September 29, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Before I start, let me
Before I start, let me say that I am not a professional historian. But I did possess a modicum of interest on the topic of nuclear armament/disarmament before 9/11 -- though it's not like I had much choice, because I have family members who enjoy debating defense policy over dinner, and have for decades. Hours of fun for the entire family, so to speak.
So I've been following the debates on deterrance with interest. And I think there are some major errors being made by people whose understanding of the theory of deterrance is somewhat rudimentary. And no, I'm not naming names, because frankly, I've gotten enough angry e-mail about the Care Bears post. Memo: it's a joke. Not everything I say is meant as a serious commentary on geopolitical affairs. Anyone who read that post, and the comments, and did not laugh out loud at the commenter who suggested leading the charge with the My Little Pony cavalry, needs to turn off the computer and get out more.
Anyway, there are some misconceptions that I think some of my emailers/commenters/other bloggers are falling into. Call me a straw man constructer if you like; thankfully, I don't get paid for this. Unless you hit the tip jar, of course, and don't you think it's really about time you gave a little something back to the blogosphere? But I digress.
First of all, nuclear deterrance is not a simple matter of overwhelming force in response to threat, as some people seem to believe. I'm seeing a lot of people who seem to view deterrance against the Soviet Union, or Iraq, as a "I'll play nice, but if you smack me, I'll smack you harder" scenario. That's a very simple game theory construction known as "Tit-For-Tat", and that is absolutely not what deterrance is based on. If it had been, we'd all be little piles of radioactive waste by now. Tit for tat is actually a very good structure for many kinds of multi-move games, but in a nuclear scenario, it's very bad, because the step-up from the preceding action to a nuclear response is likely to be geometric, rather than arithmetic. Arithmetic escalation of response is what makes tit-for-tat work; in geometric escalation, which it's hard to avoid with nukes, things go kablooie too quick to develop a sustainable equilibrium. The Soviet Union invades West Berlin; we use a nuke; they hurl all their nukes at us; we hurl all ours at them. Bad, bad, bad idea.
Instead, the architects of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) did something similar to what the Babylonian rabbis did in interpreting the Torah.
Did she go off her meds again? I hear you cry. No, but we are playing with the mgs until the tremors stop, thanks for asking.
No, seriously: in the interpretation of Jewish Law, there is a concept known as "building a wall around the Torah". Take, for example, the refusal to eat meat and dairy products together. The original prohibition that this is drawn from is "thou shalt not boil the kid in the milk of its mother". It's a pretty long way from there to "thou shalt not eat a cheeseburger, nay, nor even eat meat off a plate on which a slice of cheese has lain". You get there in successive steps: modern agriculture being what it is, there is a slight chance that the cream you are using in that Blanchette de Veau came from the cow that gave birth to the veal calf. Therefore, you shouldn't use it. You also shouldn't cook in a pot that has had milk in it, because some of the milk might linger in the pot, and you would be in violation of the commandment. Nor should you put cheese on a burger, because some of the milk in the cheese might get very hot and boil. . . next thing you know, you've got separate kitchens for meat and dairy. While a slapdash interpreter might have drawn the commandment very narrowly -- "It's okay as long as I don't deliberately boil the kid in the milk of its mother" -- the rabbis who defined the scope of modern Orthodoxy interpreted it very broadly, so that there was no chance of even unknowingly violating the commandment. And they ruled that you were as much in violation of the commandment if you ate a McDonalds cheeseburger as you would have been if you'd gone out and gotten milk from your cow so you could boil its calf for lunch. Thus they ensured that no one was tempted to slip.
Fascinating, you're saying, and what does this have to do with deterrance?
Well, the architects of MAD built a similar wall around nuclear use. They spelled out very clearly what actions, such as an invasion of West Berlin, would trigger overwhelming nuclear response. It was important that these actions were not themselves nuclear. Why? Because the logical response to an invasion of Berlin was not overwhelming nuclear force; it was some variation on conventional force, possibly backed up later with tactical nukes. But it was precisely that sort of escalation that the architects wanted to avoid -- inadvertently crossing a line in the sand where your opponent felt that it was necessary to make a limited nuclear response. Because once we'd had nukes used on our troops or cities in a limited fashion, the likely response, for a variety of reasons, would be all-out nuclear attack. And there goes the neighborhood.
MAD, frightening as it may seem, made nuclear use extremely unlikely, not merely because it threatened overwhelming response, but because it ensured that we never got into a pattern of escalation. It was not simply the threat, in other words; it was that any action that was likely to be the first step in an escalating conflict was itself chopped off by the threat of overwhelming force. Just as the rabbis drew the rules so widely that there was basically no possibility of getting into a situation where you were unknowingly boiling the kid in its mothers milk by saying that risking doing so was the same as actually doing so, the architects of MAD made sure that there was no possibility of getting into a situation where one side unknowingly escalated the conflict to the nuclear stage by declaring that the penalty for putting yourself at risk of doing so was the same as that for exploding a nuke. And now a light dawns, and you decide that maybe Jane isn't crazy, but just weird.
Now, what does that have to do with Iraq?
Well, this: we're not that committed to the Middle East. The equivalent to our Cold War deterrance strategy would be telling Saddaam that if he invaded his neighbors, we'd turn Iraq into glass. And that isn't true. The threat simply isn't credible. Israel might be able to credibly sustain a nuclear deterrance policy with Iraq, except that we complicate things. There are at least two nations that have the ability to tell Israel "If you nuke Iraq, we will utterly destroy you" -- us and Russia. (China may; I don't know what the range on their nuclear capability is. The other nuclear nations would not, as far as I can tell, be part of the equation). Not that we necessarily would. But it's not crystal clear that we necessarily wouldn't, either. So the combination of clear signalling, credible threat, blocked off escalation potential, and overwhelming, instant, certain response that sustained nuclear deterrance in the Soviet-American arms race cannot be re-created with a nuclear Iraq, as some people seem to believe. We almost got into a war with Russia, as it was; any scenario in which Saddaam has nukes will be much, much less stable.
Posted by Jane Galt at September 29, 2002 6:31 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links