September 30, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Nuclear Deterrance, Part II: The
Nuclear Deterrance, Part II: The Principle of Overwhelming Force
In Part I, we discussed the idea of walling off potential avenues of escalation. Now it's time to talk about why we chose Mutually Assured Destruction rather than, say, Mutually Assured Heavy Damage.
[Editor's Note: No, I am not a professional expert on defense policy. I'm giving you the broad principles here, not the "In 1962, the Soviet placement of an armored brigade near the Turkish border was widely seen as a signalling mechanism to convey their distrust of the protocols signed at the NATO meeting the previous month. . . ", on which I am not qualified to comment]
If you grew up in the 80's, as I did, you spent a good portion of your childhood waiting to be evaporated in a worldwide nuclear conflagration. This is especially true if your teachers were CND types who believed that MAD was the worst idea since the Barry Manilow comeback tour.
But there is a reason that the system was designed with overwhelming force, rather than limited response. It has to do with the nature of nuclear escalation. Nuclear use, especially before the advent of tactical nuclear weapons, was so shocking in its kill power, its destruction, and (importantly), its public horror, that the kind of arithmetic response (you hit me, I hit you 50% harder, and so on), was hard to sustain. I can't say this enough: deterrance is not tit for tat. I've already had five or six people email me with objections based on their analysis of nuclear deterrance as a tit for tat scenario, or comparing it to conventional military deterrance, which is not how it works. With a nuclear Iraq, the "Saddaam has been deterred" argument is meaningless, because the whole structure of deterrance changes.
Let's look at tit for tat. If you've ever seen small children playing, you've seen it at work. One child takes the other child's shovel. Outraged, the owner of the shovel pushes the thief. The thief is outraged -- he pushed me! -- and hits the shovel owner. Shovel owner is outraged -- he started it! -- and kicks his opponent. After a couple of rounds of this, the shovel is returned to its rightful owner, and the two children sit glaring at each other on either side of the sandbox.
The problem is that because of the overwhelming nature of even limited nuclear use, this pattern would be catastrophic once nukes were involved. If Russia nuked, say, Peoria, and we took out three of their cities, and then they hit New York. . . well, by the time we reached the standoff, there might not be much left to stand on.
As I pointed out in part one, the principle of overwhelming force was designed to prevent this sort of escalation. In order to do that, it had to make entering on any avenue that might lead to escalation just as unthinkable as suddenly lobbing your nuclear arsenal over the Bering Straits to see what would happen.
It also sharply reduced the incentive to gamble on borderline activities. Russia invades Canada; do we plaster them with nukes, or try to wage a conventional response? Would we use a limited nuclear response that might make it worth their while anyway? (This was, after all, the nation that killed 25,000 people to build a steel plant, 20,000,000 to collectivize the farms.) Overwhelming force didn't just make it unthinkable to risk borderline activities; it also meant that any leader who ordered such an action was guaranteed die in the resulting conflagration.
But overwhelming force truly meant overwhelming. If the Soviets, or we, had launched a single nuclear weapon, the orders were to launch a sufficient portion of our arsenal to bomb them flat. Not take out a single city for show. Literally, bomb them back to the stone age.
And there we are back to Iraq again. Not only is it unlikely that we would launch a nuclear strike on Iraq in the event of an invasion of their neighbors; it is unthinkable that we would respond with overwhelming force. Even if Saddaam did the worst and nuked Israel, would we really be willing to incinerate the entire population of Iraq in retaliation? That's what overwhelming force would mean. Yet, if you don't use overwhelming force, there is a high probability that Saddaam might survive. One of the reasons that we didn't take him out in the Gulf War was that it turned out he had two dozen or so body doubles, of which five or so were trained to impersonate him perfectly. We have no idea where he is, so we can't just nuke his headquarters.
So the first part of Cold War nuclear deterrance -- walling off potential avenues of escalation -- is unlikely in Iraq. A second important feature, overwhelming force, is also absent. Next we'll talk about credible threats.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 30, 2002 8:35 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links