Security Explanations
Although, the security explanation of the UK’s nuclear possession is near hegemonic amongst security academics, occasionally British conventional scholars investigate the motivations of policy makers. Croft and Williams (1991) provide a textbook example of a conventional analysis of British nuclear history.90 Indeed, they are one of the few to actually seek to answer the question directly “Why have successive British governments maintained and, in fact,
modernized the national nuclear forces?”, and thus provide an perfect starting point for this literature review which is structured around different answers to that very question.
In order to pose the question, Croft and Williams (1991) need an alternative explanation to counter. Thus they pose the question contra the popular (or populist) assertion that Britain acquired and maintained its nuclear forces for reasons primarily of status. Croft and Williams end up concurring with a classic security reading of British nuclear history. The article
illuminates four long standing strategic assumptions of the UK policy makers that very closely mirror assumptions made by realism, even if the authors do not state it. While the authors end up privileging security as the main motivation for the UK’s maintenance of nuclear weapons, to the author’s credit, they are cagey about drawing strong conclusions. Instead, they suggest that their analysis intends only to demonstrate “the interplay between status and security” and “that it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of security considerations in British nuclear weapon policy and history” (Williams & Croft, 1990, p. 160). Indeed, there is no shortage of scholars who directly or indirectly argue that security concerns explain the UK’s nuclear weapon possession, not to mention obviously, successive British Governments.91
89 As Tannenwald (1999, p. 434) points out “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?” Sweden, Australia and New Zealand are in particular examples of states that made the choice to reject nuclear security. Meanwhile, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all gave up nuclear weapons inherited from the Soviet Union – despite notable realists (Mearsheimer, 1992) suggesting they do otherwise – South Africa gave up their “bombs in the basement”, and both Brazil and Argentina stepped down the nuclear ladder even once they had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle (the most challenging part of the process involved in making a nuclear weapon).
90 That is not to say British nuclear weapons policy has not been the source of much attention, but most conventional histories seek to describe chronologically the various factors that led to policy makers making the decisions they did. See for example, Stoddart (2008) documenting with newly de-classified material the internal disagreements over how much was needed to fulfil the “Moscow Criterion” (to deter Russia), the decision making process that led to the Chevaline upgrade (Baylis & Stoddart, 2003).
91Around the decision to renew, and the controversy that prompted, a number of security analysts often linked to the MoD have written argumentative papers, not so much explaining why the UK has nuclear weapons, but arguing why they should have them.
Baylis and Stoddart (Baylis & Stoddart, 2012; Stoddart & Baylis, 2012) writing more than 20 years later reach similar conclusions about the primacy of security, albeit under the label
“conventional constructivism”. With their “new” approach they assert solemnly that “[…] the Realist view of the world is a socially constructed “belief” rather than an objective reality”
(Baylis & Stoddart, 2012, p. 331). However, the authors do not indicate much construction, and instead end up repeating a familiar history of the UK defence policy makers’ apparently fixed assumptions, and how they informed the nuclear policy. Indeed, their lack of new insights makes the article’s key point appear a more of semantic move: they suggest that rather than the
“material factors” emphasised by realists, the UK’s nuclear policy was driven by "ideational factors based on a 'realist' perspective held by Britain's political-‐military leadership have remained of crucial importance through to the present day.” (Stoddart & Baylis, 2012, p. 493)92 But even this clarification (neo-‐realists do not deny that policy makers have beliefs, they just suggest that in the name of parsimony we can explain international relations without them)93 is problematic: the author’s do not explain how these ideational realist “beliefs” and “the
deterrence mind-‐set” of the UK’s policy elite can be separated from the material history of the UK, or how the institutional practices of the Ministry of Defence may have contributed to this mind-‐set. 94 Nor can the authors explain why they remained so stable and became “entrenched”
without making reference to the various “material factors” of the UK’s recent history.95 Indeed, this problem is familiar in IR in which scholars get trapped in an unhelpful Cartesian
material/ideational dichotomy, and ignore how “material facts do not speak for themselves, ideas do not float freely either” (Pouliot, 2010, p. 296). Nevertheless, whether or not one grants primacy to ideas or material factors, several other scholars when investigating the motivations of British nuclear policy makers end up with similar conclusions regarding the primacy of
92 Thus, the authors go further than Williams and Croft by giving “realism” its name, however that they do fail to explore the link any further.
93 See Waltz (1979)
94Many scholars have suggested a direct the link between realism and practice in the nuclear field. Firstly, the hiring practices of the MoD in the UK seem likely to have influenced the collective nuclear position of the MoD. Booth and Wheeler (1991) complain that the academic hegemony of realism during the Cold War affected the career prospects of security professionals. Elsewhere, Booth recalled “the nuclear debate in the 1980s, the vitriol levelled against those of us [academics] who did not share Whitehall’s pro-nuclear norms"
(Booth, 1997; 372). If they disliked academics who questioned nuclear weapons, it seems unlikely they would employ people sceptical about nuclear weapons. One anonymous employee of the MoD offers support for this view describing it as “a huge organization, but one which is precisely designed not to challenge the underlying assumptions, to take them as your starting point, the water in which you swim”(Hamwee, Miall, & Elworthy, 1990, pp. 359–360).
