Tag Archive for: nuclear war

On the eve of destruction? (Part 1)

For a long time, I thought that nuclear weapons were a tolerable evil. I bought into the argument that they played a positive role in some circumstances by deterring nations from going to war because they feared the consequences. But I recently read two books—one newly published and the other over half a century old—that together convinced me that I was quite wrong to think those things.*

Daniel Ellsberg’s recent book The doomsday machine: confessions of a nuclear war planner contains many sobering observations about nuclear weapons. I didn’t need to be told how destructive they are (though he makes an important point about the size of thermonuclear yields compared to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs), but I hadn’t before appreciated the alarming scope for human error in their employment.

In particular, Ellsberg points out that reducing the risk of a pre-emptive ‘decapitation’ attack that kills most of a nation’s senior officials requires the authority to use nuclear weapons to be delegated to subordinates down the chain of command. So the popular view of the national leaders metaphorically having the sole ‘finger on the button’ can’t be true.  (And it wasn’t true right from the start—the two nuclear weapons used against Japan weren’t authorised by President Truman.) Ellsberg gives multiple examples of Cold War circumstances in which delegation could have led to disastrous escalation, plausibly describing how a single pilot or submarine commander could have set off World War III on their own initiative.

In the mid-1960s, Pentagon planners estimated that hundreds of millions of people would die as a result of a US nuclear attack on the Soviet bloc. And the suffering would not be limited to the ‘enemy’; most of those killed would be civilians rather than combatants, and allied and neutral countries in Western Europe would suffer huge casualties from radioactive fallout. You’d hope that numbers like that would have given pause to nuclear-war planners, but history shows that the growth in the nuclear arsenals of both sides accelerated from that point, reaching colossal numbers in the years that followed.

As it happens, even those horrendous estimates of casualties were optimistic. The ‘nuclear winter’ effect that would follow a large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons was unknown in the 1960s, but we now know that it would have global consequences and would kill a very large proportion of the world’s population.

After that, I was looking for something more uplifting to read, so I re-read Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. But rather than providing a respite from the bleakness, Sagan’s book turned out to have an unexpected but worrying overlap with Ellsberg’s. After a magisterial tour of the universe (as it was understood in the late 1970s), there’s a chapter that speculates about the density of intelligent life in the universe—which ought to be high, given what we know—and wonders why we’re yet to see any sign of it elsewhere.

The apparent disparity between the estimates of alien intelligence and what’s (not) observed is known by researchers in the field as Fermi’s paradox. It might be that we haven’t been looking hard enough for long enough, but the unsuccessful search has been going on for 40 years now. As a potential resolution of the paradox, Sagan points out that one of the unknowns in estimates of the number of alien civilisations is their average lifetime before coming to an end, for whatever reason. If advanced civilisations (meaning ‘capable of broadcasting information into space’) prosper for many millions of years on average, the chance of finding one or more is relatively high. But if they only last a few decades that could explain the radio silence.

In that context, Sagan refers to a classic 1960 book: Lewis F. Richardson’s The statistics of deadly quarrels. (It seems to be a collector’s item now, but if your library doesn’t have it you can read a good summary of Richardson’s results here.) Richardson assembled data on 315 wars after 1800. He was hoping to identify systematic trends or indicators for the outbreak of wars, which would provide some optimism for thinking that we could get better at avoiding them. Alas, that wasn’t to be. The depressing conclusion of his statistical analysis was that the outbreak of war is essentially random—that is, the probability of a war breaking out tomorrow is pretty much the same as on any other day.† The review linked above observes that ‘the data offer no reason to believe that wars are anything other than randomly distributed accidents’.

Between them, Ellsberg and Richardson paint an extremely gloomy picture. Richardson tells us that there’s a finite—and not especially small—probability that a sizeable war will break out at any given time. The randomness in the historical data tells us that we can’t be confident that sensible policy settings will appreciably reduce that probability. And Ellsberg reminds us that a war involving nuclear-armed combatants has the potential to bring our civilisation to an abrupt end.

The rational thing to do in light of those observations is to assume that wars will always be with us and take steps to reduce their potential to destroy our civilisation. If we want to be around to chat with our interstellar neighbours in the future, keeping nuclear weapons around is just dumb.

 

* I received several sets of comments on a draft of this piece. Perhaps not surprisingly, the consensus was that the rarefied air of an academic environment had softened my critical faculties. But ultimately the arguments I heard are unconvincing, as I’ll explain in part 2.

