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.

Historian Ward Wilson pokes holes in the mythology of nuclear weapons.

Long awaited by many of us in the arms control and disarmament communities, historian Ward Wilson's book, Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in January. It doesn't fail to deliver. What at first seems like a short book soon becomes a distillate of years of the author's thinking, to which the expansive footnotes and lengthy bibliography also attest.

Wilson is a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Monterey Institute of International Studies. For years unaffiliated, though, with either academy or a foundation, his writing style can be characterized as plain speaking and congenial, accessible to the general public as well as policymakers, strategists, and historians.

Sixty-eight years after the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, arms control moves in fits and starts and total disarmament is considered unrealistic -- unattainable to its advocates, inadvisable to most. Meanwhile, those members of the public who aren't too frightened by existential issues or too distracted to face them view global warming as more urgent than nuclear weapons. Others operate under the illusion that the end of the Cold War has diminished the nuclear threat to the point where we can live with it.

Besides, the primal logic of deterrence -- discouraging an attack by your ability to respond -- makes perfect sense to many. But, nuclear weapons may not lend themselves to deterrence as well as conventional thinking holds. In fact, the idea that "nuclear deterrence works in a crisis" is one of Wilson's myths -- as is even the proposition that they keep us safe.

Actually, deterrence is the second pillar of faith in nuclear weapons. The first was erected when their detonation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II supposedly forced Japan to surrender. It's also the first myth that Wilson attempts to debunk: "Nuclear weapons shock and awe opponents." For one cannot stand without the other. As he wrote in a 2008 article (The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence) for Nonproliferation Review that helped put him on the map as a nuclear-weapons historian: "The collapse of the Hiroshima case undermines one of the cornerstones of nuclear deterrence theory."

Turns out, as Wilson writes in Five Myths, "Japan's leaders consistently displayed a lack of interest in the [conventional] bombing that was wrecking their cities." To them, it was the Russian invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island upon which the war hinged. With Russia also planning to invade Hokkaido, the northern-most of Japan's islands, Japan realized it could not fight a war against both Russia and the United States-led Western powers. Wilson then turns the question around.

Proponents of nuclear weapons who claim that Japan was forced to surrender because of the bombing of Hiroshima face a difficult question: Why would Japan's leaders have been motivated to act by an event that was not strategically decisive?

The main piece of evidence that Wilson uses to build his case against the efficacy of nuclear weapons is the Cuban missile crisis, about which you've no doubt already seen much revisionist history in commemoration of its fiftieth anniversary last year. Wilson, though, instead of concentrating on why our nukes didn't deter Russia, focuses on why Russia's nuclear threat didn't deter President John Kennedy from blockading Cuba and demanding that nuclear missiles be removed from Cuba. "So why did," Wilson asks, "nuclear deterrence fail? And why did Kennedy take steps that seem to meet [a] definition of reckless lunacy?" (Author's emphasis.)

In still more picturesque language, he rephrases the question directly.

In the most dangerous nuclear crisis the world has ever known, one leader saw the nuclear deterrence stop sign, saw the horrifying image of nuclear war painted on it, and gunned through the intersection anyway.

In other words, fear of Russia's nuclear weapons didn't keep President Kennedy from putting the pedal to the metal. Wilson again:

One way that proponents of nuclear weapons explain Kennedy's willingness to risk nuclear war is by arguing that U.S. nuclear superiority made the risk of nuclear war negligible.…But most of the senior participants and Kennedy himself said, either directly or indirectly, that nuclear superiority had had little to do with decisions made during the crisis.…by the late 1950s both sides had the ability to inflict significant damage in the event of a war, even after absorbing a nuclear strike. 

Another approach that helped lend Wilson credibility early in his career was to forbear attacking nuclear weapons from the point of view of morality and, instead, hold them accountable on the basis of their actual usefulness as weapons.

The problem with nuclear weapons is that there is no way to concretely verify the claims that are made about their importance. There is really only one data point -- Hiroshima -- determining their cash basis. The danger is that we have overinflated their value by misinterpreting that one event.

Confident that he'd win, it's as if Wilson agreed to cede the home-court advantage to the arrayed forces of national defense: "Body count aside, will nuclear weapons win wars?" (My words, not his.) More to the point, will bombing cities, known as area bombing in World War II, prove decisive in winning wars? Wilson writes:

People often talk about nuclear weapons' ability to create destruction as if it were an accepted fact that destruction and military effectiveness are the same thing. But.…destruction does not win wars.

