No subject

rather self-evident that for virtually any state in virtually any
strategic situation, the more military power one could wield relative to
one's adversaries, the more security one gained. That all changed,
however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the Cold
War's long atomic arms race, it slowly dawned on "nuclear use theorists"
 -  whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS  -  that in the
nuclear age, security did not necessarily require superiority. Security
required simply an ability to retaliate after an adversary had struck,
to inflict upon that opponent "unacceptable damage" in reply. If an
adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it might inflict in a
first strike, that the chances were good that it would receive massive
damage as a consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted as
long as that damage was "unacceptable"), then, according to the logic of
nuclear deterrence, that adversary would be dissuaded from striking
first. What possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of the
possible obliteration of, oh, a state's capital city, and the leaders of
that state themselves, and perhaps more than a million lives therein?

Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this "unacceptable damage" model
of nuclear deterrence - which we might as well call UD  -  failed to put
the brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms competition that
began almost immediately after the USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its
own in 1949. Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence emerged,
deterrence exercised by the capability completely to wipe out the
opponent's society, "mutually assured destruction", which soon came to
be known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of aggression  -
nuclear attacks on an adversary's nuclear weapons, nuclear or
conventional attacks on an adversary's closest allies (in Western and
Eastern Europe)  -  that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter as well.
However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to dissuade the other side
from using their nuclear weapons against one's own cities and society,
by threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on the opponent's
cities and society in reply. "The Department of Defense", said an Ohio
congressman in the early 1960s, with some exasperation, "has become the
Department of Retaliation". {2}

Nevertheless, those who engaged in an effort to slow the arms race often
employed the logic of UD in their attempts to do so. "Our twenty
thousandth bomb", said Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan
Project that built the world's first atomic weapons, as early as 1953,
"will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two thousandth". {3}
"Deterrence does not depend on superiority", said the great strategist
Bernard Brodie in 1965. {4} "There is no foreign policy objective today
that is so threatened", said retired admiral and former CIA director
Stansfield Turner in 1998, "that we would $B!D(B accept the risk of receiving
just one nuclear detonation in retaliation". {5}

Consider how directly the logic of UD applies to the contemporary
international environment, to the twin nuclear challenges that have
dominated the headlines during most of the past decade, and to the most
immediate nuclear proliferation issues now confronting the Obama
Administration. Because the most persuasive explanation for the nuclear
quests on which both Iran and North Korea have embarked is, indeed, the
notion that "deterrence does not depend on superiority". Deterrence
depends only an ability to strike back. Iran and North Korea appear to
be seeking small nuclear arsenals in order to deter potential
adversaries from launching an attack upon them  -  by threatening them
with unacceptable damage in retaliation.

Neither North Korea nor Iran could hope to defeat its most powerful
potential adversary  -  the United States  -  in any kind of direct
military confrontation. They cannot repel an actual attack upon them.
They cannot shoot American planes and missiles out of the sky. Indeed,
no state can.

However, what these countries can aspire to do is to dissuade the
American leviathan from launching such an attack. How? By developing the
capability to instantly vaporize an American military base or three in
Iraq or Qatar or South Korea or Japan, or an entire US aircraft carrier
battle group in the Persian Gulf or the Sea of Japan, or even an
American city on one coast or the other. And by making it implicitly
clear that they would respond to any kind of assault by employing that
capability immediately, before it's too late, following the venerable
maxim: "Use them or lose them". The obliteration of an entire American
military base, or an entire American naval formation, or an entire
American city, would clearly seem to qualify as "unacceptable damage"
for the United States.

Moreover, to deter an American attack, Iran and North Korea do not need
thousands of nuclear warheads. They just need a couple of dozen, well
hidden and well protected. American military planners might be almost
certain that they could take out all the nuclear weapons in these
countries in some kind of a dramatic lightning "surgical strike".
However, with nuclear weapons, "almost" is not good enough. Even the
barest possibility that such a strike would fail, and that just one or
two nuclear weapons would make it into the air, detonate over targets,
and result in massive "unacceptable damage" for the United States, would
in virtually any conceivable circumstance serve to dissuade Washington
from undertaking such a strike.

In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Iran and North Korea would
not intend for their nascent nuclear arsenals to deter only nuclear
attacks upon them. If the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States
disappeared tomorrow morning, but America's conventional military
superiority remained, it still would be the case that the only possible
military asset that these states could acquire, to effectively deter an
American military assault, would be the nuclear asset.

