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