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The Second Nuclear Age, by Colin S. Gray
4. To Confuse Ourselves: Nuclear Fallacies
This chapter, which focuses primarily on proliferation-oriented topics, is designed to serve as a master filter for judgments on nuclear ideas and policy. So much of the professional literature today barely lifts its level of concern from the weeds of the erstwhile marshes of southern Iraq, or ventures beyond the containing walls of nuclear reactors, that major effort is required to escape capture by technical and diplomatic detail and local context. I am concerned lest these early years of the second nuclear age should be squandered by a transnational, extended Western defense community that is not equipped theoretically to understand the strategic history that is at hand, let alone the strategic history that may be.
The main body of the discussion in this chapter explores what is labeled, undeniably with deliberate malice, as “eight nuclear fallacies.” The choice of eight is not significant. What is significant, however, is the spirit of the analysis and discussion. This spirit is skeptical, irreverent, unapologetic, and yet deeply serious about the emerging perils to national and international security posed by WMD. Some readers will know that I have a “past,” as the ominous phrase will have it. It is precisely because I have a “past” that this chapter is especially important. Some of the strategic controversies with which my name is closely linked—nuclear strategy and strategic arms control, in particular 1 —may appear to pertain only to the now closed context of the Cold War. In this chapter, the nuclear fallacies discussed are fallacies about today and tomorrow. These fallacies have some minor resonance for all nuclear history, but they have major resonance for this second nuclear age.
The fallacies identified and discussed below comprise a mix of beliefs and arguments, some of which are advanced explicitly in the literature (e.g., on nuclear abolition, on virtual arsenals, and on a nuclear taboo); others either are implicit in much public debate (e.g., the reliability of deterrence, the infeasibility of defense, and the ability of the current international security system to cope well enough with a small nuclear war) or at least—in my opinion—loom as important topics likely to attract attention before very long. Whether the extant literature on a “fallacy” is large or small, the belief in question inherently is important, either because it addresses a matter structural to this second nuclear age or because it attracts adherents who might succeed in influencing nuclear policy in significant ways.
Fallacy 1: A Post-Nuclear Era has Dawned
Neither the nonproliferation regime that has the NPT as the jewel in its crown nor strategic trends of other kinds (e.g., keyed to the political, ethical, or technological dimensions of strategy) are in the process of aborting the nuclear character of this second nuclear age. Nuclear deterrence is not at present actively intended in great power relations, but it remains a background element. It is useful for Michael Quinlan to distinguish between a policy toward nuclear deterrence that has shifted comprehensively into generality—“to whom it may concern” as the unnamed addressee 2 —and one that absolutely renounces nuclear war. As Quinlan notes, most countries’ armed forces, most of the time, are not specifically “addressed” as threats to particular putative foes. However, the popular notion of general deterrence, and especially general nuclear deterrence, can be overappreciated. 3 Nonetheless, U.S. nuclear weapons do help frame, or backstop, U.S. diplomacy for the (pre)containment of China, they are obviously a factor in any Russian speculation about the staging of some return of imperium, and they would be inalienably on the board of statecraft in roles supporting any U.S. military intervention against regional foes. The U.S. policy stance today is decidedly unenthusiastic about nuclear weapons, 4 probably unduly so, but no matter how bland and general that policy is, actual or potential enemies of the United States have to ask the question, What do U.S. nuclear weapons mean for us?
Identification of this first fallacy is not intended to invite an argument about current trends. Most trends are reversible. The political and military-technical tide certainly would seem to be leaving nuclear options “on the beach”—with apologies to the late Nevil Shute for the reference to his apocalyptic novel. 5 The indefinite extension of the NPT at the latest review conference (1995) assuredly was a great success for the nonproliferation regime and was, at least apparently, a boost to the norms promoted by that regime. Moreover, the surge in precise military lethality that is allowed by the clutch of capabilities developed for information-led warfare would seem to place nuclear weapons at a discount. One can argue that the quest for precision in bombardment has been motivated in part by the strong desire to escape from the grip of military rationales for nuclear weapons. 6 All that appears to beckon, however, may not really be on offer.
The numbers of nuclear weapons and nuclear threshold states remain much lower than proliferation pessimists were predicting in the 1950s and 1960s. 7 There is no question that the pace of proliferation has been slow and at present shows no thoroughly convincing signs of a prospect for other than a distinctly steady acceleration. But this trend, if that is what it is, of a deliberate pace in proliferation is vulnerable to nuclear learning from any crisis, anywhere, that seems to demonstrate a strategic necessity for nuclear arms. The trend that has produced only five NPT-“licensed” nuclear weapons states (which happen to be the five permanent members of the UN Security Council), three “unlicensed” nuclear-weapons states (Israel, India, Pakistan), (at least) one near–nuclear weapons threshold state (North Korea), and three would-be nuclear weapons states (Iraq, Iran, Libya) is indeed impressive. Also, it is impressive that, inter alia, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, and Taiwan have stepped back from active pursuit of the military nuclear option. 8 More noteworthy still was the renunciation in 1990 of actual, as opposed to virtual, nuclear weapons by South Africa, whose internal and external security condition has been transformed by and large for the better, 9 and by the distinctly insecure extra-Russian legatees of part of the erstwhile Soviet nuclear arsenal.
Unfortunately, the problem is not with the fact of a slow pace of nuclear proliferation. The problem lies rather in knowing what that fact means. Are we witnessing a trend in nuclear reduction toward zero—a high policy goal embraced formally, if insincerely, by the extant nuclear weapons states—toward an existentially postnuclear era? Or does what we see signify nothing in particular about the strategic salience of nuclear weapons? Just one undeterrable, or deterrable but not deterred, nuclear act could revolutionize the terms of debate over nuclear policy in several countries.
Quantity and quality should not be confused. The small number of nuclear weapons, and near nuclear weapons, states is less important than is their identity, the potential for infectious further proliferation that they bear, and the implications for character of conflict that they carry. The principal reason that nuclear proliferation is dangerous, even if occasionally it can make a net positive contribution to regional peace with security, is exactly the reason that arms control usually disappoints. The global nonproliferation regime cannot handle the hardest of hard cases. Even if there are only a handful of predictably near-threshold states, that short shortlist happens to include polities with exceedingly serious security problems—which is, of course, a leading reason they resist the force of the control regime. The polities in question are at present only North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and perhaps Libya. In 1998, India and Pakistan left the realm of “threshold” states to enjoy the uncertain mixed blessings of full-blown nuclear weapons standing.
A significant reason this second nuclear age is not in the process of radical transformation into a postnuclear era has been identified with some hyperbole by Martin van Creveld. “By the time the cold war ended, any state in possession of even a halfway modern conventionally armed force was also capable of manufacturing, begging or stealing nuclear weapons.” 10 Van Creveld exaggerates, but not by much, and the exaggeration is merited because it highlights a point of the utmost importance. The newfound effectiveness of regular Western conventional arms is the very reason those who are conventionally challenged find NBC arms of great interest.
Fallacy 2: Nuclear Abolition is Feasible and Desirable
Two problems with nuclear weapons have the effect of acting like forces of nature. The first problem is the persistence of the strategic (i.e., force-related) element in human history; the second is the elemental fact of “the nuclear discovery.” 11 The synergy between these two “problems” creates the condition this book analyzes. One can imagine a world wherein the undesirable and admittedly irreversible fact of the nuclear discovery would be entirely unimportant; but if readers recall the discussion of political context in Chapter 2, they will appreciate that the kind of world that generates no policy demands for nuclear arms is not a world likely to be on offer anytime soon. For reasons of both general humanity and particular Western interest, the desirability of attempting to “marginalize” nuclear weapons as a central thrust to our security policy is fairly obvious. 12 But the difficulty with “marginalization” is that it cannot succeed if those security communities that are conventionally challenged logically see in NBC arms the prospect of a great equalizer. One need not master the finer points of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, 13 or even invest much time in the design of cunning plans, to appreciate that the highest of high roads to success lies in attacking the enemy’s strategy. In 1991, the United States taught would-be regional hegemons a master class in why nuclear armament is not a dispensable luxury if one chooses to act in ways the United States strongly deplores.
Marginalization may warrant classification as a fallacy—certainly it is a candidate fallacy—but at least it has the merit of being desirable for the United States, and it may even be feasible in a few cases that matter to the United States. That judgment is not intended as a ringing endorsement of the thesis that nuclear weapons can and should be marginalized in local, regional, and world politics, but it notes that this modest notion has some modest strategic utility. The contrast with the abolitionist position could hardly be more stark.
Two linked arguments on the feasibility of nuclear abolition should render moot any subsequent discussion about desirability. First, the nuclear discovery of 1945 means that nuclear weapons cannot really be abolished forever. One could speculate about abolition only if one toys with the notion that somehow, as with the formula for the Byzantines’ wonder weapon “Greek fire,” 14 human beings will lose the nuclear knowledge. But unless knowledge even of the fact of the erstwhile nuclear discovery also was mislaid, why would nuclear rediscovery not occur? “Virtual nuclear arsenals” by definition would lack physical presence, but they would constitute nuclear arsenals possible in the future. 15 (The distinctive fallacy of purposefully virtual arsenals is discussed below.)
