John Wohlstetter - Sleepwalking with the Bomb

A weak England and France invited Hitler’s contempt, and got World War II. A weak Depression-era America invited Japan’s contempt, and got Pearl Harbor. A weak JFK invited Nikita Khrushchev’s contempt at the Vienna Summit, and got the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. A weak Jimmy Carter invited the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contempt, and got the 1979 hostage seizure. Ronald Reagan’s failure to respond to the 1983 Marine barracks bombing, and his efforts to negotiate the release of hostages, invited contempt, and got an upsurge in hostage taking and terrorism across the Mideast (while his bombing of Qaddafi in 1986 restored a measure of respect). George H. W. Bush’s failure to answer the Pan Am 103 bombing, and his failure to cap Desert Storm by finishing off Saddam Hussein, invited al-Qaeda’s contempt. So did Bill Clinton’s hasty departure from Somalia, and his serial failures to respond to escalating terror attacks by al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden saw himself as the strong horse and his adversaries as weak horses. The upshot was a series of attacks, culminating in the atrocities of September 11, 2001.

George W. Bush’s failure to respond forcefully to Syrian and Iranian roles in killing U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan invited Iran’s contempt, as had earlier failures of his predecessors to respond. Iran paid us back in the cruel coinage of American soldiers slain and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Iranian munitions (some Russian made) supplied to Islamist terrorists.

The threat from fanatics is only partially distinct from that posed by the clinically insane. Fanaticism is often considered a synonym for insanity in Western societies, whose people feel that no “rational person” would contemplate nuclear use. Thus anyone who does contemplate it is deemed insane. True, Hitler was both a fanatic and insane, but not all fanatics are like him. And “rational” people can commit supremely irrational—even insane—acts.

Because we are limited in our ability to see inside the human mind and precisely pinpoint who is crazy and who is a fanatic, we should instead focus on the more prosaic task of inferring intent from action. Where, as with Iran and North Korea, a pattern of activity indicates a penchant for risk taking and gambling, we should expect more of the same. Nor can we reasonably expect anything from negotiations with fanatics whom we cannot coerce at gunpoint. Such adversaries will repudiate voluntary commitments as long as they remain in power.

In 1962 one leader—Fidel Castro, a fanatical Marxist revolutionary—apparently did indeed contemplate an all-out nuclear war, even knowing it would obliterate his own island and captive subjects. His masters in Moscow thought better of the plan, and Nikita Khrushchev instead labored with President Kennedy to pull the superpowers back from the nuclear precipice. Many people do not regard Castro as insane; to the contrary, he remains widely lionized, despite ruling a country he has utterly impoverished. Thus can fanaticism and widely perceived rationality be joined in a leader who desires to use nuclear weapons.

Despite mutual desire to avoid all-out war, large powers can find themselves involved in a nonnuclear crisis that evolves into a nuclear one. Thus the 1973 Yom Kippur War—unlike the Cuban confrontation 11 years earlier—began not as a superpower nuclear power play but rather as a regional war over lost territory. The superpowers involved themselves when the United States sought a primary diplomatic role, and the Soviet Union—eager to reestablish influence in the region that had been lost when its prime client, Egypt, sundered their alliance relationship a year earlier—sought a military role as well as a diplomatic one.

The Soviet Union, smarting from having to back down in the face of overwhelming nuclear strategic superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis, had vowed never to be caught in a similarly weak military position again. It accelerated over a quarter century of nuclear and conventional force buildup, as America, at least, partially pulled back. As its arsenal swelled, the Soviet Union became more aggressive in moving across the global geostrategic chessboard.

The second nuclear confrontation between the superpowers—in the Mediterranean in 1973 rather than the Atlantic in 1962—ended differently than did the first, in no small measure because in the interim the strategic superpower nuclear balance had changed. The eventual diplomatic compromise reached did not restore the Soviets to their former strong position, but spared them a replay of their humiliation of 1962.

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.