Nuclear Strategies
Matthew Evangelista on failures of deterrence strategy, the unraveling of arms control, and the frightening role of luck.
This week’s interview is with Matthew Evangelista, recently retired professor of Professor of History and Political Science at Cornell. Over the course of his career, Evangelista has written extensively on the nuclear arms race and U.S.–Soviet relations. We spoke with him about his concerns over the failures of deterrence strategy, the unraveling of arms control, and the frightening role of luck. It was an interesting convo for many reasons, one of which is that his perspective stands in direct contrast to previous franknews expert — Stephen Van Evera. Van Evera believes the nuclear proliferation has a stabilizing global impact, Evangelista strongly doesn’t. We chat a bit about it at the end, and we suggest reading both interviews.
This interview was conducted by Noelle Forougi for franknews and condensed for clarity. franknews is committed to bringing quality information to the public — and remaining independent, ad-free, and accessible to everyone. To support us, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Do you mind starting by introducing yourself and your background?
I’m Matthew Evangelista. I spent much of my career at Cornell University teaching courses related to history and international politics in the government department. I recently retired.
What do you focus on?
My initial work, starting in graduate school, was on the US-Soviet nuclear arms race and the Cold War. I wrote my first book on US and Soviet development of new weapons, including nuclear weapons. My second book was on efforts to end the arms race and the Cold War. I focused in particular on the transnational collaboration between US and Soviet scientists and physicians, European peace researchers, and Soviet military reformers. After that, I naively thought that the Cold War was over and nuclear weapons weren’t a problem anymore. I shifted to other issues that I saw as dangerous — US military interventions, the War on Terror and the counterterrorist response. Only recently was I dragged back to this topic of nuclear weapons again, which I credit mainly to Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
I’m curious to start by hearing you define how you see the current nuclear moment that we’re in and how you define the US’s current strategy.
Well I recently looked at a document on US nuclear strategy produced by the Biden administration in November 2024 and the most recent statements by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on NATO’s nuclear strategy. It’s a Rip Van Winkle effect. It’s as if nothing had changed from the darkest days of the Cold War. The United States is planning to use nuclear weapons in the event that “deterrence fails,” and it’s quite explicit about that.
It embraces what’s known as counterforce, essentially planning to attack the other side’s nuclear forces in the event of a war. NATO the same thing. Although there’s a lot of language about tailoring the strategy and flexibility, ultimately what it means is that if a war broke out and escalated to the use of nuclear weapons, the military planners and forces would be thinking of using the weapons in a war, attacking other nuclear weapons, attacking various targets, and we would get a nuclear war. That’s what keeps me up at night. That’s what I think people should be paying more attention to.
Long after Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan declared that a nuclear war could never be won and must never be fought, the United States and other nuclear powers are planning to fight nuclear wars. It’s a big problem.
Nuclear deterrence, to define it, is the idea that because the great powers of the world have nuclear capabilities, the threat of going to war is so great that we haven’t. And the prevailing thought is that this is what kept Europe from fighting post-World War II. Is that correct?
That’s the most broad notion of what deterrence is — that it prevents war. Some people would say that the very existence of nuclear weapons has a stabilizing, calming effect on international politics and prevents war. NATO and the United States tend to focus on Europe and say there hasn’t been a major war in Europe since World War II.
Do I see a problem with those claims? Yes, I do. For one thing, we have a major war going on right now in Europe. Pakistan and India both have nuclear weapons. Are they deterred? They’re not really deterring much. The countries have conflicts on a regular basis. I really think the notion that the presence of nuclear weapons, almost as a synonym for nuclear deterrence, is not historically supported as a way of preventing war, because we have plenty of wars.
You mentioned at the beginning feeling hopeful at the end of the Cold War – why, and how have things changed since?
I and a lot of people thought the Cold War was over. Nuclear weapons weren’t an issue anymore. Why was that? It was because the militarized division of Europe ended.