The second argument against the empirical and logical integrity of the abolitionist thesis is the persisting and reliably predictable fact of policy and strategy demands for the services of nuclear arsenals. Notwithstanding Lavoy’s interesting emphasis on the manufacture of “nuclear myths” 16 (which he defines as unverifiable rather than false beliefs) by key individuals, strategic history shows that proliferant polities “go, or approach, nuclear” for a mix of deeply serious reasons. Whether or not Western would-be nuclear abolitionists find these mixes of reasons deplorable, or on balance imprudent, is beside the point.
If nuclear abolition were politically feasible, it would not really be necessary. For a global security regime, perhaps an antisecurity-regime regime in which there was robust (lasting? everyone who mattered?) consensus on the irrelevance of nuclear weapons (and BC weapons, of course), there should also be a no-less-robust consensus on the irrelevance of weapons of any kind, save those necessary for local security. With respect to nuclear weapons, in principle one can conceive of a world wherein the nuclear revolution is rendered obsolete, not merely obsolescent, by transformational changes in technology. That is a less-than-compellingly persuasive thought, one must hasten to add. There are strategic historical precedents for whole classes of weapons being abandoned—at least by the practitioners of “civilized” and regular warfare—because they have ceased to be effective. It is difficult to imagine how nuclear weapons writ large and various, which is to say not only as deliverable by ballistic or air-breathing vehicles, might be rendered globally obsolete; but one should have sufficient respect for the power of history to offer surprises as to recognize the distant possibility. However, I do not recognize even the distant possibility of a global community that does not need to be a strategic security community because it has come to embrace all possible earthly security communities. Such a global community is more likely to be achieved in the form of a dictatorial world empire than by the effect of some stain-like spread of a zone of political peace.
Nuclear abolition is impractical because, unless time travel becomes feasible, “the nuclear discovery” by the Manhattan Project in World War II cannot be undone. To argue for a policy that is inherently and permanently impractical has to be foolish, given that it can raise public expectations that cannot be fulfilled, it wastes scarce intellectual effort, and it can serve as a counsel of perfection that destabilizes more sensible nuclear policy. 17 The idea, or standard, of abolition is not merely irrelevant to the security challenges that attend nuclear armament, however; it is irrelevant in ways that could damage security. Readers may recall that although the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty of 1987 was overtaken rapidly by the political events of the meltdown of the Soviet empire, during the years of its negotiation it was a menace to the political legitimacy of NATO’s nuclear-dependent defense doctrine. 18 Given that arguments for nuclear abolition plainly are impractical and that many of those who have associated themselves with abolitionist sentiments are genuinely nuclear experts, one is at a loss to know how to characterize those people’s views other than uncharitably. 19 Experts, those whose reputations for expert knowledge lend credibility to a debatable cause, should not advocate a process that looks to accomplish complete nuclear disarmament when they know that that process must fail.
Fallacy 3: Virtual Arsenals
“The thinking person’s” variant of nuclear abolition is the proposal for a transition to virtual nuclear arsenals. 20 Recognizing the permanent force of the nuclear discovery, and indeed leaning upon its dissuasive power, at least the virtual nuclear warriors would not be seeking impracticably to reverse strategic history by declaring nuclear facts to be nonfacts. As with many of the fallacies treated in these pages, this idea of movement toward virtual nuclear arsenals is not bereft of all merit.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, “virtual arsenals would identify as a goal a situation in which no nuclear weapon is assembled and ready for use.” 21 Rephrased, “for nuclear-weapon states, creating such a cushion [of time between a given stage of nuclear technology and a deployed nuclear force] means banning the existence of assembled, ready-to-use nuclear weapons.” 22 Virtual and opaque nuclear weapons status should not be confused. If India and Pakistan prior to spring 1998 were adherents to the former, then Israel plainly enjoys the latter. A virtual nuclear arsenal is an arsenal that could be used in action quite soon. An opaque nuclear arsenal is a nuclear arsenal that is probably entirely real but whose owners choose to leave it formally unannounced or unarguably authoritatively verified.
The proposal for virtual nuclear arsenals does have its attractive features. For example:
Nonetheless, granted its apparent attractions, there is much that is unattractive about this proposal. A first-order problem with virtual nuclear deterrents is that their post- (perhaps pre)existentiality is most vitally dependent upon the ability and willingness of policymakers in popular democracies to spot evil intention and armament in time to prepare to thwart it. A virtual nuclear arsenal has the attractive quality that it will not explode by accident or be stolen in a condition ready to use (prêt-à-porter). But if the problem of nuclear accident leading to holocaust is slight and the risk of theft is minimal, why chance paying a significant price in deterrence forsworn when the benefit to security from virtuality is arguable at best?
The case against virtual nuclear arsenals is not impregnable, but it is strong:
The argument for negotiation of virtual nuclear arsenals is quite clever and not without some appeal, but it fails the tougher tests that strategic history requires one to apply for policy adoption. Virtual nuclear arsenals must be unattractive to policymakers habituated to real nuclear arsenals, and virtuality implies a range of gratuitous vulnerabilities.
The reasons that the proposal for virtual nuclear arsenals amounts to a fallacy are intensely practical. Above all else, perhaps, the proposal is likely to appear inherently foolish to established nuclear weapons states. There are several strands to this argument. With respect to politics, none of the existing NPT-licensed, nuclear weapons states would be strategically comfortable moving from the now familiar condition of being more or less ready for nuclear action, into some zone of only near-nuclear armament. With reference to military strategy, the virtual nuclear weapons states would worry about the prospective military effectiveness of nuclear forces that had been critically disaggregated until a time of acute crisis triggered the process of operational nuclear constitution or reconstitution. The case for a virtual nuclear arsenal would be an extremely difficult briefing to give in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, London, Paris, Islamabad, or New Delhi. I would not even attempt to deliver the briefing in Jerusalem.
This may sound a little strange, coming as it does from the pen of a fully licensed professional academic, but there are some ideas in strategic studies that are too clever, too eccentrically brilliant, or just too eccentric to be real contenders for policy or strategic adoption. Whereas a skillful strategic theorist will always find something to say in praise of any idea, especially in the nuclear field concerning which so little truly is known, strategy is a quintessentially practical realm. The proposal to move toward virtual nuclear arsenals, whatever the intellectual merit in the idea, suffers from the same malady as did Thomas C. Schelling’s appallingly insightful notion of a “threat that leaves something to chance,” 24 and as also did the official U.S. plan announced in 1982 to deploy MX ICBMs in a “dense pack” basing mode. 25 Virtual nuclear arms sound silly, or at least gratuitously perilous; the taking of risks that purposefully leave something to chance sounds dangerously irresponsible, not to mention culturally opposed to policymakers’ desire for control; and “dense pack” basing affronted the widespread view that one should disperse forces for survivability, not concentrate them as a clustered target.
Clausewitz wrote that “everything in strategy is very simple, but that does not mean that everything is very easy.” 26 Anything in strategy, and especially anything bearing upon nuclear strategy, that appears to be distinctly odd or extremely subtle stands little chance of policy adoption. Most politicians, senior civil servants, and senior military officers are not practicing defense intellectuals. Ideas for nuclear policy that need to drive minds in the official audience far down unfamiliar paths are all but doomed to failure. The core reason is hard neither to locate nor to explain. If contingent nuclear use is the ultima ratio regis (as well as possibly the reductio ad absurdum of strategy) in the defense of basic national security values, it follows that the nuclear force posture and strategy should be guarded in a most conservative—or dare one say prudent—spirit.
Fallacy 4: Deterrence is Reliable
Deterrence is never reliable, and this general truth applies with particular force today in the second nuclear age. In the most vigorous and rigorous assault to date on the smellier orthodoxies of both expert and popular beliefs about deterrence, Keith B. Payne offers an uncompromising view of the pertinent realities:
In the second nuclear age, several factors are combining to change the strategic environment of effective deterrence policies: the apparent increase in threats posed by rogue states such as Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, China, and North Korea; the retraction of U.S. forward-based armed forces; and the proliferation of WMD. Given these features of the second nuclear age, in comparison with the Cold War, U.S. deterrence goals will have to be expanded: the list of players to be deterred has to be expanded, as do the types of behavior to be prevented. 27
Different aspects of Payne’s comprehensive proposition, as just quoted, are treated in detail at suitable junctures throughout this book. What matters most at this point, however, is to explain why it is that deterrence, even nuclear deterrence, is unreliable. Quinlan penetrates to the heart of the matter when he writes: “Deterrence is a concept for operating upon the thinking of others. It therefore entails some basic presuppositions about that thinking.” 28 Deterrence, therefore, is a relational variable; it is an effect upon, or influence over, behavior—achieved and achievable only with the cooperation of the intended deterree. Deterrence is structurally unreliable for precisely the same leading reason that friction in war cannot be eliminated by wonderful new technologies: 29 specifically, there are human beings in the loop for deterrence and for the conduct of strategy in war. An individual policymaker, or a group of policymakers, may decide not to be deterred. Literally, there can be no such thing as “the deterrent,” nuclear or otherwise. Whether or not a nuclear arsenal deters is a matter for decision by the recipients of would-be deterrent menaces, not by the owners of the putative deterrent.