95 For example, the authors suggest how the UK’s experience with Nazi bombing and the UK’s densely
populated island status, constituted “conditioning” of the belief about the need for strong military; however, it is difficult to see how these “material factors” can be separate from the “ideational factors” apparently driving the UK’s nuclear policy.
security in the UK nuclear policy maker’s motivations (other notable examples: Croft, 1994;
Gray, 2001; Hamwee, Miall, & Elworthy, 1990; Stocker, 2007)
However, in the literature the security explanation is not so much investigated as asserted.
Frequently, authors attempt only to argue that it is right or prudent (and remains so) to maintain nuclear weapons96. For example, Desmond Bowen (2010, p. 9), formerly of the MoD when writing in defence of the UK’s decision to begin the renewal of Trident in 2007, sums up the UK’s motivations in the simplest terms “The United Kingdom has nuclear weapons because successive governments decided that they enhanced the nation’s security”. According to Bowen the “uncertainty surrounding the future and proliferation… were the strongest determinants” of the British decision to renew. Freedman (1980, p. 139) also supports the security account.
While he is sceptical about the official reasons given for the British nuclear force, he argues that this does mean that all strategic security arguments are “specious”, only their articulation
“diplomatically awkward”. Lawrence suggests that the “most compelling strategic rationale for a British nuclear force […] resides less in the immediate requirements of British defence than in the uncertainties of the future”. Official policy dare not flesh out precisely what the UK is uncertain about, but Freedman cites unofficial pronouncements from MoD and ministers to name doubts about the US’s commitment to Europe and the credibility of the nuclear guarantee to NATO (Freedman, 1980, pp. 136–139).
The Hollowness of Security Explanations
As convincing as security explanations initially appear, they suffer from a rather timeless problem: attempting to get into the mind of decision makers.97 Sagan(1996, p. 63) puts this clearly, “A major problem exists, however, concerning the evidence for realist history depends primarily on the statements of motivation by the key decision makers, who have a vested interest in explaining that the choices they made served the national interest". Indeed, Freedman (1980), Williams & Croft (1991), rely to a large extent on official announcements, while Hamwee et al. (1990) rely on interviews.98 This is particularly problematic for Croft and Williams because they seek to deduce the importance of status concerns in decision making.
96 See Slivinski (2009), Lewis (2006, 2009), Quinlan, (2006, 2009), Stocker, (2013); Willett (2005)
97 See Wittgenstein, (1955, §150-155) for a famous articulation of this problem.
98 Croft and Williams (1991) acknowledge to a certain extent the problems inherent in their task; in their footnotes, they write that “Official publications are noticeable for their scarcity and blandness when examining underlying attitudes concerning security policy” and go on to bemoan that “retired politicians and civil servants rarely write memoirs that are of significant help” (note 6, p. 147). However, the authors do not go far enough in acknowledging the unsuitability of their methodology for their task. Attempting to weigh up the relative importance of status contra security concerns with a methodology that relies largely on looking for their articulation in official quotes is likely to go only one way.
Something, which, as Sagan (1996) suggests, is unlikely to feature highly in public pronouncements, aimed at legitimising policy decisions.99
Moreover, and troublingly, the security explanations of nuclear weapons can explain every case of nuclear possession; all one needs to articulate is a threat (Sagan, 1996; 63). Sagan observes that this leaves scholars looking for threats that “must” have existed to prompt the development of nuclear weapons, or in this case one that exists to legitimise their maintenance. But even a
“threat” is not strictly necessary. After all, if one understands the structure of the system as anarchic and self-‐help as a subsequent necessity (in the sense neo-‐realists and the UK policy makers reportedly assume); having nuclear weapons is a rational response in long run. And so realism can explain nuclear possession without specific threats too. Indeed, Booth and Wheeler (1991) named this view as “Structural Nuclearism” and declared the UK nuclear policy a
“perfect expression” of it. So, when Sagan (1996) attempts to demonstrate that the decision to develop nuclear weapons by particular states were caused by other forces than “security”, the analysis can never convincingly dispel security explanations from the equation. Indeed, a theory that explains by default a minority of cases without accounting for the rest is not very useful.100 The most that we can say is that the UK policy makers seem to believe, and certainly claim that the UK maintains nuclear weapons for security reasons.
