Challenges the assumption that a reduction of arms can affect the threat of nuclear war

The Nuclear Seduction: Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter--And What Does

By William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber, et al

University of California Press

Copyright © 1989 William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber, et al
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520061349
Chapter One
Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter

A tired old Bear bomber, and a maneuvering hypersonic re-entry vehicle … [either one] can destroy New York just as well.
—Admiral Noel Gayler, former commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific

The Fallacy of Weaponitis

The existence of nuclear weapons is a fundamental feature of the modern world. Their possession—by the human race generally or by any particular nation—definitively matters. They have completely changed the consequences of full-scale war between the dominant world powers, posing a threat to the very survival of civilization and the natural order. Correspondingly, international nuclear disarmament, or even unilateral denuclearization of individual states, would be singular historical events.

The fallacy of weaponitis lies in attributing great significance to the size and technical characteristics of the superpowers' nuclear stockpiles, and especially to the margins of each arsenal—incremental additions to or subtractions from the immense current force, such as building MX missiles or removing Pershing II and cruise missiles from Europe.1

With conventional military technology, such concerns about weapons make sense. From the ancient discovery of the club, reenacted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the horrors of modern saturation bombing, the types and quantities of conventional weaponry have undeniably affected military and political power. Conventional arms races matter because conventional wars are processes of attrition. The guns, tanks, and planes of one side oppose and try to neutralize the weapons and fighters of the other. One side's forces must deplete those of the enemy before a threat of destruction can be posed to the enemy's inner society.

Because no single weapon or small arsenal of weapons determines the result, the quality and size of the overall fighting forces matter.

The side with more or better weapons does not always win, of course, because technical factors must share the military stage with psychological, social, economic, and political ones. In modern guerrilla warfare, for example, primitively armed local organizations sometimes defeat huge, highly advanced military powers. But the military balance has determined much of human history. Firearms helped European settlers conquer Native Americans. Germany's buildup of naval power prior to World War I increased the military threat to Britain. Large, technically advanced interventionary forces supported American power in Korea and other Third World conflicts after World War II.

At the beginning of the nuclear age, too, the weapons paradigm made sense. The atomic bomb was a new weapon, and it revolutionized war and politics. The reason was the immense power of an individual atomic weapon, especially the later hydrogen weapon—so powerful that a single warhead could destroy a city. As Bernard Brodie wrote in 1959: "People often speak of atomic explosives as the most portentous military invention 'since gunpowder.' But such a comparison inflates the importance of even so epoch-making an event as the introduction of gunpowder."2

Consider what a single large warhead could do to Chicago:

One twenty-megaton nuclear bomb explodes just above ground level, at the corner of LaSalle and Adams. In less than one millionth of a second the temperature rises to 150,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit, four times the temperature of the center of the sun. A roar follows but no one is alive to hear it.

Chicago has disappeared. The crater is 600 feet deep, one-and-one-half miles in diameter. Within a five-mile radius, skyscrapers, apartment buildings, roads, bridges, trains, subways, planes, hospitals, ambulances, automobiles, gas mains, trees, earth, animals, people—all have vanished….

The fireball is hotter than five thousand suns. The firestorm roars out in all directions, absorbing all available oxygen, thereby suffocating or incinerating all the living in its path. Before it burns out it will devastate 1,400,000 acres and most of the people on them.

The firestorm is followed by the shockwave, the latter at close to the speed of sound. Then the mushroom cloud, reaching twenty miles in height, and the beginning of lethal radioactive fallout.3

All weapons are subject to diminishing returns, but with weapons this powerful the point of saturation—when increasing the number or quality of weapons adds little to military potential or risks—was reached very soon, perhaps as early as 1955 and no later than the early

1960s, although the date is unimportant now. Both sides had by then acquired so much destructive power that only secondary importance would attach to any further quantitative or qualitative improvements in the leading weapons of the day. The same was true for even large reductions in weapon stockpiles. The weapons paradigm was already obsolete.

