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The Second Nuclear Age, by Colin S. Gray
6. Coping with a Nuclear Future
As an organizing concept, the hypothesis of a second nuclear age can be tested only for its plausible explanatory merit; it cannot be demonstrated to be either true or false. As the inventor of the concept of a second nuclear age—in that formulation, at least—I need to be cautious lest I become overenamored of my own creation. This book develops an apparent paradox. On the one hand, the analysis shows how substantially different is the political context for nuclear strategy in the second, as contrasted with the first, nuclear age. With no nostalgia for Cold War certitudes and simplicities, the argument here registers the emergence of a transient second nuclear age wherein there is no single dominant axis of threat in world politics. On the other hand, the analysis shows both how generally sensible were the leading principles and practices adopted to govern the U.S. nuclear force posture and nuclear strategy in the Cold War and how useful those principles and practices should continue to be in the future. It is at least an apparent paradox that the dramatic shift of “nuclear ages,” from Cold War to a diffusion of menace in a political context bereft of a super menace, should not require a dramatically different approach to nuclear questions. Probably the closest to an identifiable requirement for a major shift in U.S. policy and strategy is the need today for the declining reliability of deterrence to be offset by a new emphasis upon military denial by offensive, and especially defensive, counterforce. The contemporary necessity for such a shift of U.S. strategic emphasis is as clear as much of the detail of future NBC peril remains opaque.
Some important segments of this book are likely to be deemed strongly controversial. Three broad arguments that find much favor here are particularly apt to spur widespread unease.
First, many people will be uncomfortable with the argument (in Chapter 5) that, overall, the U.S. approach to nuclear force planning and strategy during the Cold War retains solid merit for the future also. By way of caveats, I would like to see the United States devote serious attention to air defense and to BMD and to be more flexibly adaptable in its war planning. Nonetheless, the nuclear strategic enlightenment of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s continues to appear to have been emphatically correct on the basics of nuclear lore.
Second, most probably there will be some significant unease among readers about the political analysis that informs the hypothesis of a second nuclear age and that fuels the argument that deterrence is becoming ever less reliable. Given that I have suggested that deterrence has never been reliable, readers could be excused for concluding that I anticipate strategic conditions wherein deterrence cannot function (save by accident). Those readers would be correct. The argument is that deterrence, even nuclear deterrence, is inherently unreliable and that as a consequence the prudent U.S. policymaker should choose to acquire denial/defense capabilities as a crucial backstop to ever more uncertain efforts at dissuasion.
Third, it is entirely predictable that some readers will be offended, at the least surprised, by my apparent strategic demotion of the obvious military potential of information superiority. In fact, my only moderate enthusiasm for the several RMAs that may be in process today derives from a respect for the whole realm of strategy—in its many dimensions—and especially from respect for the strategic potential of even modestly intelligent defense planning for asymmetric combat by foes of the United States.
* * *
The argument developed in this book around the organizing concept of a second nuclear age does not rest upon any great conceptual or empirical discovery. In some ways, the very familiarity of the detail of the subject impedes understanding. The postulate of nuclear ages, rather like RMAs, helps organize possible evidence and guides the theorist, for good or ill. It is possible to make sense of a period of strategic history even though there is no dominant item of argument that would warrant a shout of “eureka.” So it is here. Everything considered here has been considered elsewhere. However, everything considered here has not been considered all together elsewhere, nor has it been considered from the perspective of strategy. While alert to change—witness the hypothesis of a succession of nuclear ages of which the current one is by no means the last—I am more impressed by continuities than by discontinuities in strategic history. Although history will not repeat itself in its fine print, this second nuclear age is but one way, albeit obviously an important one, to characterize yet another span of years of an inter(great)war kind.
It would be emotionally, if not intellectually, satisfying to be able to compress the diverse strands of argument in this book into some single, marvelously reductionist aphorism. If only some equivalent to “never divide the fleet,” “peace now,” or even “no more nukes” could fit the bill. Unfortunately, our NBC-related security condition is complex and does not lend itself to bumper-sticker treatment; that being so, there is no alternative other than to present the findings as they are, not reduced to some master cure (or band-aid). Each of these findings has been well flagged in the body of the book. Should any of these major points occasion great surprise, there would have to be something seriously wrong with the narrative trajectory of the whole of this enterprise. The Second Nuclear Age is not a dramatic production wherein an entirely unpredictable plot twist in the closing scene of the final act resolves all dilemmas and enables all parties to live happily ever after.
