E-Notes: Why Nukes Still Trump: Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century

E-Notes

Why Nukes Still Trump: Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century

By Avery Goldstein

November 13, 2000

Avery Goldstein is Director of FPRI’s Asia Program and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

The following is based on a talk Avery Goldstein delivered at FPRI on September 20, 2000. The main ideas and evidence are more fully developed in his recent book, Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century: China, Britain, France and the Enduring Legacy of the Nuclear Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2000, www.sup.org).

As the Cold War ended, many hailed the advent of a “new world order.” Hopefully, it was asserted that the decades-long anxieties associated with superpower confrontation were ending. Many predicted that the post-Cold War world would be one in which old-style international politics was fundamentally transformed; economic issues would supplant military-security concerns on the agenda of statesmen. In this context, nuclear weapons almost overnight seemed to lose their central role in international politics, though concerns about the challenge of managing nuclear risks on the periphery (the intertwined nightmares about proliferation, terrorists, and “rogue” states) continued. Indeed, the spreading conviction that the heyday of nuclear deterrence was over even led some of the leading figures from the weapons programs and strategic policy circles of the Cold War superpowers to recommend that the existing nuclear states dismantle what these new abolitionists now saw as pointless and morally dubious arsenals.

Yet, based on history, one might have expected skepticism about claims that the new world order would fundamentally differ from the old. The moment of triumph, when hopes are highest and the victors in war feel most confident in their ability to shape outcomes, seems to encourage misguided extrapolations about the future. Certainly this was true for leading statesmen and their advisors who formulated admirably ambitious plans to reshape the world in 1918 and 1945. The belief that the end of the Cold War would greatly diminish, and possibly end, the importance of nuclear weapons for international politics, arguably reflected a similarly mistaken judgment about the future among idealists. But many realists were also drawn to a similar conclusion. Why? The reason, I suggest, is that they had developed a flawed understanding of the role of nuclear weapons that was based almost exclusively on analyzing the experience of the Cold War superpowers. If instead one analyzes the experience of a wider variety of nuclear states, one reaches a different conclusion— that nuclear weapons will remain a central feature of international security affairs and indeed may well become more, rather than less, important for a variety of great and not so great powers well into the 21st century.

Before elaborating, however, let me add that I am not denying that important changes accompanied the end of the Cold War. The collapse of the Soviet Union of course ended the era of bipolarity, and economic concerns have come to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the considerations that guide foreign policy makers. Yet, in three crucial ways the world has not changed: [1] states must coexist in an anarchic realm (absent a higher authority on which they can depend to ensure their security, they must prepare for the possibility that they will have to rely on themselves); [2] states continue to put national before supranational interests; and, [3] despite remarkable advances in military technology there is still no fully effective defense against nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Because of these three important continuities nuclear weapons and the deterrent strategies they serve will remain powerfully attractive to a growing variety of states in the 21st century. This will be true despite, and indeed in part because of, the changes in polarity and the rising prominence of economic concerns that others have emphasized.

How do I justify my claim about the enduring legacy of the nuclear revolution? In part, the claim rests on the insights of theories about international politics and military strategy that explain the choices states face in the circumstances like those prevailing during the Cold War and after. In part, however, the claim is rooted in evidence, the historical record that provides some confidence in the logic of abstract theories and suggests lessons about the world that now exists. With respect to evidence, it is important to note that it is no longer reasonable to assert that there is a lack of good evidence for evaluating theoretical arguments about nuclear strategy. There is simply much more and much better evidence available than ever before, in large measure because of the release of formerly classified documents that began during the last decade of the Cold War in the US, a process that has been unevenly mirrored in other countries as well. The access scholars enjoy today would have seemed truly fantastic to those researching nuclear issues before the 1980s. The new evidence does not, of course, contain final answers about the big questions. Analysts will continue to disagree about defining and interpreting the facts of history. Nevertheless, the distinction between such debates about nuclear history and those about earlier eras is a matter of degree, not kind.

