Foreign Policy In Focus

During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence failed to thwart crises, which were subsequently solved with good, old politics.

We may owe thanks for the absence of war (other than proxy) during the Long Peace -- aka the Cold War -- between the United States and the Soviet Union less to nuclear deterrence, as is commonly assumed, than to the "underlying politics." That's a thesis beginning to gain credibility which Francis J. Gavin presents as well as anyone (though I've just begun the book) in Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2012).

Theories about nuclear weapons, he writes (my additions bracketed):

… were based on a certain view of the world: that the international system was no longer solely driven by geopolitical competition between the great states. While these drives still mattered, international relations were now shaped by the existence of and interaction between rival nuclear forces. The weapons themselves -- their lethality, their numbers, their deployments -- drove the politics, not the other way around. The interaction could produce outcomes -- arms races, dangerous crises, and even inadvertent war -- separate from the political sources of the rivalry. These theories implied that the most effective policy might not be focusing on the underlying political dispute between rivals but to control their [nuclear] weapons and their interactions. [In part, it] meant that mutual efforts had to be made to limit dangers and to negotiate, not about the core geopolitical issues driving the dispute, but control of the weapons themselves.

"This is an extraordinary way of viewing international relations," Gavin continues. But, he asks, "does it accurately reflect the way the world works?" He then attempts to answer his own question. (Emphasis added.)

It is interesting to reflect on how rarely the ups and downs of the superpower geopolitical competition mirrored the movements of the arms race. The Soviets pushed the United States aggressively on the issue of West Germany's military status by threatening West Berlin's viability at a time when the USSR was not only weak but potentially open to a US first strike in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Soviets left West Berlin alone after 1962, even as the US nuclear superiority that arguably helped protect the city disappeared. Why? Because the core geopolitical questions surrounding West Germany's military and political status were resolved, largely to the Soviet Union's satisfaction. In fact, it is very hard to find any evidence that … the Soviets ever considered launching a "bolt from the blue" against the United States.

Ward Wilson also approached the failure of deterrence in the Berlin crisis of 1948. In his book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), about which we recently posted, he writes:

Historians debate whether the redeployment of [nuclear weapons-capable] B-29s to England successfully deterred the Soviets. But few ask how Stalin could have initiated the crisis in the first place. When he ordered access to Berlin cut off, the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons. (the Soviet Union would not explode its first nuclear weapons for another year). Cutting off access to Berlin carried with it a significant risk of war. Where two large armed groups confront each other in a narrow space, there is always the possibility of accidental escalation. Or escalation could have been intentional. One of the options considered by Washington during the crisis was sending an armored column to force its way up the autobahn to Berlin. Given the risk of provoking a nuclear war and the U.S. nuclear monopoly, why wasn't Stalin deterred from initiating the blockade? If the risk of nuclear war deters, why did Stalin start a crisis that could have led to the use of nuclear weapons against his country?

In other words, politics often proceed independently of considerations of the threat of a nuclear attacks. Meanwhile, far from lending clarity to international relations, nuclear deterrence just creates another obstacle and adds another layer of complexity to world peace.

A pretext for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in European states is to free them from the need to develop nuclear weapons.

Yesterday we posted about the little brother of The Bomb (strategic nuclear weapons): tactical, or lower yield, nukes. We cited a number of reasons that tactical pose as much of a threat as strategic. Among them are the exorbitant cost -- modernizing the B61 tactical nukes in the U.S. stockpile will cost $10 billion. Another: they blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional weapons, as can be seen in the instance of Pakistan, which may be developing them for use against India.

On August 27, at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Kingston Reif outlined issues that tactical nukes raise with extended or umbrella deterrence (stationing nuclear weapons on the soil of our allies, ostensibly to provide them with the same deterrence that Americans "enjoy").

 … the 2009 final report of the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States … highlighted the importance of nonstrategic (or "tactical") nuclear weapons. … It noted that the continued deployment of approximately 200 US nonstrategic B61 gravity bombs in Europe and the maintenance of nuclear-armed Tomahawk cruise missiles … in the Pacific are essential to extending deterrence on behalf [of] US partners in Eastern Europe and East Asia. Without these capabilities, the commission hinted, some US allies might just choose to develop their own nuclear weapons.

In other words extended deterrence, intended to protects our allies from enemies, also deters those allies from seeking nuclear weapons of their own -- friendly deterrence, if you will.

As far as the United States protecting our allies, Reif concludes:

The real lifeblood of extended deterrence lies in an ally's confidence in the strength of its political relationship with the United States. If relations fray, then extended deterrence will be perceived to be weak -- no matter how many or what kinds of nuclear weapons the United States possesses. 

Or, as Reif wrote in a postscript to the article at Nukes of Hazard, the blog of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (for which he serves as Director of Nuclear Non-Proliferation):

The more US interests are intertwined with allies, the more likely the United States is to come to their defense. 

Hot on the heels of the development of nuclear weapons, strategies for dealing with them -- bad pun alert! -- mushroomed. Much of it emanated from the RAND Corporation, home to, as Fred Kaplan explained in The Wizards of Armageddon (Touchstone, 1983) "a small and exceptionally inbred collection of men -- mostly economists and mathematicians, a few political scientists -- who devoted nearly every moment of their workaday thoughts to thinking about the bomb: how to prevent nuclear war, how to fight nuclear war if it cannot be deterred."

Specific subjects included fun stuff like first and second strikes, the always popular mutual assured destruction (MAD), launch on warning, and, finally, targeting cities versus targeting "counterforce" (the enemy's nuclear weapons).