1. The nuclear fact is a condition, not a problem. The nuclear fact refers to the strategic consequences of the nuclear discovery. None of the contemporary or predicted political, military, technological, or other trends discussed in this book will rescind the nuclear era. Neither narrowly—in the form of military and civil technologies, via an information-led RMA or in the form of chemical and biological weapons—nor broadly, because of an evaporation of policy demand for the strategic effect that nuclear weapons can produce, are agents appearing that will consign nuclear weapons to the museum of strategic history.
This finding, also identified as a theme in Chapter 1, will come as no grand revelation. It is, however, perhaps close to a revelation to appreciate how little impact new information-led military capabilities, new developments in BC weaponry, and the political restructuring of world politics after the Cold War are having upon the strategic salience of nuclear arsenals. The contemporary U.S. antinuclear preference is as understandable in light of the country’s “information edge” as it is either irrelevant or even likely to prove self-negating. If foreign and defense policy were a game of solitaire, then the strong U.S. preference for a postnuclear world order would be of major interest and indeed would be feasible. If anything, the strength of the U.S. non-nuclear preference—more precisely, the reasons for that preference—must fuel interest elsewhere in the search for an equalizer to U.S. conventional advantage. One does not require a Ph.D. in strategic studies to applaud the logic expressed by Gennadiy K. Khromov when he writes: “Liquidating existing nuclear arsenals, along with the transition to virtual nuclear arsenals, will benefit those countries with the most powerful conventional forces. Potential signatories of such a treaty would only be interested in it if conventional weapons were similarly restricted.” 1 As we saw in the extensive discussion of nuclear fallacies in Chapter 4, the difficulties with virtual nuclear arsenals would far exceed that identified by Khromov (its unfairness to polities who find themselves conventionally disadvantaged), but he does signal usefully a massive structural problem for any great scheme of multinational nuclear deemphasis or outright abolition (from the active weapons inventory, at least).
Much of the better RMA analysis, for example as reported by Williamson A. Murray, suggests persuasively that RMAs overlie each other, 2 meaning that yesterday’s RMA (or RMAs) can persist into today and beyond, that today’s mega-RMA might comprise a cluster of quasi-independent—and somewhat interdependent—RMAs, or that today there are several RMAs jostling simultaneously for authority. A somewhat more radical idea than those entertained by Murray is the possibility that the contemporary RMA, or RMAs, do not constitute a great change with clearly knowable parts and consequences but rather yield hugely contestable evidence that lends itself to some notably rival interpretations. But no matter what edifice of theory one erects to help understand and explain what is going on in contemporary strategic history, there is an enduring necessity to take account of the unique strategic value that policymakers of different cultures find in the actual, or prospective, acquisition of a national nuclear arsenal.
The nuclear revolution arguably is different from other RMAs in that it offers a long-term resting place for polities unable or unwilling to compete for advantage in later RMAs. An appropriate analogy might be with a belligerent who rejects conventional resistance in favor of irregular warfare (including terrorism). Thinking “arrow-like” about the course of strategic history, one is apt to assume that the military prowess achievable from exploitation of today’s accessible RMA must trump the prowess that derives from exploitation of yesterday’s RMA. 3 Indeed, one of the more popular definitions of a “military revolution,” offered by Andrew F. Krepinevich, points explicitly to a nonlinear increase in military effectiveness.
What is a military revolution? It is what occurs when the application of new technologies into a significant number of military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptations in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of conflict. It does so by producing a dramatic increase—often an order of magnitude or greater—in the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed forces. 4
As a general rule, as Krepinevich emphasizes, exploitation of an RMA brings major strategic advantage. But the absolute quality to nuclear weapons about which Bernard Brodie and his collaborators wrote so eloquently in 1946 5 means that an information-led RMA might be trumped by the “old reliable” equalizer of a nuclear arsenal. In practice, that may not prove easy to effect. An information-dominant United States, supreme in space, air, and cyberspace, should be well equipped to wage conventional (and even some unconventional) warfare against a nuclear-armed enemy, and by prompt offensive and defensive counterforce defeat that enemy’s nuclear-armed forces militarily. Nonetheless, no matter how competent multilayered protection ought to be, it is a safe prediction that nuclear-armed forces, even if small and unsophisticated, would equalize well enough with state-of-the-art conventional arms. Rephrased, yesterday’s RMA—the nuclear revolution—will not be strategically eclipsed by the late-model conventional weaponry of information-age America.
