|
|
|
|
The Second Nuclear Age, by Colin S. Gray
1. Nuclear Problem, Nuclear Condition
This is a second nuclear age. The good news is that the first nuclear age that was defined and driven by Soviet-U.S. superpower antagonism definitively is dead. The less good news is that a nuclear quality to world politics persists beyond the erstwhile great East-West Cold War. The prospectively even less good news is that a third nuclear age probably lurks in the wings and could see the return of a single dominant political axis of nuclear-armed hostility.
This book is about our future with nuclear weapons and with other so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMD): biological, toxin, chemical, and radiological. It is tempting to frame the argument explicitly with truly long-term suggestions about a likely succession of nuclear ages, but the hypothesis of a second nuclear age is sufficiently novel to dampen incentives to more heroic theoretical outreach. A professional person is always most vulnerable at the level of assumptions. I am acutely aware of the need to bed my argument within a well-built house of plausible propositions about the workings of world politics.
The Second Nuclear Age is about the meaning of nuclear weapons for national and international security today and tomorrow. Beyond that magisterial and rather daunting description lies a host of more modest ambitions. The subject here is both the character of an emerging era and a requirement to define how particular kinds of menaces can be defeated, otherwise neutralized, or simply endured on tolerable terms. The problem is how to cope well enough with a persistently, albeit evolving, nuclear (and biological and chemical) future.
Because propositions drive analysis and shape conclusions, it is important to be aware of their presence, identity, and influence. This book explores the twin views, first, that nuclear weapons are an important subject for security and, second, that they will continue indefinitely to be such. The former view is not particularly controversial. A fair-sized legion of security theorists, conservative and liberal alike, endorses this first view so strongly that in some cases they hope by their educational efforts to be able to deny validity to the second view. 1 As the exceptionally bloody twentieth century moves to its close, the sentiment and principled determination to marginalize and then effectively, if not necessarily quite literally, to abolish nuclear arms is very much in the political and ethical ascendant.
In my view, the movement for nuclear abolition is as hopeless of achievement as it is frequently well intentioned. As the title of this chapter suggests, nuclear weapons provide a particular character of condition as well as constituting a problem. Since strategy by definition is a practical subject 2 —it is about bridging what can be a yawning gap between political purpose and military (and other grand-strategic) means—it is foolish, because impractical, to treat what we will show is a permanent nuclear condition as if it were a problem that could be resolved and thereby expunged. To risk overemphasis of claim, nuclear weapons are not akin to the horse cavalry and mounted infantry of yore, albeit quite recent yore. The future, we can hope, is a long time—asteroids and other (e.g., geophysical, pandemic) hazards permitting. The future cannot be foreseen in detail, but for both good and ill one can foresee a long-term role for nuclear weapons and other WMD. In principle, and one day for near certain, nuclear weapons might be superseded by functionally superior substitutes; indeed, for some purposes and for some countries—one in particular, the United States—such substitution already is far advanced. 3 Nonetheless, the nuclear era endures.
Another view that is significant for the plot of the analysis—this time at a much higher level than weaponry—is that the nature of world politics will not so alter in the twenty-first century that security demand for the several strategic services that can be provided by nuclear arms will evaporate. It is most plausible to argue that the nature and purpose of war and strategy are eternal in their essentials but that their character is ever changing. One might well endorse the proposition that, at most, nuclear weapons were a vital part of yesterday’s answers to yesterday’s security and strategic questions. Then one might seek logically to outflank the potential provision of strategic effect by nuclear armament with the claim that those weapons are no longer relevant to the questions that security communities ask.
By way of a partial analogy, one can suggest that a possible reason Carl von Clausewitz’s master work On War has had no worthy successors in the field of the theory of war and strategy is that the dominant question in need of answer has changed in the course of this century. Whereas Clausewitz delved straight into “war proper,” 4 without diversion into either the causes of war or even into how real war for limited political goals might influence the course of military operations, many people since 1918 have been apt to see war itself as the question in need of answer. As a person of his time, place, and therefore culture, Clausewitz did not romanticize war and generalship, but neither did he question their necessity.
