Sleepwalking With the Bomb (34 page)

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 transpired, 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 extinguished 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. T
HE 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.”

President Obama’s utopian rush towards nuclear abolition ignores the vital lessons nuclear-age history teaches. His abject failure to support the Iranian uprising of June 2009 by leading an allied coalition to impose strong sanctions then, instead of pursuing talks that had no plausible chance to succeed, exemplifies why we are sleepwalking towards an avoidable nuclear catastrophe. Equally risky is his desire to “set an example” for other nations to follow in reducing nuclear arms, when our adversaries are more likely to increase their arsenals instead, in pursuit of greater power and influence.

T
WO-THIRDS OF
a century offer up twelve guidelines for leaders in public office.

1. Arms control cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather must be considered along with an adversary’s conduct.

2. Arms agreements must be based upon genuine, not presumed, commonality of strategic interest.

3. Revolutionary powers cannot be contained; they must be defeated.

4. Nuclear weapons give nations a “dying sting” capability that virtually precludes preemptive action and confers near-total survival insurance.

5. The nuclear balance matters if any party to a conflict thinks it matters, and thus alters its behavior.

6. Civilian nuclear power inherently confers military nuclear capability.

7. Intelligence cannot reliably predict when closed societies go nuclear.

8. Ally proliferation can be prevented only by superpower constancy.

9. Popular pressure for unilateral disarmament can prevail unless Western governments explain its hidden, grave dangers.

10. Disarming hostile powers cannot be done by negotiations alone.

11. Never allow single or low-number points of catastrophic vulnerability.

12. Nuclear policy must be fundamentally defensive: its goal is to avoid the apocalyptic trinity of suicide, genocide, and surrender.

In applying these lessons it is supremely important to distinguish between three classes of adversary states: rivals, rogues, and revolutionaries. Rivals, like China and Russia, do not desire our outright destruction; their interests are too intertwined with our survival to allow for that. But they do desire to displace us in primacy of influence in world affairs. China desires to attain the supreme position it enjoyed for most of the past two millennia as the world’s preeminent power; it is beginning this quest by seeking to become primary power in the western Pacific region. For its part, Russia desires to regain the territories it controlled before the end of the Cold War. Rivals, however, may aid rogue regimes by transferring military and nuclear technology.

Rogues, like North Korea, do not necessarily seek to dominate a region. Rather they seek to ensure their own survival. Towards this end, nuclear weapons are the best survival insurance policy their leaders can purchase.

Revolutionaries, like Iran, seek not merely to adjust their position in the existing global order, but to overturn that order and establish a new one. Iran’s leaders are militant Islamists who ardently desire the destruction of Great Satan America and Little Satan Israel. These regimes are least likely to be peacefully persuaded to change their course.