is the significance of the Chinese test: It marked the true beginning of nuclear insecurity in the world’s largest continent.
Global Roaming runs every Tuesday to take stock of international events and trends from a political and economic perspective.
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