Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age

Keith B. Payne

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813184135
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

Keith Payne begins by asking, "Did we really learn how to deter predictably and reliably during the Cold War?" He answers cautiously in the negative, pointing out that we know only that our policies toward the Soviet Union did not fail. What we can be more certain of, in Payne's view, is that such policies will almost assuredly fail in the Second Nuclear Age—a period in which direct nuclear threat between superpowers has been replaced by threats posed by regional "rogue" powers newly armed with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

The fundamental problem with deterrence theory is that is posits a rational—hence predictable—opponent. History frequently demonstrates the opposite. Payne argues that as the one remaining superpower, the United States needs to be more flexible in its approach to regional powers.

Chapter 1

Introduction

To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

—Sun Tzu, sixth century, B.C.

The word deterrence may bring to mind the Cold War’s “balance of terror” and threats of nuclear “mutual assured destruction.” During the Cold War, U.S. policies of deterrence vis-à-vis the Soviet Union focused on nuclear weapons and nuclear threats. These deterrence policies and the nuclear weapons supporting them became the focus of an often noisy and cantankerous public debate concerning U.S.-Soviet relations and nuclear weapons.

The debate about nuclear weapons in the United States often descended to “bumper-sticker” sloganeering, supposedly pitting thoughtful anti-nuclear activists against a primitive and malevolent military-industrial complex. That characterization of the nuclear debate, popularized in much commentary on the subject, may have been useful politically, but was a gross distortion.¹ Serious debate about nuclear weapons actually revolved around the question of how to deter the Soviet Union and the related role for nuclear weapons in policies of deterrence.

Thinking about deterrence in “balance of terror” terms probably hinders more than helps understanding. Deterrence should be considered in a much broader context. Although policies of deterrence were in fact central to the rationale for U.S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War, at a more general level deterrence is one of the most important and prevalent modes of behavior between individuals as well as between countries. It is neither new to the nuclear age nor relevant only to military considerations. Indeed, it is a standard feature of familial and community relations. Thinking about deterrence in these more familiar contexts, at least initially, is a useful route to understanding its role in international relations.

All in the Family

Given the association of deterrence with Cold War nuclear issues, it may seem harsh to suggest that it could have anything to do with familial relations. Yet, deterrence clearly is practiced widely among family members. Parents the world over tend to be experienced practitioners of deterrence vis-à-vis their children. There obviously are many significant differences between the parent-child relationship and state-to-state relations, but the basic deterrence mechanism is important in each.

When mothers and fathers try to discourage their children from doing some mischief, they typically warn of the punishment sure to follow any such behavior. If, for example, a youngster who cannot swim well appears to be contemplating a move toward the deep water at the local swimming pool or pond, a sharp parental warning usually comes quickly. Before expending the time and energy necessary to move the youngster physically, parents hope that a stern warning will be sufficient to change the child’s course.

If the child understands the warning, considers the risks of continuing on course, and consequently decides to stay put, the parents have practiced deterrence effectively. For parents, deterrence offers real advantages. They are able to shape the child’s behavior as desired, with minimum exertion and without open conflict with the child. In addition, instead of reacting after trouble unfolded, they have prevented it from occurring in the first place. (It should be noted that anyone with much experience poolside can attest to the frequent failure of parental deterrence policies.)

At another level, deterrence is a key component in preventing crime. For example, signs at department stores and supermarkets frequently announce that “shoplifters will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” The store’s management, of course, hopes that these warnings will lead a would-be thief to believe that the risks of shoplifting will outweigh the possible gains, and therefore to choose not to shoplift. Such warning signs represent an attempt to deter. Again, effective deterrence is much to be preferred to the alternatives. Rather than reacting to a crime already committed, with the risky, time-consuming, and costly process of actually catching a thief, it is hoped that effective deterrence can prevent the shoplifting from occurring, in this case, at the trivial expense of a warning sign.