The challenge to nuclear weapons appears at several levels. Three ascending altitudes must be noted. First, one can argue that the military, strategic, and hence even political effect that once could flow only from nuclear capabilities in the future will be provided by non-nuclear military means. Precise “conventional” destruction or disablement will, indeed already can, replace some of the desired effects of nuclear use and in forms that are more user-friendly for appropriately fearful, not to say ethically aware, policymakers.
Second, one can argue that the future of warfare will not register conflicts of kinds to which nuclear (or other) weapons of mass destruction will be militarily relevant. On this claim, the great wars of the twenty-first century will see widespread and hugely savage combat, but that combat will occur at very close quarters in ever more urban geography. 5 The future of warfare, in this view, though savage indeed, is unlikely to have the character of the great struggles of the Westphalian period of modern history, which is to say of state against state.
Third, and finally, the approach of the millennium encourages a millennial optimism that is as well meant as it is imprudent. One could argue that the competition for security (and other goals and values) is a condition of anarchy that describes the essentials of the political world of Homer’s graphically violent Iliad, just as it describes at least the core character of world politics in the twentieth century, 6 but that that condition is now in process of radical change. Chris Brown, a leading British academic theorist of international relations, tells us that today “we may not have world government, but we do have ‘global governance.’” 7 Brown is correct in pointing to the fact that world politics today is not in a Hobbesian condition of anarchy, but, one should add, it never really was in such a state. One can note the complex interdependencies among polities, societies, economies, and cultures yet still harbor dark suspicions to the effect that the chameleon-like social institution that is war will be adapted to changing times more successfully than it will be tackled by abolitionist impulses. Readers may care to recall that, since the 1850s, what Michael Walzer terms “the war convention” has aggregated an ever larger and more rigorously demanding body of norms and regulations for the control of beastliness in war. 8 Nonetheless, as the famous book title of 1948 expressed the matter, this century has seen an “advance to barbarism” awesome in its actual, and even more in its officially licensed potential, record of violence. 9 The 1990s registered the commission in Europe and Africa of war crimes that are at least in junior league with the Holocaust of the early 1940s, and as recently as the late 1980s, two super states had in place contingency war plans for nuclear use on a scale that easily could have produced an immediate and delayed death toll in the tens, or even hundreds, of millions. All of this may argue the necessity for radical benign change in the condition of world politics, but, alas, it does not argue conclusively, or even persuasively on the evidence available, a sufficiency of pressure for such change.
The attitude that informs this book is that although anything is possible in security affairs—the Holocaust in the heart of “civilized” Europe has settled that matter 10 —we have seen at least the structure of the most relevant future because we have good enough access to much of our past. This attitude, perspective perhaps, is of course controversial. I believe it to be well founded, but I do not claim it as a Great Truth. It is neither atavistic nor unimaginative to argue that “strategy will, or should, rule” in the next century, as it has in this one. 11 This is not to claim any dominance for distinctively strategic competence, only an enduring relevance of the strategic function for security communities.
* * *
This book aspires to explain the structure of the problem of a persistently nuclear security and insecurity condition so that appropriate classes of measures can be readily identified and eventually win political acceptance. The ambition to recommend how we can survive more securely by coping as effectively as possible with the characteristics of this second nuclear age constitutes journey’s end in Chapter 6. En route to Chapter 6, the analytical narrative trajectory proceeds by explaining the concept and “working” of the second nuclear age (Chapter 2) and takes a fresh look at the somewhat overstudied subject of nuclear proliferation, this time with a view to uncover some of the more unhelpful of the fallacies that impede clear thought and (what I regard as) prudent policy (Chapters 3 and 4). Next, the analysis visits the intellectual and policy terrain of nuclear strategy to see what remains useful from the glory decades of the Cold War in the different security conditions of this second nuclear age (Chapter 5). The concluding chapter (Chapter 6) considers the ways in which we can cope tolerably well with our nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons future.
