PRIMACY OF THE
NUCLEAR WAR PROGRAM
Soon, though it
had been “off the radar” for some time, nuclear
war avoidance has once again become the world’s overriding
policy obligation. The justification for such a resurrected
rank-ordering is straightforward and not at all mysterious.
In brief, if the world should fail to prevent a nuclear war
over Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, all other
sought-after human values would be imperiled.
Various specific
policy questions will need to be answered immediately. Above
all, analysts must query, what should be done to limit and
remedy Russia’s ongoing aggression, war crimes and crimes
against humanity? What can be said more precisely in relevant
law about the responsibility of Russian army soldiers for
their president’s multiple crimes against Ukraine? Without
exaggeration, these egregious crimes now begin to compare
with what was unleashed by another dangerous dictator in early
September 1939.
There is more.
To begin, US and allied national leaders must accept that
even generally unwanted escalatory breakdowns could occur.
On the specific matters of nuclear deterrence, matters rendered
even more time-urgent by Putin’s announced posture of
“nuclear high alert,” this means refining pertinent
threat-based strategies of “escalation dominance.”
In essence, nuclear deterrence is a “game” that
major world leaders will sometime have to play, most plausibly
over Ukraine. It follows that these leaders can learn to join
this hideously complex game purposefully and skilfully, or
instead merely deal with it on an ad hoc basis and
with marginal policy attentiveness.
The optimal choice
here will be one that obviates any further or escalating warfare
between the players, but that also puts an end to ongoing
Russian crimes of war and crimes against humanity. Therein
lies the core dilemma: For the United States and NATO to meaningfully
help Ukraine, they will first have to construct and skilfully
“climb” an unstable escalation “ladder.”
Going forward,
controlling nuclear proliferation will become increasingly
important and potentially overriding for world politics and
global diplomacy. In this connection, it would prove problematic
to assume that nuclear deterrence credibility must always
correlate positively with military threat destructiveness.
Indeed, from the standpoint of stable nuclear deterrence,
the likelihood of any actual nuclear conflict between states
could sometimes relate inversely to the plausibly expected
magnitude of catastrophic harms.
There is much
more. Regarding the probability of a nuclear war, one tangible
understanding is axiomatic. This particular understanding
stipulates that determinable differences in probability will
depend upon whether the particular war in question is intentional
or inadvertent. Subsequently, a further analytic division
must always be made between an inadvertent nuclear war caused
by decisional errors in calculation and a nuclear war occasioned
by accident, hacking or computer malfunction.
For the United
States and its allies now fashioning policy over Ukraine,
no authentically scientific estimations of nuclear war likelihood
could be made apart from such a prior conceptual distinction.
Nuclear proliferation
has been dealt with by competent nuclear strategists for decades,
usually, by capable thinkers who understand that any alleged
benefits of nuclear spread would be overridden by unimaginably
staggering costs. To wit, the proliferation-expanded risks
of inadvertent nuclear war, accidental nuclear war, nuclear
war by irrationality/coup d’état and nuclear
war by miscalculation are both manifest and indisputable.
How did global
jurisprudence get to its present position? An answer obtains.
The “Westphalian” system of international relations
and international law first bequeathed by treaty law in 1648
remains fundamentally unchanged. It remains rooted in anarchy
and is subject to a steady worsening by chaos. Prima facie,
the ongoing unwinding of civilized life in Ukraine signals
the rapidly-growing and potentially intolerable costs of such
chaos.
THE DETERIORATING
BALANCE OF WORLD POWER
Historically,
the idea of a balance of power – an idea of which the
nuclear-age balance of terror is a variant – has never
been more than facile metaphor. In fact, it has never had
anything to do with ascertaining any true equilibrium. As
such a “balance” is always a matter of individual
and necessarily subjective perceptions, adversary states can
never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances
are oriented in their favour. In consequence, each side in
our still-Westphalian world order must perpetually fear that
it will be left behind. Accordingly, the continual search
for balance only produces ever wider patterns of insecurity,
inequality, disequilibrium and legal wrongdoing.
