August 07, 2002
From the desk of Jane Galt:And now for the third
And now for the third issue I want to address: the idea that Iraq getting nuclear weapons is somehow the same as China getting them in the 50's; that MAD will just expand to include the new players. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
From the 1950's until the 1990's we've had a very stable nuclear system based on Mutually Assured Destruction. This is necessary because nukes are all offense, no defense; there is no possible stable system except tit for tat, and tit for tat is catastrophic.
But the system was stable, because there were essentially three players: the US, Russia, and China. Britain and France only get them because they're our dorky younger siblings; Israel exists in a special situation in which they don't dare use them unless they're already being destroyed -- but they can keep from being utterly destroyed by belligerent neighbors because said neighbors know that Israel has the will to take the attacking nations with them.
Anyone who's taken part in such games under less stressful conditions knows that the more players you add to the game, the less stable it becomes. The instability increases exponentially rather than arithmetically as each new player is added to the game. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the more players are involved, the more difficult it becomes to assess the likely reaction to any action, and thus the larger the possibility that someone will misjudge and make a catastrophic mistake. The second is that as you increase the number of players you increase the likelihood that an irrational player -- or one who is attempting to be rational, but whose judgement is so poor as to lead them to take apparently irrational actions -- will be introduced gets larger and larger. The third is that in small-player games, signalling is much easier than in large player games, where signals get complicated by alliances and such, and the risk of inadvertently sending a bad signal to a third party constrains the ability of other players to send effective signals about their intentions. The result is that just as it becomes harder for a player to accurately predict what the response to a given action will be, it becomes harder for the other players to signal their intended reaction. And the fourth is that as the players proliferate, it becomes easier to attribute actions to other players. For example, had a suitcase bomb gone off in New York in 1948, we would have known who was responsible. Had it gone off in 1959, we would have had two conceivable suspects. Now? How sure can we be? Sure enough to mount a nuclear response? The moment that there are enough players to mitigate the assured part of mutually sured destruction, the likelihood of a detonation begins to grow rapidly.
It is no accident that Sadaam attacked Kuwait after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the bi-polar alignment that had forced stability dissolved, and the game was suddenly multi-player.
There is no question of whether Iraq will make the region, and the world, more unstable by acquiring nukes. Such an action is inherently destabilizing, not least because his neighbors will almost certainly attempt to acquire them in response, and because Israel will undoubtedly attempt to maintain MAD by proliferating. One can certainly imagine a signalling disaster that results in an Iraq/Israel catastrophe. But much easier to imagine is a situation where a player takes advantage of proliferation to engage in covert attack. If 5 middle eastern nations have nuclear capability, how attractive would it be for a country that doesn't like us -- which is, really, all of them -- to slip a bomb to Hezbollah? It would be very, very hard to pin on a single state. The threat of assured destruction which makes the nuclear armament stable would disappear.
Posted by Jane Galt at August 7, 2002 09:44 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links