How effective is nuclear deterrence today?

“The bal­ance of pow­er between nations as a deter­rent has (…) become more unsta­ble.” In his speech at the École de Guerre in 2020, Emmanuel Macron was already paint­ing a wor­ry­ing pic­ture of the land­scape of deter­rence, which has been fur­ther dark­ened by the war in Ukraine and Russia’s rhetoric of intim­i­da­tion. Togeth­er with Paul Zajac, direc­tor of strate­gic affairs with­in the mil­i­tary appli­ca­tions depart­ment of the CEA (French Alter­na­tive Ener­gies and Atom­ic Ener­gy Com­mis­sion), which designs and man­u­fac­tures the nuclear war­heads of the French deter­rent, we take stock of the strate­gic threats to West­ern democ­ra­cies and the state of deter­rence in France.

Paul Jazac. The post-Cold War peri­od in West­ern democ­ra­cies was marked by both a dimin­ish­ing role for nuclear deter­rence in defence strate­gies and a focus on the risk of nuclear pro­lif­er­a­tion, which remains a major con­cern today. After the fall of the USSR, West­ern coun­tries that had signed and rat­i­fied the Treaty on the Non-Pro­lif­er­a­tion of Nuclear Weapons (also known by its acronym TNP, con­clud­ed in 1968 and to which France acced­ed in 1992) want­ed to set an exam­ple through dis­ar­ma­ment mea­sures, and the nuclear issue became less present in the pub­lic con­scious­ness. How­ev­er, this devel­op­ment has not been mir­rored in Chi­na and Rus­sia, where nuclear strate­gies have remained central.

A turn­ing point was reached at the end of the 2000s, with a renewed focus on nuclear pow­er in the inter­play between pow­ers. This is most clear­ly seen today with the war in Ukraine, through Russia’s strat­e­gy of nuclear intim­i­da­tion, which aims both to pre­vent West­ern gov­ern­ments from sup­port­ing Ukraine and to divide pub­lic opinion.

I would qual­i­fy Ray­mond Aron’s remarks: deter­rence is there to pre­vent major wars between pow­ers, not just nuclear wars. And in this sense, it works, includ­ing in the con­text of the war in Ukraine: it is the exer­cise of deter­rence that pre­vents an exten­sion of the con­flict. How­ev­er, the fact is, and this has been the case since the Cold War, that nuclear deter­rence does not pre­vent “periph­er­al con­flicts in rela­tion to those that would pit the major pow­ers against each oth­er, nor the con­cept of proxy wars.

In the 1960s, more than a dozen addi­tion­al nuclear pow­ers were expect­ed to emerge in the West­ern world over the fol­low­ing decade. In real­i­ty, the imple­men­ta­tion of the NPT nor­ma­tive frame­work has worked for the most part: the num­ber of States that have acquired nuclear weapons out­side this frame­work can be count­ed on the fin­gers of one hand (Editor’s note: India, Pak­istan, North Korea and Israel²).

Iran is cur­rent­ly at the cen­tre of a major pro­lif­er­a­tion cri­sis, which could set a prece­dent, either strength­en­ing or weak­en­ing the entire sys­tem, depend­ing on the out­come. The risk of an Iran­ian nuclear arse­nal is that it could trig­ger a pro­lif­er­a­tion cas­cade in the region, with coun­tries that see their secu­ri­ty dimin­ished seek­ing to devel­op their own capabilities.

North Korea’s ille­gal with­draw­al from the NPT could also be seen as a fail­ure of the non-pro­lif­er­a­tion effort, and its recent rap­proche­ment with Rus­sia con­sti­tutes a major attack on the archi­tec­ture of non-pro­lif­er­a­tion. Rus­sia, a coun­try with NPT sta­tus and there­fore with the respon­si­bil­i­ty to guar­an­tee the treaty’s stan­dards, implic­it­ly recog­nis­es North Korea’s nuclear sta­tus through this rapprochement.

The war in Ukraine could also, depend­ing on its out­come, have oth­er sys­temic con­se­quences. In the event of Ukraine’s defeat, some coun­tries might con­sid­er that the only effec­tive pro­tec­tion against the poten­tial aggres­sion of a nuclear-armed coun­try would be to acquire their own nuclear capa­bil­i­ties. This is one of the rea­sons why it is impor­tant that Russ­ian aggres­sion fails.

In France, nuclear deter­rence is still at the cut­ting edge of devel­op­ments in mil­i­tary tech­nol­o­gy; its cred­i­bil­i­ty depends on this. This bears repeat­ing, as we could be for­giv­en for think­ing that it is a some­what sta­t­ic tool, hav­ing changed lit­tle since the 1960s. On the con­trary, the sta­bil­i­ty of this strat­e­gy is guar­an­teed by con­stant tech­no­log­i­cal adap­ta­tion, car­ried out by the Min­istry of the Armed Forces and the CEA. France is thus in an impor­tant phase of renew­ing its nuclear arse­nal. We are devel­op­ing the 3^rd gen­er­a­tion of nuclear-pow­ered bal­lis­tic mis­sile sub­marines, and all the result­ing adap­ta­tions for the bal­lis­tic mis­sile in its future ver­sions. With regard to air­borne capa­bil­i­ties, we are also work­ing on the next vec­tor and the nuclear war­head it will car­ry. This work is of course based on pro­jec­tions into the future to ensure that the tool will remain at the cut­ting edge in the com­ing decades. It is a con­stant­ly evolv­ing chal­lenge, and for the nuclear war­heads it is con­duct­ed using sim­u­la­tion meth­ods, with­out recourse to test­ing. With­out going into detail, I can men­tion two major fields of inno­va­tion and capa­bil­i­ty devel­op­ment: hyper­son­ic tech­nolo­gies on the one hand and space tech­nolo­gies on the other.

To a cer­tain extent, this is true: I am think­ing in par­tic­u­lar of those who advo­cate the abo­li­tion of nuclear weapons, who seem to me to pur­sue their objec­tives in an irenic man­ner, dis­con­nect­ed from secu­ri­ty issues. It can also be argued that eth­i­cal and moral con­cerns are sec­ondary for pow­ers such as Rus­sia or Chi­na, for example.

In well-estab­lished democ­ra­cies, these two debates must be con­nect­ed to ensure the con­sis­ten­cy of deter­rence strate­gies with the rule of law, which is the foun­da­tion of the demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem. In his speech of 7 Feb­ru­ary 2020, the Pres­i­dent of the French Repub­lic empha­sised the impor­tance of artic­u­lat­ing the strate­gic and eth­i­cal dimen­sions of nuclear deterrence.

For deter­rence is in fact a para­dox, which on a moral lev­el is called dis­sua­sive inten­tion: one puts one­self in a posi­tion to car­ry out an action in order not to have to car­ry it out. We must come to terms with this para­dox, while exam­in­ing deter­rence in the broad­er con­text of defence strat­e­gy. It is when deter­rence, con­sid­ered as strict­ly defen­sive, is at the ser­vice of a defence strat­e­gy con­sis­tent with the demo­c­ra­t­ic frame­work, that we can achieve con­sis­ten­cy between strat­e­gy and morality.

Interview by Anne Orliac