2. Deterrence is wonderful, when it works. Time and again I have exceeded the empirical evidence when I have propounded the theme that deterrence is unreliable. The reason this theme, argument, or finding is so important is that its implications for the practical realm of strategy and statecraft could be literally devastating. It stands to reason, as the formula has it, that nuclear-armed states should conduct their mutual strategic relations with historically unusual caution. However, everything that a professional strategic analyst—at least this professional strategic analyst—understands about the structure and functioning of strategy screams beware of complacency about the reliability of deterrence.
To write in praise of deterrence is as undemanding as often it is necessary; it is not, however, sufficient to pass the test of strategic prudence. After the fashion of Payne’s path-breaking study Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age, 6 my examination of the second nuclear age leads me to be skeptical of the reliability of deterrence, not to be critical of the concept, or even the theory, of deterrence itself. Unlike arms control theory, the theory of deterrence does not suffer from a fatal internal contradiction. The only problem with deterrence is that it can be difficult, and on occasions impossible, to achieve. The criticism is not of deterrence the theory, the policy, or the strategy, but rather of any inclination to believe that the success of deterrence somehow can be assured. Admittedly, there is no historical evidence of the failure of nuclear deterrence; if anything, the record of the “long nuclear peace” of the Cold War suggests that nuclear deterrence does work reliably. 7
The problems that most impress me are (1) the abundant historical evidence of failure of “conventional deterrence”; (2) the structural and ultimately indeterminate human element in all putative deterrence relationships; (3) the necessarily voluntary, if coerced, character of deterrence; (4) the lack of conclusively persuasive evidence of any kind demonstrating that nuclear threats deterred war between East and West from the late 1940s to the late 1980s; and (5) appreciation that even a single failure of nuclear deterrence might ruin our country, our region, and possibly our planet (just one failure could have catastrophic consequences).
The preceding paragraph is not intended to form the basis for an indictment of deterrence as concept, theory, policy, or strategy. Quite to the contrary, as the title of this subsection (and “finding”) affirms, deterrence is wonderful, when it works. Arms control literally cannot work in the toughest of tough cases when it is really required because of the paradox that the enemies who need to cooperate cannot cooperate because they are enemies—at least they cannot cooperate through arms control. Deterrence, however, can work when one really needs it. The difficulty is that it can never be relied upon to work with the kind of assurance that we would like when under nuclear menace. Reliable deterrence can neither be bought by calculable threats that can translate into determinate force-building plans nor be assured by immaculate execution of strategic theory. Intended deterrees simply may fail to “get the message,” they may get the message but choose to discount it, they may not be able to control their country’s military machine, or they may be drunk, otherwise incapacitated, or willing to suffer a collective martyr’s death for what to them seems a great and worthy cause. One cannot predict that any of these dire conditions will obtain between nuclear-armed adversaries, but such a possibility surely is more probable than is the postulate of a perfect, repeat perfect, performance of nuclear deterrence forever. 8
For this second nuclear age, and perhaps beyond, the appropriately prudent conclusion to draw about a policy of deterrence is that it is necessary, but it cannot possibly be sufficient for public safety. With respect to nuclear peril, we in our current condition may well be not unlike those Europeans who in late July 1914—and ignorant of the decision for war already taken in Vienna and Berlin 9 —reasonably could find comfort in the undeniable fact that the general European peace had held despite a series of alarms since 1905 (the First Morocco Crisis). A quarter century on, Fred Charles Iklé’s 1973 article “Can Nuclear Deterrence Last Out the Century?” still appears to be focused on the most pressing question of modern times. 10 The all but historical fact, as of this writing, that Iklé’s question is answered in the affirmative does not, at least should not, engender dismissive contempt for that question. Whether we have been more clever than lucky, or vice versa, over the years of the nuclear era to date, one can hardly deny the possibility that the margin of safety against the failure of nuclear deterrence could be frighteningly slim and fragile.