Among the instances he cites besides Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the siege of Stalingrad during which the Wehrmacht destroyed the city with bombing and artillery. Soviet soldiers clung to the ruins and eventually outlasted the German assault. Wilson concludes:

Destroying cities and killing civilians is large beside the point in terms of military strategy.

Each of the five myths transitions to the next. Wilson pulls this off exceptional gracefulness when, at the end of Five Myths About Nuclear Weapons, he addresses the subject of the nuclear genie -- the idea that nuclear know-how and technology can't be un-developed, as it were, and stuffed back into the bottle. Connecting the circle, he writes that obsolescence will obtain when it's shown that nuclear weapons are no longer viewed as useful in winning wars. 

Nuclear weapons and voter ignorance are a lethal mix.

Most of us keep our distance from the subject of nuclear weapons. Nor is it hard to understand why. Many think that since the end of the Cold War, nuclear war has become a minor threat. Especially when compared to an economy that seems like it's always on the brink of imploding just as the United States and Russia seemed always on the brink of exploding into nuclear war. Nor, understandably, are most who are aware that nuclear war remains a threat capable of facing what may well be a sword of Damocles hanging over their very existence, as well as their families'.

Another, less apparent, reason why most of us avert our attention from the prospect of war waged with nuclear weapons is that we believe that national-security policy, as well as warfighting strategy, not to mention the daunting technology of nuclear weapons, are above our pay grade. After all, deterrence seems to be working, doesn't it? Perhaps, but, when it comes to weapons with the destructive power of nuclear weapons, keeping the world waiting with bated breath to make sure that war doesn't break out is not a long-term solution.

In an oped at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists titled Democracy and the bomb, Kennette Benedict, its executive editor, points to the lack of attention paid to nuclear weapons and disarmament in the recent election as evidence that most of us feel overwhelmed by the whole subject. "Too often," writes Ms. Benedict

… many of us lucky enough to live in democracies view elections as the only responsibility we have as citizens and leave the policy discussions to the elected and to the experts. … Political leaders and policy experts don't always encourage a lot of participation, either; perhaps they believe that citizens are badly informed about issues and that their participation will result in poor decisions.

But

Allowing policy leaders and officials to make decisions for us, however, is at odds with the principle of equality, as Robert Dahl notes in his often overlooked essay "Controlling Nuclear Weapons: Democracy versus Guardianship." …  The principle of guardianship … holds that only a small minority of citizens is sufficiently qualified and therefore capable of making binding decisions for the nation. As Dahl observes, the political system of a modern democratic country is usually a combination of democracy and meritocracy, but, when it comes to nuclear weapons, "We have in fact turned over to a small group of people decisions of incalculable importance to ourselves and mankind, and it is very far from clear how, if at all, we could recapture a control that in fact we have never had." We are living in a democracy based on guardianship, not equality, when it comes to nuclear weapons.

Since it combines two of our favorite subjects -- nuclear weapons and voter ignorance and/or apathy -- we were only too happy to go straight to the horse's mouth and read Controlling Nuclear Weapons (Syracuse University Press, 1985), which, though Benedict refers to it as an essay, was published as a short book. Dahl, who taught at Yale University and was known as the "dean" of American political scientists, writes that the idea that only a minority of persons are competent to rule, per Plato's The Republic, has enjoyed new life (at least as of the eighties) in democratic countries because

… the complexity of public issues challenges the assumption that ordinary people are competent to make decisions about these matters. in order to make wise decisions, decision makers need specialized knowledge that most citizens do not possess.

Furthermore

One might respond by saying that even in a democracy, after all, complex decisions like these can be delegated to experts. But suppose that most of us do not even possess enough knowledge to understand the terms on which we can safely delegate authority over these decisions to those more expert than we? Then we have not simply delegated authority. Instead, we have alienated [or given away -- RW] control over our lives to others: that is, for practical purposes we simply lose control over crucial decisions, and lose control over our lives. The more we alienate authority … the more we lose our freedom, and the more hollow the democratic process becomes. Or to put it another way, the more that we alienate authority the more the external forms of democracy clothe a de facto regime of guardianship.

Thus, the subject of nuclear weapons not only overwhelms us, but may strain democracy itself to the breaking point. As Dahl asks:

Are the institutions of contemporary democracy adequate to cope satisfactorily with the enormous complexity of public matters?