My claim about the enduring legacy of the nuclear revolution also reflects fresh evidence in a different sense— more thorough consideration of cases beyond the oft-studied Soviet-American nuclear interaction. Considering the experience of other nuclear states suggests that some of the received wisdom about nuclear strategy — in particular about the meaning and requirements of nuclear deterrence— was distorted by the focus on the very special, arguably atypical, cases of the Cold War superpowers. Both superpowers during the Cold War enjoyed special geopolitical advantages. In different ways, each imagined that the size and remoteness of their heartlands from the likely front lines of engagement in Europe and Asia made it possible to at least contemplate the limited use of force, perhaps even limited nuclear force, in ways that might not court immediate disaster. Policymakers in Washington and Moscow also enjoyed the availability of massive resources, each spending roughly ten times as much on their military as any other state did. By contrast, most other states lack such strategic remoteness and their military planners have to cope with much tighter resource constraints. This encourages them more consistently to consider the efficiency and effectiveness of the strategies they embrace and the military forces they deploy. For states facing these more typically pressing circumstances, one may find more relevant lessons about the possible role of nuclear weapons by looking beyond the experience of the Cold War superpowers to countries like China, Britain, and France. What are those lessons and what do they suggest about important international security concerns in the 21st century?

The Nuclear Experience of China, Britain, and France

The chief, though not sole, security requirement for China, Britain, and France during the Cold War was to figure out how to ensure their vital interests against threats from a superpower whose military capabilities they simply could not match. None could muster military forces sufficient to dissuade a superpower by making it clear that they could successfully fend off his military assault. If they were unable to deploy defenses to dissuade their mighty adversary, what could they do? The most obvious answer in the era of bipolarity was to call on the only available partner with the clout to compensate for their military inferiority. Thus, one easily grasps the reasons why China, Britain, and France allied with one superpower against the other. But all three also fretted about the adequacy of this approach. However capable their patron might be, they worried about his reliability, decided that dependence was too risky, and sought a means to ensure their own vital interests.

Nervousness about depending on even the most capable of allies is easy to grasp. In the anarchic realm of international politics, a partner’s promises of support necessarily fall short of airtight guarantees. Would an ally provide prompt and adequate assistance? Absent a world authority to enforce agreements, there could be no comfortable answer to this question, not even for allies with a formal treaty. This historically familiar concern about diffident allies was exacerbated during the Cold War by the novel condition of bipolarity and the presence of nuclear weapons. Unlike the previous era of multipolarity, in which each important ally contributed a significant military benefit to a coalition’s security, in the bipolar world the junior partners in alliances with each superpower had only marginal military value; not even the largest of the superpower’s allies could decisively tip the balance of power between the two giants. Recognizing their lesser military value, junior partners naturally worried about the risks their patron would actually run on their behalf. Moreover, in a world in which the superpowers possessed nuclear weapons, the fear of abandonment was intensified. Nuclear weapons not only further reduced the value of an ally’s military capabilities for the superpowers, it also elevated the risks of solidarity and the temptation of abandonment. Clearly, each superpower, knowing that it was vulnerable to the destructiveness of the other’s thermonuclear arsenal, had a strong incentive to avoid entrapment in a dangerous showdown, especially if it was a showdown over someone else’s vital interests.

China, Britain, and France understood the unavoidable strategic logic of the new era and saw it as a powerful incentive to discover a means to provide for their own security. Each concluded that the best approach was to emphasize a strategy of deterrence that entailed the deployment of its own nuclear weapons to dissuade even a vastly superior adversary from threatening vital interests it could not defend. Unable to block a superpower’s assault, China, Britain, and France decided that they could convince the adversary that it was too dangerous to mount a serious challenge by forcing him to face the risk of unacceptable pain and suffering from a punishing retaliatory strike using nuclear weapons. While they also continued to hope that alliance with one superpower against the other would make them secure, all three simultaneously hedged against the fear of abandonment by developing, deploying, and modernizing their own ability to reach out and inflict horrifying punishment.

The growing historical record ever more clearly reveals the seriousness of abandonment concerns in Beijing, London, and Paris that (reinforced by status considerations) fostered a determination to acquire, and then do what was necessary to retain, the sort of national nuclear deterrent that each saw as an absolutely essential insurance policy, even when the economic and political price for their determination was steep. Exaggerated or not, their conviction is unmistakable in the old and new evidence about many of the key conflicts and crises of the Cold War years (e.g., the Korean War, multiple crises in the Taiwan Straits, the siege of Dienbienphu, the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missiles Crisis, Sino-Soviet border clashes) and about the divisive disputes over sharing nuclear weapons technology that plagued relations between the superpowers and their allies who insisted on having their own nuclear arsenals.