3. Nuclear weapons are weapons; nuclear strategy is strategy. One can argue, not unreasonably, that the effectively open-ended scale of damage that nuclear weapons might inflict has had the result that “strategy hits a dead end.” 11 In one sense, at least, such an idea undeniably is correct. Nuclear weapons could be used in ways, and on a scale, such as to void any relevance to strategic considerations: so much is not in doubt. The challenge, however—at least as these matters are regarded here—is to craft approaches for coping well enough with the permanent nuclear fact. To tell policymakers and professional military people that nuclear arsenals, if unleashed, could make a mockery of any and every strategic aspiration is, one suspects, to risk telling them what they know already. It is improbable that policymakers anywhere need to be educated as to the extraordinary qualities, and quantities, of nuclear armament. But once one has registered politically correctly the awesome awfulness of nuclear (let alone BC) armament, what next? This is a nuclear age plainly distinguishable in political structure from the decades of the East-West Cold War, and the nuclear thread continues to weave in and out of matters of regional and global security. Once one reads that strategy hits a dead end because of the nuclear fact, what does one say about our, and others’, nuclear arsenals and strategies? More to the point, which working hypotheses can best help explain and understand how nuclear weapons could influence international security?
I have long believed that recognition of the possibility of nuclear catastrophe should not be allowed to paralyze the strategic imagination. Moreover, given the permanence of the nuclear fact, intellectual or policy resignation in the face of undeniably awful nuclear possibilities appears most imprudent.
Nuclear problems are not entirely generic. Because the United States of 1980s vintage could not with high assurance have defeated Soviet nuclear arms in a classic military sense, it does not follow that the United States of the early twenty-first century could not defeat the nuclear arms of an Iraq, Libya, Iran, or North Korea—or, dare one suggest, of a China also. Much of that putative defeat could be inflicted by U.S. conventional forces operating offensively and defensively to achieve multilayered counterforce effect. But most likely there would be some nuclear (and BC) arms buried deep underground or deployed with an agility that would thwart precise conventional firepower
Nuclear weapons would not usually engage other nuclear weapons in a classic military clash of armed forces, though such a role most probably would predominate in the U.S. case. It does not follow as a consequence, however, that nuclear arms would not be weapons and that nuclear strategy would be something other than strategy. Terror can be a weapon and form the basis for strategy, to cite the leading practicable option for newly nuclear-proliferant polities. In point of fact, whenever one inquires at all rigorously how strategy and statecraft can exploit the unique strategic properties of nuclear armament, one finds answers readily enough. It is unfortunate for clarity of useful focus in public debate that in this second nuclear age there exists very little prudent discussion of nuclear weapons in strategic perspective. More often than not, nuclear arms simply are disdained as an embarassing military artifact of the Cold War that cannot be wished away definitively because of the nuclear discovery. At worst, nuclear weapons are not really treated as weapons at all but rather as antihuman devilish devices urgently in need of exorcism. Even typically realistic—and “classic realist”—strategic commentators incline to the view that the leading purpose suitable for approaching nuclear armament should be a desire to secure their “marginalization.” 12 The problem with marginalization pertains not to its desirability but rather to its political feasibility and even its military wisdom.
With regard to military roles for nuclear arms, it is interesting to note that the leading Western historian of nuclear strategy, Lawrence Freedman, has written that “however questionable their military purposes, then, nuclear arsenals can serve a variety of political goals—from holding together alliances, to gaining international attention, to deterrence and intimidation.” 13 The argument in Chapter 5 did not emphasize military purposes for nuclear arms; on the contrary, the analysis was very much along the lines that Freedman’s words suggest, but neither did it shy away from specifying both specialized niche and more general war-fighting roles. The public debate over nuclear arms thus continues in this second nuclear age in the context of what amounts to a conspiracy of silence over the military uses of those weapons for strategic effect, a conspiracy also noticeable in the years of the Cold War. Nuclear “employment” as threat and as diplomatic message indicating (intending to indicate, perhaps) willingness to escalate both fall within the realm of strategy, though not within the realm of military strategy. 14
Few if any would-be nuclear proliferants will seek nuclear arms with a view to securing military victory by the actual use of those weapons. Nuclear weapons status, even nuclear-weapons threshold status, instead will be seen as a vital means for achieving strategic effect directly upon foes’ policymaking processes, rather than indirectly via the imposition of damage in battle. Nonetheless, nuclear weapons are weapons, and nuclear strategy is strategy. Whether the immediate focus is military or political consequences, recognition of the common currency of strategic effect alerts us to the authority of strategy.