The reservation we have with Dahl's otherwise valuable book is that he seems to think that nuclear weapons are a problem to which society needs to adjust. Dahl provides ideas for solutions for citizen participation in nuclear-weapons decisions, many of them more or less implemented in the meantime via information technology. But they seem like so much tweaking.

The case can be made that nuclear weapons are the ultimate test of democracy. But the stakes are too high if we lose. In fact, the existence of nuclear weapons needs to adjust to the needs of society by eliminating them.

We find ourselves in reluctant accord with libertarians, though while many of them believe that government is too large and complex for the average voter (as best explained by Ilya Somin for the Cato Institute in 2004) to understand, we'll just stick with "too complex." Nuclear weapons, with the existential questions they force us to face and their daunting strategy and technology, exponentially compound the problem. They discourage participation in democracy, at exactly the point democracy is most needed. As Benedict writes:

Once citizens no longer feel qualified to participate in decisions about their very survival, the connection between the governing and the governed is severed. It is hard to see where the democracy is in this.

When speaking about nonproliferation and disarmament, it's usually assumed that the latter cuts the ice for nonproliferation. In fact, it's part and parcel of the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. In other words, large nuclear states are expected to demonstrate via substantive disarmament measures that it's safe for smaller nuclear states to follow their lead in disarming. In the same vein, it becomes un-necessary for non-nuclear states to acquire or develop nuclear weapons.

But conservatives and even some realpolitik types, especially lately, seek to decouple nonproliferation from disarmament. That is, they believe that not only shouldn't nonproliferation  depend on disarmament, but that disarmament shouldn't transpire until nonproliferation has been assured.

That's not the only cart they put before a horse.

In A Survey of the Nuclear Weapons Landscape, Hudson Institute fellow Christopher Ford at New Paradigms Forum illustrates another such transposition. He asks:

. . . has the Cold War model of bilateral and numerically-focused arms control finally run its course? Does traditional arms control need to give way to a new era focusing more upon improved transparency and confidence-building relationships as a prerequisite for any potential further cuts? . . .  That's certainly a lot harder than just crunching numbers for a new treaty, but the time when disarmament could be regarded as being principally about numbers may be past.

In other words, he suggests disarmament may be contingent on the political climate, a position that conservatives can scarcely be faulted for adopting. It's true, of course, that improved relations between states is the only enduring answer to arms control. In fact, in its idealism and faith in human nature to change, adhering to this position is  kind of endearing on the part of conservatives.

At the same time, this approach reveals a conservative blind spot: inability to acknowledge that possession of nuclear-weapons program is a global emergency. The sheer existence of nuclear weapons is more of a threat than the dispositions of the states that possess them.

We're talking about triage. As with land mines and cluster bombs, for example, nuclear weapons need to be taken out of the hands of mankind well before it sorts out its dark impulses, if it ever does.

Arms control organizations usually try to cut the Obama administration some slack on nuclear disarmament and accentuate the positive, such as the New START treaty, however minimal its disarmament measures. But the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) operates under no such constraints. Among the conclusions of its just-released SIPRI Yearbook 2011 (for purchase only): "continuing cuts in US and Russian nuclear forces are offset by long-term force modernization programmes."

SIPRI Senior Researcher Shannon Kile said:

It’s a stretch to say that the New START cuts agreed by the USA and Russia are a genuine step towards nuclear disarmament when their planning for nuclear forces is done on a time scale that encompasses decades and when nuclear modernization is a major priority of their defence policies.

An example of modernization in the United States is the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility (CMRR-NF), about which I frequently post, at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. In November 2010, the White House estimated the budget for its construction at $3.7 to $5.8 billion. The function of the CMRR-NF is to support the manufacture of nuclear pits (the core of nuclear warheads, where the actual chain reaction occurs).

Bear in mind that not only are 14,000 pits that have been recovered from decommissioned warheads stored at Amarillo's Pantex plant, where warheads are both assembled and disassembled, but Los Alamos studies on pit aging have shown they have lifetimes in excess of 100 years. That's assuming that you believe we actually need nuclear warheads for national defense. 

Commentators and arms control organization spend too much time debating the nuclear disarmament policies. But calling for rollbacks in nuclear weapons counts for little when a state such as the United States commit huge sums of money to ensure the continuation of the nuclear-industrial complex. American arms-control organizations can take a lesson from SIPRI and follow the money. Their failure to do so only raises questions about the sources of their own funding.