Of “Ages” and Revolutions in Military Affairs
To call a book The Second Nuclear Age is to register a conceptual claim before the evidence is presented. Historical periodization can be apparently arbitrary, is often contestable even on its own leading criterion, and is neither right nor wrong. In common with definitions, periodization is either more or less useful and, on the evidence available, more or less plausible. Letters of fire in the sky did not proclaim on 6 August 1945 that the (first) atomic, or nuclear, age had dawned. Similarly, on 22 December 1989—the day that the Berlin Wall began to be dismantled—no unarguably authoritative source insisted that a second nuclear age was dawning. Although the concepts of first and second nuclear ages are intellectual constructs, these concepts are both massively supportable empirically and, above all else, they are useful.
There is a paradoxical quality about the hypothesis of a second nuclear age. On the one hand, it proclaims a major change in nuclear security context. On the other hand, this central hypothesis—that we are in a second nuclear age—intentionally amd inherently devalues the significance of that major change. If it is claimed that a first nuclear age is being displaced by a second, it should follow that a third nuclear age could succeed this second one, then a fourth, and so on. A sense of serialization is exactly what is intended. The suggestion is not that just because there have been clearly distinctive first and second nuclear ages, future strategic history has to witness a series of distinguishable nuclear ages. It is possible that nuclear weapons might lose all attractiveness for potential owners. It is more probable that nuclear weapons, like gunpowder arms, effectively have entered human arsenals forever; but that has to be a matter strictly for speculation.
The first contribution to the paradox cited above is the claim that the years 1945–1989 (arguably 1947–1991) constituted a first nuclear age, an age organized and dominated by the rivalry between two superpowers. Of course, the USSR was never quite a superpower in the same category of global excellence as was the United States—a geopolitical and geostrategic fact of some historical significance (ask Fidel Castro). 12 I claim further that the fall of the Berlin Wall and of the Soviet imperium in East-Central Europe, and then the demise of the USSR itself, so altered the political context that provides the structure for nuclear-related matters of international security that it is plausible, and useful, to hypothesize the arrival of a second nuclear age.
This book proclaims that nuclear (and biological and chemical) menace remains important—both negatively and, more contentiously, positively—for our security but that the character of that menace changed almost beyond recognition from, say, the mid-1980s to the late 1990s. The Second Nuclear Age is about the problems of coping with the largely unfamiliar challenges of a different—hence “second”—nuclear security environment from that in which today’s policymakers were educated strategically. Also, the book is about the process of trying to cope with a new nuclear age when the conceptual, and much of the material, “toolkit” derives from a previous period.
Narrative history may be old-fashioned, but it corresponds quite well to the physical laws of space and time. The course of historical events proceeds consequentially from causes to outcomes, none of which can be final. Several aspects of the hypothesized “second nuclear age” are eminently contestable. Nonetheless, proclamation of “second” suggests both distinctive differences from “first” and the possibility of “third” and beyond.
Scholars of nuclear security issues have neither been particularly well integrated in their analyses with military security debate as a whole, nor been well integrated into broad arguments about the course of world politics. The hypothesis upon which this book rests simply is that there was a first nuclear age coterminous with the Cold War, and now there is a second nuclear age that has important implications for the global security condition after the Cold War. Whether or not a “third,” “fourth,” or “fifth” nuclear age beckons in our security future is irrelevant to the argument.
Readers are requested to be strategically bifocal. Above all else, this book is about coping well enough with the second nuclear age that now is dawning. Of less immediate moment is the strategic historical probability that the nuclear connected facts of today are building the conditions that will emerge one day as a third nuclear age. On current form in world politics, though not yet quite predictably, a putative third nuclear age is most likely to be organized by the return of a single central axis of antagonism in world politics. Over the next fifty years or so, there are very few even semiplausible worthy competitors to a United States that geopolitically has to constitute one side of the axis in question. The short list of possible candidates for status of “principal and worthy foe” (or foes) of the United States includes Russia, the European Union, Japan, China, and—to be fanciful—Brazil and an Islamic state or coalition.