Daunting as that sounds, some of the concepts are deceptively simple. Or, to put it another way, they started out simple, but were worried to death in think tanks and other institutions. For example, the term deterrence, when used in international relations, just means using the threat of an attack to compel a foe to either act or refrain from acting in accordance with the deterring state's wishes. Yet, applied to nuclear weapons, deterrence has spawned countless books, papers, and conferences.

An arms race, of course, is the principal component of deterrence: each side tries to stockpile weapons more advanced than those of its designated enemy to keep it from attacking. In the field of nuclear weapons, the arms race manifested itself as, for example, development of first, the atomic bomb, then, the exponentially more powerful hydrogen bomb; first, bombers, then intercontinental missiles.

The second element of an arms race besides maintaining a development edge over one's enemy is building more weapons. Human nature, right? When it comes to nuclear weapons, one assumes that the perceived need to go forth and multiply is determined by how many weapons the enemy has. In fact, it's more dependent on the number of your enemy's targets. In the January/February issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ivan Oelrich explained how this works (behind a pay wall).

Nuclear weapons were first aimed at cities, the centers of population and industrial production. This targeting strategy was, in part, a natural extrapolation of the mass city bombing tactics of World War II. But cities also became nuclear targets by default; with the very inaccurate early missiles, cities were the only targets big enough to hit. As accuracy, weapon numbers, and intelligence on enemy-weapon location increased, it was irresistible for both sides to target the enemy’s nuclear weapons. … The targeting of weapons inevitably led to an arms race. If cities were the only targets, then neither side needed more weapons than the other side had cities to shoot at. But once nuclear weapons became targets, each side had to have as many weapons as the other side for counterforce attacks, plus more to shoot at “value” targets like cities. When each side needed just a few more than the other, an arms race without end was on. [Emphasis added.]

One's first impression is that attacking weapons is significantly less barbaric than attacking population centers. Alas, in practice, it doesn't work that way. In its counterintuitiveness, switching a nation's nuclear weapons policy away from counterforce parallels missile defense. In the first, you're restraining yourself from taking away your enemy's weapons. In the second, you surrender the ability to shoot down attacking warheads to keep from inciting your enemy to make more to both overwhelm your missile defense and mount a second attack if the first is thwarted.  

That's part of what makes nuclear races so lethal: the field is fraught with seeming Sophie's Choices like that.

For his blog for the Council on Foreign Relations, Micah Zenko decided to … Ask the Experts: What Would Iran Do With a Bomb? The reply of one, Kyle Beardsley of Emory University, provides an instructive answer to the question of whether nuclear weapons would provide Iran with deterrence.

Given that Iran already has a strong deterrent—via its importance to hydrocarbon supplies, robust conventional forces, ability to disrupt fragile situations in Lebanon and Iraq, and Western war weariness—it is doubtful that Iran will notice much immediate advantage from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Still, never let it be said that whatever it is that drives states to nuclear weaponize is a rational process. Meanwhile, Annie Tracy Samuel of the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center writes:

Iran's possession of a nuclear weapon would be a troubling and disturbing development. … However, there is reason to believe that Iran’s theoretical possession of a nuclear weapon would not profoundly alter the essence of its foreign policy [which] both before and after the 1979 revolution, has been largely pragmatic, particularly in action if not always in rhetoric. 

As a disarmament advocate I'm incapable of acceding to the idea of yet another state acquiring/developing nuclear weapons. But, while it may be impossible to prove that nonproliferation is contingent upon us disarming, we have little recourse other than to try.

You know how we're always hearing that we're stuck with nuclear weapons forever because the knowledge it took to create them can't be unlearned? Those who believe that disarmament is both dangerous and pointless make the case that sufficiently threatened, a state that once possessed nuclear weapons can always restart the production lines. But, however obvious that may seem, perhaps it's not quite so straightforward.

In November 2010 the Hudson Institute published a paper by fellow Christopher Ford entitled Nuclear Weapons Reconstitution and its Discontents: Challenges of "Weaponless Deterrence". The phrase in quotes, also known as "virtual deterrence," means that, even if state were to reach something approximating Global Zero, they could still deter each other with the ability to ramp up production of their nuclear weapons should they decide a national-security crisis warranted it. But exactly how viable is that?

In a section of his paper titled "The Problem of Re-Learning," Ford writes: 

. . . a former nuclear weapons possessor would need to take careful account of the fact that in an arcane and sophisticated arena such as nuclear weapons design, it can be terribly hard to re-learn after a long absence what one was previously able to do. It may be the case, as Jonathan Schell has argued, that "the knowledge" of how to make nuclear weapons cannot be erased from the world, but one must qualify this by an appreciation that there are a great many different levels of knowledge of nuclear weapons design. 

For example, preserving the knowledge of how to make 

. . . a ballistic missile re-entry vehicle that must not only be fairly small but also carefully engineered for mating to and precise detachment from its booster under the demanding physical and environmental circumstances of trans-atmospheric travel [is a] demanding requirement. If one were additionally constrained by [a prohibition against building] "new nuclear weapons," . . .  the requirements would be tougher still.  According to some experts interviewed for this study, quickly and reliably rebuilding present U.S. "legacy" designs years from now -- and with a workforce none of the members of which had been involved in building or testing them in the first place -- might scarcely be possible at all.

Ford refers to this as a problem (for plans for weaponless deterrence, anyway). In fact, it provides some hope that nuclear knowledge can be, if not unlearned, too rusty and dusty to be of any real use. In the end, weaponless deterrence may turn out to be ineffective as a last resort in the event of abolition. Neither may nuclear knowledge prove to be as much a barrier to disarmament as it now seems.