But however desirable a nuclear deterrent may have seemed, could Britain, France, and especially impoverished China deploy forces sufficient to credibly threaten a superpower whose capabilities they could not match? A superpower adversary, after all, could choose from a wide variety of options, including even the limited use of nuclear weapons, and act against a less capable nuclear state knowing that its leaders could not rationally decide to retaliate. Although a handful of surviving weapons might cause catastrophic damage in the superpower’s homeland, the smaller arsenal of its victim (especially if it had suffered damage in a first strike) would not be able to prevent the superpower from launching a subsequent strike that more completely destroyed its victim’s homeland. Thus, it would be irrational for the victim to decide to retaliate in the first place since that would be self-defeating and probably suicidal. Understanding this logic, both parties would know in advance that as long as the superpower refrained from an unlimited first strike (in which case the victim would have few inhibitions on launching whatever he could), a rational victim would have to yield. The small nuclear state, to use the phrase that Paul Nitze applied to a much less severely outgunned US during the late Cold War years, would be “self-deterred.” The problem with this portrayal of rational nuclear deterrence, and the reason why weaker nuclear states like China, Britain, and France (as well as others during and after the Cold War) believe that modest nuclear arsenals can effectively dissuade a vastly more powerful adversary, is that it ignores the combination of fear and uncertainty that confronts a potential aggressor when nuclear weapons are in play.

In the real world, an adversary can never be certain that the victim will always make the objectively rational choice. He must confront a host of worrisome fears — the victim might launch whatever nuclear forces have survived an attack because decision makers have broken under the enormous strain of a nuclear crisis or indulge a sense of emotional outrage; the attacker’s limited first-strike might be misinterpreted as an all-out attack removing the victim’s inhibitions on retaliating; commanders to whom authority was delegated during the crisis (when forces are put on higher levels of alert and peacetime safeguards are loosened) might decide to launch retaliatory strikes without orders from above. The point is not that such fears would be based on likely scenarios. On the contrary, during peacetime all nuclear states make concerted efforts to safeguard against irrational leaders impulsively triggering national suicide, to closely monitor the behavior of nuclear adversaries, and to maintain tightly centralized control over their nuclear forces.

But an aggressor cannot count on normal peacetime restraints holding, especially since he knows that his threatening actions against a weaker, nervous, and highly vulnerable victim will increase the normally low probability of such unlikely fail-deadly scenarios. In particular, smaller nuclear states who doubt their ability to absorb a first-strike and then react, have clear incentives during a crisis to ready their forces and command and control for quick response. Thus, the combination of fear about what might go wrong and the consequences of being wrong, explains why nuclear deterrence of the strong by the weak is more robust than “rational” deterrence theory would suggest. Unless even a minor nuclear power can be disarmed with virtual 100% certainty, the onus of initiating an unpredictable, possibly disastrous chain of events that could entail absorbing a nuclear retaliatory strike, falls to the aggressor. In even the most lopsided nuclear pairs, this unavoidable worry exerts a powerfully dissuasive effect.

Exploiting this distinctive deterrent effect of nuclear weapons China, Britain, and France focused on ensuring their ability to create what Devin Hagerty has labeled, “first-strike uncertainty” in the mind of their superpower adversaries. Rather than seek unattainable parity or even an assured destruction capability based on fielding invulnerable retaliatory forces to convince the adversary that his aggression would certainly be met with devastating punishment, these smaller nuclear powers concluded that they could deter their adversary by convincing him that no matter how well planned his first-strike, it was possible that some nuclear retaliatory forces might be available and that they might be used. Would the weapons survive and be used? The adversary’s planners (and objective analysts) could reasonably answer, “probably no.” Yet this is equivalent to answering “possibly yes,” a discomforting thought when one might be courting nuclear catastrophe. Such reasoning inspired China, Britain, and France as they developed nuclear deterrents that combined clever doctrine, deployment, and deception in order to cultivate first-strike uncertainty in their mighty adversary’s mind.