None of the candidate-worthy foes identified above are plausibly truly peer competitors; that is, none of the polities either cited or hypothesized appears to have the multidimensional strength to develop into a globally hegemonic superstate. But each of the possible foes mentioned either is or could be strategically competitive in at least one or two regions and in one or more varieties of conflict. One might recall that because of the rich multidimensionality of war and strategy, as well as of belligerents, North Vietnam—the Prussia of Southeast Asia—was entirely strategically competitive in the 1960s with a hugely self-confident (at least initially) United States. 13 It is probable that in neither a second nor possibly even a third nuclear age will the United States be obliged to cope with a nuclear-armed antagonist fully in the same league of capabilities as itself (recall that during the Cold War the USSR was never really a first-class superpower). But that thought implies less good news for the United States than one might expect.
By far the most probable future central axis of antagonism in world politics is one between the United States and China. 14 The possibility, or probability, has to be mentioned at this early juncture, because the reemergence of Sino-U.S. antagonism is a trend that could carry the political traffic necessary to incubate and deliver a third nuclear age. Such an age is incubating today, much as the seeds, roots, or origins of conflicts grow during postwar, interwar, and then prewar years. There is no certainty about the general character, let alone the detail, of the age after the current one, but much of the material from which that future age will be fashioned is around us now.
Every conflict is distinctive. I do not confuse the China of, say, 2020 with the USSR of 1980, or with Nazi Germany. Furthermore, I do not confuse nuclear armament with any “last move” in weaponry, nor do I suggest that the key algorithm for periodization in strategic history has to be geopolitical change rather than technical development or ideological revolution (a new religion, for example, or revival of old ones). It just so happens that the dominant differences between the first and the second nuclear ages were wholly political, as the USSR foundered and the great Cold War died a strategically natural and unpredictably peaceful death. The argument that the contemporary, which is to say “second,” nuclear age eventually will give way to a third nuclear age is not seriously troubled by the recent excitement over an information-led revolution in military affairs (RMA). 15 A third nuclear age, which I judge—or guess—will likely be triggered by intense Sino-U.S. antagonism, will thus be the product principally of geopolitical and geostrategic calculation. In the twenty-first century, the United States and China are likely to define each other as the preponderant menace to their vital interests.
The idea of a second nuclear age is under heavy conceptual and empirical challenge from what might be termed the forces of RMA. One might suggest that the admitted novelty of the current nuclear context in practice is overshadowed by a contemporary RMA geared to the exploitation of cyberspace or, more radically, that the new age that is dawning is not a second nuclear age but rather an information age. The several meanings of the information-led candidate RMA—especially, on one hand, the more precise delivery of bombs and bullets and, on the other hand, information power in cyberspace—and their implications are discussed as appropriate throughout this text.
Both nuclear ages and RMAs are eminently contestable concepts of convenience. However, the case for claiming that today we live in a nuclear age radically different from the nuclear age of the Cold War decades is empirically clearer and more plausible than is the claim for arrival of an information-led RMA. Notwithstanding my conviction that nuclear weapons will remain significant as instruments variably of security and insecurity, I cannot simply dismiss out of hand the theory that information technologies will transform war—that is, the “grammar” of strategy, 16 not the nature of war—and in the process condemn nuclear armaments to the garbage heap of strategic history. In historical practice, quite often RMAs—and RMA remains a slippery grand idea—can appear other than strictly and neatly seriatim. 17 Moreover, the several fruits of RMAs can persist, even when those “revolutions” appear on the stage successively; the stage may just become more crowded. Eschewing arid definitional discussion of RMA, one needs to understand that the political, social, and military domain of purportedly revolutionary change is apt in practice to be limited. If nuclear weapons heralded a true revolution, an RMA on anybody’s terms, what was it that they revolutionized? The practicability of great war between nuclear-armed states perhaps; but large-scale conventional warfare certainly has not been abandoned, even though fears of uncontrollable escalation have discouraged nuclear powers from fighting each other. 18 No matter how genuinely revolutionary one judges the nuclear revolution to have been, the fact remains that almost the full panoply of late pre–nuclear weapon types remain in the arsenals of many countries. The nuclear era, in its two ages, has proved compatible with (non-nuclear-armed) aircraft, armored fighting vehicles of all kinds, surface ships and submarines, and all manner of personal and crew-served firearms. This does not amount to an eccentric claim that there has been no nuclear RMA, but it does constitute a warning about the practicably restricted domain even of apparently the most unarguably revolutionary of RMAs.