At issue here is not so much the core logic of some long-appreciated deterrence theory, but rather the application of that theory to strategic historical practice and the judgments offered in explanation of strategic history. What we know, as contrasted with what we believe, about the record of deterrence in the first nuclear age of the Cold War appears less and less impressive as the archives open, as oral histories burgeon, and as scholars entertain seriously second thoughts about “nuclear history.” 30
The logic of deterrence, as propounded quite formally in a small library of books, articles, and studies since the mid-1950s, most probably is eternal and universal. But the application of that logic, indeed even knowledge of when to apply that logic, always has the potential to be catastrophically variable. To understand a problem in general terms is not necessarily the same as to understand how to solve or alleviate it. The United States in 1990 was led by a generation of Cold War–trained would-be practitioners of deterrence, could draw upon a historically unparalleled measure of scholarly expertise in deterrence theory, and happened to be at the peak of its military prowess. And yet, Saddam Hussein was not deterred from seizing Kuwait. 31 If the U.S., indeed Western, defense community of 1990 was proud of anything, it was proud of its presumed achievement in deterrence over four decades of Cold War. 32
Deterrence per se is not the source of difficulty. The last thing the world needs is another great tome on deterrence theory. The problem is that deterrence is inherently unreliable because actual locally encultured human beings, deciding for any of the reasons that may move us humans, can decide that they will not be deterred. It is probably true—indeed it is very probably true—that nuclear deterrence is much more reliable than is non-nuclear, at least (extra-NBC) conventional, deterrence; but even the tilting of the playing field in favor of deterrence with the WMD qualification cannot guarantee success. For once, Quinlan is not entirely to be trusted when he judges that “only a state ruler possessed by a reckless lunacy scarcely paralleled even in prenuclear history would contemplate with equanimity initiating a conflict that seemed likely to bring nuclear weapons down upon his country.”3 33 Quinlan’s intended reassurance has the reverse effect of that intended. If the rhetorical qualification “with equanimity” is deleted, the fragility of Quinlan’s claim is exposed.
Forty-plus years of superpower-led Cold War may tell us little about the working of deterrence, and especially about the requirements for its successful functioning. If deterrence works at both a general and an immediate level, with the former helping to shape the course of events that might plausibly bring the latter into play, was either side specifically—which is to say “immediately”—deterred (from doing what over which issues) in the Cold War? And if deterrence is believed to have worked “immediately,” just why did it work? These are questions so hard to answer with high confidence of historical accuracy that scholars must qualify their responses. The necessity for such qualification makes the point that drives this fourth fallacy. If one is irreducibly unsure as to why certain deeply undesired events did not occur during the Cold War, even though one knows the course of relevant strategic history, how much more uncertainty pertains to putative deterrent relations in the future?
Nothing, repeat nothing, can render intended deterrent effect entirely reliable. Prudent and sensibly fearful policymakers certainly should be appalled to the point of cooperation by some not totally incredible prospect of suffering damage utterly disproportionate to the prospective gains from an adventurous policy. But “should” is not “will,” and even if policymakers genuinely are appalled by the risks that they believe they are running, they might decide to run those risks anyway. Western scholars who place confidence in the practice of the theory of stable deterrence are wont to neglect to factor in the political dimension of strength of motivation for inimical behavior. 34 The key problem is that even if every roguish regime in the world is deterrable over every issue on which it is contemplating bold moves, there is no way that a U.S. would-be deterrer can be certain that it would know the specific requirements of deterrence for all those cases.
A United States that, for example, wishes to achieve such deterrent effect in Beijing as may be necessary is entirely uncertain over how much, and over some questions even whether, deterrence is needed. To a significant degree the deterrence needs of the United States vis-à-vis China currently are unknowable. Some readers may be discomforted by such an open-ended argument regarding China, but that open-endedness is the very core of the difficulty that one must recognize. A China hugely in a condition of domestic turmoil is distinctly possible for the next several decades. How the desperately insecure leaders of such a China could be deterred from taking action—in a bid for national unity—over Taiwan, we cannot know reliably; and even those insecure Chinese leaders themselves cannot know reliably. Ultimately, deterrence is like that.
Fallacy 5: Stable Deterrence Works Today
This fallacy has two important aspects. First, it misunderstands current conditions, and, second, it all but invites misunderstanding of some chaotically nonlinear futures. 35 At the level of general deterrence, U.S. military power casts a shadow of global domain over the cunning plans of any and every would-be “rogue,” or regional “aggressor,” in the world. But each would-be regional revisionist polity has to interrogate its specific circumstances, and its understanding of U.S. affairs, to inquire whether that general deterrence has any plausible, let alone probable, relevance to the adventure that it contemplates. Unfortunately for reliability of scholarship, if the general deterrence delivered by the U.S. armed forces has practical effect in immediate deterrence, we are unlikely to know about it. When lines are not drawn in the sand, there are unlikely to be footprints for scholars to photograph.
The first aspect of this fifth fallacy is the presumption that the absence of U.S. belligerency today demonstrates the successful working of a stable deterrence. On the contrary, the absence of U.S. belligerency today most probably means nothing more significant than that no polity is sufficiently motivated to challenge the U.S.-shaped world order. Perception of this probable condition is inherently inadequate as stated, because that low motivation may well simply recognize the improbability of success in the face of active U.S. military opposition.
The second, and more troubling, aspect of this particular fallacy is one that appears and reappears throughout strategic history. Specifically, it is a common failure of the strategic imagination to recognize how difficult it can be to deter those who are truly desperate, those who are overconfident, and those who are fatalistically resigned to submit to “History’s command” or the “will of Allah,” and so forth, according to cultural predilection. 36 Usually, the absence of conditions of acute crisis and war will not be (negative) evidence of the successful functioning of some mechanism for stable deterrence. The leading problems of evidence for scholars are that they cannot know how much dissuasive influence U.S. military power produces for a general deterrence that discourages those would-be aggressors who rule out certain forms of challenge to a U.S.-backed regional order; and that they cannot know or discover whether or not a regional power declines to be heroic in the face of immediate U.S. deterrence, having first decided to be brave in the face of general U.S. deterrence.
Argument by illustrative analogy is not widely favored by U.S. scholars, but I will defy that fact. Because the Soviet leadership in 1989–1991 decided not to fight for the Soviet imperium, the Soviet empire, or even (utterly unpredictably) for the USSR itself—even the Turkish Empire, “the sick man of Europe” for the better part of a century prior to 1914, resisted its demise more vigorously—it is widely believed that stable deterrence throughout the Cold War must have been easily achievable. After all, if Soviet leaders would not even contest, à outrance, their political patrimony at home, how formidable really were they over matters of relative influence much further afield? This is not the place to debate the decline and fall of the Soviet empire; indeed, such a mission would exceed the domain of the inquiry. 37 But I am concerned lest false conclusions be drawn from the relatively painless demise of Soviet authority. A group of Soviet leaders different from that led by the unfortunate and incompetent Mikhail Gorbachev could well have decided that their sacred ideological duty mandated a brutal response to the thoroughgoing challenge posed by local opposition to Soviet imperium in East-Central Europe in 1989. Admittedly, this is counterfactual argument, but it would not have been excessively difficult for different Soviet leaders to have licensed, one need hardly add motivate, East-Central European satraps to suppress popular dissent. Tiananmen Square easily could have happened in Berlin in 1989 (e.g., Alexanderplatz). If it had happened, the Soviet imperium of the great socialist empire might well have been preserved, albeit in severely damaged condition both politically and morally.
The point of the above pseudoanalogy is to emphasize that the fall of the Soviet empire probably tells us nothing of great importance about deterrence, stable or otherwise. On the basis of the perilously limited evidence available to date, one has to conclude that the East-West deterrence relationship played scarcely, if at all, in the demise of the Soviet empire. To make the point unmistakably, one needs to specify the contrary hypothesis. Specifically, Gorbachev could have asked, “can we suppress (shoot down, and so forth) the dissenters” wherever and whenever they needed suppressing? Had Gorbachev decided to roll tanks over anti-Soviet protesters throughout East-Central Europe, and had the United States and NATO decided to try to discourage such action, then we would know more about the relative ease with which the USSR could have been deterred. The problem for strategic theorists is that they do not know whether the manner of, and conclusion to, the demise of the USSR is or is not attributable to the suasive effort of nuclear-led deterrence.
Fallacy 6: Carry On . . . Small Nuclear Wars?