At the start of
the Cold War (now best re-titled as “Cold War I”),
the United States first began to codify rudimentary orientations
to nuclear deterrence and nuclear war. At that time, the world
was tightly bipolar and the enemy was the Soviet Union. Tempered
by a shared knowledge of the horror that temporarily ceased
in 1945, each superpower had understood a conspicuously core
need for expanding global cooperation (to wit, the United
Nations) as necessary adjunct to conflict preparedness.
With the start
of the nuclear age, American national security was premised
on grimly primal threats of “massive retaliation.”
Over time, especially during the Kennedy years, this bitterly
corrosive policy was softened by subtler and more nuanced
threats of “flexible response.” Along the way,
a coherent and generalized American strategic doctrine was
crafted in increments to accommodate almost every conceivable
kind of adversary and adversarial encounter.
Systematic and
historically grounded, this doctrine was developed self-consciously
and with very deliberate prudence. In its actual execution,
however, much was left to “seat-of-the-pants”
calculations. In this regard, the 1962 Cuban missile crisis
speaks for itself.
Strategic doctrine,
earlier generation defense intellectuals had already understood,
is a “net.” Only those who cast, can expect to
catch. Nonetheless, even the benefits of “casting”
would remain subject to various considerations of individual
human personality. In the terms of professional strategic
thinkers, there would always remain an “idiosyncratic
factor.”
Although for a
time immediately after collapse of the Soviet Union the world
became increasingly multipolar, we are now witnessing the
start of “Cold War II.” This time, however, there
will likely be more conspicuous points of convergent interest
and prospective cooperation between Washington and Moscow.
In principle at least (e.g. current mutual concerns for controlling
Jihadist terrorism) “Cold War II” could potentially
offer a propitious or even improved context for overlapping
strategic interests.
Yet, even after
the continuation in force of New START between the U.S. and
Russia, Moscow continues to reinvigorate its production of
intercontinental ballistic missiles, and ICBM supporting infrastructures.
In part, this represents a predictable Russian response to
fears that America may be expanding its plans for expanded
ballistic missile defense in Europe, and (as corollary) for
enlarging NATO blueprints to advance allegedly aggressive
strategies of “encirclement.”
THE WIDER GEO-STRATEGIC
CONTEXT
At this moment.
US strategic planners should be thinking especially about
already-nuclear North Korea and Pakistan and a still prospectively
nuclear Iran. Among other issues, Tehran’s repeated
calls for “removing” Israel as a state are unambiguously
exterminatory; in law, they also represent an “incitement
to genocide.” Looking ahead, military nuclear developments
in North Korea, Pakistan and Iran could prove synergistic,
circumstances that are largely unpredictable and potentially
overwhelming.
There will also
be legal considerations of justice. Nullum crimen sine
poena; “No crime without a punishment,” was
a key principle of justice reaffirmed at Nuremberg, in 1946.
This principle likely originated in the Hebrew Bible and the
Lex Talionis or law of exact retaliation.
The Trump-brokered
Abraham Accords have had no discernible effects upon preventing
nuclear war in the Middle East. If anything, Iran was only
made more belligerent by the Accords’ design to diminish
Iranian power, and certain major Sunni Arab states (probably
Egypt and/or Saudi Arabia) will soon feel new incentives to
nuclearize themselves. In all such uncertain cases, there
will emerge more-or-less plausible issues of enemy irrationality.
Regarding such “special” situations, ones where
leadership elites in Pyongyang, Islamabad, Tehran or elsewhere
might sometime value presumed national or religious obligations
more highly even than national physical survival, the logic
of deterrence could fail. Such failure, moreover, could be
sudden and catastrophic.
Any such fearful
scenario is “probably improbable,” but it is by
no means inconceivable. This hesitancy-conditioned probability
calculation is effectively mandated by assorted fixed limitations
of science. More precisely, one can never speak reliably about
the probability of unique events (all probability judgments
must be based upon the determinable frequency of past events).
Fortunately, of course, there has never been a genuine nuclear
war.
Again, important
for leaders to understand will be various possible interactions
or synergies between changing adversaries and their particular
ties to China, Syria and Russia. In managing such strategic
threats, Cold War II will hurt our already imperiled planet
and carry heavy legal burdens for criminal regimes such as
Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Strategic policies
will have to deal with a variegated assortment of sub-national
threats of WMD terrorism. Until now, insurgent enemies were
sometimes able to confront states with serious perils and
in assorted theatres of conflict, but they were never really
capable of posing any catastrophic hazard to a nation’s
homeland.