Although the contemporary armies of nuclear-armed states bear more than a slight similarity to the most effective armies of 1918, 19 one should be prepared for the strong possibility, probability even, that a mature information-led RMA will prove entirely compatible with a persistently nuclear context. Not only can RMAs appear in tandem or more, they can also persist in authority—albeit bounded authority—as they are adapted to changing conditions. This is precisely what The Second Nuclear Age is about. The nuclear RMA has transmuted significantly as its political context has been revolutionized.
Principal Themes
This book most directly is about nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy in strategic history, but the analysis also bears upon some enduring and universal themes in relation to which nuclear matters can be viewed as a case study. Both singly and in shifting coalition, seven themes weave in and out of this text.
My first theme is the prospective permanence of the nuclear fact for strategy. In its more inclusive form, this theme amounts to the claim that strategic history is more cumulative than serial. No matter what governments and others may decide about nuclear arsenals, the clock of strategic history cannot be wound back to an era of prenuclear innocence. Much as people have children whether or not they are ready to be parents, and newborn polities were declared independent from colonial rule whether or not they were technically and ethically fit for self-government, so in the 1940s humankind acquired through military atomic knowledge the ability to make unprecedented hell on earth, even though the structures and attitudes of world politics were not radically reformed. The nuclear fact was layered both on top of and in some competition with more traditional grand-strategic and military-strategic instruments of statecraft. The nuclear era with its several “ages” may prove to be a passing phase in strategic history, but it is a phase with no terminal point plausibly predictable from today.
Second, the nuclear challenge to our security does not reduce to a simple menace, even though the eventual emergence of a third nuclear age characterized by a dominant axis of nuclear-armed antagonism is likely. In more general terms, this theme is a reminder that strategic peril is wont to come in multiple forms. As the discussion in Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrates plainly, the interests and motives behind and the character of the nuclear challenges in this new nuclear age require a complementary layering of policy initiatives if the requisite flexibility to cope with nuclear danger is to be achieved. In the near future, nuclear peril can take the form of an intended counterdeterrent to a U.S. regional protection role (for example, over the Republic of China on Taiwan); of an attempt at commercially minded criminal extortion (history at last would catch up with fiction); of an emphatic political statement by one of world history’s “loser” causes; or of an initially small nuclear war waged by regional rivals. And this is to cite but a few among the appalling possibilities. One should not exaggerate nuclear danger. Kenneth Waltz, for example, no matter how persuasive one finds his central thesis that nuclear-armed neighborhoods tend to be polite neighborhoods, has performed a most valuable service with his powerfully argued deflation of some of the overexpanded balloons of nuclear menace that have been floated in recent years. 20 Nonetheless, one should not discount nuclear threats. Indeed, it is the unique potency of nuclear threats upon which Waltz’s thesis leans most essentially.
My third general theme is a troubling addendum to the second theme. We will have occasion to treat more than casually the other (than nuclear) WMD (i.e., biological, toxin, and chemical weapons), which pose a growing array of threats that are in part at least distinctive in profile from nuclear menaces. Scientifically speaking, biotechnology is probably the most dynamic of the sciences today and—notwithstanding the public and official fascination with information technologies—bears truly awesome menace for international security. Compared with nuclear weapons, biological and toxin weapons are relatively cheap to produce, conceal, and deliver. As Martin Shubik has argued persuasively, global security conditions change when a small group of terrorists, criminals, patriots, freedom fighters, or whatever quite reliably by their own unaided effort can kill millions of people. 21 Welcome to the biotechnological age of warfare in the twenty-first century. This is not, at least not quite, to suggest that this current, “second” nuclear age will be succeeded by a biotoxin/chemical age of war whose lethal instruments will comprise stocks of weapons that would spread botulism, bubonic plague, typhoid, and anthrax or would deliver hydrogen cyanide or VX nerve gas. But, readers are alerted to the fact that throughout this book, even when it is apparent that the text deals explicitly with nuclear problems, biological, toxin, and chemical menaces are always on the author’s mind. When necessary, the discussion treats those extranuclear WMD as separately as strategically they require to be treated.
