Foreign Policy In Focus

Recently John Dower's Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq (W.W. Norton, 2010) was reviewed by Greg Chaffin for Foreign Policy in Focus. Halfway through it, I find Cultures of War, in which the author uses a comparison between U.S. reactions to Pearl Harbor and 9/11 as a starting point, powerful and convincing. In the course of the book, he delivers a compelling analysis of the "terror" or area -- as opposed to precision -- bombing campaigns that the allies waged against, in large part, the citizens of Germany and Japan. After that, it only seemed natural to the United States to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Dower writes:

The euphoria of victory over Japan, and of the end of the struggle against Axis fascism and aggression more generally, was extraordinary.

It was also fragile and ephemeral. The underside of triumph was profound anxiety -- a presentiment that making and using the atomic bomb had birthed not peace but vulnerability of a sort inconceivable just a few years earlier.

In other words, instead of laying a solid foundation of peace, the use of nuclear weapons ensured that it was constructed, as it were, of inferior materials. As a result, the whole house of our national security could come crashing precipitously down at any time. Dower quotes Manhattan Project physicist I.I. Rabi, reflecting on Trinity, the first nuclear test: "Suddenly the day of judgment was the next day and has been ever since." 

Two sentences after his first quote above, Dower writes:

When the twin towers of the World Trade Center were taken down on September 11, this suppressed or diluted dread [of nuclear attack] erupted, certainly among Americans, as full-blown collective trauma.

Our arms race with the Soviet Union instilled a deep-seated fear in our hearts. Damped down and building pressure over the years, that fear only needed to be ignited by 9/11 before it came spewing out. Hence, most of us were all too happy to, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, "go massive." Our wide-of-the-mark reaction to 9/11 paralleled area as opposed to precision bombing and, in the process, only stiffened the resolve of the opposition.

When you think of a nuclear treaty such as New START, a decrease in the number of nuclear weapons naturally comes to mind. While that's been true in the past, New START leaves the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia more or less intact. In March 2010 Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists explained at it Strategic Security Blog that:

. . . the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead and actually permits the United States and Russia to deploy almost the same number of strategic warheads that were permitted by the 2002 Moscow Treaty [thanks to, in part, a] new counting rule that attributes one weapon to each bomber rather than the actual number of weapons assigned to them. [In fact, this] "fake" counting rule frees up a large pool of warhead spaces under the treaty limit that enable each country to deploy many more warheads than would otherwise be the case. . . . Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear reductions treaty as it is a verification and confidence building treaty.

(As well as -- anyone familiar with my writing knows -- a mechanism by which Republicans squeezed an $85 billion commitment from the Obama administration to shore up the nuclear-industrial complex over the next decade.)

The confidence-building to which Kristensen alluded is an element of the treaty to which many conservatives objected. With nostalgia for the Cold War still running high among them, they bridled at the extent to which New START signified a "reset" in relations with Russia. Thus, with hawks always willing to poke a stick into the hive of U.S.-Russia relations, it's folly to think that just because the Cold War ended that we've been inoculated against nuclear war with Russia. Especially since the chances of an accident are greater than ever, as I explored in a previous post.

Not to worry, though -- we can always "ride out" a nuclear attack. Ride-out is one of the president's two options in the event of a nuclear attack, neither of which is declared policy, though. First, the other: launch-on-warning. In that scenario, as soon as it believes that it has detected nuclear weapons headed towards it soil, a state mounts a retaliatory strike. In another words, the attacked state isn't waiting around for the decisive confirmation -- which detonation on its soil constitutes -- that the alarm wasn't false.

Ride-out is waiting until struck before retaliating, to keep from responding to a false alarm. Besides, to do otherwise would violate the spirit of deterrence, which stands in opposition to a preemptive attack. Of course, you're wondering if the United States would be in a position to counterattack after the initial nuclear strike on its soil. Not only will our missile silos have been targeted but the nuclear command and control infrastructure.

In a recent paper for the Hudson Institute, Christopher Ford, one of its research fellows, addresses this. 

