by Cheryl Rofer
The idea of deterrence is that if a country is (or looks) strong enough, other countries won’t attack it. That’s easy enough to understand, and it makes a certain amount of sense. Animals use deterrence, by puffing up and standing their hair on end to make themselves look bigger, and, if that fails, by engaging in behaviors to convince the other how undefeatable they are. A certain amount of readiness, posturing and whatever works can avoid an encounter that could cause real damage.
After the world contained enough nuclear weapons to destroy it, deterrence became more attractive, essential even. The prospect of destroying the earth was the ultimate deterrent.
For theorists of nuclear war, deterrence was the sine qua non. Under what circumstances could it break down? What kind of war might that provoke? What about the rest of the world? The two big nuclear powers shielded their allies from each other in what came to be called “extended deterrence,” the big player might bring nukes in if their clients were attacked. That layered on more complexities in deterrence theory. It led to deploying nuclear weapons to allies, some of which remain in Europe.
If we are to move toward a goal of no more nukes, we have to consider extended deterrence as well as the regular kind. A common objection to decreasing the numbers of nuclear weapons is that they are a deterrent. It seems to me that deterrent requires something that is deterred, but it is often used as I used it in the previous sentence, deterrent period. If pressed, I suspect that those who say such things would say that nuclear weapons deter wars, perhaps that they deter the world-engulfing sorts of wars the twentieth century made famous. Or that they deter the use of nuclear weapons by other nations.
This is where deterrence starts to make me crazy. We have nuclear weapons because they deter. The evidence for deterrence is that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945. But there are many other things that nuclear weapons did not deter. Nuclear arsenals did not prevent problems for the big two nuclear powers in Chechnya or off the coast of Somalia. Or Georgia, or Iraq or Afghanistan. So what is it that nuclear weapons deter?
The fact that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945 might be due to any number of things. We’re proving a negative here: there was no hostile use of nuclear weapons since 1945 because…[fill in the blank]. It could just be that Europe tired of its suicidal arguments, and Japan gave up the imperial pretensions that destabilized its relations with both China and Russia. China decided that commerce looked better than war, and the Soviet Union’s economy collapsed its ideology. It’s hard to prove that any international action was the result of any other single action, much less prove that something didn’t happen for a particular reason.
What nuclear weapons did seem to deter was nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. But the Soviet Union held Europe hostage, much as North Korea holds South Korea hostage today. In any war, Europe could not have avoided enormous damage. Soviet conventional superiority made American aggressiveness dangerous, while American nuclear power countered Soviet aggression. I can see some logic to that.
But those days are over. India and Pakistan now brandish nukes at each other, and Israel is edgy about its nuclear monopoly. India and Pakistan seem to have established a sort of nuclear deterrence, but both sides keep introducing more kinds of weapons into the mix. The Soviet Union and the United States recognized, in the anti-ballistic missile treaty, that that sort of thing could be destabilizing.
But it’s extended deterrence that really makes me crazy. The Cold War theory was you whack us or one of our guys, and we whack you back. Don’t even look like you’re going to do it. Like the Jets and the Sharks or Crips and Bloods. And it worked, or seems to have. But then the Soviet Union fell apart and some (actually, most) of their guys joined us. That changes the calculus. Extended deterrence continues for Europe and Japan, and extended deterrence for Poland and Bulgaria has shifted from one side to the other.
A number of views of extended deterrence were presented at the Carnegie Conference. There is a cozy feeling of being protected by the US nuclear forces that has been going on for some time and should continue indefinitely. There was also a recognition that the world has gotten more complicated, and maybe nuclear deterrence isn’t the last word. And there is an uneasy feeling that maybe that promise of protection wouldn’t mean much if nuclear push came to nuclear shove. Would the US risk New York for Tallinn’s cyber-banking system? Estonians who got sucked into the Soviet Union have their doubts.
We simply don’t know the rules of deterrence in this multi-threat world. What kind of provocation justifies what kind of retaliation? How big do you have to be to convince others that they shouldn’t attack you? Which others? Russia? China? Iran? North Korea? Al-Qaeda? Somali pirates? And then you get into the arms-race kind of thinking: how will they ratchet up their deterrence and what will that mean for our deterrence? We know that we wouldn’t attack anyone, but how do they see our capabilities if we’re worrying about their capabilities? Not to mention what you should tell them and not tell them about your capabilities and intentions to scare them sufficiently but also keep them guessing.
Come to think of it, isn’t it this kind of posturing (plus a silly system of alliances, yes) that got us into World War I? Maybe we need to think more about what deterrence means instead of just slinging around Cold War threats.
We’ve gotten our judgements of others’ deterrability wrong in the past, too. We’re probably more likely to inflate threats than the other way around, which adds to the posturing and arms-racing.
Cold War deterrence is gone. It’s not at all clear what deterrence means in today’s world, let alone extended deterrence. If you’re not deterring anything on your own, it’s hard to say you’re deterring it for someone else.