4. Ethnocentricity can mislead. Ethnocentric judgment can take different forms and is pervasive in Western strategic literature. I use ethnocentrism “as a term to describe feelings of group centrality and superiority.” 15 “Culture-bound” strategic commentators have long been susceptible to being overimpressed with their own genius and rectitude at the expense of recognizing the role played by their particular interests. The most salient connection between these thoughts and the thrust of this book is the all but “trained incapacity” of some Western experts on NBC non- (counter- and anti-)proliferation to take sufficiently seriously the motives of local and regional “rogues.” 16 Readers may recall that earlier in this text I offered a public security warning against uncritical reference to “rogue” polities. Notwithstanding the no less perilous path of an uncritical relativism—for example, the use of poison gas is just the Iraqi way of telling Iranians and Kurds that they mean business—frequent reference to “rogues” can promote a creeping self-deception.
Such thoughtful and well-respected theorists as Waltz and Martin van Creveld, for example, in an important sense write ethnocentrically as Western analysts even when they appear to write in a contrary mode. Both theorists have argued forcefully that there is no evidence that new nuclear proliferants, or nuclear-threshold states, in the developing world either have behaved, or are likely to behave, other than with extreme caution in their management and employment of a nuclear arsenal. 17 One is moved to comment, a little cynically, that that position bears some family resemblance to solemn judgments from the late 1930s to the effect that there was no proof that Adolf Hitler wanted either to begin a European war or to kill all the Jews in Europe. The line between a strictly true, and a true but deeply misleading, claim can be a fine one.
The argument here as the fourth finding is not entirely cultural by reference or in content. Even though WMD command universal respect for reason of the MD in the WMD, it is the genuine insecurity context of proliferant polities and groups that will loosen the bonds of policy restraint, just as it provided a leading motive for proliferation in the first place. Moreover, the content of strategic culture is not universal. A near-universal respect for WMD, and especially for nuclear weapons, need not translate through the social action of culture into a command for “utility [only] in nonuse.” 18 U.S. professors of politics may not be encultured readily to appreciate feelings of desperation about national security, a deeply un-American attitude of policy resignation in the face of what appears to be the will of God (or Allah), let alone to endorse an all but unthinkable enthusiasm to wield WMD as an instrument for achieving change.
A difficulty with the essentially ethnocentric—if in many ways worthy—view that there is a global strategic (and political and moral) enlightenment about WMD is that that view does not have to be much in error in order to be catastrophically wrong. Waltz and van Creveld are plausible in their optimism about new nuclear proliferants, on the evidence to date, for what that is worth. It is not worth much of policy relevance to the United States, because the golden rule of prudence in national and international security obliges us to consider what may happen as well as what has happened. History tells us that all weapons eventually are used, that accidents happen, that policymakers miscalculate, and that friction can rule.
Ethnocentrism can have at least two serious negative consequences for security. First, its operation disinclines us to treat with due seriousness the scale and velocity of local motivation to acquire WMD for reasons that are locally compelling. (One should not forget how useful the extant nuclear weapons states continue to find their nuclear arms.) Second, with minds and hearts worthily keyed to questions of arms control, and at worst to matters of political semiotics, we may be culturally incapable of empathizing with polities who are prepared actually to use NBC, but especially nuclear, weapons in war.
5. Nuclear war(s) can happen. It is tempting to subsume this fifth theme or argument under the rubric of the Clausewitzian admonition that friction rules, but to do that would be to succumb to the ethnocentric error discussed above. U.S. strategists today can scarcely conceive of the purposeful first use of nuclear weapons, let alone the resort to a classic first strike. It follows in such U.S. perspective that a nuclear war would have to be the product of some variants of friction. Inadvertence, accident, miscalculation—these are the stuff of which nonpurposeful nuclear conflict would be made. The granting of validity to that view, however, should not blind us to the possibility—and if one looks far enough, the strong probability even—of (small) nuclear wars waged by belligerents who fully intended to wage them (if with aspirations for one-sided nuclear operations, of course).
It would be agreeable to be able to report that the absence of nuclear war since 1945 proves, indeed demonstrates, the extreme unlikelihood of nuclear war conducted by anyone over any issue. Unfortunately, scholars do not really know how to interpret that absence of nuclear use. One can talk now of a tradition of nonuse of nuclear weapons, even of a taboo against nuclear use, but that is only talk. The tradition or taboo in question is just one detonation away from being exposed as a wishful thought. Alternatively, to be fair, the tradition or taboo-breaking nuclear explosion could be the shocking exception that would reinforce and somehow lock in the taboo against nuclear use. As of now we do not, and cannot, know which judgment is the more correct.
