Sleepwalking With the Bomb

by John C. Wohlstetter

  Arms-control doctrine further holds that nuclear war is unthinkable because “a nuclear war cannot be won,” and that if somehow a nuclear war starts, the use of even one weapon will inevitably lead to all-out nuclear exchanges. Thus only a truly insane leader could even seriously contemplate starting a nuclear war. And thus the concept of “nuclear superiority” is meaningless, because there can be no winner in a nuclear confrontation. Nuclear weapons are unusable, except to support “mutual assured destruction” as a deterrent to their ever being used. International institutions acting in accord with “world opinion” can mediate seemingly intractable differences between nations. And in saving the human race from mass self-destruction, geopolitics can be redeemed.

  But such beliefs presume that our adversaries share our core civilizational values. They do not. These values are scorned by the likes of North Korea’s blinkered Stalinist dictatorship, attempting to use its nuclear bombs for blackmail and to expand international commerce with aspiring rogue nuclear powers. They are scorned by atavist Islamists seeking to seize power in Pakistan so as to gain control over its growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, already about 100 bombs. And they are scorned by the fanatical revolutionary clerics ruling Iran, who might well use nuclear blackmail to undermine the existing world order, starting in the oil-rich and turbulent Mideast. We continually imagine moderates in governments where they are a scarce commodity at best and an extinct species at worst.

  During the Cold War doves imagined that each new Soviet leader might prove to be one who would liberalize the system and reach peaceful coexistence. When former KGB chief Yuri Andropov ascended to power upon the death of Leonid Brezhnev, for example, rumors promptly surfaced that Andropov, architect of the bloody suppression of the Hungarian revolt, was a closet liberal who liked scotch and jazz. In fact he liked neither, nor anything else Western and liberal.

  Stir into this poisonous nuclear geopolitical brew a Russia that is a stagnant petrostate, consuming its natural resources as its population dies off at a younger average age by the year. Add a China that is determined to vault to preeminence on the world stage, restoring its long-lost greatness via economic primacy and cyber-dominance coupled with regional military intimidation. While neither Russia nor China is a plausible candidate to initiate nuclear war, any shift in the nuclear balance in their favor could alter their behavior during a major crisis, as happened with the former Soviet Union during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

  We would do well under the circumstances to recall the words of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, speaking on the Senate floor about the Reagan administration’s response to the December 1981 Soviet crackdown in Poland: “We court great danger when we invite the contempt of totalitarians.”

  If a powerful America is often the object of anger and resentment, it is also feared. But a weak America, far from engendering sympathy, will earn the contempt of allies and adversaries alike. Allies will seek alternative arrangements—including their own nuclear weapons—to secure their position. Enemies will plot potentially lethal trouble. Further, “setting an example” by our own steep arms reductions will not reassure smaller powers like India and Pakistan, who feel threatened and lack a superpower guarantor they trust.

  A weak England and France invited Hitler’s contempt, and got World War II. A weak Depression-era America invited Japan’s contempt, and got Pearl Harbor. A weak JFK invited Nikita Khrushchev’s contempt at the Vienna Summit, and got the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. A weak Jimmy Carter invited the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contempt, and got the 1979 hostage seizure. Ronald Reagan’s failure to respond to the 1983 Marine barracks bombing, and his efforts to negotiate the release of hostages, invited contempt, and got an upsurge in hostage taking and terrorism across the Mideast (while his bombing of Qaddafi in 1986 restored a measure of respect). George H. W. Bush’s failure to answer the Pan Am 103 bombing, and his failure to cap Desert Storm by finishing off Saddam Hussein, invited al-Qaeda’s contempt. So did Bill Clinton’s hasty departure from Somalia, and his serial failures to respond to escalating terror attacks by al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden saw himself as the strong horse and his adversaries as weak horses. The upshot was a series of attacks, culminating in the atrocities of September 11, 2001.

