Nukes in the 21st century
Sunday, April 22, 2007 at 9:00AM ARTICLE: Congress Skeptical of Warhead Plan: Lawmakers and Experts Question Necessity, Implications of a New Nuclear Weapon, By Walter Pincus, Washington Post, April 22, 2007
I don't have any problem with exploring and developing a new warhead. I think nukes are good and keep the peace through deterrence.
I just don't believe in the myth of strategic missile defense (though I support a tactical version) nor in global gun control.
You want a nice lawn, then you grow grass instead of poisoning weeds.
Nukes provide the strategic top-cover for the end of great power war. and I see no reason to mess with that historical reality. When states knock on that door, I let them in and seek integration by other means.
Just look at all the middling powers we've successfully brought on board to some degree in the last quarter-century: only Pakistan, Israel and India have chosen to keep nukes. So many more walked or gave them up.
Now, with the whole nuke paradigm shifting due to energy/environment, the counter-proliferation model seems more counter-productive by the day.
Reader Comments (5)
As long as the United States has a creditable claim to effectively owning any chunk of blue water on the planet, and as long as we're not tyrannical idiots about it, it's a strong disincentive for anyone else to even try to build a fleet that challenges it.... which in turn means that those dollars will go to more productive ends than financing belligerant fleets. The utility of trying to build a fleet capable of challenging the US Navy is very low because the economic cost is so very high, and because any expert out there can look at US capabilities on the horizon (like more carriers equipped with Pegsus or Pegasus-like UCAVs) and just shrug in despair.... or just live quietly under cost-free, piracy-free protection.
It has always seemed to me that a similar logic should obtain regarding missile defense. No one should seriously believe that we can build a system any time soon (possibly, ever) that would hold off a determined Russian strike. That's sheer fantasy. But can we build a system that greatly reduces the utility of a North Korean or Iranian system? That seems a much more realistic proposition. If that's possible, can we engage in partnerships with Israel or Japan or Poland to enhance their security at the same time, and keep them from feeling naked and exposed? This also seems possible. Could we do the same with India and Pakistan? Perhaps not today, but perhaps someday. That seems to me like an excellent, practical, pragmatic way to deal with proliferation-- reduce the incentive to build the damned things in the first place and sell security. I think there's a guy out there writing books and giving talks on the idea of selling security on an international level, even, so maybe there's something to that....
You quite properly say that this does nothing to guard against covert nukes. You're right. But I still pose this question: If nuclear missiles are so useless, why do nation-states such as India, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran continue to spend measurable fractions of their military and research budgets on, not just nukes, but reliable missile delivery systems? Building a nuke, after all, is still hard; building one that you can loft a few hundred or a thousand miles with reasonable circular error probability is still damn hard. Are all these states spending all that money irrationally? And if not, why is the idea of reducing the utility of that money spent irrational in turn?
(I realize after I wrote this that it might seem hostile. I hope it's not taken as such-- sometimes I write more strongly than the situation warrants.)
I would just say that history shows nukes are for having and not using. Every country--even ours--comes to this conclusion once they get them.
I want to have plenty of nukes to make massive retaliation real. Missile defense adds nothing to that. All it seems to indicate is the desire to be able to pull off a nuclear strike without fearing retaliation--hence, destabilizing.
No one pursues this seriously except us. Why is that?
Thanks for the reply.
To answer your question directly, it's because no one else has even close to the means, and I'm not sure anyone has the strategic desire, either. In no particular order, I think the next possible states to be able to put something like together would be China, Russia, or Japan.
China can dream of having the economy and industrial base to pull this off, but they're a long way from having the aerospace technology required-- building true aerospace expertise is a generational affair. I'm not convinced they have the geopolitical footprint, either.
Russia has the aerospace technology and the geopolitical footprint, but the last thing they need is another economic arms race. And Japan has the technology and maybe the economy, but they're a Pacific island; they don't have the footprint required.
In summary, it's a game that only we can play, and only a very exclusive club can even think about playing in the next twenty to thirty years.
That said, I agree with your statement that nukes are for having, not for using... up to a point. But only to a point. After all, we used them. And after the Indian Parliament Attack in 2001, *I* sure thought there was a non-zero chance of an actual nuclear war...!
I guess I should say that I want to agree with you 100% on that point, but I can't. Philosophically, I can't, becuase while I do regard, e.g., Iran and North Korea as deeply rational actors, rational actors are embedded into a noisy physical world. This noise infests not only the agent's perceptions of the world, but the agent's perceptions of itself, and even the agent's reactions to the world around it. As such, the possibility for mistakes exist, and that thought is very scary. I'm not so much after the ability to cancel someone's mistake by building this system (although that'd be a good side effect) but trying to think strategically of a way to change the incentives of the system in such a way that nukes are less attractive.
(I come from a computer science background, and there are a lot of computer science and economics papers written around these themes. I would be-- literally-- shocked, if there weren't a number translated into political science terms, but you're the expert there so I'm hardly going to lecture you on it. I'm just saying where I'm coming from.)
Also, I'm kind of unsympathetic to the notion that we're trying to build a system no one else has. I wouldn't see Iran, for instance, bending over backwards to give nukes to Saudi Arabia just so the Saudis don't feel put upon.
Nor does anyone seem to have a burning desire to pump enough cash into their naval programs to compete with us on the grounds that we can launch an amphibious invasion of any coastal country in the world, but no one can think seriously about doing that to us. I'm honestly not sure what the difference between the one situation and the other is supposed to be. Why is a missile defense shield "not fair," but a surface fleet defense shield is not only "fair," but stabilizing?
Anyway, thanks for the response, Tom. It was a pleasure.
If a bomb went off in Long Beach Harbor next week what would we do? Even if we could trace the origin of the bomb, my guess is that there would be massive worldwide condemnation of any action we might take in retaliation.
Am I a cynic? You bet.
The lynchpin to our nuclear strategy since the Krushchev days has been not merely to have them, but to limit who else has them to powers we can deal with on other levels. We do see some new actors (North Korea specifically) that we have difficulty pulling levers on without resorting to violence, but rest assured that the sole power in Korea today is completely aware that his life span is measured by how he uses his nukes: use them as a deterrent, and we will be deterred. Sell them, and it no longer remains in anyone's interest to allow him to remain alive. QED: possessing nukes is a bidirectional deterrent, same as always.
A "deterrent" missile defense system simply isn't part of that effect, while freeloading on US protection of the sealanes to a small extent is, since it allows freedom of the seas and economic reliance on Middle Eastern oil exports in far-flung places which otherwise might require their own security plans (and blue-water navies) apart from ours. Economics drive diplomacy in this case, and while most great powers will work both ends (i.e., possess nukes to deter us from aggression, while relying on us to maintain peace on the seas for their economic progress) the minor powers (Korea and Iran specifically) will darn sure try to copy the great power model in those two circumstances. I would argue that it is both rational, and possibly necessary (since their cheapest, and therefore best options lie in that direction,) for them to do so.