We can attribute a lot of that to Mikhail Gorbachev, and even point to a specific event: a speech he gave at the United Nations in December 1988. He announced a unilateral reduction in the Soviet armed forces of half a million troops and he also signaled that the Soviet military forces, which had mainly been used to repress movements for liberalization in the communist regimes, would no longer be used for that purpose.
The other thing was that there was a dramatic reduction in nuclear weapons. We had the INF Treaty, the Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, which eliminated two entire categories of nuclear weapons. This required big concessions on the Soviet side, and Gorbachev was willing to make them.
But things have changed. That treaty no longer exists. The United States and Russia are both developing the weapons that were banned at the time. We have only one remaining treaty of all the ones that were signed in those days, the New START treaty, and it’s slated to expire in February. Even if it were continued, and Putin has suggested that he’d be willing to continue it without renegotiating a new one, just keeping to the current limits, the verification measures would not continue. Those have been abandoned for a couple of years now. I think we’re back in a pretty dire situation.
When did we start building new weapons again? When did things get worse again?
We had treaties in effect that brought the level from tens of thousands down to thousands. They constrained the numbers, but in some respects they didn’t constrain the types. And these programs have been reintroduced over the years.
The United States has been pursuing the replacement of the Minuteman land-based missiles with this hugely expensive program that’s gone way over budget. The United States also develops new versions of existing nuclear warheads — one that is slated for deployment in Europe, and it’s clearly a weapon that would be used to fight a nuclear war in Europe, which would be a disaster.
Can you speak a bit to Ukraine giving up their nuclear weapons in 1994. I think some would push back on your argument of deterrence not working and point to this moment as an example of what would happen with uneven nuclear powers.
The existence of nuclear weapons during the war in Ukraine have actually enabled Putin to continue the war without fear of intervention from other European states or the United States. Nuclear deterrence is working great for Putin, by making the United States and Europe cautious about aiding Ukraine’s defense. It didn’t work very well for Europe or Ukraine in preventing Russia’s invasion.
It’s not entirely correct to say Ukraine had nuclear weapons or had a nuclear capability. Ukraine had Soviet nuclear weapons based on its territory when the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991. The US interest was to have those weapons consolidated under Russia’s control so they could be incorporated in the nuclear reductions being negotiated.
In the atmosphere of the early 1990s when the emphasis was on nuclear disarmament, for Ukraine to say they wanted to keep nuclear weapons would have put them in the same pariah status as North Korea or Iran. Ukraine was also the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, so anti-nuclear sentiment there was very strong.
What did Ukraine get in return in terms of security guarantees? Whatever it got was not worth very much. There were the 1994 Budapest Accords with security assurances that gave enough wiggle room so that when Russia threatened Ukraine’s security, the states that had signed — the United States, Russia, and some European states — did not come through.
John Mearsheimer thinks every country should have nuclear weapons. But people who argue that nuclear weapons proliferation would be a good thing forget about the transitionary stage when the state is developing its nuclear capability and would be very vulnerable to preventive attack. If Ukraine had decided to keep Soviet-era nuclear weapons, Russia might have attacked sooner to prevent Ukraine from developing a functional nuclear capability. Trying to keep those weapons would have made Ukraine a pariah rather than integrate it with the West and Europe as Ukraine wanted.
It reminds me of the situation with Iran earlier this year.
It’s a good point. We don’t even know if Iran really aspires to have nuclear weapons.
Right.
It’s been enriching nuclear material to the extent that it could have a breakout capability and develop nuclear bombs. But even the uncertainty was enough to make Israel and the United States attack. You could imagine a similar situation in many different places.
You argue that, once the Ukraine war ends, we should look to alternatives to Ukraine joining NATO. Can you tell me more about that?
In an article I published in the journal International Security, I draw a lot on the debates at the end of the Cold War in the 1980s, especially about the dangers of nuclear deterrence, nuclear escalation if deterrence failed, and what alternatives to nuclear weapons might exist in NATO’s defense strategy.