Modern chaos theory alerts us to the possibility, even probability, of discontinuities in strategic history. 38 Whereas the gunpowder revolution took more than a century, from the 1320s to the 1410s, 39 to take substantial effect, the atomic age occurred apparently after the fashion of a light being switched on. That is in some sense an exaggeration, but still it is true to claim that the atomic age exploded into political and strategic reality between the surrender of Germany and the surrender of Japan in 1945, only a three-month period. A similar shock to popular and official consciousness undoubtedly will be administered by the next episode of nuclear use in war. 40 I suggest, in the guise of yet more fallacies discussed below, that antinuclear taboos and assumptions about a persisting nonuse of nuclear weapons are apt to disappoint and mislead. The principal problem with beliefs about such antinuclear taboos and assumptions—apart from the plausible fact that they may be perilously fictitious—is that they encourage Westerners to disarm themselves against significant potential dangers. If one believes, and wants to believe, that there is a tolerably authoritative universal taboo against nuclear threats, and especially against nuclear use, one is unlikely to expend many scarce resources worrying about, let alone preparing against, actual nuclear use. This is not to claim that scholars who write about a nuclear taboo are dismissive of the possibility of its being defied. On the contrary, they emphasize the importance of the normative proscription of the taboo precisely because of the danger of nuclear war. Such scholarship, though no doubt well intended, confuses a limited truth—that nuclear weapons carry some normative stigma—with a social proscription of great significance. As we shall see, the idea of a nuclear taboo is both empirically somewhat valid yet all but irrelevant to international security.
This sixth nuclear fallacy is especially poignant because it illustrates with exemplary clarity how the path to hell can be paved with good intentions. Paradox is the problem here. The more settled the expectations of a future that excludes nuclear (or other WMD) use, the more shocking must be the events of blunt nuclear threat or of actual nuclear use. In principle this need not be the case, but in practice when antinuclear preferences influence strategic culture, as has happened in the West, readiness to cope with the stigmatized nuclear events is likely to have fallen early victim to the virus of hope. No one knows the probability of occurrence of nuclear war, but we all should know that
whenever there is a possibility of a nuclear detonation, a vital interest is created. Whatever the prior security commitments or stakes in a particular conflict, few events would rock national, regional or global security more than even one nuclear detonation. While a war involving small nuclear powers need not necessarily raise such apocalyptical scenarios as those developed for a superpower war, with the spectre of a true end to history, the concept of a “small” nuclear war has yet to be developed. Any nuclear use still moves us into the area of unimaginable catastrophe. 41
A small nuclear war is an oxymoron. While most probably it is true that a nuclear war between regional powers would have the effect of encouraging extraregional actors to keep their heads down, it is not likely that a “small” nuclear war between regional rivals would have negligible, or world system–supporting, consequences. Scholar-theorists like Kenneth N. Waltz probably are correct when they point to the readily confinable domain of a regional nuclear conflict. In Waltz’s brutally realistic words: “If such [relatively weak] states use nuclear weapons, the world will not end. The use of nuclear weapons by lesser powers would hardly trigger them elsewhere.” 42 No one wants to be a player (target) in other people’s nuclear wars. But to argue that a small regional nuclear war is going to remain small and regional is to risk missing the point. The historical event of a nuclear war, no matter how small and tactically contained, must demonstrate the nonsense in the assumption that nuclear nonuse is the “rule of the road” in world politics.
The principal concern behind this sixth nuclear fallacy is that theoreticians and policymakers should not discount the strategic effect of small nuclear wars, either because such wars are geostrategically distant or because they are small relative to large. The sounder proposition is the claim that nuclear war is nuclear war. Unfortunately, it is improbable that a benign resolution to many human security dilemmas would follow from the experience of a small nuclear war. All things are possible, but they are not all equally probable. Human beings’ strategic condition and proclivities, in short their humanity, have remained constant throughout history; it is therefore unlikely that a small nuclear war in South Asia, or indeed anywhere, would prompt an end to strategic history per se.
Although a small nuclear war is entirely possible, it is not, of course, certain. Moreover, such an event would be eminently survivable for most of the planet: it would be “Apocalypse now” in one or two neighborhoods, albeit leading to much peril downwind (à la Chernobyl, only probably much worse). The nuclear event, far from proving the exception to a taboo on nuclear use, would likely consign the taboo to humankind’s well-stocked museum of impracticable beliefs. 43 One can argue that a small nuclear war, for all its horror—actually because of its horror—would serve usefully to underline all of the long-known, but perhaps now blandly overfamiliar, reasons why the nonproliferation regime is of extraordinary importance. In other words, a small nuclear war would be overall a readily survivable and isolatable event that, on balance, probably should reinforce the NPT regime and its associated norms. That is possible, but one argument may not suit all cases. By way of contrast to the relatively optimistic view just cited, a small nuclear war might
For all the speculation that the subject of this sixth nuclear fallacy could attract, at least three interdependent claims merit close attention. First, too little thought is being given to the consequences of a nuclear war, small or otherwise. Much of the world, certainly much of the Western community of defense experts, appears unwilling to face the persisting problems of a permanent nuclear era. A sense of nuclear incredulity renders many people, experts not excluded, disinclined to think prudently about nuclear (biological and chemical) war. Much as most civilian strategic theorists will wallow happily in ideas about security, strategy, and war in the abstract but shy away from the decidedly ugly “face of battle,” 45 so they are profoundly uncomfortable with discussion of events beyond, or through, the veil of deterrence and crisis as they relate to nuclear (and BC) war. If one’s energies are focused upon the restricting or reversing of NBC proliferation and, if need be, upon (extended) deterrence of NBC-led menace in regional conflicts, it is humanly understandable, though not professionally praiseworthy, for one to be reluctant to venture into a future zone of policy failure.
The second claim about this fallacy is that, in Freedman’s words, “few events would rock national, regional or global security more than even one nuclear detonation.” If a major airplane accident, a large earthquake, or even just a handful of Tomahawk cruise missiles on Iraqi targets can command global attention as shaped by media coverage, what kind of notice would a “small” nuclear war attract? The question all but answers itself. One cannot predict in detail what the many consequences of a small nuclear war would be for the course of, and eventual conclusion to, this second nuclear age; but one can be certain that the shock of the nuclear event would score extremely high on the strategic Richter scale. Even if much more forethought had been devoted to anticipation of such a nuclear event than is the case to date, still the shock would be profound. Some experts may expect a small nuclear war or two over the course of the next several decades, but it is unlikely that a large fraction of the general public, their opinion shapers in the mass media, or their political leaders would share that “expert” expectation.
Third, tragedy in one arena can, though need not, sound an alarm that is heeded elsewhere. The successive tragedies that overwhelmed Czechoslovakia in 1938, Poland in 1939, and much of Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and France in 1940 delivered a cumulative and salutary wake-up call that Britain eventually heeded. It seems most probable that a small nuclear war would not change much of the structure of the political context probed in Chapter 2, but it would change radically the terms of debate over strategy around the world, including the United States. Following some no doubt hysterically “abolitionist” immediate reaction to the fact of nuclear use in war again, the United States and many others would realize that what they would have just witnessed by way of nuclear tragedy actually could have been precluded, at least rendered far more difficult to effect, by military counterforce—offensive and (especially) defensive. 46 One can predict that the wake-up call to deploy active antimissile defenses most probably, and sadly, will have to take the form of real historical demonstration that nuclear weapons are weapons that can be used. This second nuclear age will wake up to the necessity for treating nuclear weapons as weapons only after the nuclear-armed belligerents in some regional conflict have sounded the bell of danger as clearly as did Germany’s actions from 1938 to the spring of 1940.
Fallacy 7: Defense Does not Work in a Nuclear Age
Of all the highways and byways of nuclear-related policy and strategy, none is so harassed by mythical perils—yesterday’s anxieties promoted long past their sell-by date—and general ideological baggage as is the subject of ballistic missile defense (BMD). One of the less appreciated reasons that BMD options failed to crack the consensus barrier in the United States during the Cold War was that the prospect of actual nuclear war was denied psychologically. When the massively undesired is denied as a plausible future—it is too awful to think about—it is hugely unlikely that scarce assets will be allocated to prepare to alleviate the consequences of catastrophe. There were always some grounds for technical argument over the probable effectiveness of the BMD technologies then in contention for adoption, but the military-technical debate over BMD in the 1960s, 1970s, and especially the early to mid-1980s offers rich pickings to those in quest of barely concealed subtexts. 47 Many arguments were not quite what they seemed to be. There was no BMD deployment, no matter how sophisticated or ample in relevant redundancy and mass, that cunning offensive-force planners could not defeat, at least in theory, with their deadly vu-graphs.