For with nuclear weapons, a nation's armed forces no longer must be defeated, or even seriously confronted, before its inner society can be destroyed, because the penetration of so few warheads is needed to accomplish the task.4 General war would no longer be a drawn-out process of attrition but an orgy of mutual devastation. Additional weapons on one side could do little to inflict greater damage on the other.

Even modern air attack with huge conventional bombs does not dispense with the task of defeating the enemy's armed forces. For example, the Allied bombing of German cities during World War II killed hundreds of thousands of people but did not make a decisive difference in the war. In more recent memory, the heavy bombardment of cities such as Hanoi and Beirut caused unimaginable human horror, but even in combination with the extensive bombing and shelling of other cities and villages, it did not completely destroy Vietnamese or (at least so far) Lebanese society.

In contrast, as McGeorge Bundy writes, "a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable." Herbert York, another former high-level American official, concurs: "From one to ten are enough whenever the course of events is being rationally determined." Yet we urgently debate the composition of nuclear arsenals that now number not in the tens but in the tens of thousands. As the military historian Michael Howard notes, the amount of damage to be expected from a war that employs such weapons is so insensitive to the sizes of the nuclear arsenals held by the opposing powers that "the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers could be reduced by a factor of a hundred without affecting their capacity to destroy each other, and probably the rest of the world as well."5

The Existential Balance of Terror

Overkill in itself did not make the arms race irrelevant. The arms race would matter had it produced either (1) a way to defend society against

nuclear weapons or (2) a way to control nuclear war and prevent escalation to all-out carnage. In either case, leaders might believe that their nations could survive or even win a nuclear war and hence might be more inclined to fight one. But because of the great power of the individual hydrogen weapon, no arsenal can provide an effective defense or a reliable means to prevent escalation.

Brodie predicted, almost from the beginning, that an effective defense would be impossible. To those who said that every new weapon always brought forth a suitable defense, he retorted that "after five centuries of the use of hand arms with fire-propelled missiles, the large number of men killed by comparable arms in the recent war indicates that no adequate answer has yet [been] found for the bullet." When a single warhead can demolish a city, a meaningful defense of society must be nearly perfect—a goal that no military technology, including President Reagan's Star Wars plan, can achieve (see Chapter 5). As former secretary of defense James Schlesinger—hardly a nuclear dove—said without qualification: "There is no realistic hope that we shall ever again be able to protect American cities."6 If we could build weapons to protect cities, these weapons would certainly matter. Since we cannot, MX missiles, orbiting battle stations, and arms control treaties are irrelevant; everything will probably be destroyed with or without them once the missiles are launched—unless, that is, nuclear war could be kept limited.

If a nation could build weapons or other devices to reliably control escalation, then even without a defense, leaders might imagine surviving or even winning a limited nuclear war. But the hydrogen weapon is too powerful to be controlled by any known means. Through blast, heat, radiation, and electromagnetic pulse, even a few nuclear weapons could destroy the leaders, organizations, and communication devices needed to control nuclear war. As we shall see, no one has devised a weapons system, a command mechanism, or an arms control treaty that could give leaders reliable control over events after a nuclear war erupted or one that could reliably prevent escalation once leaders lost control.7

Noted strategic analyst John Steinbruner observes that "regardless of the flexibility embodied in individual force components, the precariousness of command channels probably means that nuclear war would be uncontrollable, as a practical matter, shortly after the first tens of weapons are launched, regardless of what calculations political leaders might make at the time." Desmond Ball's thorough study agrees that "control of a nuclear exchange would become very difficult to maintain after several tens of strategic nuclear weapons had been used." The conservative

strategic theorist Colin Gray regards the effort to wage nuclear war in controlled steps as little more than "suicide on the instalment plan."8

Once central control of a nuclear war is lost, the fate of the earth will be left to dozens, perhaps hundreds, of isolated commanders with nuclear weapons at their disposal. No one can say what they will do. As Michael Howard observes: "The length of the war and the destruction it causes would be determined not by the number of weapons available but by the readiness of the belligerents to endure punishment in the hope of ultimate victory. A few missiles directed against carefully selected targets might cause the moral collapse of one belligerent, or indeed both; or they might fight on as grimly among the radioactive ruins as did the Russians in the ruins of Stalingrad or the Germans in the ruins of Berlin."9

