Abstract
We don’t expect states to share nuclear weapons, their technology or their delivery systems, because of the difficulty the donor has in assuring the reliability of the recipient state.1 Nevertheless, nuclear sharing has occurred in a number of instances. It started with France, the UK and the US; then continued with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during the Second World War; the US and its NATO allies; the USSR and China; France, Israel and South Africa; and China and Pakistan. On a lesser scale, other states have also acted counter to the conventional wisdom and shared expertise that enhanced the nuclear capability of recipient states. Most nuclear sharing occurs between allies, but the overwhelming numbers of allies do not share nuclear weapons. Whether they do so depends to a large extent on the prevailing strategic incentives to share, particularly whether adversaries have tacitly negotiated an agreement to manage their competitive nuclear diffusion, whether the allies are democratic, and the stability of their domestic decision-making processes.2 Historically, only grave security threats are likely to overrule the reluctance of states to share the sensitive technology of the most powerful weapons. Iron, which Pliny described as “the most useful and most fatal instrument in the hand of man,”3 was the preeminent capital weapon of pre-modern times, and its sharing was prohibited by most societies, from the Hittites4 and Philistines,5 to Charlemagne.6
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Notes
“Gifted” in the original parlance: Lewis A. Dunn, and Herman Khan, Trends in Nuclear Proliferation, 1975–1995 (New York, Hudson Institute, 1976), 129.
Any theory of nuclear weapons sharing should be consistent with broader explanations of politically significant capital weapons diffusion. Richard Holmes, ed., The World Atlas of Warfare: Military Innovations that Changed the Course of History (New York: Viking, 1988), 30.
Georges Fischer, The Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1971), 73.
Of the 128,000 warheads manufactured between 1945 and 2010, approximately 2,200 were prepped for loaning from the US to NATO in Europe and Canada in the event of war. No other warheads changed hands, although this may have happened have in wartime between the Soviet Union and select members of the Warsaw Pact. The US, UK and France exchanged fusion warhead designs between each other, as, for fission warheads, did the USSR and China, France and Israel, Israel and South Africa, China and Pakistan, Pakistan and Libya, and possibly Pakistan and North Korea. Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Inventories, 1945–2010,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 66, no. 4 (July/August 2010), 77–83
Christopher Chyba, Chaim Braun, and George Bunn, “New Challenges to the Nonproliferation Regime,” in George Bunn and Christopher Chyba, eds., US Nuclear Weapons Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2006), 126–160
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Matthew Kroenig, “Importing the Bomb,” in Robert Rauchhaus, Matthew Kroenig and Erik Gartzke, eds., Causes and Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation (London: Routledge, 2011), 61–81
On forced uranium exports from East Germany, see Michael Goodman, Spying on the Nuclear Bear (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 23
Pavel Podvig et al., Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 82–83.
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Duane Bratt, The Politics of Candu Exports (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 43
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Chyba, Braun, and Bunn, “New Challenges to the Nonproliferation Regime,” in George Bunn and Christopher Chyba, eds., US Nuclear Weapons Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 2006), 126–160
Allan Krass, Peter Boskma, Boelie Elzen, and Wim Smit, Uranium Enrichment and Nuclear Weapon Proliferation (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1983), 59.
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T. V. Paul, “Power, Influence, and Nuclear Weapons: A Reassessment,” in T. V. Paul, Richard Harknett, James Wirtz, eds., The Absolute Weapon Revisited, Nuclear Arms and the Emerging International Order (Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1998), 19–46
Waltz 1981, 1990, 1993, and Pierre Gallois, The Balance of Terror (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 229
Nathan Busch, No End in Sight (Lexington: The University of Press of Kentucky, 2004), 3.
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Richard Betts, Nuclear Blackmail and Nuclear Balance (Washinton, DC: The Brookings Institution, 1987), 138–144
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Eckhard Lubkemeier, “Building Peace under the Nuclear Sword of Damocles,” in Patrick J. Garrity and Steven A. Maaranen, eds., Nuclear Weapons in the Changing World: Perspectives from Europe, Asia, and North America (New York, Plenum Press, 1992), 223–239
For a critique, see Ward Wilson, “The Winning Weapon?” International Security 31, no. 4 (Spring 2007), 162–179
Bernard Brodie, “War in the Atomic Age,” in Fredrick S. Dunn, Bernard Brodie, Arnold Wolfers, Percy E. Corbett, and William T. R. Fox, eds., The Absolute Weapon: Atomic power and World Order (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1946), 21–69
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© 2014 Julian Schofield
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Schofield, J. (2014). Introduction: Nuclear Sharing and Why More May Be Better. In: Strategic Nuclear Sharing. Global Issues Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137298454_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137298454_1
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