Initially, at least, the unique event of a (hopefully small) nuclear war cannot be predicted statistically. We are entirely in the realm of guesswork when we pass judgment on the prospects for continuation of the long nuclear peace.
6. Biological and chemical weapons pose some unique challenges. The U.S. defense community that ultimately delivered, at least safeguarded, the historic political victory of the late 1980s over the Evil Empire of the heirs of Lenin spent more than forty years analyzing and overanalyzing nuclear weapons. That defense community did not much study the strategic implications of old and new biological, toxin, and chemical weaponry. That is a fact rather than a criticism. Notwithstanding the offensive and defensive BC weapons research and production programs of both sides in the Cold War (until late 1969, with reference to the U.S. offensive BW program, illegally into the 1990s for the Soviet program), the range of BC menace literally was dwarfed in strategic significance by nuclear threats. Nuclear weapons reliably deliverable over transoceanic distances by missile or aircraft were much more obviously militarily useful—though not necessarily ultimately more controllable—than were BC weapons with their effects heavily dependent on the weather, on precise mechanical dispersal of lethal aerosols, on the most careful storage, and (for biological agents) on the elapse of considerable time (for incubation). A military assault upon the United States by designer viruses or clouds of poison gas, even if such weapons performed their dastardly missions as intended, could not disarm U.S. nuclear-armed forces of the ability most promptly to write finis to the Soviet experiment. When planning for a great military contest, BC weaponry, especially of the necessarily non–promptly fatal biological kind, cannot begin to compete with nuclear arms for the honor of attempting a disarming first strike, or even a strike that should limit the damage likely to be suffered in immediate retaliation. For this reason, preeminently, BC weaponry generally was as technically underdeveloped as were the concepts, policy, and strategy for its employment. 19
The reality of the situation just described is that until very recently Western strategic thought and defense planning have viewed the BC tranches in the NBC basket largely as terra incognita. Both superpowers developed and deployed biological and chemical weapons in the Cold War. However, in good part for the reasons provided in the preceding paragraph, there is effectively no strategic theory of, or doctrine for, biological or chemical warfare (though there is a large literature on the tactical employment of chemical weapons). The first major work of theory worthy of the name has yet to be written, at least published, on “strategy for biological warfare.” We should probably be grateful for this neglect. Readers should be aware that the BC realm is not alone in being avoided by Western strategic theorists; there exists no major work on “strategy for space warfare” either.
The absence of a strategic theoretical literature on BC warfare does not mean that polities and substate groups will not figure out strategically effective ways to use BC agents for coercion in peacetime and success in war. England had an effective navy centuries before Alfred Thayer Mahan told that navy about “seapower,” and the United States today exercises “spacepower” even though it does not really understand the concept very well (but see the discussion below, under the eighth finding).
When a community of security experts does not know how to treat a category of difficulty, it is apt to retreat into conditions of denial or wishful thinking. A common response to the BC challenge to world security today is simply to shunt discussion toward the prospects for arms control via the current, alas pathetically inadequate, conventions on biological and toxin and on chemical weapons. As noted earlier, biological and chemical weapons programs are extraordinarily difficult to identify unambiguously in the context of pharmaceutical and chemical research facilities and industrial activity apparently geared to legal, and nonmilitary, missions. For recent illustration, it is reported that Libya currently is well embarked—with help from Iraqi scientists—on developing a “biological warfare complex under the guise of a medical facility.” 20 Probably with self-conscious irony, Libya’s General Health Laboratories near Tripoli have been acquiring such dual-use—medical research and biological warfare—items as freeze driers, incubators, amino acid analyzers, and toxin identification kits.
