Nukes as Propaganda

My guess is that the experts quoted by The New York Times are right, and Putin's big talk about new nukes is more for domestic political consumption -- designed to bolster a sense of Russian greatness and nationalism -- than for any actual national security purpose. I wish there was more attention paid to this dimension of nuclear programs in India, Pakistan, Iran, Brazil (where something odd is going on), and other places. The trouble is that this sort of thing -- including the desire of non-nuclear rich democracies like Germany, Japan, and South Korea to maintain the technical capacity to go nuclear on short notice -- winds up having spillovers into actual policy. Pakistani nukes put pressure on Iran. Iranian nukes would put pressure on other Middle Eastern countries to go nuclear. German resistance to a stronger NPT makes it harder to deal with Iran.

The United States could use a clever plan for breaking -- or at least attenuating -- the perceived link between possession of a strategic weapons capacity and a country's status as a major power. In the pre-1914 era, a lot of tensions got created in Europe by Germany's desire for more colonies and sea power. The irony was that there was no good reason of national interest for Germany to seek colonies. But the Kaiser and others perceived that, as a great nation, Germany deserved her "place in the sun" and that getting it in the context prevalent at the time meant she needed colonies. Similar sentiments in the USA got us into trouble in the Phillipines. Perception can become reality, and reality can become dangerous. A non-nuclear method of increasing the national self-esteem of the large (either population-wise or economically) non-nuclear countries could do a lot of good.