The example I wrote about in that article that I thought was — and others think was — probably the most dangerous point in Europe during the Cold War was the Berlin crisis in 1961. The United States and NATO planned that if the Soviet Union took over West Berlin, which was an enclave deep within communist East German territory, the US would first try to defend with conventional force. If that failed, they would use nuclear weapons selectively to signal resolve. What NATO and the United States didn’t know is that the Soviet military plan was to attack with nuclear weapons if NATO showed preparations to use them. The deterrent plan was actually a plan for nuclear war.
This is what I see as a constant theme in US planning: a mismatch between what the United States thinks will deter and what the adversary plans to do. Deterrence isn’t an attribute of the weapons itself — deterrence is up to the side you’re trying to deter, how they respond. I used that historical case to say nuclear deterrence isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be and to suggest alternatives.
But I think it’s a topic that really requires a lot of attention. What would be a way of defending a post-war Ukraine without relying on nuclear weapons, which I argue are just too risky and too devastating in their consequences if they were used?
Do you see a real alternative and a world in which your argument can actually come to fruition? Is there a world where we start giving up nuclear power, and in that case, who goes first?
One thing to remember is that we actually have a treaty prohibiting the possession and use of nuclear weapons. If you want to think about alternatives to nuclear deterrence, you might start by saying we have already decided they are illegal – this is in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. When it was presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations, 122 countries signed on to it. We could say most of the world thinks nuclear weapons are illegal. It happens that the United States and Russia and China and Israel and Pakistan and India and North Korea don’t think so, and neither do their allies.
If you think of that as a starting point, you could say we see the possibility, given the widespread opposition to nuclear weapons, of stigmatizing them.
But we do the opposite. When Putin started threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons, ordering an exercise simulating nuclear operations, what would be an appropriate response if nuclear weapons were stigmatized? It would be: how dare you do that. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the French president Macron immediately ordered a nuclear exercise of French forces.
It seems we’re in a world where norms are crumbling and international consensus is holding less and less weight these days.
I want to be careful of your time, but I do want to ask this one other question. We spoke to another academic, Stephen Van Evera, earlier this year. The way I understood his argument is that, because of the proliferation of nuclear weapons we have spheres of influence, so we can be happy with our sphere and not get involved in others. And, in a way, it is this vision of world peace in that we do not have great powers trying to conquer the whole world and each other. I’m curious what you think about his argument?
I am familiar with Van Evera, I’ve known him for over 40 years. He’s someone I respect quite a lot. He’s super smart, but I think that he exaggerates the stabilizing elements of nuclear weapons. I also think he exaggerates the idea that nuclear weapons would be used for retaliation only if one great power tried to take over another great power. That’s not actually what the nuclear strategies are.
Russia, which under the Soviet Union used to have a policy not to use nuclear weapons first, now has a policy that some people call escalation to de-escalate. It’s very much like the NATO strategy I described before, to use nuclear weapons as a kind of signaling device that things are going to get much worse if you respond. But that doesn’t actually prevent escalation. It could provoke escalation. I just don’t see the situation as stable as Van Evera and others do.
Another scholar worth talking to is Benoît Pelopidas in Paris, who has written in particular about the role of luck in preventing nuclear war. He’s looked at a number of cases of accidents, of miscommunication, and he says we’ve actually been saved from nuclear war mainly by luck. If you acknowledge that it’s luck that has prevented nuclear war, that makes you much less enthusiastic about the stability of nuclear deterrence and commits you more to look for alternatives. I’m more persuaded by his arguments than by Van Evera’s.
Catherine Lutz called it — though in a different context — magical thinking. We think because nothing major has happened to us on our own soil, we think that our current policy should remain.
Exactly – the thought that because nothing bad has happened yet, nothing bad will happen.