Sleepwalking With the Bomb (33 page)

Given emerging perils, it is essential that missile defense technology be unleashed, not retarded, by existing arms accords, including New START, and that development on multiple types rapidly proceed. The need for this technology is urgent.

Which makes all the more worrisome President Obama’s identification of missile defense as of “particular” interest in accommodating Moscow’s desires after the November election.

The danger of EMP may seem remote. But failure to protect against it—by hardening essential infrastructure and strengthening missile defense—greatly increases the payoff for surprise attacks, and thus the chance they will be carried out and succeed. The potentially catastrophic consequences of EMP underscore the importance of nuclear-age history’s Eleventh Lesson: N
EVER ALLOW SINGLE OR LOW-NUMBER POINTS OF CATASTROPHIC VULNERABILITY
.

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Some countries claim a 200-mile limit to territorial waters, but such claims are not currently recognized under international law.

How the Great Democracies Triumphed, and so Were able to Resume the Follies Which Had so Nearly Cost Them Their Life.

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of a century cannot predict every crisis to come. History does not always repeat itself, but if we are to disregard what history teaches we should have good reason to do so—reason grounded in facts, and logical inferences drawn from those facts. We also should hold a keen appreciation of the intractability of human nature and how that nature affects global politics.

The civilized person recoils at the utter moral insanity and ultimate strategic futility of nuclear war. But defending and preserving civilization from its worst enemies, some of highly dubious stability, necessitates considering how to prevent the very real prospect that nuclear weapons will be used for the first time since 1945. The prospect of such a hideous, civilization-altering event seems to be growing as time passes. There is no time to waste in remedying unfortunate turns in nuclear policy and restoring more prudent policies so as to confront emerging nuclear dangers.

The select community of serious nuclear strategists, often satirized as enamored of matters at once esoteric and macabre, diligently and creatively pondered ways to avoid nuclear Armageddon. They got things right enough to help guide the civilized world through the era of super-power contest. Their collected wisdom coupled with history’s nuclear-age lessons offers the civilized world the best—and the last—chance to defeat the emerging, malignant nuclear actors of the twenty-first century before nuclear demons seize the world stage.

The bombs of 1945 generated a powerful current of opinion among leaders and the citizenry—the belief that those blinding atomic flashes had rendered traditional principles of geopolitics and war obsolete. The advent of the nuclear age coincided with the creation of the United Nations, which was to accomplish after World War II’s global carnage what the League of Nations had failed to do after the slaughter of World War I’s trenches. It is understandable that with tens of millions of lives already lost in what was to prove history’s bloodiest century, the prospect of destruction on a vastly greater scale—made possible by the potentially unlimited thermonuclear power of the hydrogen bomb—would drive pacifist passions and utopian yearnings.

Events since 1945 have proven the dolorous refutation of such beliefs and hopes. The nuclear genie is not only still out of the bottle, it has multiplied. Malignant actors are now in possession of nuclear technology and could well have it within their power to fatally wound modern civilization in the not-too-distant future. The five members of the original nuclear club have been joined by four more, with only one of these, Israel, a truly stable democratic state that would not use nuclear weapons save if its literal survival required it. India is a democracy, fairly stable, but going through an economic and social transformation that will test that stability. Pakistan is rife with Islamist fervor and anti-American passions. A mysterious clique of xenophobic tyrants runs North Korea. Iran is approaching nuclear membership but is neither stable nor pacific in its strategic aspirations. Its revolutionary leaders desire to attain regional hegemony in the Mideast, driving American influence to the periphery, and then ultimately to destroy Western civilization.

Despite the clear lessons offered by this history, many have embraced mythic pasts. According to these myths, the threat of extinction posed by an all-out nuclear arms race is sufficient to create a fundamental commonality of interest in mutual survival. Thus patient diplomacy can bring about a nuclear-zero world in which we “end the nuclear nightmare” once and for all. The genie can, in this view, be put back into the bottle after all. There is no serious evidence to support this view. A companion myth is one of benevolent world government, though even a cursory look at the United Nations shows how chimerical such a vision is in real life.

For those who harbor such beliefs, arms control has become a doctrine that transcends geopolitics. Like all utopian beliefs, it is based upon revelatory rather than empirical truth and is thus beyond refutation by concrete evidence in the form of actual events. Arms treaties are inviolate, leading supporters to deny or minimize violations, lest they lead to abandonment of the treaty. Each treaty stands as a step towards nuclear zero. There can be no steps backward on this path. There are, in this view, no undetectable clandestine caches, nor implacable enemies.

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.