This text has no interest in reopening old debates over BMD. Suffice it to say, as this seventh fallacy claims, that it is an error simply to argue that “defense does not work in the nuclear era.” In this second nuclear age, the challenge is to be able to defeat missile threats far more modest in scale and sophistication than was the case in the 1970s and 1980s in the great Cold War. Both the strategic-theoretical and the military-technical-tactical referents for this subject have been transformed since 1989. Some of our arms control experts appear still to be trapped in a Cold War time warp that prevents them from thinking about BMD in a rational manner. If U.S. arms control experts would elevate their eyes to scan the political context that provides the meaning for their professional endeavors, they would notice that, notwithstanding the START process, there is no political context of real antagonism in Russian-U.S. security relations. Much of the contemporary cottage industry of U.S. arms control activity proceeds with a blithe indifference to the overwhelming political fact that—let us emphasize this—there is no Russian-U.S. “strategic balance” today. To risk overstatement of what should be obvious, no one cares or should care how U.S. strategic nuclear forces stack up against Russian strategic nuclear forces, because such military comparison lacks political referents of antagonism. When there is no political content worthy of the label in dispute between two great powers, their military relationship is apt to be a topic only for relaxed contemplation.
Of course, Russia today resents the U.S.-led Western victory in the Cold War; that is not at issue. It follows that today’s Russia is easily seduced into a political flirtation with China, another power resentful of the contemporary U.S. hegemonic condition. None of this means, however, that there is, or is likely to be again a Russian-U.S. strategic balance of much significance. Strategic history is governed by political history. It is not impossible that the new Russian Federation should reprise the role of Soviet Problem for Eurasian and U.S. security, but it is distinctly improbable. At this writing, at least, Russia appears as a still noteworthy and still unusually nuclear-well-armed power, but one that is set solidly on the path of an enduring decline. Moreover, there are persuasive reasons of broad political context why Russian nuclear-armed forces should not be the proximate U.S. problem either in the remainder of this second nuclear age or in a third such age. Of course, one cannot be sure, but when contrasted politically and geostrategically with the China of the twenty-first century, the Russian Federation looks like yesterday’s menace. This is not to deny that the brief, troubled era of Russian-U.S. cooperation now has passed. More to the point, however, is the fact that early-twenty-first-century Russia will have security problems far more serious than those stemming from resentment of a United States that is hegemonic after the Cold War.
Active defense in the nuclear era would have had great difficulty working against, say, “the Soviet threat” of 1980–1985 vintage, but that tactical judgment cannot hold vis-à-vis regional missile threats today and tomorrow. Because the United States could not have limited damage usefully in the context of a Soviet missile attack in 1970 or 1980 (if that is true), it does not follow that the (ballistic and cruise) missile threats posed by regional powers, not excluding China, could not be defeated early in the twenty-first century. There is no technically compelling connection between claims from the early 1980s that the (Soviet) missile assault will always get through 48 and parallel claims today that BMD will not work in the future.
Although there can never be any absolute guarantees, it is as certain as anything can be in this friction-fraught realm that a multitiered U.S. BMD architecture would defeat militarily any missile menace from regional powers. Nonetheless, there are particular tactical problems posed by regional foes that would stress BMD competencies. Regional nuclear wars will register short times of flight for missiles dispatched to strike targets in-theater. Short ranges translate as minimal, potentially even subminimal, reaction times even for optimally alert and well-positioned active defenses. Almost regardless of the degree of technical sophistication of the defense, short-range ballistic missiles and some medium-range ballistic missiles could pose a genuinely intractable challenge to the defense. That limiting thought aside, BMD today and tomorrow can pose a politically and militarily lethal menace to the suasive power of missile threats.
The Russian-U.S. agreement at the Helsinki Summit meeting on 21 March 1997 to prohibit the development, testing, and deployment of space basing for interceptors for theater missile defense (TMD) is profoundly atavistic. 49 In order both to help sustain the ABM Treaty regime and to hinder the pace of TMD programs, for the first time TMD is subject to explicit international control. The rationale for this backward-looking policy démarche is that allegedly there is urgent need to demarcate TMD from the so-called strategic missile defenses that are constrained by the terms of the ABM Treaty. It is difficult to appreciate the strategic wisdom in placing entirely new constraints upon BMD developed to defeat the WMD that regional powers might deliver by missile when that mission is urgent, technically feasible, and fraught with awful consequences should it fail. The difficulty increases when one finds that a leading reason for the agreement is to spare possible Russian anxieties over the survivability in flight of their long-range ballistic missiles when, to repeat, the United States is not, and is unlikely to be, in a condition of strategic balance or imbalance with the new Russia. One might observe of a United States that remains officially still committed to expansion of constraints upon BMD in a world of growing WMD menace—on official U.S. assay, please note—that those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad (or is it MAD?). 50
Although I am strongly persuaded of the case for BMD, and have debated the subject for nearly thirty years, I am not contemptuous of views different from my own (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, perhaps). Of course, there is a case against BMD; there always was. The point is that that case is not sound. Critics can argue, correctly, that today’s BMD options are not militarily very impressive. That is true but beside the point; it argues for more effort and better programs. Also, one can argue, again correctly, that intelligent adversaries will attempt to swamp or evade U.S. BMD prowess. Again that is true, but irrelevant because obvious and expected. If the United States declined to build any force that foes would try to thwart, it would not build anything. The issue is not will they try but rather are they likely to succeed? Also, one could seek to oppose BMD with the distinctly sensible argument that foes thwarted with respect to missile delivery will seek to evade such active defenses by means of “irregular” insertion of WMD into the United States. As a matter of strategic logic, that argument is sound. 51 It is not sound, however, to argue that because there are several ways to deliver WMD (e.g., by ballistic and air-breathing vehicles, and by sea and across land frontiers), we should grant ballistic missiles a free ride.
Missile defense should not be analyzed in isolation. This text treats BMD in the context broadly of counterforce, in company with offensive military action against missile forces. Even when BMD is treated properly within a mix of active offensive and defensive options, still it remains a subject curiously stapled to counsels of military perfection. The strategic truth of the matter is that BMD may well prove useful for deterrence and defense, but no defensive measures literally can guarantee the tactical negation of the offense. If deterrence is unreliable, as strategic history in general—but not Cold War strategic history—shows, then the case for active defense against proliferant powers’ most probable weapon of choice, the ballistic missile, is strong indeed. 52 Reflection on the decades of Cold War yields a less-than-ringing endorsement for the thesis that nuclear-era deterrence is robustly reliable. Both sides of the argument over the military-technical perils of the East-West nuclear standoff can register telling blows in debate. Does the record of a nonwar outcome to the Cold War, notwithstanding the facts of many accidents and much mutual miscalculation, 53 reveal the reliability of nuclear deterrence, simply the authority of luck, or some indeterminate mix of the two? Because there was no Soviet-U.S. nuclear war, it does not follow that the case against BMD stands proven. Alas for scholarly rigor, the absence of nuclear war proves nothing in particular about the merit in opposing views during the recurrent debates over BMD. U.S. BMD deployment might have added complications for a rational would-be Soviet attacker that could prove definitively dissuasive; or (improbably, but who really knows?) Soviet strategic anxiety at the prospect of impending U.S. deployment of multilayered missile defenses might have triggered desperate action on the Soviet part. We are in the realm of strategic fiction, or perhaps prudent forecasting.
Much less fanciful than the above small venture into counterfactual history, however, is consideration of the merits in BMD today.
First, the unreliability of deterrence that must attend strategic relations between a U.S. superpower and some regional polity strongly motivated to assert itself in its immediate neighborhood renders actual defense much more important than it was for East-West strategic nexuses during the Cold War. Readers may recall that a significant asymmetry that helped structure the U.S. phase of the Vietnam War was the contrast in intensity of commitment between Washington and Hanoi. Basic punitive deterrence on the grand scale, though perilous in the extreme if challenged, let alone tripped into consequential military action, probably is robust in the face of broad threats to national values. But if the political will of the U.S. superpower is challenged over some matter of only arguably vital national interest—the continued independence of the Republic of China on Taiwan, for instance—vast threats of nuclear punishment are less than self-evidently deterring. 54 In confrontation with regional powers, the United States, acting as protector of a regional order, has a need to be able to deny tactical, and hence strategic, success to the aircraft and missile-deliverable NBC weapons of those regional powers. Multitiered and mobile forward-deployable theater missile defense (TMD), backstopped critically by a national missile defense (NMD) capability—to minimize the option for terroristic efforts at blackmail—should help enable the superpower to extend protection, even by extended deterrence.
Second, U.S. deployment of complementary tiers of BMD—and extended air defenses—devalues the currency of missile threats. Given that missiles have no close substitutes as terrifying, tactically reliable, and swift-delivery vehicles for WMD (even though, as noted, they are less than ideal for delivery of BC agents that must work in aerosol form), the strategic benefit to regional order from U.S. BMD is considerable. One should not advance this argument too far. There is no question but that U.S. BMD should be able to defeat the offensive missile force of any regional polity; but the workings and anticipation of friction, the enemy’s cunning plans, bad luck, and strategic prudence all would function in practice to diminish the leverage that BMD and air defense deployments should yield.