This thesis departs quite dramatically from these conventional security accounts of the UK nuclear policy. Instead of seeking to get into the minds of the decision makers, it investigates the public performances of foreign policy. In contrast to these scholars, this thesis holds that the UK government has considerable -‐ though not hegemonic -‐ discursive power in (re)producing the discursive frame through which the British public understand nuclear weapons, UK-‐Self and international Others. Thus, in contrast to asking why the UK has nuclear weapons, this thesis asks how the UK government represents its nuclear weapon policy as legitimate and desirable, which, as the following chapters will show, has not been easy. A ‘realist’ rationale does not necessarily offer a diplomatically amenable rationale, and moreover, the realist representations of the international might legitimise the UK’s possession of nuclear weapons but also requires continuous discursive labour to maintain it and discipline alternative discourses that challenge
99 Even on a personal level, admitting one does anything because of concerns about status is socially awkward, both for other people and oneself.
100 Thus even if one accepted that those realist assumptions and security concerns “caused” the UK to maintain its nuclear weapons, this still does not tell us very much. It cannot explain how the UK arrived at, and maintain those assumptions while others living under the same anarchic conditions have not. Equally, now the Soviet Union has dissipated, why the UK considers uncertainty and North Korea so dangerous as to necessitate nuclear weapons while most of the rest of the world looks at the same uncertainty and shrugs its collective shoulders.
Indeed, the price of parsimony is usually hollowness
the various representations of “uncertainty”, “anarchy”, and the utility of nuclear weapons in such a world. Nevertheless, some chinks of light amidst these conventional texts point the way towards this thesis’ problematization of the discursive maintenance of the UK’s nuclear weapons.
Freedman (1980) offers such a window when he writes of the difficulties the UK has faced in finding public rationale for its nuclear weapons that was not “diplomatically awkward”. In essence Freedman is analysing how the UK could find a balance in their nuclear rationale between desirability and legitimacy. What Freedman considers the true rationale—self-‐help and doubt about the US nuclear guarantee—could not be articulated without undermining NATO and angering its allies. Meanwhile, expressing just certainty in the US’s nuclear umbrella would have made redundant the need for UK nuclear weapons. Thus, according to Freedman, the UK hit upon the “second the centre of decision making” rationale that managed to constitute a role for the UK’s nuclear weapons in NATO, without explicitly expressing doubts about the US nuclear umbrella. Although Freedman’s is an objectivist account, his analysis points to the agency the UK government has in constructing meaning for its nuclear weapons and the world that enabled the UK’s continued maintenance of nuclear weapons. 101 Further, Freedman’s suggestion that the UK’s public rationale “is not wholly convincing” (1980, p. 135), indicates that finding a legitimate and desirable rationale—representation of the world and the UK’s nuclear weapons—was not easy. Moreover, Witney (1995; 1994) describes how the end of Cold War prompted the need to “refurbish the rationale” and that none of the options available seemed appealing. Witney’s refurbishment metaphor more than hints at how the UK government has agency in constructing—or perhaps, given the metaphor—painting a picture with its foreign policy that enables its nuclear weapons maintenance. Further, the difficulties Witney identifies hints at the considerable discursive labour needed to keep the UK’s nuclear deterrent from
“death by atrophy” (as Witney puts it). All this suggests that conducting a thorough discourse analysis of the UK’s nuclear foreign policy performances should prove insightful for
understanding how the UK maintained its nuclear weapons.
Further grist for this thesis’ mill is found when Hamwee et al.(1990) begin to problematize the representations of the UK nuclear policy makers, even if their primary goal remained analysing the assumptions of those policy makers, rather than the meaning produced by their foreign policy performances. The authors draw attention to two discursive habits that serve as a useful prequel to chapters 6 and 7. First, they note that the policymakers “slipped into a kind of
101 Freedman (1980, p. xv) ends his introduction that the goal of his book is to provide “a book of description and analysis rather than advocacy”.
childish banter”, or more precisely euphemism, whenever they talked about nuclear war, in contrast to the clear language they used elsewhere (Hamwee et al., 1990, pp. 360–361). Further, the authors also remark upon the “insurance” metaphor commonly used by the “decision-‐
makers” which they note misleadingly “assumes that the possession of nuclear weapons creates no risk for the possessor of nuclear weapons , just as the payment of insurance creates no risk for the policy holder”(1990, p. 261) While the authors do not go further than a couple of paragraphs, their observations fit with much wider international literature encompassing research as diverse as Carol Cohn’s (1987) seminal feminist work, and the Harvard Nuclear Study Group (1983, p. 12). The latter, for instance, suggests that "Denial of the horrors of war can be witnessed among civilian strategists, military men, and policymakers in the penchant for euphemisms the use of innocuous language to mask the ugly reality of war." (p.12) Drawing on nukespeak (see chapter 2), and picking up on the UK thread begun by Hamwee et al., but then largely dropped by UK scholars,102 this thesis analyses how the UK foreign policy
representations of its nuclear weapons facilitate the maintenance of the belief in their desirability and legitimacy.