  George W. Bush’s failure to respond forcefully to Syrian and Iranian roles in killing U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan invited Iran’s contempt, as had earlier failures of his predecessors to respond. Iran paid us back in the cruel coinage of American soldiers slain and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Iranian munitions (some Russian made) supplied to Islamist terrorists.

  The threat from fanatics is only partially distinct from that posed by the clinically insane. Fanaticism is often considered a synonym for insanity in Western societies, whose people feel that no “rational person” would contemplate nuclear use. Thus anyone who does contemplate it is deemed insane. True, Hitler was both a fanatic and insane, but not all fanatics are like him. And “rational” people can commit supremely irrational—even insane—acts.

  Because we are limited in our ability to see inside the human mind and precisely pinpoint who is crazy and who is a fanatic, we should instead focus on the more prosaic task of inferring intent from action. Where, as with Iran and North Korea, a pattern of activity indicates a penchant for risk taking and gambling, we should expect more of the same. Nor can we reasonably expect anything from negotiations with fanatics whom we cannot coerce at gunpoint. Such adversaries will repudiate voluntary commitments as long as they remain in power.

  In 1962 one leader—Fidel Castro, a fanatical Marxist revolutionary—apparently did indeed contemplate an all-out nuclear war, even knowing it would obliterate his own island and captive subjects. His masters in Moscow thought better of the plan, and Nikita Khrushchev instead labored with President Kennedy to pull the superpowers back from the nuclear precipice. Many people do not regard Castro as insane; to the contrary, he remains widely lionized, despite ruling a country he has utterly impoverished. Thus can fanaticism and widely perceived rationality be joined in a leader who desires to use nuclear weapons.

  Despite mutual desire to avoid all-out war, large powers can find themselves involved in a nonnuclear crisis that evolves into a nuclear one. Thus the 1973 Yom Kippur War—unlike the Cuban confrontation 11 years earlier—began not as a superpower nuclear power play but rather as a regional war over lost territory. The superpowers involved themselves when the United States sought a primary diplomatic role, and the Soviet Union—eager to reestablish influence in the region that had been lost when its prime client, Egypt, sundered their alliance relationship a year earlier—sought a military role as well as a diplomatic one.

  The Soviet Union, smarting from having to back down in the face of overwhelming nuclear strategic superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis, had vowed never to be caught in a similarly weak military position again. It accelerated over a quarter century of nuclear and conventional force buildup, as America, at least, partially pulled back. As its arsenal swelled, the Soviet Union became more aggressive in moving across the global geostrategic chessboard.

  The second nuclear confrontation between the superpowers—in the Mediterranean in 1973 rather than the Atlantic in 1962—ended differently than did the first, in no small measure because in the interim the strategic superpower nuclear balance had changed. The eventual diplomatic compromise reached did not restore the Soviets to their former strong position, but spared them a replay of their humiliation of 1962.

  The 1973 Yom Kippur War crisis confirmed a hard truth about a power’s perception of the strategic nuclear balance: the balance matters if any power in a major confrontation acts as if it does. For such action will have consequences that affect how a crisis unfolds and how it ends. The United States responded sharply to Soviet escalation and prevailed, because the Soviets had not attained the position Brezhnev foresaw he would attain in 1985. Yet thus fortified, albeit ultimately his prediction for the USSR proved the polar opposite of what tr
anspired, Brezhnev acted more boldly than did Khrushchev over Cuba, at least in part because of the vast increase in the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

  And superpowers’ actions can have long-lasting consequences beyond those envisioned at the outset, as was the case with the Suez Crisis of 1956. The failure of the U.S. to back its allies (Britain, France, and Israel) against a Soviet client (Egypt) triggered a series of disastrous events that unleashed both secular and religious hyper-aggressive tyrannies, waves of terrorism that spread globally, demoralization and thus weakening of key American allies, and independent nuclear proliferation by allies. The reverberations of Suez continue today, to the detriment of American ability to influence events in the Mideast.

