October 1, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:Nuclear Deterrance, Part III In
Nuclear Deterrance, Part III
In Part I, we talked about walling off potential avenues of escalation. In Part II, we covered the principle of overwhelming response. Now, we're going to talk about credible threat.
It's pretty obvious: when you're playing a game with such high stakes, you'd better make damn sure that your opponent believes you will launch. If he has any doubt at all, MAD won't work.
How do you establish credibility? Well, I've heard persuasive arguments that we didn't until the Cuban Missile crisis. That was what really convinced both sides that they didn't want to approach any of those potential avenues, because the other side was serious.
The problem is, we had to risk a nuclear war to get there. And in that case, both sides had a lot of advisors, a lot of communications, and a lot of mechanisms for restraining escalation.
The biggest weakness the Soviets feared was falling behind in the arms race. The biggest weakness we feared was that a pacifist might get into the White House and start unilaterally disarming. Those would have eroded the credibility of the threat they presented the other side. Obviously, if McGovern had been elected, he couldn't have just started dismantling our nukes. But he would have given the Soviets the -- correct -- impression that we were less likely to respond. That's why most defense policy people back then were hawks. Unilateral disarmament just didn't make sense in the context of a nuclear standoff.
Now, as to Saddaam: what threat do we want to project? Well, the Middle East. Saddaam with a nuke might hand it off to terrorists -- you don't know, and I don't know, and no combination of facile reasoning is going to divine that answer for us. More likely, however, is that he will use his nuke to invade his neighbors, with the threat of either nuking our troops if they show up, or one of our cities, or Israel. This threat will be made very publicly.
My take on this is that we would have to let him. We are not prepared to make the kind of committments that would be required to stop him.
Commit to sending troops to a theater after Saddaam had promised to turn them into radioactive dust?
Commit to blowing up Miami to save Riyadh?
Commit to the destruction of Israel (it wouldn't take many bombs for that) in order to save Kuwait? With the radiation scarred victims running night after night on every channel next to Saddaam saying he warned us?
Commit to saying that we'll use nukes on him if he uses them on us.
Well, yes, we will. But Saddaam can better afford to lose a city than we can. You're talking about committing to pound Iraq into radioactive dust.
But if we were presented with a threat to nuke us if we resisted conventional force, I think we'd back down rather than place ourselves in harm's way.
Well, that's just your opinion, say my interlocutors.
Well, yes, but you see if there is any reasonable doubt, you no longer have a credible threat. The wall around the potential avenues of escalation just came tumbling down. I don't have to prove that we wouldn't nuke Iraq if they invaded Kuwait, or nuked Israel, or if an atomic weapon went off in an American city and we could not trace its provenance; you have to prove that it is so utterly certain that we would do so as to provide credible deterrance to Saddaam. And you can't prove that. For one thing, we have elections every four years. And for another, it just isn't that likely.
I didn't say nuke Iraq if he invaded Kuwait --
You said "send conventional troops that he can only repel with his nuclear weapons, which will cause us to nuke him". In other words, enter on a potential avenue of escalation, which is exactly what nuclear deterrance is supposed to avoid. I don't think we would nuke Saddaam if he invaded Kuwait. I also don't think we would send troops in the face of a direct threat to use nukes on them. That's exactly what the architects of nuclear deterrance were trying to avoid: confronting a nuclear opponent on territory of sufficient importance that he might feel it necessary to deploy a limited nuclear response. That's why the Soviets didn't invade West Berlin.
As Den Beste said, the problem is that we are more sensitive to a nuclear risk than our opponent. He will enter onto an avenue of escalation, gambling that we will not risk meeting him there. And he's probably right.
All right, so we'd let him take Kuwait. . .
And Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Gulf states. Do you have any idea what this means, economically?
Right now, the OPEC cartel is restrained in its price fixing because members have high incentive to cheat. The restraint is thus actually quite modest, because otherwise cheating becomes rampant, and the price drops anyway.
Saddaam with nukes and a free hand in the Middle East would be sitting on more than 50% of the world's proven oil reserves. Given the extreme inelasticity of demand for oil, a quasi-monopolist like that would have incentive to produce far, far less than he's currently pumping in order to maximize his revenue. Most of the other OPEC members are already near full production; it's the Saudis and Iraqis who are producing much less than they could. Ratchet back the rest of the Middle East oil and the price jump would make the 70's look like Bargain Hunter Day at the oil mart. The effect on the world economy -- well if you think it's bad now, wait 'til productivity plummets because oil's too expensive.
Could he hold the Middle East? You'd better hope so, because now if he falls we have no way of controlling what whackos get hold of his nukes. Those who have been arguing he's "rational" have no such guarantees for his successor.
In short, we are unable to mount a credible threat that we will respond with overwhelmingly disproportionate force in the face of nuclear-backed aggression, or to repel territorial goals in the Middle East. A third pillar of nuclear deterrance is not available to us.
I can't stress enough how important this is. There is no such thing as deterrence if your opponent is not certain that you mean what you say. The more weasel room there is, the less believable it is.
Contrast this with MAD. At least to my knowlege, no one doubted that in the face of certain actions, we would launch on the Soviets. The hawks and the peaceniks, the left and the right, all believed that we would, indeed fight the Soviets over Western Europe, over missiles in Cuba, etc. And so, we now know, did the Soviets.
The very fact that people are arguing about whether or not we would launch on Saddaam in the face of an Iraqi incursion into Kuwait means it has already failed. There is reasonable doubt about our response. Which makes it potentially lucrative to enter an avenue of escalation. We know that Saddaam will gamble; what else could you call deciding to go up against the world's biggest and most advanced military after they'd staged a massive buildup on your border?
When nuclear weapons are involved, the last thing you want is to roll the dice.
Next: Why non-proliferation is central to deterrance.
Posted by Jane Galt at October 1, 2002 8:35 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links