In each case, whether parents warn a child or the store management warns potential thieves, the hoped-for result is the same: the person to be deterred comprehends the risks, weighs the potential costs and benefits, judges the potential costs to be greater than the benefits, and therefore decides against the unwanted behavior in question. In principle, the requirements for effective deterrence are not daunting. The person to be deterred must be informed of the threat, believe the threat is at least plausible, and rationally weigh the potential “cost” of the threat against the value of choosing to go ahead with the forbidden action. “Rational” in this sense simply describes a decision-making process in which the person to be deterred is informed of the situation (that is, takes in information), weighs the alternative courses of action as to the pros and cons of their likely outcomes, and chooses that course judged to give the best return according to the person’s hierarchy of values.² The child rationally chooses to stay away from the deep water because, for the child, whatever pleasure might come from being in the “adult” section of the pool is not worth the subsequent parental displeasure and punishment. For the shoplifter, whatever might be the value of committing the crime, it is not worth the possible consequences. It is important to note that in these hypothetical examples of effective deterrence, the persons attempting to deter—in these cases, parents and store management—must pose a threat that speaks to the respective value hierarchy of the child and the shoplifter, is understood, and is considered at least plausible.

The Advantages of Deterrence

The advantages of an effective policy of deterrence are evident from the examples offered above. Effective deterrence conserves effort on the part of those issuing the warning because no action is necessary to enforce their preferred behavior: the child or thief has changed behavior of his or her own accord before the unwanted action occurs. Because deterrence here is preventive rather than reactive, it typically involves less effort by the parent or store management than would be the case if the situation had to be resolved by direct action.

Not surprisingly, the immediate advantages of an effective deterrence policy—obvious in these everyday examples—also make deterrence a highly desirable part of a country’s national security strategy. The Department of Defense defines deterrence as “the prevention from action by fear of the consequences. Deterrence is a state of mind brought about by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable counteraction.”³ If the opponent’s “state of mind” can be manipulated so that the opponent decides against attacking or pursuing some provocative course, there may be no need for direct military engagement. That is, if an opponent can be led to act in preferred ways without battle, a country can protect its interests while avoiding the possibly severe risks and costs of battle.

Given this tremendous advantage of a successful deterrence policy, there is little wonder that Sun Tzu, the great Chinese strategist of the sixth century B.C., observed that the ability to deter and coerce an opponent is superior even to the ability to defeat an opponent in battle: “For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”⁴ Sun Tzu clearly was not a pacifist, and his point is not to dismiss the value of winning battles. His point is that placing an opponent in a position wherein that opponent decides not to challenge or provoke, but instead accepts one’s desired course, is far superior to engaging the opponent in battle to enforce one’s will. According to Sun Tzu, only when one is unable to deter or coerce without resort to force must one pursue the more risky and costly alternative of doing battle.

Following Sun Tzu’s principle, the unparalleled U.S. and allied victory over Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf war did not reflect “the acme of skill.” The Gulf war certainly represented one of the most dramatic military victories in history. Nevertheless, deterring Saddam Hussein from invading Kuwait or successfully coercing him to leave Kuwait without battle would have demonstrated the highest level of skill. Of course, neither route might have been feasible in practice.

Deterrence and the Cold War

As Sun Tzu’s writings demonstrate, strategists have long understood that the capability to deter is “the acme of skill.” With the emergence of the nuclear stalemate during the Cold War, Sun Tzu’s admonitions were taken to their logical conclusion. Engaging the opponent without resort to force (that is, deterring and coercing) not only was advantageous in the context of the enormous superpower nuclear arsenals; in many ways it was the only reasonable option available. This point was recognized very early in the nuclear age by the brilliant theorist and military historian Bernard Brodie. Looking forward, Brodie offered the view in 1946 that “thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them.”⁵

National security strategy is about the use of power of all kinds to achieve national goals; military strategy is about the use of military power in support of national goals. The U.S.-Soviet nuclear stalemate introduced a limit on the extent to which the actual use of military power could support national goals. With nuclear weapons available to both superpowers in such abundance by the late 1960s, there was a limit to the level of conflict and provocation that could serve any political purpose.

