Nations and WMD

Hypothesis on why some nations should not have WMD

Many of today’s powerful nations have been through enough strife to know the pain conflict inflicts upon their own people, let alone the enemy. Yet, this does not stop them from waging war. However, on the face of it (post-WWII) nations tend to wage war against what they believe to be the weaker nation, suggesting they pick the fights they know they can win. A strong nation will therefore be strong with a powerful arsenal of weapons. By extension, this is also to say that two evenly matched nations know war will be devastating for both, and victory is not certain for one over the other, so the power implicit in having a vast arsenal of weapons is cancelled out. Hence war by other means may be necessary (vis the Cold War) or they may even try to get on via cultural and economic exchanges!

Another angle on this is that with only a few nations having a vast conventional and nuclear (or other WMD) arsenal then they, by virtue of spies, diplomatic exchanges and international inspections, have an improved capability of ‘knowing the enemy’. Indeed, they may even think like the enemy. The message so far is that powerful nations are less likely to go to war against each other.

Of course, a state without the comparative advantages in conventional weapons (i.e. the industrial infrastructure, human resources and so on) can look for alternative advantages in order to compete with a similar level of force-threat as a powerful nation under a conventional/nuclear weapons regime. Here, technological solutions can be used which includes efficient WMD where there is literally a big bang for the buck to counter the issue of funding and resourcing a conventional weapons program. Hence we have the threat of less powerful nations or ‘small states’ pursuing alternative weapons technologies.

Let’s look at the weapons/chances of winning permutations [need to work on this a bit so it makes sense]:

Here, the aggressor has either WMD or conventional weapons. The WMD are present or absent. Conventional weapons are weak or strong (amount of firepower per person would be the delimiting factor). The defender or those who perceive and calculate threats are divided into the strong and the weak. The strong defenders are those who have WMD and or strong conventional weapons to counterattack with. One could expand the table to include the defender’s combinations of WMD/conventional but it would obscure the point a bit.

Overall, cheap alternative weapons – manifesting as WMD – constitute a threat to all nations, but not least because of the weapons themselves being threatening. It is also the mentality of the states that pursue these programs which need to be regarded as suspect because they may well not have had the maturing experiences of having to be a responsible nation first.