Leaders, then, cannot know just what will happen if nuclear war breaks out, regardless of the state of the arms race. They know only that they will probably not be in control and that mutual annihilation may well occur. That risk, that uncertainty, is what frightens and deters them. It may or may not be enough to prevent a holocaust. But pending the abolition of nuclear weapons, an effective defense against them, or a way to curb the risk of escalation, further arming or disarming cannot affect the terrible uncertainty that produces the balance of terror. That terror, as Brodie noted, is not at all delicate; it is existential, inherent in the existence of the "absolute weapon."10

The nuclear warhead is the ultimate blunt instrument of human violence whose effects cannot be calculated in advance and whose use always risks the destruction of far more than is originally intended. After four decades of effort and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, no one has found a way to sharpen the weapon to eliminate or even greatly reduce this risk. That much is well known. In a 1984 survey 90 percent of Americans agreed that "we and the Soviets now have enough nuclear weapons to blow up each other several times over"; 89 percent said that "there can be no winner in an all-out nuclear war; both the U.S. and the Soviet Union would be completely destroyed"; 71 percent believed that "there is no defense in a nuclear war"; and 83 percent thought that "a limited nuclear war is nonsense."11

McGeorge Bundy coined the term "existential deterrence" to describe the implications of these basic nuclear realities. He observes that the "terrible and unavoidable uncertainties in any recourse to nuclear war" invalidate all strategies based on specific weapons and scenarios. 12

All that matters is the possibility of uncontrolled escalation once the nuclear shooting begins. No one knows the likelihood of escalation or how to prevent it. So real political leaders, as opposed to abstract models of nuclear strategists, concern themselves only with the gross fact that catastrophic escalation could occur—that is all that they really know.

The whole complex labyrinth of nuclear hardware and the doctrines governing its use thus collapse to a single easily understood fact: each side has "large numbers of thermonuclear weapons that could be used against the opponent, even after the strongest possible preemptive attack." This reality is "essentially unaffected by any changes [in weapon deployments] except those that might truly challenge the overall survivability of the forces on one side or the other."13 The remote likelihood of such a challenge (see Chapter 2) makes deterrence inherent in the existence of the weapons.

If the strength of deterrence—the main force preventing nuclear war—is existential and thus relatively independent of the arms race, then logically the risk of nuclear war should be also. Like most nuclear doves, however, Bundy is well known for his opposition to "the competition in weapons systems," which, he dramatically writes, "is now itself becoming the largest single threat to peace." Similarly, George Kennan writes that "today we have achieved, we and the Russians together, in the creation of these devices and their means of delivery, levels of redundancy of such grotesque dimensions as to defy rational understanding"; that "the nuclear bomb is the most useless weapon ever invented"; and that "the relative size of the arsenals has no serious meaning." But Kennan too looks to these "redundant" and "useless" weapons for solutions to the nuclear problem, most dramatically with his well-known advocacy of a mutual 50 percent across-the-board cut in superpower nuclear arsenals.14 Yet if this "modest proposal" were ever carried out, could Kennan claim that deterrence and the risks of war had been fundamentally altered—rooted as they are in a "redundancy of grotesque dimensions" that even a 50 percent cut would hardly begin to undo?

The right, the center, and the left seem equally misguided in attaching great significance to which nuclear weapons are deployed or destroyed by the superpowers. Because no realistic changes in the pace, balance, or even direction of the arms race can alter the basic conditions of our nuclear existence, they should make little difference to the incentives to start nuclear war, the damage we can expect should a war occur, or the division of international political power. Even major steps by the superpowers to rearm (including Star Wars) or to disarm (including the nuclear

freeze or large cuts in nuclear arsenals) would leave the nuclear problem essentially unchanged, as we argue in more detail in succeeding chapters. The common tendency to identify the problem of nuclear war with the nuclear arms race is a logical fallacy that dangerously distorts nuclear politics by promoting technical fixes to what is overwhelmingly a political problem.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Nuclear Seduction: Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter--And What Doesby William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber, et al Copyright © 1989 by William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber, et al. Excerpted by permission.
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