Small wars and nuclear peace

The Economist writes about great power equilibrium: 

But for a balance of power to bring a new order it must do more than satisfy the two main actors. It must also bring stability to others or be flexible enough to encompass change. It must offer something of what Britain brought to 19th-century Europe through policies which sought to preserve the status quo by ensuring no country could dominate. Wars still happened, but their goal, as Henry Kissinger put it, was equilibrium, not total conquest. Unfortunately, as Dr [Francis] Fukuyama points out, using small wars to recalibrate the balance of power in a world studded with nuclear weapons will court catastrophe. How such a system could function is a mystery. America's wrecking-ball revolution, the 'Economist', 2 July 2026

Right; and small wars aren't going to stop happening any time soon. Does anybody seriously believe that there are there are systems in place that will effectively stop them becoming nuclear if one or other of the protagonists have the means to use them? We've been lucky, so far. The number of warheads has fallen from about 70000 since the Cold War, but there are now nine countries in possession of 12187 warheads, and those numbers are likely to increase. 

Consider the incentives on offer to those in power today: if they possess nuclear weapons they can initiate a conflict knowing that they can dictate its course by threatening, implicitly or otherwise, to deploy them. If the target of their aggression doesn't possess nuclear weapons or if the target cares more about its civilian population than the aggressor, then at some point our luck is likely to run out. It might be today, it might be in a few years, but the number of countries with nuclear weapons continues to proliferate and we should not have to rely on those in power to continue to exercise restraint at all times. The taboo against threatening use of nuclear weapons has been broken. It now appears inevitable that, before long, the taboo against their use will also be broken. Our political systems reward those most adept at acquiring power. Threatening the use of nuclear weapons is one way in which a regime can hold on to that power.

What can ordinary people - those of us who are content not to have the power to kill millions of human beings - do, faced with the realistic possibility that the nuclear taboo will be violated some time soon? My suggestion is that we issue Nuclear Peace Bonds. These bonds would be redeemable for a fixed sum only when a targeted array of indicators of peace had been achieved and sustained for a period of at least thirty years. They would reward those who do most to reduce the likelihood of nuclear conflict. Backed by a combination of governments, non-governmental organisations, philanthropists and ordinary people, they would encourage a variety number of diverse, adaptive peace-generating approaches. Some would inevitably fail; the way the market for the bonds would work means that these efforts would be terminated and resources diverted into more promising initiatives.

The effect of Nuclear Peace Bonds would be to give incentives to accelerate and guide our progress toward a less violent world more efficiently than has happened so far: a protracted, haphazard and bloody path that has given us a less violent world until now, but also one that has left us fearful of nuclear catastrophe. We can do better than that. By acknowledging that not all approaches are going to work, and supplying incentives for those that do, we can guide and accelerate evolutionary processes to bring about, as quickly and efficiently as possible, what is surely our one of our most urgent goals: sustained nuclear peace.