Just as the acronym WMD conflates large and potentially strategically significant differences among broad categories of weapons, the acronyms BCW (biological and chemical weapons) and BTCW (biological, toxin, and chemical weapons) similarly conflate major technical distinctions that have strategic significance. 22 With reference to the essential nature of each category of weapon: biological weapons are infectious microorganisms that reproduce within the human target-victim host and cause an incapacitating or fatal illness; toxin weapons are poisonous chemicals that are produced by living organisms and have some features common to both chemical and biological agents; and chemical weapons consist of artificial, nonliving poisons. Fortunately, perhaps, biological weaponry, which is by far the most potent category of menace among this hellish brew, is also the most difficult to weaponize for reliable, temporally useful military and strategic effect. Whereas chemical weapons (CW) and toxin weapons (TW) produce lethal or incapacitating effects within minutes, and certainly in hours, biological weapons (BW)—needing time to reproduce within human hosts—have incubation periods in the range of twenty-four hours to six weeks. To take an extreme example, it would have to be an unusually long-term strategic planner who would target an enemy society with the AIDS virus, given that that virus has a mean incubation period of close to ten years. Apart from the operational problem that BW weapons really are only weapons for truly strategic assault, one needs to bear in mind the caveat that employment, or misemployment, of BW weaponry could give the concept of fratricide a whole new scale of meaning.
For obvious convenience, the discussion in this book employs the synonymous acronyms WMD and NBC (nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons); and when considering non-nuclear WMD, it refers to BC (biological and chemical, with the toxins category left silent but understood as included).
The twins of “change and continuity” are the fourth theme of this text. RMAs happen; at least great changes in the character of war keep recurring. But the irregular recurrence of such change in the grammar of war and strategy does not alter the nature and purpose of those phenomena. This book provides both broad conceptual and some narrowly detailed examination of a very great change indeed in the character of world politics, which is to say the historic transition from a first nuclear age to a second. Furthermore, the book must deal speculatively with the strong possibility, even probability, of yet another historic transition—in this case from a second to a third nuclear age. In addition, the discussion here of WMD is conducted against the backdrop of the implications of the major cumulative changes for security and strategy that currently are being effected by the arrival of new information technologies. This theme may appear so familiar as to warrant dismissal as a cliché. How many tedious reports, articles, and speeches have carried the deadly twin ideas of change and continuity? I risk the charge of purveying a truism by arguing that change and continuity is a compound theme that typically is not handled well by strategic theorists; whether this book can be an exception only time will tell. It is no mean feat to sort out, as scholars should, what is wont to change and what is not and—above all else—why that should be so.
Fifth, deterrence is unreliable; 23 there are inherent, structural problems with the reliability of deterrence, even of nuclear deterrence. This theme is not intended to convey the message that deterrence does not work, and neither is it chosen to imply that deterrence should not be attempted. The point rather is that defense professionals are wont to forget that (nuclear) deterrence is an effect in a mixed coercive and cooperative relationship. To attempt to deter is to offer the intended deterree the choice either to cooperate or not to cooperate. The elegance and sophistication of the theory of deterrence, especially of nuclear deterrence, stand in sharp contrast with the difficulties that can impede the successful practice of deterrence.
