Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following World War II. By 1949, however, it was committing itself fully to the continent’s security, furnishing that commitment with the force of law. Even so, NATO’s European members harbored doubts about American reliability and concerns about the alliance’s effectiveness.
At the time of the treaty’s signing, the allies had only 50 army divisions in Europe; the Soviet Union, meanwhile, had 175. The West was not going to redress that imbalance any time soon, if at all. Instead, both sides of the Atlantic agreed that the solution would be nuclear weapons. If Red Army forces poured through the Fulda Gap into West Germany, the United States would respond with nuclear attacks on invading forces.
To the allies’ dismay, however, on August 29, 1949, only four months after the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear device. The United States had lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons. As a result, the European allies worried that Washington might shy away from using its nuclear arsenal when faced with Soviet aggression for fear of a Soviet nuclear response.
To address this dilemma, the United States not only deployed a large number of nuclear weapons to Europe, but also instituted nuclear sharing arrangements. Allied pilots would fly nuclear-capable aircraft and drop bombs on Soviet forces in the event that the United States ordered their use. And, while all American weapons in Europe were nominally under US control, security precautions were kept intentionally lax; NATO nations, frustrated with US inaction, could have stolen and used American warheads against American wishes. These arrangements served to reassure American allies (and to deter Moscow), while also establishing shared responsibility for, and shared risks of, nuclear use. Everyone had skin in the nuclear game.
Perhaps counterintuitively, NATO’s reliance on nuclear deterrence — and America’s commitment to defend its allies with nuclear weapons — played an important role in creating the conditions for the emergence of the global nonproliferation regime. The Nonproliferation Treaty was borne of both a Soviet desire to prevent West Germany from developing its own nuclear arsenal and an American desire to keep nuclear weapons out of China’s hands. Although the latter objective would prove futile, with Beijing testing a nuclear weapon in 1964 (four years before the NPT was eventually signed), West Germany ultimately (albeit grudgingly) went along with the effort, as did Western Europe’s other non-nuclear, technologically advanced states. They did so because America’s commitment to defend NATO with nuclear weapons obviated the need for individual arsenals.
Together, America’s nuclear umbrella and the NPT have been remarkably successful in keeping the nuclear genie in its bottle, with only a handful of notable exceptions. While the introduction of nuclear weapons to South Asia has contributed to decades of dangerous instability on the subcontinent, the rest of the Indo-Pacific has, thus far, avoided that fate. Despite the expansion of Russian and Chinese nuclear arsenals and the development of a North Korean nuclear force, American allies in Northeast Asia have refrained from fielding their own capabilities, Southeast Asia remains a nuclear-free zone, and Australia and New Zealand have eschewed independent nuclear deterrents.
Has the United States drawn the right lessons from these successes and those in Europe under NATO? Is it applying the right ones to tackling current security challenges in the Indo-Pacific? On the one hand, there is evidence that Washington recognizes the central role that nuclear weapons should play in its Pacific alliances. Last spring, President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol established the US-Republic of Korea Nuclear Consultative Group “to strengthen extended deterrence, discuss nuclear and strategic planning, and manage the threat to the nonproliferation regime posed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
Notably, however, this new Nuclear Consultative Group is, in many ways, a response to growing domestic demands in South Korea for an indigenous nuclear capability. Indeed, Asian allies are finding numerous reasons to question American dependability as China embarks on an aggressive nuclear buildup. Over the past two years, the Biden administration has repeatedly and openly exhibited trepidation in the face of Russian nuclear saber-rattling. Leaders in the Democratic Party have called for the United States to adopt a no-first-use policy and eliminate the president’s sole authority to order a nuclear strike. Meanwhile, a series of recent opinion pieces in major American newspapers signal that a new push for arms control may be imminent. Influential Republicans, for their part, have called for a complete abandonment of Ukraine, raising fears about the reliability of other American commitments, including the nuclear umbrella. Most damning, the United States has no clear strategies for contending with China’s buildup, nor for waging a war in the Pacific under the shadow of or involving the use of nuclear weapons, nor for simultaneously deterring two adversaries whose nuclear arsenals outclass America’s own.
History suggests that, under such circumstances, US allies might do more than merely debate the necessity of developing their own nuclear deterrents. In the late 1970s, US President Jimmy Carter abrogated the US-Republic of China mutual defense treaty after severing diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and he planned on withdrawing all American forces from South Korea. Both countries subsequently restarted illicit nuclear research they had first pursued during an earlier period of doubts about American reliability.
To forestall similar crises in Asia today, Washington should consider nuclear-sharing arrangements with allied nations, more intimate involvement of partners in US nuclear planning, and new approaches to nuclear signaling. As America looks back on 75 years of the North Atlantic alliance, one lesson from NATO’s early, contentious years is clear: to deter Russia and China in the Pacific, prevent war, and avoid a proliferation cascade in Asia, the United States must place nuclear weapons front and center.
Michael Mazza is a senior director at the Project 2049 Institute and a senior non-resident fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.
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