Third, the ability of the world’s “ordering” powers, the G8 club, to function responsibly in extended deterrence and defense roles requires that they should not be hostage to any polity, faction from a polity, eccentrically motivated military unit, accident-prone military unit, or roguishly criminal body that can brandish a tactically credible threat to deliver a few NBC weapons by plane or missile. Active missile defenses cannot banish all menace of NBC weapons. But such defenses can carry a plausible promise to defeat a threat that typically would number only in the tens of vehicles, at most. There are some NBC delivery threats that BMD cannot answer: weapons of very short range, for example, or weapons that arrive in backpacks, by car, or by boat. Nonetheless, what BMD and air defenses certainly can do with high assurance is strategically—not to say morally—well worth doing.
Fourth, and finally, with the arguable possible exception of the residual though still modernizing Russian strategic nuclear arsenal, there are no missile-armed groups in the world today, or prospectively tomorrow, whose WMD capabilities should prove beyond defeat by U.S. offensive and (especially) defensive counterforce means. It is not obvious on military-technical or economic grounds why the United States should be obliged to settle again for the potentially strategically paralyzing reality of mutual assured destruction nexuses with regional polities. 55 Acting strategically as a distant protecting power for regional security, the United States needs to deny leverage to regional owners of WMD. If both the United States and a regional foe rely heavily on a punitive deterrence, the probable asymmetry in vitality of rival interests at stake will leave the United States with a politically lethal deterrence deficit. U.S. BMD and extended air defenses can help deny hostages to U.S. behavior compliant with the wishes of regional foes. Moreover, the United States and its principal allies could commit to deploy active defenses that would stay either ahead of or at least tactically competitive with regional missile-borne threats of action by WMD. But so long as the ABM Treaty regime is permitted to prevent orbital deployments of BMD-dedicated interceptor missiles or of BMD weapons based on “other physical principles,” the prospects for really effective missile defenses are short of glittering.
Fallacy 8: Nuclear Weapons Have Come to be Stigmatized by a Taboo against their “Use”
Reference has been made already to a nuclear taboo. Although the proposition of a nuclear taboo is both plausible and attractive, it is perilously flawed in a way that is likely to set damaging ambushes for those who have been imprudently optimistic. The idea of a nuclear taboo hovers somewhat uneasily between fact and value. Widespread endorsement of the desirability of social demotion and general denigration of all things nuclear works to hinder prudent thoughts and action on the subject of how best to cope with the permanence of nuclear facts. Commitment to the worthy idea of a nuclear taboo is wont to encourage effort devoted to strengthening the nonproliferation regime—activity that generally is sensible, praiseworthy, and often worthy of the energy expended—rather than to deal effectively with the enduring nuclear dimension to security.
The case of a nuclear taboo is one of those instances where a sound idea, as well as a culturally inescapable but not thoroughly effective proscriptive norm, has the potential to function to unanticipated dangerous consequences (the law of unintended consequences). The proposition that the global nonproliferation regime has come to be supported and is to a degree propelled forward by a nuclear taboo is an astrategic rationalization by generally unintentionally hypocritical Westerners. The fragility of Western theory about a nuclear taboo is easily demonstrated. Supported by the structurally discriminatory NPT regime, the majority of declared nuclear weapons states simultaneously reaffirm the nationally vital security functions of their WMD and condemn WMD in the hands of others—but not all others, one must hasten to add. Israel’s nuclear arsenal attracts little negative comment from the West, and the newly demonstrated and declared nuclear weapons states of India and Pakistan have attracted more expressions of understanding than condemnation from other polities outside the West. It is only the third tier of would-be nuclear weapons states, deemed irresponsible if not roguish for their rejection of Western norms of civilized international (and domestic) behavior, that falls under the heavy censure of spokespersons for a nuclear taboo.
The policy inclinations fairly attributable to Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Libya hold no appeal for me. However, that said, one should not risk gratuitous damage to international security by fooling oneself with parochial nostrums. While arguably it is true to claim that a nuclear taboo has grown that deglamorizes and delegitimizes nuclear arms, such a taboo has proved itself no reliable barrier to further nuclear proliferation. If there had ever been some danger that states capable of acquiring nuclear arms somehow would slip naturally into actual nuclear capability, then the taboo argument would have much more force. But for all its popularity, inherent attractiveness (to us, at least), and apparent political sophistication, the operation and significance of a nuclear taboo is not all that it may seem to be. One should not presume causal connection between the phenomenon of a very slow pace of nuclear proliferation and the international popularity of a nuclear taboo. The latter probably has some relevance to the former but nowhere near as much as often is implied or claimed.
Similarly, one should not presume a causal connection between nuclear nonuse and a nuclear taboo. One of the major studies of weapon taboos, for example, inadvertently illustrates the weakness of the evidential base for taboo claims. Null hypotheses are notoriously difficult to prove. For example, Richard Price and Nina Tannenwald overreach severely when they claim that “the strengths of the nuclear taboo and the odium attached to nuclear weapons as weapons of mass destruction render unusable all nuclear weapons, even though certain kinds of nuclear weapons could, from the perspective of Just War theory, conceivably be justified.” 56 This is just not so. The arguments for the historical functioning of a nuclear taboo advanced by Price and Tannenwald cannot bear the strategic traffic that is run over them. In their analysis, normative proscription—taboo-related injunctions—assumes a residual value that is methodologically infeasible. “Taboo” argument tends to degrade under pressure into a residual culturalist explanation that is advanced as an unduly pervasive explanation. The problem is that a taboo does exist, but its worth as an explanation for the nonoccurrence of some undesired events is not at all powerful.
Before proceeding further into a critique of the hypothesis of a nuclear taboo, it is important to outline the apparent context of that hypothesis.
A taboo is a socially sanctioned prohibition that may, or may not, carry the force of law. 57 Contemporary discussion of nuclear weapons issues is ambivalent on the question of whether or not a nuclear taboo exists. It is significant, for example, that in a well-regarded 1991 study, Lewis A. Dunn wrote aspirationally that “the goal here should be to reduce to an absolute minimum the role of nuclear weapons and to bring about a global nuclear taboo.” He proceeded to refer favorably to the prospect that “[a] commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons and fostering a global nuclear taboo against their use would also contribute across the board to containing the scope of nuclear proliferation and its consequences.” 58 To quote Dunn again, a global taboo against nuclear use would (1) “reduce the prestige of going nuclear”; (2) “greatly help to ensure the long-term extension of the NPT”; (3) “influence thinking among new nuclear powers”; and (4) “provide legitimacy for great power or UN Security Council actions to defuse or contain the threat of regional nuclear wars.” 59 There is much to be said in praise of the taboo hypothesis. Unfortunately, the proposition that an international political taboo against the “use” (i.e., the threat or the employment) of nuclear weapons has coalesced, is coalescing, or might coalesce has about as much validity as the proposition that major war is, is becoming, or soon will be obsolete. 60 In the decent opinion of truly civilized folk the use of nuclear weapons (let alone chemical or, heaven forfend, biological weapons) may well be far beyond the pale of acceptable options for statecraft; that, however, can never be the relevant issue. Most probably there exists today a political taboo against nuclear weapons per se, and certainly against the use of nuclear weapons, that is authoritative for most people and most polities. If ruling notions for all of world politics were determined by a crude head or political unit count, then indeed it would be true to point to the power and influence of a or the nuclear taboo.
The reality of world politics in this second nuclear age is, alas, far removed from that just fantasized. Self-helping security communities cannot be influenced very usefully by a nuclear taboo, especially when the principal articulators of this taboo are citizens of contentedly and prospectively permanently nuclear-armed states. To put this concept in some context, there are social (and legal) taboos against incest (everywhere) and spitting in public (in some societies), but in neither of these cases are taboos able to cope with the truly hard cases (“necessity knows no proscriptive norms,” to misquote Theobald von Bethman Hollweg). 61 The idea that embattled polities with the most serious of security problems could be influenced conclusively by a Western-led nuclear taboo is close to absurd. Less absurd is the proposition that the stigmatization of nuclear arms that is largely implicit in the global nonproliferation regime, which is capped by the NPT, might help inhibit the pace of further nuclear proliferation. A general delegitimization and “deglorification” of nuclear arms should facilitate the efforts of those who seek to impede the path of would-be nuclear proliferants. That granted, the superordinate difficulty remains that supply-side antiproliferation measures cannot succeed unless success is claimed merely for delay.
The central problem with the hypothesis of a nuclear taboo is that it endeavors to deny needs both of the logic of policy and the grammar of strategy, to resort to Clausewitzian phrasing. 62 U.S. adherents to the hypothesis of the importance of a nuclear taboo should explain why this taboo can carry authority, given that it is flatly and robustly contradicted in key senses by the strategic beliefs and policies of eight nuclear weapons states. There is a nuclear taboo that stigmatizes nuclear threat or employment. But policymakers in the eight nuclear weapons states do not equate such stigmatization—or singularization, for a less pejorative rendering—with unusability. Nuclear weapons may be weapons of last resort (for us, at least), but last resort should not be confused with no resort. More to the point, perhaps, is the question of how a nuclear taboo possibly can contribute usefully to world peace with security when this second nuclear age provides a buyer’s market for fissile material, for skills in nuclear weapons design and industrial fabrication, and for ballistic and air-breathing means of nuclear weapons delivery.
