February 11, 2007
Deterrence III Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:30 AM EST John Steele Gordon agrees that deterrence is “a slim reed upon which to depend if Iran should get nuclear weapons” but suggests that the examples I gave about failed deterrents are not altogether apposite, because “the countries involved are either non-nuclear on both sides or on one, with the aggressor the non-nuclear or using non-nuclear means. Pakistan might have risked trying to assassinate the Indian parliament, but I doubt it has ever seriously entertained the idea of lobbing a nuke into New Delhi, for fear of the consequences.” Mr. Gordon seems to think that rational actors will not use nuclear weapons against adversaries capable of retaliating in kind, but doubts the rationality of the Iranian leadership. These are fair points, although many apparently rational actors have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons against nuclear-armed adversaries. NATO assumed it might be forced to first use of nuclear weapons in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack on West Germany, and a lot of ink was spilled elaborating theories in which either NATO or the Warsaw Pact might think first use of nuclear weapons was a rational strategy. The most common theory was that preempting the bulk of an enemy’s nuclear arsenal might in certain situations be the least bad strategy. No one did it, of course, but an awful lot of people talked and wrote about it. A lot of weapons were procured on the strength of arguments of this kind, SS-20s and Pershing IIs, MIRVs, and generations of ever-more accurate weapons designed for so-called counterforce strikes. While I could repeat my argument that non-nuclear deterrence has failed many times, that would avoid Mr. Gordon’s point. He is arguing that nuclear weapons are sufficiently different from other weapons that they are a special case. Again, there is much to be said for this view, but some non-nuclear outcomes are sufficiently terrible that the view does not seem to me to be indisputable. Thinking this over, I stand by one of my examples, at least after tinkering with it a bit. I agree that RAF Bomber Command’s failure to deter Hitler does not prove that strategic deterrence failed, because for that to be the case, one would have to prove that Hitler went to war despite his belief in the efficacy of strategic bombing. But (a) Hitler went to war with Poland believing that Great Britain would back down, so he did not think he was risking strategic bombardment, and (b) in 1939 the Luftwaffe did not concern itself overmuch about the efficacy of British strategic bombing (this would change, and the memory of the RAF’s strategic bombing has had quite a remarkable effect on German attitudes toward war). But turned around, I think the example makes my point. The British chose to go to war with Hitler despite their (wholly mistaken) belief that in 1939 Nazi Germany possessed the means to launch absolutely devastating strategic attacks on British cities. Respectable estimates in the 1930s had predicted hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in the first hours of war. The estimates of likely casualties were in fact much greater than the numbers that would have been inflicted by a Hiroshima-style bomb. So Britain went to war convinced it was risking something worse than a nuclear attack. And while Britain initially refrained from targeting enemy civilians, in large part out of concern about retaliation in kind, after some provocation Britain escalated attacks against enemy civilians, with no reason to assume that Germany could not retaliate to ghastly effect. Strategic bombers were supposed to ensure MAD, and deter accordingly. Long before it was clear that their (initial) lethality had been overestimated, they nonetheless failed to deter.
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