Sixth among the themes explored in this work is the persistence of the distortion that the lenses of both political and strategic culture and national but parochial interest can wreak upon strategic policy. 24 Rephrased, local culture and interest fuel self-delusion. Candidate cases of this self-delusion especially relevant for this book include the propositions that the international community can be divided into responsible, as contrasted with “rogue,” states (or groups) and that the dawn of the proclaimed information age will promote the conduct of cleaner, more “surgical,” information-led military campaigns. Precise delivery of ordnance from unmanned, standoff arsenal platforms (floating, flying, or orbiting) allegedly will remove much of the pain, and blame (for unwanted collateral damage), from war because it will be waged by the United States’ information warriors. 25 An underrecognized, albeit obvious, dimension of war and strategy is the adversarial relationship between belligerents. Forms of conflict that we deem most attractive, which is to say forms that play overwhelmingly to our comparative strategic advantage, are unlikely to appeal to our foes. 26 That logic may or may not matter very much, depending upon the practicable choices open to the enemy. Nonetheless, this theme of the self-deluding potential of local culture and interest bears a notable promise to distort defense policy over the next several decades. It can be easy to forget that the character of this second nuclear age is not shaped solely by the negative attitudes toward nuclear armament dominant in an ever more I-war-minded U.S. defense community. Indeed, the less strategically attractive nuclear weapons appear to the United States, the greater the attraction of those weapons and other WMD to possible foes and other “rogues.”
There is, and can be, no objective definition of rogue states. Were the idea of a rogue state not in widespread usage today, certainly I would be delighted not to promote it further. However, this particular pejorative term-of-art does enjoy both wide currency and tolerably plain meaning. A rogue state is a polity judged by us to be committed to overturn a settled framework of order that we regard as legitimate (at least, legitimate enough). The principal problem with the concept is that its rather casual deployment can encourage an unhelpful disdain for the rationality, and indeed the sincerity, of the policymaking of the “rogue.”
Finally, the seventh theme is the Clausewitzian revelation that friction can rule. 27 Scholars, including myself, no less than public officials, are tempted to draw neat and orderly pictures of the future. Understandably, if unfortunately, scholars and officials are massively liable to seduction by the structure of their distinctive responsibilities. It is the duty of the strategic scholar to explain the structure of those future problems that he or she anticipates. Logically, and sometimes with a perilous hubris, the scholar proceeds to explain that if, as predicted, this or that were to prove a serious danger, then this or that should provide the strategic effect necessary to defeat that danger. Unsurprisingly, we scholars are liable to design appropriate solutions to the problems that we also have designed. Similarly, though with greater excuse because of the pressures of immediate public accountability, officials are all but required to appear to believe that what they propose must be uniquely the correct response to anticipated perils. Because the process of defense planning cannot yield definitely correct answers—so many divisions, squadrons, and the like—definite scenarios are likely either to drive force planning or at least to dignify force plans developed according to other, less reputable criteria. Given that this book is a policy-scientific study of the problem of coping with a persistently nuclear future, 28 the theme of friction, chance, uncertainty, and risk asserts that the future course of strategic history is certain to contain surprises, some of them major and some of them significant in their potentially negative effect upon our security. Even if friction does not rule, it can stage a coup attempt at any time with consequences that must challenge the prudence in statecraft, strategy, and defense planning. To cite but one basket of perils, nuclear accidents of several kinds can happen and have happened. Recent scholarship is particularly eloquent on the statistically cumulative dangers that attend the nuclear era of whatever “age.” 29
So What?
Nuclear security problems have not gone away and are unlikely to vanish over the next several decades. The subject of The Second Nuclear Age is a set of WMD perils that, in a later “age” born out of this second age, will most probably return as the dominant danger embedded in the return of a great balance-of-power struggle. For the nearer term, in the second nuclear age (of uncertain duration) there are numerous local, regional, and criminal perils to international security that challenge our ability to adapt and to empathize with cultures different from our own.
Now that the great Cold War is history and new RMAs are being touted by theorists and salespeople, the time is ripe for reconsideration in detail of our strategic knowledge of nuclear affairs. Most of that knowledge was discovered, or created, to meet the immediate needs of the Cold War. With the Cold War definitively interred, and with even the post–Cold War period disappearing into history, how much of that nuclear knowledge from the decades structured preeminently by the bilateral Soviet-U.S. rivalry retains its integrity? What need is there for nuclear strategy today? If strategy bridges the gap between military means and political ends, what ends can, and should, nuclear military means now serve?