To show the absurdity of the hypothesis of a nuclear taboo is akin to demonstrating the folly in the United Nations. Neither critique really is fair, because neither subject can command the merit in its destiny. Practical demolition of the value in the hypothesis of a nuclear taboo, and thoroughgoing criticism of the United Nations, ultimately are futile exercises, because both are shooting at straw targets. The United Nations cannot reform until its members reform their approaches to world politics. Similarly, a nuclear taboo cannot assume solidly reliable significance until political-military conditions are permissive, in which case it will not be needed. It is just naive to believe that nuclear arms, or other WMD, can be rendered morally unfashionable to a point of policy insignificance.
Occasionally a strategic topic arises that is so basic that it is unusually challenging of the ability to communicate pertinent considerations. I am legally Anglo-American and typically entirely unsympathetic to the regional uses to which sundry “roguish” proliferants might commit a nuclear arsenal; but still I am troubled by the ethnocentrism that suffuses the idea of a nuclear taboo. I have no difficulty whatsoever understanding, even applauding, policy decisions for a putatively permanent nuclear future for my polities. It follows that I have no difficulty comprehending why Iraqis, Iranians, North Koreans, and Libyans expect to register worthwhile security benefits from nuclear acquisition. If the Western-authored hypothesis of a nuclear taboo impairs our (Western) ability to empathize with non-Western incentives to acquire NBC weapons, it will have done us poor service.
I have striven to avoid writing scenarios of nuclear use in this book. One of the more important reasons this chapter attaches importance to BMD—and indeed to all variants of counterforce, offensive and defensive—is that I believe this age may well register an actual regional nuclear war. Whether or not there is a global nuclear taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is a question of no great interest. What is of interest is whether or not nuclear-armed, nuclear-threshold (almost-nuclear-armed), or opaquely nuclear-armed security communities would sanction nuclear threats or employment. Given that the eight currently declared nuclear weapons states have no difficulty answering that question in the affirmative, what plausible confidence can repose in the hypothesis that a nuclear taboo can severely modify the answer? Thus is the nuclear taboo revealed as a toothless proscription; somewhat true, but not true enough.
Because the theory of the nuclear (and BC) weapons taboo is neither wholly correct nor incorrect, it is exceptionally difficult to provide fair judgment upon the writings of the handful of scholars who have pursued this idea to date. Since it may well be impossible for me to do full justice to the nuanced views of those scholars, I can at least be clear in the presentation of my own views. The recognition that nuclear weapons provide cause usefully to be stigmatized by a taboo is, in my opinion, a fallacy because although there is a very widespread taboo that stigmatizes nuclear weapons—possession, threat, and use—that normative proscription cannot handle arguments and assertions of security necessity. Recognition, let alone celebration, of the undoubted fact of this widespread taboo helps disarm us psychologically, politically, and militarily, so that we are less able to cope with WMD realities than we might be in the absence of notice of this taboo.
In addition to the logic I have advanced that is critical of the taboo theory, two more general complaints also need airing. First, “nuclear tabooists,” if I may call them such, have yet to demonstrate that they have thought very deeply about the true scope of normative influences upon political and strategic behavior. In other words, the nuclear taboo as a normative proscription is apt to be offset in its impact upon political behavior by the impulse not only of security necessity but also of competing norms. Second, as one who has ventured into the perilous waters of theory about “strategic culture,” I must attest to some uneasiness about the open-ended influence allowed nuclear (and other) tabooist, or “culturalist,” explanations, especially of nuclear nonevents.
Conclusion
Most of the discussion in this chapter has been devoted only to the analysis of nuclear, among NBC, issues. Generally, though not invariably, such problems as have been identified for Western society as likely to flow from nuclear proliferation are considerably worse when treated in the context of chemical and biological perils. BC weaponry is harder to isolate and detect than is nuclear (for example, many insecticides are nerve agents) 63 but is probably tactically easier to deliver—though not to deliver in a condition of reliable lethality. The only good news of strategic importance is that BC, and especially biological, weaponry can be difficult to employ to useful effect as weapons.
Although the exploration of a second nuclear age is far from completed by the discussion here, four “working conclusions” command attention at this juncture. First, there can be no serious dispute about the assumption that the nuclear era is with us forever. This point, though apparently obvious, nonetheless meets with resistance. One could say that the nuclear discovery of 1945 settled the matter for all time. Nuclear use may be deterred, evaded, putatively defeated, or otherwise sidelined, but it cannot be removed from the board of world politics. The contemporary literature on nuclear abolition needs augmentation by the reminder that what has been abolished could, after a while, be reassembled (with no need for reinvention).
Second, nuclear nonproliferation, antiproliferation, and counterproliferation ultimately will not work. Policy approaches that address the supply side to profound matters of security invariably fail. One could moderate this negative judgment, in praise of the additional multidimensional costs (including loss of time) that the NPT regime and adjunct measures often can impose on would-be proliferants, but one should not blur the issue and risk misleading people. Eliot Cohen is correct when he writes: “Of course it makes sense to pursue marginal remedies [fundamental remedies for proliferation being unavailable] as energetically as possible. . . . But both technically and politically they can achieve only limited success.” 64 The regional security demand for some WMD offset to contemporary U.S. conventional prowess, the diffusion of nuclear (and biological and chemical) knowledge, and the post-Soviet relative ease of access to necessary technologies and skills all add up to mission impossible for nonproliferation. Sensible defense planners certainly should buy such time as they are able at a reasonable cost before an Iraq or an Iran acquires an “Islamic bomb” to add to BC arsenals; but the challenge for the future is more to learn how to cope with proliferation, and especially how to defeat the more malign of its possible consequences, than to devise new (and futile) ways to stem or reverse it.
The third conclusion is that the United States and its friends and allies are unlikely to be persuaded by anything short of the dread event of actual WMD use to take the problems of WMD security really seriously in this second nuclear age. The U.S. defense community appears still so hoist with self-regard for the presumed success of its deterrence policy during the Cold War that it has yet to notice that it has adopted no policy or strategy to date likely radically to alleviate, let alone resolve, the principal military security challenges of the early twenty-first century. Deterrence is wonderful, if achievable. Although many leaders of newly proliferant polities are likely to be as risk-averse as Waltz and Quinlan affirm all nuclear-menaced folk to be, 65 only an irresponsible optimist would extrapolate from the decades of the Cold War an uncritical paean to the all-purpose marvels of deterrence. It would take only one leader who was not as nuclear risk-averse as textbooks on nuclear deterrence say he or she ought to be, or only one policy decision that erroneously was believed to be prudent but transpired to be otherwise, for the second nuclear age to register a “small” nuclear war.
The fourth working conclusion to these chapters on proliferation is that the unreliability of deterrence, in a political context where the United States continues to act as the sheriff for regional order around the world, mandates rapid acquisition of active missile and extended air defenses as components integral to a multilayered “war-fighting” approach to regional NBC challenges. Admittedly, BMD will have an impossible task against truly short-range threats, and extremely low-flying NBC-armed vehicles also will stress defensive competence. There is no single magical solution to all the military threats that proliferant polities and extrastate groups technically could pose. Moreover, no matter how multitiered is the U.S. answer to proliferation and the peril of hostile NBC use in war, Stanley Baldwin’s somewhat accurate claim that “the bomber will always get through” should be assumed to be a probable strategic truth for our NBC future. “Zero tolerance” of tactical, operational, strategic, and political failure is the right attitude, the correct vision with which to approach nuclear and BC threats, but it should not be the authoritative expectation. Furthermore, the typically defense-inattentive general publics in democracies, reared on official faith in deterrence, probably excessive confidence in U.S. military power, and deep incredulity about WMD disaster, most likely would be shocked into panic reactions by the utterly unexpected arrival of a “small” regional doomsday. If that oxymoronically modest doomsday were to engulf a Western expeditionary force, then truly would we see a policy and strategy debate on this subject of how to live prudently in a nuclear era that we cannot annul.
Endnotes
Note 1: For example, see Gray: “Nuclear Strategy: The Case for a Theory of Victory;” (with Payne) “Victory Is Possible”; “War Fighting for Deterrence”; “Moscow Is Cheating”; House of Cards. Back.
Note 2: Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 28. Back.
Note 3: Morgan, Deterrence, ch. 2. Back.
Note 4: One telling indication of this political and military fact is the cumulative demotion of “Strategic Nuclear Forces” in the Annual Reports of the secretary of defense to the point where, in 1998, those forces appear under Chapter 5, following chapters on conventional and special operations forces. William Cohen, Annual Report, ch. 5. This admittedly somewhat “Kremlinological” point is checkable for accuracy with the relative positioning of the chapter-length discussion of the strategic nuclear forces in the Annual Reports for, say, 1990 and 1991. Back.