The "Korean Committee for Solidarity with World Peoples", a mouthpiece
for the North Korean government, captured Pyongyang's logic quite
plainly just weeks after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
"The Iraqi war taught the lesson that $B!D(B the security of the nation can
be protected only when a country has a physical deterrent force $B!D(B" {6}
Similarly, a few weeks earlier, just before the Iraq invasion began, a
North Korean general was asked to defend his country's nuclear weapons
program, and with refreshing candor replied, "We see what you are
getting ready to do with Iraq. And you are not going to do it to us." {7}

It really is quite a remarkable development. North Korea today is one of
the most desperate countries in the world. Most of its citizens are
either languishing in gulags or chronically starving. And yet  -  in
contrast to all the debate that has taken place in recent years about
whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive
strike on Iran  -  no one seems to be proposing any kind of military
strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that
North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about UD is that it seems every bit as
effective as MAD. North Korea today possesses no more than a handful of
nuclear warheads, and maintains nothing like a "mutual" nuclear balance
with the United States. In addition, the retaliation that North Korea
can threaten cannot promise anything like a complete "assured
destruction". To vaporize an American carrier group in the Sea of Japan,
or a vast American military base in South Korea or Japan, or even an
American city, would not be at all the same thing as the "destruction"
of the entire American nation - as the USSR was able to threaten under MAD.

And yet, MAD and UD, it seems, exercise deterrence in precisely the same
way. Astonishingly, it seems that Washington finds itself every bit as
thoroughly deterred by a North Korea with probably fewer than ten
nuclear weapons as it did by a Soviet Union with 10,000. Although UD
hardly contains the rich acronymphomaniacal irony wrought by MAD, it
appears that both North Korea and Iran intend now to base their national
security strategies solidly upon it.

There is very little reason to suppose that other states will not soon
follow their lead.

President Obama, of course, to his great credit, has not only made a
nuclear weapon-free Iran and North Korea one of his central foreign
policy priorities, he has begun to chart a course toward a nuclear
weapon-free world. In a groundbreaking speech before a huge outdoor
rally in Prague on April 5th, he said, "Today, I state clearly and with
conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a
world without nuclear weapons". (Unfortunately, he followed that with
the statement that nuclear weapons abolition would not "be achieved
quickly, perhaps not in my lifetime", suggesting that neither he nor the
nuclear policy officials in his administration fully appreciate the
magnitude and immediacy of the nuclear peril. Do they really think the
human race can retain nuclear weapons for another half century or so,
yet manage to dodge the bullet of nuclear accident, or nuclear terror,
or a nuclear crisis spinning out of control every single time?)

The one thing we can probably say for sure about the prospects for
universal nuclear disarmament is that no state will agree either to
abjure or to dismantle nuclear weapons unless it believes that such a
course is the best course for its own national security. To persuade
states like North Korea and Iran to climb aboard the train to abolition
would probably require simultaneous initiatives on three parallel
tracks. One track would deliver foreign and defense policies that assure
weaker states that we do not intend to attack them, that just as we
expect them to abide by the world rule of law they can expect the same
from us, that the weak need not cower in fear before the strong. Another
track would deliver diplomatic overtures that convince weaker states
that on balance, overall, their national security will better be served
in a world where no one possesses nuclear weapons, rather than in a
world where they do - but so too do many others. And another track still
would deliver nuclear weapons policies that directly address the
long-simmering resentments around the world about the long-standing
nuclear double standard, that directly acknowledge our legacy of nuclear
hypocrisy, and that directly connect nuclear non-proliferation to
nuclear disarmament.

The power decisively to adjust all those variables, of course, does not
reside in Pyongyang or Tehran. It resides instead in Washington.

Notes:

[1] The Washington Post (May 25 2009).

[2] Quoted in Daniel Lang, An Inquiry Into Enoughness: Of Bombs and Men
and Staying Alive (1965), page 167.

[3] Quoted in Ibid, page 38.

[4] Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (1971  -  first
published in 1965), page 274, quoted in Sarah J Diehl and James Clay
Moltz, Nuclear Weapons and Nonproliferation: A Reference Handbook
(2002), page 34.

[5] Quoted in The Nation, Special Issue Containing Jonathan Schell's
interviews with several nuclear policy professionals and intellectuals
(February 2/9 1998), page 40.

[6] Quoted in Securing Our Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons
Convention, Tilman Ruff and John Loretz, editors. (2007), page 37.

[7] Don Oberdorfer, PBS, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (October 09
2006), quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of
Nuclear Danger (2007), page 141.

_____

Tad Daley is the Writing Fellow with International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War, the Nobel Peace Laureate disarmament advocacy
organization. His first book, Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a
Nuclear Weapon-Free World, is forthcoming from Rutgers University Press
in January 2010.

http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/20090528105725478


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/