The deterrent logic that guided China, Britain, and France highlights the essential features of strategy in the nuclear age in ways that the elaborate doctrines and extravagant arsenals of the superpowers did not. Moreover, it suggests why nuclear deterrence will not only remain at the core of the security policies of the five states who were declared nuclear powers during the Cold War, but also why a nuclear capability has been and will remain attractive as an option for other states as well. For the growing number of states who can cross the nuclear threshold, some will face security challenges that entail choosing among burdensome alternatives. Although developing, deploying, and maintaining a nuclear arsenal is neither cheap nor easy in an absolute sense, against an adversary whose capabilities one cannot match, nuclear weapons married to a deterrent strategy promise greater security than that provided by comparable spending on conventional forces married to a defensive strategy. The effectiveness and efficiency of nuclear deterrence as a means to enhance security will have a strong appeal to states worried about grave threats they cannot otherwise parry and reluctant to entrust their fate to undependable international organizations or self-interested allies.

Lessons for the 21st Century

What does this mean for international security in the 21st century? Only a few of the implications can be summarized here.

First, the familiar claim that economic concerns have attained a new prominence in the thinking of statesmen underscores an important reason why nuclear weapons will be more, not less, attractive to a variety of states who face serious security threats. Advanced industrial states engaged in fierce global economic competition can scarcely relish the prospect of investing larger sums in increasingly expensive conventional forces, when smaller sums provide for a more certain nuclear deterrent guarantee of vital national interests. For less prosperous countries facing daunting military threats and who are able to cross the nuclear threshold, the economic argument is even more compelling, since some will simply be unable to fund conventional forces in the quantity or quality that satisfies their security needs.

Second, the shift from a bipolar to a unipolar and perhaps one day a multipolar world is unlikely to diminish, and may well increase, the appeal of the nuclear deterrent alternative. Under unipolarity, states unable to match the world’s sole surviving superpower and who believe it may threaten their interests, will see a nuclear deterrent as the most affordable and plausible counter within reach. Recent Chinese and Russian thinking has clearly reflected this logic. Should a multipolar world emerge in the early 21st century, another advantage of nuclear deterrents will be apparent. Among several great powers, states may need to hedge against possibly shifting threat perceptions. Unlike conventional forces whose effectiveness is tailored to the nature of a particular adversary’s capabilities, the punitive effect of nuclear weapons is highly fungible and the payoff from investing in them is less volatile. The defensive value of a specific mix of conventional land, sea, and air forces may diminish dramatically should the identity of the adversary change. The deterrent usefulness of one’s nuclear arsenal can be maintained simply by retargeting. This advantage reinforces the economic attractiveness of the nuclear option.

Third, ballistic missile defenses (BMD) currently in the pipeline do not promise much of a strategic payoff in dealing with nuclear threats to the US. None of the systems now envisioned provide perfect defenses. And less than perfect defenses simply do not alter the consequences of uncertainty in the nuclear age that shape the choices of real world political leaders. Would a US president make a fundamentally different choice about intervening in a dangerous conflict, attacking a hostile country, or escalating a crisis with even a much weaker nuclear adversary because he believed that our missile defenses meant there was only a 10% chance of absorbing a terrifying retaliatory strike against an American city or two? The consequences of being wrong would make this decision just as difficult with a highly effective, but imperfect, defense as without one. Instead of being liberated by a technical change in our odds of disaster, the president’s decision would continue to turn on a political assessment— whether the adversary would dare use his nuclear weapons, knowing that even if he gets “lucky” and beats our defenses he could expect a devastating strike in return. Such thinking returns both the strong and the weak to the familiar real world of nuclear deterrence in which we already live.

