国家が核武装するとき

Why Countries Build Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century
Proliferation no longer begets proliferation– conventional military power does.

zachary-keck_q
By Zachary Keck
July 03, 2013

President France’s rationale was straight forward. As Hymans explains, he believed that “French military power must remain at least one order of magnitude superior to Germany’s; thus, the fewer the restrictions on German conventional weapons, the greater the need for a French atomic force.” Given France’s suffering at the hands of the German military in WWI and WWII, his decision isn’t too hard to comprehend.



Israel’s decision to pursue the bomb was also motivated almost entirely by its perceived conventional inferiority vis-à-vis its Arab neighbors. Although these neighbors did not possess nuclear weapons, Israeli leaders in the late 1950s and 1960s could not be optimistic about the military balance both then and into the future. After all, Egypt alone is 55 times larger than Israel and, in 1967, had about eleven times its population. Israeli leaders therefore calculated that acquiring a nuclear weapon was the surest way to negate this inherent conventional imbalance, and thereby ensure the Jewish state’s survival.



Of course, the U.S. military is part of the equation on the Korean Peninsula, and its stunning victory in the first Gulf War left little doubt about its conventional dominance in the post-Cold War era. Subsequent years have confirmed this dominance, as well as the United States’ willingness to use it to overthrow adversarial governments. This was ominous indeed for policymakers in Pyongyang, who rightly calculated that they couldn’t match America’s conventional military might. Consequently, they sought to negate its military superiority by acquiring the ultimate deterrent.



The U.S. threat to Iran has only grown more precarious since 2003; not surprisingly, Iran’s nuclear program has made its greatest advances during this time.




The fact that conventional military power is the strongest factor driving nuclear proliferation should guide how we think about proliferation threats in the future. For instance, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, its neighbors will be unlikely to follow suit. Not only do these states lack the necessary technical capacity, but they have little to fear from Iran’s nearly non-existent power projection capabilities.

On the other hand, the rise in China’s conventional military strength makes it likely that Eastern Asia will be the region where the most potent proliferation risks emanate from.

　フランス、イスラエル、北朝鮮、イランなどの例をあげて、隣国が核武装したからといって、核武装するわけではないが、仮想敵国との通常兵器でのギャップを埋めようとするとき、国家は核武装する、と。


　今後、中国の通常兵器での能力が高まってくるので、すでにその技術をもっている日本や韓国の指導者が核武装すべきであると考える可能性はたかい、と。


ーーーーー日本は、平和、紛争抑止のために、核武装へのシナリオをしっかり議論しておく必要がある。歴史問題で足を引っ張られているどころではないのである。