† For the technically minded, the frequency of the number of wars that begin in a year is very closely matched by a Poisson distribution. See Figure 3 in the summary paper linked above.

‘Tragic but distinguishable postwar states’

As some readers will probably recognise, the title of this post is a phrase drawn from Herman Kahn’s On thermonuclear war, one of the more depressing texts of the 20th century. Kahn, writing in 1960 when the Cold War was at its height, argued that policymakers should try to limit losses even in the most serious forms of warfare: that there were marked differences between conflicts that resulted in the deaths of two million people and required a one-year economic recuperation, and those that resulted in the deaths of 160 million people and required a 100-year recuperation—not to mention a number of ‘distinguishable’ points along the spectrum between those extremes.

Over recent months there’s been no shortage of commentators telling us that conflict on the Korean peninsula would be ‘tragic’. If by ‘tragic’ they mean ‘costly’, I’m inclined to agree—although Western perceptions of ‘costly’ conflicts seem to have shifted over recent decades, driven in part, no doubt, by the rise of the one-child family. Still, we need to look beyond the adjective; the Kahn aphorism is a reminder that tragedy comes in many forms—and that some tragic outcomes are distinctly preferable to others.

The viability of military options on the Korean peninsula has resurfaced in the wake of North Korea’s latest ballistic missile test. Strategic opinion seems genuinely divided on one critical question: can nuclear deterrence effectively corral North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal? On one side is a group that believes that even a North Korea with an appreciably bigger nuclear arsenal than the one it now enjoys can be deterred by the classic—and proven—mechanism of nuclear deterrence. On the other side is a group that sees the North Korean nuclear problem as idiosyncratic, and worries that nuclear deterrence might not translate well to our current dilemma.

It’s a critical point. If nuclear deterrence will work in relation to North Korea, we can be more relaxed about the pace and scope of North Korea’s nuclear and missile advances. If it won’t, the requirement to find some other leverage against Pyongyang takes on a degree of urgency.

So what do we know of nuclear deterrence? Sadly, not as much as we’d like. Part of the reason lies with the mechanism itself. As former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban once said, ‘deterrence … is the science of things that do not occur’. Frankly, we often struggle to accurately attribute causation to events that do occur; doing so in relation to ones that don’t is a much more complex endeavour.

Moreover, although nuclear deterrence has been around for decades, practical experience of its operation is somewhat limited. The bulk of that experience derives from the Cold War, when two heavily armed superpowers built a finely wrought balance of terror. Those superpowers shared a sense of the high cost of great-power war, the resources to throw at command and control problems, a willingness to tolerate each other’s spheres of influence, and an intercontinental separation between their homelands. Most of all they shared an aversion to risk—because both had large equities in the international system.

Yes, other nuclear powers existed alongside the US and the Soviet Union. But the deterrent capabilities of the British and French arsenals were never really tested outside the broader superpower contest. A similar point might be made with regard to China’s nuclear force, deployed in Asia, the secondary theatre of the Cold War. Still, the P5 players all saw themselves as members of an exclusive club—a club which enshrined their status as ‘responsible’ nuclear powers. Those perceptions—plus their shared day-to-day experiences of managing international security crises on the UN Security Council—shaped their dealings with each other.

Of course, the bomb eventually spread beyond the P5. India and Pakistan built arsenals for regional deterrence, as did Israel. And North Korea, a narco-criminal pariah state boasting a record of bad behaviour, eventually pushed its way into the nuclear club. Its doing so has sharpened an important question: is this a club that anyone can join through mere determination to proliferate? (Personally, I’d favour making admission harder, at least to the point where it matches quality preschool enrolment: a country that wants nuclear weapons has to show that it can play nicely with the other kids.)

North Korea is the first of the non-P5 nuclear powers to aspire to intercontinental capabilities. ICBMs matter because they allow Pyongyang to play at the global level, rather than just at the regional level. Deployed in sufficient numbers, ICBMs allow a state with almost no equity in the global order to pull down that order on a day of its choosing.

Perhaps deterrence would stop such an event from occurring. But just how certain can we be of that? Are we basing that judgement simply on the value that Kim Jong-un places on his own life and the survival of his regime? He certainly cares little for his people. He already holds Seoul hostage to his whims, courtesy of North Korean artillery deployed north of the DMZ. We shouldn’t allow him to place much of the world in a similar position courtesy of nuclear-armed ICBMs. If it looks like we’re reaching such a point, we need to think seriously about Kahn’s ‘tragic but distinguishable postwar states’.