Key asymmetries in the distribution of power mean that the United States and other G8 polities are especially in need of thinking and planning strategically about biological and chemical perils to their security. Whereas the late USSR reasonably could aspire to compete militarily in symmetrically regular forms of combat, most possible foes of the United States tomorrow probably will not so aspire. Of course, there are undeniable old-fashioned virtues to nuclear arms. Such arms are the ultimate in swift brutality, they are reliable in their destructive effect (if their delivery is tactically practicable, that is), and they are universally comprehended and feared. But nuclear weapons are more difficult, and certainly much more expensive, to develop, deploy, and keep operationally ready than are many of the more accessible BC weapons options. Moreover, if—unlike the case of the superpowers in the Cold War—a polity is seeking weapons of terror for strategic effect through coercive diplomacy, the military-operational arguments against BC arms all but evaporate. If a polity plans to try to win militarily against the United States—the Soviet aspiration in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—then there is no prudent choice other than to rely heavily upon the kind of armament that can strike immediately, swiftly, and reliably with a promptly lethal destructive or disabling effect, all of which conflates to a strategic and policy demand for nuclear weapons. But regional players, or even local groups who cannot aspire to wage war symmetrically with a superpower, could afford to be less impressed by the uniquely predictable virtues of nuclear arms.
7. Counterforce is essential for antiproliferation. Just because NBC nonproliferation in the long run is a lost cause, it does not follow that particular antiproliferation acts have to be bereft of strategic value. Because one cannot do everything, for all time, still it can be worth doing something now. To explain, I have shown how and why the nonproliferation regime keyed to the NPT of 1968 and the biological (and toxin) and chemical weapons conventions of 1972 and 1995, respectively, cannot possibly succeed—if by success one means the definitive arrest and reversal of the trend toward NBC proliferation (and the proliferation of their missile means of delivery). 21 Such a heroically ambitious definition of policy success, however, is not very interesting to the practical world of statecraft and strategy. What can be attempted in aid of nonproliferation, and if need be by way of active antiproliferation, is some mix of the following:
Readers may recall that magic moment in the movie The Dirty Dozen when the scrofulous “general” Donald Sutherland asks the immaculately groomed colonel about his beautifully uniformed honor guard: “Very pretty, Colonel, but can they fight?” Today there are grounds for concern that the ever more marvelously information-rich armed forces of the United States are becoming less and less usable as an instrument of U.S. policy. U.S. readers should ask themselves how serious they wish their country to be or to become in its deeds in support of its antiproliferation policy. Of course, Americans care about the proliferation of NBC arms. But do they care sufficiently to take effective military means—of any and every kind necessary—to thwart such proliferation?
The excuses truly are legion for a U.S. preference not to have resort to literally forceful options to ensure NBC weapons control or disarmament. What is more, most of the candidate excuses will either be or be made to sound reasonable and assuredly prudent. A short list of excuses for a decision not to use force against the WMD of a proliferant polity includes the following:
Excuses for inaction in the face of plausible evidence of NBC proliferation will never be in short supply, and the fact that very occasionally—for example, as in December 1998—forceful action will be taken does not lessen the authority of this list. An obvious implication of the short list just provided is that defensive reactive means of active counterforce, rather than anticipatory or proactive offensive means, are by far the more politically user friendly. If the leading-edge answer to regionally acquired WMD is air defense and BMD, then strictly speaking one needs to take action only in response to the launch of those weapons by the regional foe. There should be no need to emphasize the point that in aid of policy legitimation, heavy reliance upon defensive counterforce sacrifices the advantages of the initiative.
8. Contested space control may be the United States’ Achilles’ heel. It may seem strange that a book on the second nuclear age that has of necessity devoted most of its attention to NBC, and especially to nuclear, weapons and their implications should need to conclude the itemization of major themes, arguments, and findings with a strong caveat on the subject of space control. The reason is that the U.S. armed forces are, and are becoming ever more, dependent upon space systems for their combat effectiveness. The information-led RMA does not work if the United States loses control of space. Space control refers to the ability both to use earth orbit on a predictable basis and to deny such reliable use to a foe. “The American way of modern war” will not work if a foe can contest U.S. use at will of the spaceways. The U.S. armed forces—land, sea, air, special operations, nuclear—depend upon space systems for early warning, communications, navigation/targeting, weather, geodesy, and intelligence, and—one day—for some key BMD, air defense, and terrestrial bombardment options also.
