In May the Obama administration announced a new national nuclear policy. Its most striking feature is the pledge that, if a country that has signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty should attack the United States with other weapons of mass destruction (chemical or biological), the U.S. response will be non-nuclear. President Barack Obama has said that one of his goals is to help bring about the abolition of nuclear weapons, and the new policy is clearly a carrot intended to help achieve that end: sign the treaty and you are safe from U.S. nuclear attack (though not from a "devastating conventional response").
So many people in and out of the administration clearly believe that nuclear weapons are a kind of ultimate evil, whether necessary or not. Perhaps it is time to think back through that claim. Did the United States commit a kind of original sin when it attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki
What has the role of these weapons been, and what is it likely to be Perhaps most important, can the nuclear deterrent be replaced by something more benignThe first point worth making is that deterrence has worked astonishingly well since 1945. The bomb kept the Cold War cold. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin crisis before it were both built up after the fact into much riskier occasions than they were. The Soviets in particular were shocked by what they saw as grossly irrational American behavior (mainly threats) during the Cuban crisis, to the point of fearing that the Vietnam War could somehow have gone nuclear. The record suggests that other supposed Cold War near-nuclear crises, such as one during the 1973 Middle East War, were overrated.
The reason for this success seems simple. Nuclear weapons threaten governments in a unique way. A ruler who thinks that, should he attack, he will quickly and personally be obliterated sees matters very differently from one who may imagine the more distant prospect of losing a war, i.e., who may be deterred in a more conventional manner. Much nuclear planning is based on the idea of threatening a country's ability to conduct a war, but in fact the main deterrent is much more likely the quick and vivid threat that those who decided to fight the war would be destroyed. That is why, near the end of the Cold War, U.S. strategic policy turned toward the threat of decapitating the Soviet Union. The Soviets eventually developed a semi-automatic command system designed to fire a devastating return salvo in the event that their command centers were destroyed. That was perfectly acceptable, because the point of the U.S. policy was to prevent war rather than to fight it. The strategy to be adopted if war had broken out would (or at least should) have been quite different. That is why NATO envisaged a war that would begin non-nuclear and then probably stop as both sides were forced to contemplate the possibility that nuclear weapons would be used on a large scale.
Nuclear Proliferation
The sense that nuclear weapons might tend to freeze aggressive intentions animated the Chinese, at least in the 1980s, to promote nuclear proliferation. They used to say that the Soviets would never have invaded Afghanistan had the Afghans possessed a nuclear bomb. Their view was that nuclear weapons clipped the wings of the superpowers. It is widely accepted that the Pakistani weapons program, which has been the basis for further proliferation, employed a Chinese warhead design. The Chinese in turn certainly remember that former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev first promised Mao Zedong the bomb, then withdrew the offer, precipitating the Sino-Soviet split. In their view the bomb insured them against all sorts of threats, including from the Soviets who wished to dominate them. Once Mao had the bomb, he could unleash his devastating cultural revolution without fearing that someone would exploit the chaos to attack him. This history makes it difficult to imagine why the Chinese would be willing to compel Iran to abandon its nuclear program.
A cynic might imagine that national leaders would prefer a non-nuclear world, because it would be much less dangerous for them, in a very personal way. Nuclear deterrence puts many other people at terrible risk, and it would be a better world if the risk were concentrated on the national leader. That may be the content of the administration's new policy. Incidentally, it probably took the demonstration at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to make the point that nuclear weapons really were different. Some recent historians have pointed out that those who died in the two explosions made it possible for the Japanese government to surrender with honor and thus to spare the lives of the several million (or tens of millions) of Japanese who would surely have died had the war continued.
Of course, this kind of deterrence may not work in some important cases. It may be, for example, that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believes what he says, that the physical destruction of his nation by nuclear weapons would usher in a new age of Islam. In that case the bomb becomes a usable weapon, and there may well be a nuclear war in the Middle East (Israel is unlikely to welcome nuclear destruction by Iran, and Mr. Ahmadinejad may come to regret his rhetoric). It is, however, difficult to imagine how even a devastating war in that region would destroy the rest of the world.
Precision Attack
The new factor is the advent of long-range precision non-nuclear weapons, the first being a non-nuclear Trident missile. The U.S. Air Force has long advocated an instant global strike system employing a hypersonic missile or space plane. In both cases the goal is a warhead that can arrive anywhere on earth, precisely targeted, within an hour. For example, a dictator's underground lair can be demolished by a sudden strike from the sky, which he is unlikely to be able to fend off. Instead of making the world safe for biological or chemical warfare, the new U.S. policy has, in theory, substituted a much more focused deterrent. The strike will kill the dictator and his retinue, but it will not touch his innocent population.
Unfortunately, there is a major rub. While the new strike system is a technological miracle, for it to work effectively it needs foolproof targeting. Whoever fires the precision missile has to know exactly where the dictator is, at that moment, and for the next hour. Our record on this score is lackluster. During the 1991 Gulf War we tried repeatedly to kill Saddam Hussein, and each time we failed. During the 2003 war we tried both to find Saddam and also to find and destroy the television studio in Baghdad from which he tried to rally his army and his people. None of these attempts came even close to success. One might also point to the 1998 failure to assassinate Osama bin Laden using cruise missiles.
Imagine, for example, that at Time Zero we know that our target is in Room X of his vast presidential palace. Our devastating missile entirely destroys Room X and the adjacent five rooms, plus the floors above and below. Unfortunately, not realizing that devastation was on the way, a few minutes after the strike was launched, the dictator decided to go to his library ten rooms away. He hears the blast, but he survives. If that seems fanciful, remember that the rather large missile represented by the airliner that hit the Pentagon on 9/11 killed fewer than 5 percent of that building's normal population. Merely walking out of an office to go to a meeting would have saved some people. Precision long-range attack cannot possibly offer any assurance of killing a specific individual.
The reason for failure is simple; it is the same reason that political assassination usually fails. Major threats usually do not come from popular democratic leaders, because war against a superpower is generally not too popular. Deterrence focuses on those who are far more interested in their own egos than in their populations, and who do not suffer from the sorts of limits that afflict democratic leaders. The potential target of the deterrent threat knows that he is already under threat, not only from us but from many of his associates and also from his population. To stay alive, he makes his movements unpredictable. He may also employ doubles. He hides alternative command centers. If he were easy to kill, either from close up or from far away, he would already be dead.
Nuclear weapons sober such national rulers because they are so devastating that normal methods of concealment may well fail. A big nuclear warhead in effect makes up for the limits of our intelligence systems. The same thing that makes nuclear weapons so very unpalatable
that they would devastate a substantial area and thus would kill many innocent people makes them a credible threat.Finally, why is the long-term danger of biological or chemical attack somehow so much less horrible than the threat of quick nuclear devastation that we are so willing to distinguish one from the other