by Xi Lin

Created on: May 26, 2008   Last Updated: May 27, 2008

A nuclear taboo is a normative basis for non-use that is pervasive and powerful. Much like the taboo of cannibalism would dissuades us from engaging in it even if there isn't a punishment, the nuclear taboo acts the same way. The maintainment of the nuclear taboo is necessary because

First, The nuclear taboo is effective in preventing the use of nuclear weapons. Nina Tannenwald explains why the mutually assured destruction theory of deterrence is not sufficient. "This investigation is motivated by several empirical anomalies in the conventional account-deterrence-of the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945. First is the non-use of nuclear weapons in cases where there was no fear of nuclear retaliation, that is, where the adversary could not retaliate in kind. This anomaly includes [For instance] the first ten years or so of the nuclear era, when the United States possessed first an absolute nuclear monopoly and then an overwhelming nuclear advantage over the Soviet Union. It also includes non-use by the United States in Vietnam (where the United States dropped tonnage equivalent to dozens of Hiroshima bombs) and in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Fear of retaliation also does not account for why Britain did not use nuclear weapons in the Falklands, nor for why the Soviet Union did not resort to nuclear weapons to avoid defeat in Afghanistan. A second anomaly emerges [also,] when we turn [can] the question around and ask why nuclear weapons, supposedly fearsome deterrent weapons, have not deterred attacks by nonnuclear states against nuclear states. China attacked U.S. forces in the Korean War, North Vietnam attacked U.S. forces in the Vietnam War, Argentina attacked Britain in the Falklands in 1982, and Iraq attacked U.S. forces and Israel in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Knowledge of a widespread normative opprobrium against nuclear use may have strengthened expectations of non-nuclear states that nuclear weapons would not be used against them. A third anomaly is that, as Harald Miller has pointed out, the security situation of small, non-nuclear states has not been rendered as perilous in the nuclear age as a realist picture of a predatory anarchy would predict, even though they are completely defenseless against nuclear attack and could not retaliate in kind.2 Most non-nuclear states do not live daily in a nuclear security dilemma. Finally, if deterrence is all that matters, then why have so many states not developed nuclear weapons when they could have done so?

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