Note 5: See Sagan and Turco, Path Where No Man Thought, p. 54. Back.
Note 6: Price and Tannenwald, “Norms and Deterrence” (pp. 140–141), argue that “the drive to create ‘smart’ bombs and other high-tech options so that leaders will not have to resort to nuclear weapons is indicative of the special status of nuclear weapons.” Emphasis added. The causal connection asserted by Price and Tannenwald is rather too simple and direct for my taste. Back.
Note 7: For discussion of this matter in a period classic with some lasting merit, see Lewis Dunn, Controlling the Bomb, ch. 3. Back.
Note 8: Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition. Back.
Note 9: I equivocate a little here because the explosion of criminal and intertribal violence in the new South Africa has led to a marked deterioration in the personal security of all citizens. Back.
Note 10: Creveld, “New Wars for Old,” p. 91. Back.
Note 11: Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 1. Back.
Note 12: A strong argument for “marginalization” is advanced in Freedman, “Nuclear Weapons.” Back.
Note 13: Sun Tzu, Art of War, esp. p. 177. Back.
Note 14: Davidson, “Secret Weapon of Byzantium.” Back.
Note 15: Mazarr, “Virtual Nuclear Arsenals” and Nuclear Weapons in a Transformed World. Back.
Note 16: Lavoy, “Nuclear Myths and the Causes of Nuclear Proliferation,” esp. p. 206, n. 7. Back.
Note 17: Abolitionist, eliminationist aspirations are demolished in Freedman, “Nuclear Weapons”; Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons; and Payne, Case Against Nuclear Abolition. Also, there is some enduring merit in Garrity, “Depreciation of Nuclear Weapons in International Politics.” Garrity concludes his lengthy review of nuclear matters by suggesting that “it is possible to argue that officials and scholars have hitherto been overly fascinated with thinking about nuclear weapons, as opposed to understanding other outstanding political and military issues that are now coming to the forefront. Whatever the merits of this viewpoint, we should perhaps now be concerned that in the future there will be too little official academic interest in things nuclear. Nuclear weapons may now seem to be increasingly anachronistic and irrelevant. But if this attitude prevails, or if traditional concepts are applied unthinkingly to new circumstances, nuclear weapons could re-emerge on the scene in unexpected and dangerous ways” (p. 501). Those are words of wisdom. Back.
Note 18: Haslam, Soviet Union and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons in Europe; Heuser, NATO, Britain, France and the FRG: Nuclear Strategies and Forces for Europe. Back.
Note 19: For a brief sample of an extensive literature, abolitionist sentiment may be located in the following: Schell, Abolition and Gift of Time; Regina Cowen Karp, Security Without Nuclear Weapons; Rotblat, Steinberger, and Udgaonkar, Nuclear-Weapon-Free World; Canberra Commission, Report; Goodpaster and Butler, “National Press Club Luncheon Address”; Butler, “Stimson Center Award Remarks”; National Academy of Sciences, Future of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy. Back.
Note 20: Mazarr, “Virtual Nuclear Arsenals” and “Notion of Virtual Arsenals.” Back.
Note 21: Mazarr, “Virtual Nuclear Arsenals,” p. 14. Back.
Note 23: Gray, House of Cards, ch. 6, provides detailed justification for this claim. Back.
Note 24: Schelling, Strategy of Conflict, ch. 8. Back.
Note 25: David Dunn, Politics of Threat, ch. 8. Back.
Note 26: Clausewitz, On War, p. 178. Back.
Note 27: Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age, p. 17. Back.
Note 28: Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 16 Back.
Note 29: For reasons explained admirably in Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War. Back.
Note 30: Iklé, “Second Coming of the Nuclear Age,” is thoughtfully skeptical about our record of success with deterrence during the Cold War. Iklé is nothing if not consistent; see his articles “Can Nuclear Deterrence Last Out the Century?” and “Nuclear Strategy.” In the growing library of post–Cold War histories of the first nuclear age, the following are prominent among those works that merit close attention: Andrew and Gordievsky, Instructions from the Centre; Trachtenberg, History and Strategy; Nathan, Cuban Missile Crisis Revisited; Leffler, Preponderance of Power; Scott Sagan, Limits of Safety; Lebow and Stein, We All Lost the Cold War; Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; Haftendorn, NATO and the Nuclear Revolution; Dockrill, Eisenhower’s New-Look National Security Policy; Mastny, Cold War and Soviet Insecurity; Gaddis, We Now Know; Fursenko and Naftali, “One Hell of a Gamble”; May and Zelikow, Kennedy Tapes; and Fischer, Cold War Conundrum. Back.
Note 31: Stein, “Deterrence and Compellence in the Gulf,” is excellent. Back.
Note 32: Howard, “Lessons of the Cold War.” Back.
Note 33: Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 16. Emphasis added. Back.
Note 34: Notwithstanding his focus upon irregular warriors, Ralph Peters offers a superb essay on the power of human motivation in “Our New Old Enemies.” Back.
Note 35: For some arguably relevant theory, see James, Chaos Theory. Back.
Note 36: Peters, “Our New Old Enemies.” Back.
Note 37: Suffice it for now to record that for centuries to come scholars will be arguing about “the decline and fall of the Soviet empire.” At the present time there is a shortlist of contending major explanations (most are predominantly deterministic, as scholars fall into the trap of rationalizing what was substantially highly contingent), but there is no dominant theory that commands near universal respect. Back.
Note 38: In addition to James, Chaos Theory, see Ruelle, Chance and Chaos; Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos; and Beaumont, War, Chaos, and History. Back.
Note 39: See Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Italy, esp. ch. 2. Back.
Note 40: Mandelbaum, “Lessons of the Next Nuclear War.” Back.
Note 41: Freedman, “Nuclear Weapons,” p. 39. Emphasis added. Back.
Note 42: Sagan and Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, p. 17. Back.
Note 43: On taboo issues, see Paul, “Nuclear Taboo and War Initiation in Regional Conflicts”; and Price and Tannenwald, “Norms and Deterrence.” Back.
Note 44: Many of the most pertinent issues are discussed usefully in Wilkening and Watman, Nuclear Deterrence in a Regional Context. Back.
Note 45: Keegan, Face of Battle. Back.
Note 46: Krepon, “Are Missile Defenses MAD?”; Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age, pp. 142–152. Back.
Note 47: The following sample from the large literature available covers all points of view: Carter and Schwartz, Ballistic Missile Defense; Payne, Strategic Defense; Brzezinski, Promise or Peril; York, Does Strategic Defense Breed Offense?; Marshall Institute, Concept of Defensive Deterrence; Chayes and Doty, Defending Deterrence; Payne, Missile Defense in the 21st Century; Baucom, Origins of SDI; and Edward Reiss, Strategic Defense Initiative. Back.
Note 48: On 10 November 1932, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons in a phrase that has become cliché that “the bomber will always get through.” For the context see Bialer, Shadow of the Bomber, ch. 1 (Baldwin’s claim is quoted on p. 14). Back.
Note 49: White House Press Release. For the full political, legal, and strategic contexts, see Lambakis and Gray, Political and Legal Restrictions on U.S. Military Space Activities. Back.
Note 50: Appropriately scathing comment upon this unfortunate and strategically imprudent development is provided by David Smith, “Missile Defense After Helsinki.” Back.
Note 51: It is the logic of asymmetrical strategy. See Matthews, Challenging the United States Symmetrically and Asymmetrically. Back.
Note 52: Ballistic missiles are the most militarily attractive delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons; they are good enough—though not ideal—for delivery of chemical agents that require carefully controlled dispersal if they are to be suitably and promptly lethal; but they are far from ideal for exact delivery of the delicate living organisms that are the agents of biological warfare. See U.S. Congress, Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, pp. 50–52, and Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction, esp. pp. 32–36, 94–99. Back.
Note 53: Blair, Logic of Accidental Nuclear War; Scott Sagan, Limits of Safety; Fischer, Cold War Conundrum. Back.
Note 54: See Wilkening and Watman, Nuclear Deterrence in a Regional Context; and Arquilla, “Bound to Fail.” Back.
Note 55: On the basics, see Panofsky, “The Mutual Hostage Relationship Between America and Russia.” Back.
Note 56: Price and Tannenwald, “Norms and Deterrence,” p. 140. Back.
Note 57: For example, we recognize taboos against incest and cannibalism; in addition, there is a taboo against remaining seated during the playing of the national anthem. Back.
Note 58: Lewis Dunn, Containing Nuclear Proliferation, pp. 69, 70. Emphasis added. Back.
Note 60: Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday. Back.
Note 61: Quoted in Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p. 240. The chancellor’s actual words were, “Necessity knows no law.” Back.
Note 62: Clausewitz, On War, p. 605. Back.
Note 63: Crone, Banning Chemical Weapons, is helpful, as is Utgoff, Challenge of Chemical Weapons. Back.
Note 64: Eliot Cohen, one among “Three Comments,” p. 37. Back.
Note 65: Waltz in Sagan and Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 21, 22, 24; Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 16. Back.
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