. . . analysts [have] wondered for years whether it was even possible to ensure sufficient nuclear force and C3I [command and control] survivability in the face of the enormous nuclear barrages that were possible at the height of the Cold War. Desmond Ball and John D. Steinbrunner, for instance, argued in the early 1980s that such survivability was, for practical purposes, a fool's errand. . . . As the Soviets put more and more warheads on their missiles . . . it seemed increasingly likely that no such system would be able to survive a full-scale attack.

Back in 2004, writing for his Center for Defense Information, neither was Bruce Blair too sanguine about riding out a nuclear attack.

The option to "ride out" the onslaught and then take stock of the proper course of action exists only on paper. . . . The bias in favor of launch on electronic warning is so powerful that it would take enormously more presidential will to withhold an attack than to authorize it. 

Besides: 

Military nuclear commanders designed the hardware and procedures of emergency decision-making to ensure that no president would actually deliberately opt to ride out a Soviet nuclear attack, even though U.S. nuclear policy [as stated above -- RW] endorsed second-strike retaliation – assured destruction – as the essential element of U.S. deterrent strategy. . . . They knew full well that the U.S. nuclear command system would collapse under the weight of such a Soviet first strike. . . . Riding out was not a practical choice in the real world, and so the operational system was geared so that presidential approval to unleash U.S. strategic forces before the first incoming Soviet missile reached America would be obtained. 

But, in "today's post-Cold War context," writes Ford, C3I "survivability may be less Quixotic an aspiration." In other words, despite the incremental progress that New START represents, the number of nuclear weapons may now be low enough to enable us to ride out an attack. "It may now be possible," he explains, "for both sides to develop a credible 'ride-out' option – arguably for the first time in decades . . .  simultaneously ensuring retaliation and reducing incentives to implement launch on warning." 

The term "ride-out" implies a mutual decision about how many casualties are acceptable. Needless to say, no such consensus exists. One man's survival is another's "the living will envy the dead."

More from Ford: "Domestic U.S. civil defense preparations were . . . discontinued" at the height of the Cold War when arsenals were at their largest. The "Kennedy Administration had proposed an extensive civil defense program in 1961, but it soon became clear that most defensive measures could be far more easily and cheaply neutralized by the enemy than created in the first place."

Recently however, the Obama administration has revived the subject of surviving a nuclear attack if you're not at ground zero. On December 15, William Broad wrote in the New York Times:

The government has a surprising new message: Do not flee. Get inside any stable building and don't come out till officials say it's safe. The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. . . .

Administration officials argue that the cold war created an unrealistic sense of fatalism about a terrorist nuclear attack. "It's more survivable than most people think," said an official. 

That's if you hold to the prevailing doctrine that terrorists, not a nuclear state (the question of a state arming the terrorists aside), would be the likely source of an attack. The attack would presumably be a fraction of that mounted by a state such as Russia. 

Whatever the case, the new emphasis on nuclear survival doesn't sit well with many. In an article for the Atlantic titled The Unexpected Return of Duck and Cover, Glenn Reynolds writes:

But now "duck and cover" is back, not as kitsch but once again as serious advice from the federal government. Faced with growing concerns about a nuclear attack on one or more major cities . . . authorities are once again looking to educate citizens about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. And that advice sounds a lot like what they were saying in my grandfather's day: Duck and cover. 

False hope, in other words. At Truthout, Ira Chernus also scoffed at the notion.

The Obama administration wants us to learn to accept the prospect of a major American city destroyed. Its report never even mentions the possibility of averting disaster by changing the U.S. policies that enrage people, whether abroad or at home. 

In other words, "negotiating with terrorists" frightens Washington even more than a nuclear attack on American soil. 

You might think that a new arms control treaty might be anything but a cause of celebration to the director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that maintains America's nuclear weapons. A decrease in nuclear weapons makes inroads into his turf, right? But Thomas D'Agostino's exuberance about New START positively spills off the pages of an op-ed he wrote for the Washington Times, Unprecedented commitment to modernize.

