Nuclear War and the Luck of Prudence

Speaker: Christopher LaRoche (Central European University)

Discussants: Benoît Pelopidas, Sciences Po-CERI/CNRS and Richard Ned Lebow, King's College London

Abstract:

No nuclear power has employed its nuclear weapons in war since 1945 — despite decades of costly nuclear planning, investment, and close calls. A central explanation of this "puzzle of non-use" is that nuclear weapons impose or incentivize a cautious deliberative rationality, or prudence, on their possessors. A recent challenge to this nuclear rationality thesis is that luck, defined as lack of control, has repeatedly saved the world from nuclear war — not prudence.
 

Both the prudence and luck explanations for nuclear non-use underspecify how each interacts with the other in crises, however. Christopher LaRoche investigates that interaction by reexamining their locus classicus, the Cuban Missile Crisis. His paper argues prudence and luck were each necessary but insufficient causes of the crisis' non-nuclear outcome. Drawing on cognitive psychology and moral philosophy, he argues prudence is dispositionally and situationally scarce: few people meet prudence's high standards, and crises are likely to incite imprudence. Nuclear prudence is, in other words, itself dependent on luck. The Cuban Missile Crisis was, in this view, doubly lucky in a rare "luck alignment": (1) its leaders luckily made de-escalatory decisions at key junctures within the ambit of their control, and (2) several near-misses luckily did not escalate the crisis outside that ambit. The investigation concludes by examining the prospects for nuclear prudence in contemporary politics. It argues that contemporary domestic political processes in key nuclear states encourage revisionism and personalism, thus neither selecting for prudent leaders nor incentivizing prudence from the "bottom up." This puts in doubt nuclear rationality’s core assumption: nuclear weapons impose prudence on their possessors.