Ballistic missile defenses may yet be desirable for other reasons that outweigh the easily understood economic and diplomatic costs. Imperfect defenses, for example, can serve local warfighting purposes, blunting the effectiveness of (especially non-nuclear) missile attacks in theaters remote from the US. Or they may be desired as an expensive insurance policy with at least a chance (in other words, at least better than nothing) of knocking down weapons that might be launched accidentally or by an adversary for whom strategic calculations are irrelevant (though casual claims about the irrationality of terrorists and rogue state leaders are overstated). Such purposes, however, are not the ones normally used to justify the investment in BMD. Instead, it is usually argued that BMD will offer effective defense against a determined adversary and will enable a future president to stand up to nuclear blackmail. But if the concern is missiles tipped with nuclear warheads, even a slightly leaky defensive umbrella will leave the president with the same sort of excruciating choice he now faces— whether to take actions that entail accepting a risk of absorbing of horrifying punishment. The strategic consequences of such uncertainty in the nuclear age, consequences that guided the thinking of Chinese, British, and French planners, will endure until a means is discovered that completely negates the enormous destructive potential of nuclear weapons.

Finally, nuclear abolitionists may undervalue the contribution of nuclear weapons to international peace. Put simply, the unnerving risk that nuclear weapons could be used is an uncertainty that induces cautious behavior. In a conventional world, one that lacks the possibility of swift catastrophe that the existence of nuclear weapons creates, states can resort to military force in the belief that it will help them achieve their goals and be confident that the worst case scenario is only the manageable one of defeat or a negotiated peace. With nuclear weapons in the background, the worst case scenario is quite different. This inescapable fact makes the use of force a less appealing option and encourages nuclear states to search for safer ways to realize national goals, to avoid crises, and to carefully manage those crises that prove unavoidable. To be sure, nuclear weapons will not end interstate conflict or even the use of force. But as the history of the Cold War reveals, these events unfold in ways that differ because of the nuclear specter. The pattern continues. The oft- repeated alarm about the nuclear risks in South Asia, for example, routinely overlooks the greater cautiousness that has characterized recurrent Pakistani-Indian military confrontations since the mid-1980s after which both parties have had to had to factor in the danger of nuclear escalation.

Moreover because the risk of nuclear war not only is a powerful incentive to maintain the peace but also is a risk that is easily established, at least two concerns that trouble nuclear abolitionists can be addressed well short of achieving their ultimate and (short of universal amnesia about modern science) arguably quixotic goal. One is the interest in redirecting resources from military to civilian economic purposes. A grasp of the basic logic of nuclear deterrence without its bloated superpower trappings suggests the adequacy of modest nuclear arsenals and also that their possession reduces the size of the increasingly expensive conventional forces states must deploy. Possessing a nuclear deterrent, a state needs only a conventional capability that [1] provides the means to force a major adversary to advertise his intentions (as the French put it) so that he must confront the imminent risk of catastrophic escalation, and [2] covers those lesser contingencies for which nuclear threats are irrelevant. As such, the continued role of nuclear deterrence suggests possibilities for economically beneficial nuclear and conventional arms control that can be justified on strategic and not just moral grounds.

A clear understanding of the requirements of nuclear deterrence also provides strategic justification for addressing a second concern the abolitionists emphasize— the fear of accidental or inadvertent use. These dangers are made acute by unnecessarily large arsenals primed for launch on short notice and geared towards the quick execution of elaborate nuclear warfighting schemes requiring prompt use against a large target set. These were the postures the superpowers adopted during the Cold War. When facing the reality test of crises and limited wars, however, the fear of uncertainty and the possibility of unpredictable and uncontrollable escalation undermined self-confidence and induced great caution. Because deterrence requires only cultivating the adversary’s uncertainty about suffering devastating retaliation, arsenals can safely be kept to a size that is more easily controlled and put in the service of simple retaliatory doctrines that do not require they be ready for quick, spasmodic use. Unlike the superpowers, Britain, France, and China based their planning on this belief that the uncertainty that dissuades could be had even with relatively small, relatively vulnerable nuclear forces. In the 21st century, it is their Cold War experience that will be most relevant not only to insecure states who are weighing the costs and benefits of developing their own nuclear deterrents, but also to the policymakers in existing weapons states who have the option of managing their arsenals in ways that continue to provide ample security, but more safely and at an even more reasonable price.

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E-Notes

Why Nukes Still Trump: Deterrence and Security in the 21st Century

The Nuclear Experience of China, Britain, and France

Lessons for the 21st Century

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