To face any such
unprecedented and portentous situation, national leaders will
need to “arm” themselves with antecedent nuclear
doctrine and policies. By definition, such doctrine and policies
should never represent “seat of the pants” reactions
to ad hoc threats. Rather, because generality is
a trait of all serious meaning in science, such doctrine and
policies will have to be shaped according to broad categories
of strategic threat. In the absence of such previously worked-out
conceptual categories, human responses are almost certain
to be inadequate or worse.
RATIONALITY, IRRATIONALITY
AND STRATEGIES OF PREEMPTION
From the start,
all strategic policies have been founded upon some underlying
assumption of rationality. We humans have always presumed
that our enemies, states and terrorists, will inevitably value
their own continued survival more highly than any other preference
or combination of preferences. But this core assumption can
no longer be taken for granted.
Expressions of
decisional irrationality could take various different and
overlapping forms. These forms include a disorderly or inconsistent
value system; computational errors in calculation; an incapacity
to communicate efficiently; random or haphazard influences
in the making or transmittal of particular decisions; and
the internal dissonance generated by any structure of collective
decision-making (i.e., assemblies of individuals who lack
identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements
impact their willing capacity to act as a single or unitary
national decision maker).
Confronted with
Jihadist enemies, states and terrorists, world leaders must
quickly understand that our primary threats to retaliate for
first-strike aggressions could sometime fall on deaf ears.
This holds true whether we would threaten massive retaliation
(MAD), or instead, the more graduated and measured forms of
reprisal termed nuclear utilization theory (NUT).
Ultimately, sensible.
nuclear doctrine must recognize certain critical connections
between law and strategy. From the formal standpoint of international
law, certain expressions of pre-emption or defensive first
strikes are known as anticipatory self-defense. Expecting
possible enemy irrationality, when would such protective military
actions be required to safeguard the human homeland from diverse
forms of WMD attack?
This is an all-important
question to be considered.
There are pertinent
jurisprudential issues for decision-makers and commanders.
Recalling that international law is part of the law of the
United States, most notably at Article 6 of the Constitution
(the “Supremacy Clause”) and at a 1900 Supreme
Court case (the Pacquete Habana), how could anticipatory military
defense actions be rendered compatible with conventional and
customary obligations? This critical question must be raised,
and answered.
There is more.
From the standpoint of international law, it is always necessary
to distinguish pre-emptive attacks from preventive ones. Pre-emption
is a military strategy of striking first in the expectation
that the only foreseeable alternative would be to be struck
first oneself. A pre-emptive attack is launched by a state
that believes enemy forces are about to attack. A preventive
attack, on the other hand, is launched not out of any genuine
concern about “imminent” hostilities, but for
fear of some longer-term deterioration in a prevailing military
“balance.”
In a pre-emptive
attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action
is anticipated is presumptively very short; in a preventive
strike, the anticipated interval is considerably longer. A
related problem here is not only the practical difficulty
of accurately determining “imminence,” but also
the problems of postponement. To the point, delaying a defensive
strike until an imminent threat would be tangibly ascertainable
could invite existential harms. Any state’s resort to
“anticipatory self-defense” could be nuclear or
non-nuclear, and be directed at either a nuclear or non-nuclear
adversary.
Any such resort
involving nuclear weapons on one or several sides could prove
catastrophic. World leaders must understand that any proposed
national strategic doctrine will need to consider and reconsider
key issues of nuclear targeting. Relevant operational concerns
here would concern vital differences between the targeting
of enemy civilians and cities (so-called “counter value”
targeting) and targeting of enemy military assets/infrastructures
(so-called “counterforce” targeting).
Most national
leaders still don’t realize that the actual essence
of “massive retaliation” and MAD was always an
unhidden threat of counter value targeting.
Any such partially-resurrected
doctrine could sound barbarous or at least inhumane, but if
the alternative were less credible systems of nuclear deterrence,
certain explicit codifications of counter value posture might
still become the best way to prevent millions of civilian
deaths – i.e., deaths from nuclear war and/or nuclear
terrorism. Neither pre-emption nor counter value targeting
could ever guarantee absolute security for Planet Earth, but
it is nonetheless imperative that we put serious strategic
thinkers to work on these and other critically-related nuclear
warfare issues.