Over the next decade, the Obama administration has proposed investing more than $85 billion to modernize the nuclear stockpile, recapitalize the infrastructure that supports it and reinvigorate the science and technology at the core of our stockpile stewardship efforts.

Having worked on NNSA budget issues through the administrations of three presidents representing both parties, I can say with confidence that this is the most robust, sustained commitment to modernizing our nuclear deterrent since the end of the Cold War. . . .

My predecessor, former NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks, put it best, saying he "would have killed" for budgets like this and for the top-level support we have gotten from the White House. 

D'Agostino barely nods at the disarmament component to the treaty.

When President Obama released his Nuclear Posture Review earlier this year, he outlined the need to move toward a smaller stockpile. . .

You'd think D'Agostino would be more discreet about extolling New START as a means of ensuring the future of the nuclear weapons industry rather than as a disarmament treaty. The degree to which he isn't is a measure of the extent to which the Obama administration has given away the nuclear farm -- to the tune of that $85 million mentioned above -- to secure passage of New START and achieve another Health-Care Reform-like Pyrrhic victory. 

You're passionate about the abolition of nuclear weapons. But isn't owning up to an uncompromising position on disarmament just a way of marginalizing yourself? Perhaps not. In the long run, those in the margins -- grassroots types sprouting by the side of the road -- may have a better chance of implementing disarmament than those steering policy limos down the middle of the road.

Take the Obama administration's nuclear initiatives -- the new START, the security summit, a revised nuclear posture review. However tentative, they might seem like steps in the right direction toward disarmament. Yet, in what can only be called a perverse experiment in cognitive dissonance, that same administration is requesting a 10 percent increase in funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration over the year before. Now fold that $7 billion into the $180 billion it's requesting to upgrade U.S. nuclear weapons production for the next ten years. You can be forgiven for wondering what happened to the "dis" in disarmament.

Some assume that these budget hikes are the administration's way of securing votes needed from conservative congresspersons to pass START. In reality, what it shows is how deluded are those who believe that decisions about nuclear weapons are predominantly determined by political instead of financial considerations. Darwin BondGraham, Nicholas Robinson, and Will Parrish explain at ZComm (emphasis added):

Rather than allowing a neat policy process carried out at the executive level to determine the future of the nuclear weapons complex, forces with financial . . . stakes in nuclear weaponry, working through think tanks like [the Hoover Institute], or corporate entities like Bechtel and the University of California, are actively attempting to lock in a de-facto set of policies by building a new research, design, and production infrastructure that will ensure nuclear weapons are a centerpiece of the US military empire far into the future.

According to the authors, among those forces if not necessarily with financial stakes, but acting on their behalf, are two of the "four horsemen" who, along with Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn, wrote a series of op-eds for the Wall Street Journal ostensibly calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Former defense secretary William Perry is a senior fellow at Hoover, as is George Schultz, who was president of Bechtel for eight years before he became Ronald Reagan's secretary of state. Even more worrisome, prior to her appointment as Obama's undersecretary of Arms Control and International Security, Ellen Tauscher was a congressperson who worked to secure federal funding for the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia nuclear laboratories in her California district.

With the four horsemen's last WSJ column, How to protect our nuclear deterrent, the cat was out of the bag. First, the title was a giveaway because as a rule only hawks or realists subscribe -- as, no doubt, they were advised by some communications firm -- to the re-branding of nuclear weapons as "our nuclear deterrent." Neither offensive nor even defensive any longer, apparently they're now just the equivalent of a big stick that we don't need to brandish, nor even keep in plain sight. In short, proponents of nuclear arsenals can be disarming in the service of their advocacy.

"But as we work to reduce nuclear weaponry," the four horsemen wrote, "and to realize the vision of a world without nuclear weapons, we recognize the necessity to maintain the safety, security and reliability of our own weapons." Suddenly their support for disarmament was reduced to a cover under which the nuclear-weapons industry was making a strategic fallback to a position where it could retrench, secure in the knowledge it occupy it in perpetuity. In other words, if disarmament were a shell game, our eye is on the politics when it should be following the money.