Because the United States confronted a Soviet Union easily capable of annihilating the fabric of U.S. society with nuclear weapons, U.S. freedom to engage the Soviet Union militarily was limited. Under the conditions of such utter societal vulnerability to the opponent, the use of extreme force against the opponent in support of a national goal was not an option consistent with national survival. A provocation expected to lead to direct hostilities, and the likelihood of large-scale nuclear war, could be considered only under the direst of circumstances.

Thus during the Cold War, the actual use of force leading to a general nuclear war became disconnected from any possible national goal. A superpower nuclear conflict could, according to some estimates of extreme circumstances, have led to some 160 million U.S. dead.⁶ No use of force that culminated in the destruction of the nation could be related reasonably to support for achieving national goals. Nuclear weapons had uprooted traditional notions of military strategy: their use could not contribute to anything worthy of the name “victory” because no national goal could be worth the cost of general nuclear war. This situation logically led to the development of limited and proxy war theories by “the best and the brightest” during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It also led to the ascendancy of deterrence in U.S. military strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In relations with the Soviet Union, the actual employment of nuclear weapons had become disconnected from supporting national objectives, but the threat of their use became central to military strategy. Persuading the Soviet leadership that our nuclear threats were credible in this context came to be of paramount concern.

The focus of traditional military strategy was to prevent an enemy from achieving its military objectives and to attain one’s own by defeating the enemy’s military establishment; on occasion deterrent effect could be found in the capability to do so. In contrast, nuclear deterrence policy attempted to shape an enemy’s behavior by threatening its homeland with nuclear attack, without the prior requirement of defeating its military establishment.

Because deterrence gained ascendancy in U.S. military strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the key question became how to deter. What Soviet actions should the U.S. attempt to deter by nuclear threat? What should be the character of the nuclear threat behind the U.S. deterrence policy? What types of forces were helpful or unhelpful for deterrence? To whom and how should nuclear threats be communicated? How could those threats be made believable to the Soviet leadership? These became the critical questions. The answers were not obvious.

Learning How To Deter

In the illustrations given of familial and community deterrence, answers to the basic questions about how to deter are also not obvious. In such cases, however, there are many opportunities for testing various approaches to deterrence to determine which approach works best. If deterrence fails several or many times, the result need not be disastrous: the parent can spring to action if the toddler does not heed the warning about going too near the pool; the store detective can pursue the shoplifter if necessary.

In contrast, during the Cold War the U.S. could not road test various approaches to deterrence policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union to determine which policy worked best. The occasions for testing nuclear deterrence policies were too few and unpredictable, and our information about the opponent’s decision-making too limited, to allow an understanding of why deterrence might have worked or failed. The penalty for failure was too high to engage in a conscious testing scheme.⁷

Consequently, a debate about how best to deter the Soviet Union and what forces were necessary for deterrence raged throughout the Cold War. The basic issues in this debate changed very little over the years: in the 1970s and 1980s it pitted the so-called nuclear war-fighting approach to deterrence against the mutual assured destruction (MAD) approach.⁸ The labels occasionally changed, but the basic differences upon which positions were based did not. The debate about U.S. nuclear weapons, when not carried on at a bumper-sticker level of sloganeering, reflected this deeper debate about how to deter. Finding the truth, in any scientific sense, simply was impossible because there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate the superiority of one approach to deterrence over another. On this base of ignorance, competing assertions about how best to deter and what level of weaponry was necessary for deterrence could simply be repeated with vigor, without much apparent risk of being demonstrably wrong.

Consequently, during the early-to-mid 1980s, advocates of a freeze in nuclear capabilities could argue that ceasing any further development of nuclear weapons w...