OPERATING ACCORDING
TO PRIOR PLAN
The first time
that a world leader will have to face an authentic nuclear
war crisis, his/her response should flow seamlessly from broad
and previously calibrated strategic doctrine. It follows that
national leaders should already be thinking carefully about
how this complex doctrine ought best to be shaped and codified.
Whatever the particulars, these leaders must acknowledge at
the outset the systemic nature of our “world order problem.”
Any planetary
system of law and power management that seeks to avoid nuclear
war must recognize a significantly underlying axiom: As egregious
crimes under international law, war and genocide need not
be mutually exclusive. On the contrary, as one may learn from
history, war could sometimes be undertaken as an “efficient”
manner of national, ethnical, racial or religious annihilation.
When the war in question becomes a nuclear one, the argument
for genocide becomes unassailable.
In the final analysis,
global rescue must go beyond narrowly physical forms of survival.
At stake is not “just” the palpable survival of
Homo sapiens as a distinct animal life form, but also the
species’ essential humanitas. For now, too-few
species members have displayed any meaningful understanding
of this less tangible but still vital variant of human survival.
“Just wars,”
wrote Hugo Grotius, the unchallenged founder of modern international
law, “arise from the love of our innocent.” Now,
however, it is plain, by definition, that a nuclear war could
never be “just” and that certain earlier legal
distinctions (e.g., just war vs. unjust war) must be continuously
conformed to the ever-changing technologies of military destruction.
The only sensible adaptation in this regard must be to acknowledge
the persisting connections between international law and natural
law, and then to oppose any retrograde movements by powerful
nation states to undermine such acknowledgments.
Always, the only
reasonable use for nuclear weapons will be as controlled elements
of dissuasion, not as actual weapons of war. The underlying
principles of any such rational diplomatic posture go back
long before the advent of nuclear weapons. In his oft-studied
classic On War (see especially his Chapter 3, “Planning
Offensives”), the ancient Chinese strategist Sun-Tzu
reminded succinctly: “Subjugating the enemy’s
army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.”
Later, along these same lines of inquiry, Carl von Clausewitz
underscored the inevitable intellectual impediment: “Everything
is very simple in war,” says Clausewitz, in his classical
discussion of “friction” in On War, “but
the simplest thing is difficult.”
Herein, this concept
refers to the unpredictable effect of errors in knowledge
and information concerning US-Russian strategic uncertainties;
on US and Russian under-estimations or over-estimations of
relative power position; and on the unalterably vast and largely
irremediable differences between theories of deterrence and
enemy intent “as it actually is.”
THE PROBLEM OF
UNCERTAINTY
A central analytic
problem here remains the uncertainty felt by every state concerning
reciprocal intentions of other pertinent states or sub-state
decision-makers. To become more effective, Russia-sanctioning
efforts must soon be oriented toward expanding control over
too many separate and independent national wills. Gaining
such imperative control is also a specific example of a more
general human problem; i.e., the decisional difficulty that
arises whenever benefits of common or collective action are
contingent on a reliable expectation that certain other “players”
will cooperate. The core dynamics of this problem were already
described metaphorically by philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli
in The Discourses.
The world is a
stupendous machine, composed of innumerable parts, each of
which being a free agent has a volition and action of its
own; and on this ground arises the difficulty of assuring
success in any enterprise depending on the volition of numerous
agents. We may set the machine in motion, and dispose every
wheel to one certain end; but when it depends on the volition
of any one wheel, and the corresponding action of every wheel,
the result is uncertain.
At the same time,
nuclear war avoidance must include strategies that can reduce
the likelihood of an inadvertent nuclear war. For the United
States, such strategies will have to reference scenarios based
on decisional miscalculation by leaders, prospects of leadership
irrationality and also nuclear conflicts caused by enemy hacking
or computer/mechanical/electrical malfunction. In executing
this overriding policy task, imagining the world of international
relations in terms of Machiavelli’s “stupendous
machine” could prove intellectually challenging and
prescriptively gainful.
There is not much
time left. “The worst does sometime happen.”