In particular, the U.S. ability to conduct precise, which is to say precisely effective, conventional warfare is vitally dependent upon the enabling agency of space capabilities. Enemies able to harm U.S. space systems, and perhaps to use space systems (for example, by the prompt purchase of near real-time imagery from the commercial satellites of nonbelligerent polities), would have found a notable equalizer to the military effectiveness of the United States’ latest RMA. If, as one can and must predict, earth orbit becomes yet another geographical environment for armed conflict, 22 it is likely as a consequence that the sharp cutting edge of U.S. information-led weaponry would be noticeably dulled. The prospect of such an eventuality must reduce confidence in the putative strategic effectiveness of those conventional forces linked to an information-led RMA. If or when the United States loses assured control of space, it will be obliged to either revise dramatically downward its foreign policy aspirations or return to a condition of higher reliance upon nuclear menace in its strategy. 23
This is not a fine academic point; it is, rather, registration of a classic lesson of strategic experience. Any geographical environment the military exploitation of which yields significant advantage has to be an environment well worth fighting to contest. Because the U.S. information-led RMA depends critically upon information gathered by, and passed from, space systems, it is entirely certain that foes of the United States will devote great energy to exploring cost-effective ways to deny the United States strategically effective use of the spaceways. This strategic logic has been true for the use of the sea and the air; there is no reason it should not hold for outer space also.
Envoi
This book may be deeply unsettling, not to say unsatisfactory, to some readers. Any work that determines as an effort in policy science to try to explain the structure of a problem, rather than advance a preferred solution, invites a dissatisfied readership. My approach to the subject is flagged plainly enough in my title. The Second Nuclear Age conveys intentionally the suggestion that strategic history must accommodate at least several nuclear “ages.” To advertise the complexity of NBC security issues is good for fit with historical experience but is less good for appeal to those who already have found their single, simple, preferred solution to NBC ills.
I have argued for the proposition that we live today in a second nuclear age. In addition, I have suggested that the global political structure and policy demand for nuclear assistance in this second nuclear age are vastly different both from the first nuclear age of the great Cold War and from a forthcoming third nuclear age, which is likely to be defined most characteristically by the return of a single, dominant axis of international antagonism. Would that there were some magic wand that would render NBC-related security issues miraculously and reliably resolvable. Candidates for the magic wand include deterrence, BMD, arms control/disarmament, and offensive counterforce keyed to an information-led RMA. Each is interesting and worth pursuing, but none—indeed not even all together—can banish NBC perils. Insecurity, including NBC insecurity, is the human condition.
Endnotes
Note 1: Khromov, Letter to the Editor. Blank, “Nuclear Strategy and Nuclear Proliferation in Russian Strategy,” explains the current necessity for nuclear dependency in Russian strategy. Back.
Note 2: Murray, “Thinking About Revolutions in Military Affairs.” Back.
Note 3: Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Back.
Note 4: Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer,” p. 30. Emphasis added. Back.
Note 5: Brodie, Absolute Weapon. Back.
Note 6: Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age. Also see his “Post–Cold War Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Deterrence Policy.” Back.
Note 7: I adapt “long nuclear peace” from Edward Gibbon’s reference to “this long peace,” History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, p. 62. Back.
Note 8: See Iklé, “Second Coming of the Nuclear Age.” Back.
Note 9: Herwig, First World War, chs. 1, 2. Back.
Note 10: Iklé, “Can Nuclear Deterrence Last Out the Century?” Back.
Note 11: Brodie, “Strategy Hits a Dead End.” Back.
Note 12: Freedman, “Nuclear Weapons.” Back.
Note 13: Ibid., p. 187. Emphasis added. Back.
Note 14: The classic treatment remains Schelling, Arms and Influence. Back.
Note 15: Booth, Strategy and Ethnocentrism, p. 14. Back.
Note 16: Trained incapacity” was one of the favorite concepts of Herman Kahn. Personal discussions with Kahn. Back.
Note 17: Sagan and Waltz, Spread of Nuclear Weapons, chs. 1, 3; Creveld, Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict, esp. chs. 3, 4. Back.
Note 18: Brodie, War and Politics, ch. 9. Back.
Note 19: The extent to which times have changed is flagged in Shubik, “Terrorism, Technology, and the Socioeconomics of Death.” Back.
Note 20: Evans, “Iraqi Scientists ‘Helping Libyan Germ Warfare.’” Back.
Note 21: See Rumsfeld Commission, Executive Summary. Back.
Note 22: Gray, “Influence of Space Power Upon History.” Back.
Note 23: See U.S. Space Command, Long Range Plan; and Gray and Sheldon, “Spacepower and the Revolution in Military Affairs.” Back.
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