  Deterrence did eventually prevail during the Cold War. The massive uncertainties unavoidably attendant on launching a large-scale nuclear attack provided real-world deterrence far more credible than a deterrent threat to commit reciprocal suicide if attacked. Deterrence cannot reliably work against the truly insane, even those with small nuclear arsenals. What will be tested, should Iran go nuclear or Pakistan’s arsenal fall into jihadist hands, is whether fundamentalists can transcend their ideology and accept deterrence. It is a proposition imprudent to test if we can avoid it. Preventing fanatics from obtaining nuclear weapons beats relying on a calculus of deterrence.

  There is a further danger in relying upon retaliatory deterrence alone: the potential for a terror state to engage in nuclear blackmail by proxy. A common fear among those who assess potential nuclear threats is that a terror state transfers several bombs to a terrorist group. The group sets off one bomb in a major American city. It then announces that there are bombs already placed in several other cities, and that if America retaliates against any suspect group or state, or if any nuclear search team approaches the hidden weapons, more bombs will instantly be detonated. It is far from clear that any American president would order nuclear retaliation under such circumstances.

  Securing the existing global nuclear arsenal, and thus preventing sale, gift, or theft of nuclear weapons, necessarily entails nuclear-capable states cooperating and nuclear-aspirant states being denied access to nuclear status.

  A constant companion to mythic pasts has been the fantasy future of rapidly moving towards a nuclear-free world. Some Manhattan Project scientists joined disarmers in the aftermath of the bomb’s use to end World War II. Ronald Reagan, to the consternation of Lady Thatcher, sought to strike such a bargain at the 1986 Reykjavik summit. His idea was checked only by Mikhail Gorbachev’s insistence that Reagan limit missile defense to the laboratory. Reagan refused, and the moment was gone. And Reagan, at least, hedged his offer by insisting on retaining a robust missile defense program, as a national security insurance policy against clandestine nuclear cheating.

  The latest movement pushing for nuclear zero includes former senior national security officials who served American presidents over the past 40 years. In an article published as this book went to press, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft set eight criteria for moving to lower levels, in the process rejecting the idea leaked by the Obama administration for a rapid push to a U.S. nuclear arsenal of 300 weapons.

  They argue for retaining sufficient, diversified forces; stronger verification; extending force reductions to the growing arsenals of proliferating powers; factoring in missile defense and conventional long-range strategic forces; sustaining alliance guarantees to discourage allies from proliferating; and avoiding the mirror-imaging trap of assuming our enemies share our values, and the perspective on nuclear weapons that our values encompass.

  Their viewpoint is a more carefully framed position than that taken by those who wish to rapidly reduce America’s arsenal to 300. But two large problems face those following this gradualist prescription. First, until we know the size of China’s arsenal, and know more about sophisticated nuclear weapons that China and Russia are testing and deploying, we should not entertain further reductions. Second, the cause of rapid disarmament gains momentum from prestigious officials advocating it, and may lead to a stampede of popular opinion. Let a single nuclear weapon detonate anywhere, and the cause will pick up potentially irresistible momentum. Cautionary advocacy of gradual reductions could well fall by the wayside. What is needed is action to bring about positive regime change in hostile states and, if necessary, preventive action to delay nuclear club membership in aspirant hostile states in the interim.

  Well-crafted arms agreements can contribute to strategic stability, if arms control is viewed as an essential foreign policy tool rather than an always-paramount goal—an inherently good end in itself. Establishment of hot-line channels of communication, arrangements guarding against accidental war, verifiable arms reductions, notification of maneuvers, and careful information sharing can all enhance security.

  Yet we must “trust but verify.” The closer we move to nuclear-free status, the higher confidence we must have in our means of verification. And as verification will never imaginably be ironclad, we will need to hedge against nuclear surprise. This will require newer technologies that can provide superior means of detection, defense against, and disarming of nuclear cheaters. Such technologies must also be fully able to deter conventional and unconventional nonnuclear threats, to provide a full spectrum of national and global security.