For a disturbing thought with which to conclude this opening chapter, is it even sound to argue that we can interrogate the nuclear “knowledge” inherited from the decades of Cold War in order to find the nuggets of theory and practice that can continue to serve us well? What if our problem is not only one of adapting past nuclear wisdom to the new conditions of a second nuclear age, but also is one of possible base metal in what long has been believed to be gold? What should we endorse from the theories and practice of nuclear security of Cold War vintage when we suspect that our physical and political survival may have been achieved despite, rather than because of, some of those theories and practices?
Endnotes
Note 1: Close approximations to this position may be located in Canberra Commission, Report; and National Academy of Sciences, Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy. Back.
Note 2: Brodie, War and Politics, pp. 652–653. Back.
Note 3: Blaker, Understanding the Revolution in Military Affairs. Back.
Note 4: Clausewitz, On War, p. 131. Back.
Note 5: Peters, “Our Soldiers, Their Cities.” Back.
Note 6: Bull, Anarchical Society; Waltz, Theory of International Politics. Back.
Note 7: Chris Brown, Understanding International Relations, p. 121. Back.
Note 8: Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 44. Back.
Note 9: Jurist, Advance to Barbarism. Back.
Note 10: On “civilization,” see Gong, Standard of “Civilization.” Back.
Note 11: For detailed justification of this argument, see Gray, “RMAs and the Dimensions of Strategy.” Back.
Note 12: The Cuban perspective is well, indeed possibly unduly well, treated in Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble.” Back.
Note 13: This is not to deny that pessimistic military prognoses of the scope and scale of the U.S. mission were not in short supply in the early 1960s. See Buzzanco, Masters of War. The telling point is that the U.S. government proceeded in Vietnam even though it was the beneficiary of much unwelcome news about the difficulty of the task. Back.
Note 14: The strongest statement to date of this possibility is Bernstein and Munro, Coming Conflict with China. Also see Shambaugh, “Chinese Hegemony”; and Nye, “China’s Re-emergence.” Back.
Note 15: See Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer”; Blaker, Understanding the Revolution in Military Affairs; Gray, American Revolution in Military Affairs; Murray, “Thinking About Revolutions in Military Affairs”; Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Athena’s Camp; and Freedman, Revolution in Strategic Affairs. Back.
Note 16: Clausewitz, On War, p. 605. Back.
Note 17: Murray, “Thinking About Revolutions in Military Affairs.” Back.
Note 18: Jervis, Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution. Back.
Note 19: See Jonathan Bailey, First World War. Back.
Note 20: Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons; Sagan and Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, chs. 1, 3. Back.
Note 21: U.S. Congress, Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction, chs. 2, 3; Dando, Biological Warfare in the 21st Century; Shubik, “Terrorism, Technology, and the Socioeconomics of Death”; Betts, “New Threat of Mass Destruction”; Cole, Eleventh Plague. Back.
Note 22: In this paragraph, as generally elsewhere in the text on the technical “basics” of biological, toxin, and chemical agency, I rely heavily upon U.S. Congress, Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction. This excellent report warrants description as a manual for would-be proliferants. Back.
Note 23: For a previous venture into this analytical area, see Gray, Explorations in Strategy, ch. 3. Back.
Note 24: Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism; Bathurst, Intelligence and the Mirror. Back.
Note 25: Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare”; Friedman and Friedman, Future of War. Back.
Note 26: See Freedman, Revolution in Strategic Affairs, pp. 38–41; and Matthews, Challenging the United States. Back.
Note 27: Clausewitz, On War, pp. 119–121. Back.
Note 28: Lasswell, “The Policy Orientation”; Dror, Design for Policy Science. Back.
Note 29: Feaver, Guarding the Guardians; Blair, Logic of Accidental Nuclear War; Scott Sagan, Limits of Safety; Thayer, “Risk of Nuclear Inadvertence,” and responses by Blair, Feaver, and Sagan (pp. 494–520); Pry, War Scare. Back.
Email this citation