  A strategy based on past failures will itself fail, and a sufficiently serious failure in nuclear arms policy can destroy Western civilization. Between mythic pasts and fantasy futures lies the perilous present. Fundamentally, nuclear policy must be defensive in orientation: nuclear policy makers should resist reaching for the nuclear-zero stars, and instead concentrate on avoiding the nuclear Armageddon abyss. Unless the West changes policy soon, a Doomsday scenario looks increasingly likely.

  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a publication founded in the dawn of the nuclear age to promote the gospel of arms-control doctrine under the guise of empirical science, in 1947 set its “Doomsday Clock” at seven minutes to midnight. The clock metaphor was chosen by the editors to signal how close they thought the world then was to nuclear extinction.

  Periodically the editors set a new time, when they decide that a significant event has altered the world’s nuclear risk level. Twice the clock reached two minutes to midnight—in 1949, upon the first Russian A-bomb test, and in 1953, after the 1952 American H-bomb test. It stood at three minutes to midnight in 1984 when Ronald Reagan allowed the Soviets to walk away from the bargaining table. When the INF Treaty became reality four years later, on Ronald Reagan’s terms, it was moved back to six before the witching hour. The end of the Cold War in 1991 pushed the clock back to 18 minutes to Doomsday—the furthest from Doomsday it has ever been. During President George W. Bush’s second term it was pushed to five minutes to midnight, as the hydra-headed Islamist monster surfaced and struck. On January 14, 2010, following U.S.-Russian arms talks and President Obama’s call for a nuclear-free world, it was moved back to six before. On January 10, 2012, the clock was moved back to five minutes to midnight, due to lack of progress in arms reduction over the past two years.

  It is tempting to dismiss the clock as all for show, and indeed those positioning it have conceded that its original time setting was theater to grab public attention. It is certainly not scientific, in any real sense. Rather, it is ideological. Only arms agreements seem to move the clock back, while saber rattling or breakdowns in negotiations seem to nudge it forward. Yet, with proliferation attained by rogues, and Islamist fanatics in search of their jihadist nuclear genie, time is running out. After two-thirds of a century without a nuclear attack, even a single nuclear detonation would tragically alter the course of history, causing catastrophic loss of life and damaging the global economy to the tune of trillions of dollars—a reality even President Obama recognized in his 2009 Prague address. Depending upon what form such a nuclear attack takes, Western civilization would at minimum suffer a devastating blow to societal cohesion; in an absolute worst case it might be exting
uished permanently.

  It is not too late to act. But we must act decisively and soon, focusing on threats of today, understanding the past as it actually unfolded and the lessons it teaches, and deferring utopian projects for a nuclear-free future and benevolent world government. THE BEDROCK GOAL OF NUCLEAR STRATEGY FOR CIVILIZED NATIONS MUST BE TO AVOID WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED THE “APOCALYPTIC TRINITY” OF STRATEGIC NUCLEAR OPTIONS: MUTUAL SUICIDE, GENOCIDE, OR SURRENDER—in the words of strategist Raymond Aron—submission “to a detestable world order provided it dispels the agonies of individual insecurity and collective suicide.” This goal makes up the Twelfth—and most fundamental—Lesson of nuclear-age history.

  We must take preventive action to foster regime change in nations whose acquisition of nuclear weapons creates grave risk of nuclear catastrophe. As a last resort, if other means fail, a preventive military option must be preserved. Failure to take necessary active measures to defend against nuclear-armed missiles and passive measures to harden societal infrastructure essential to life and health greatly increases the payoff for surprise attacks. Such lapses simply increase chances that attacks will be carried out and succeed.

  “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,” Albert Einstein said, “but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” To have the best chance to avoid nuclear catastrophe, we should absorb the right lessons from the two-thirds of a century we call the nuclear age. We should keep in mind Dean Rusk’s tart quip that “only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something.”