Isegoria

The most spectacular event of the past half century, Thomas Schelling explains in Arms and Influence, is one that did not occur:

We have enjoyed sixty years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger.

What a stunning achievement—or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune. In 1960 the British novelist C. P. Snow said on the front page of the New York Times that unless the nuclear powers drastically reduced their nuclear armaments, thermonuclear warfare within the decade was a “mathematical certainty.” Nobody appeared to think Snow’s statement extravagant.

We now have that mathematical certainty compounded more than four times, and no nuclear war. Can we make it through another half dozen decades?

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These weapons are unique, and a large part of their uniqueness derives from their being perceived as unique. We call most of the others “conventional,” and that word has two distinct senses. One is “ordinary, familiar, traditional,” a word that can be applied to food, clothing, or housing. The more interesting sense of “conventional” is something that arises as if by compact, by agreement, by convention. It is simply an established convention that nuclear weapons are different.

True, their fantastic scale of destruction dwarfs the conventional weapons. But as early as the end of the Eisenhower administration, nuclear weapons could be made smaller in explosive yield than the largest conventional explosives. There were military planners to whom “little” nuclear weapons appeared untainted by the taboo that they thought ought properly to attach only to weapons of a size associated with Hiroshima or Bikini. But by then nuclear weapons had become a breed apart; size was no excuse from the curse.

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Was Ike really ready to use nuclear weapons to defend Quemoy—or Taiwan itself? It turned out he didn’t have to. The conspicuous shipment of nuclear artillery to Taiwan was surely intended as a threat. Bluffing would have been risky from Dulles’ point of view; leaving nuclear weapons unused while the Chinese conquered Taiwan would have engraved the taboo in granite. At the same time, Quemoy may have appeared to Dulles as a superb opportunity to dispel the taboo. Using short-range nuclear weapons in a purely defensive mode, solely against offensive troops, especially at sea or on beachheads devoid of civilians, might have been something that Eisenhower would have been willing to authorize and that European allies would have approved, and nuclear weapons might have proved that they could be used “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” The Chinese did not offer the opportunity.

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Hardly anybody born after World War II remembers the name of Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson. But most who have studied any American history know the name of John Foster Dulles.

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The anti-nuclear movement in the Kennedy administration was led from the Pentagon, and in 1962 McNamara began his campaign—his and President Kennedy’s—to reduce reliance on nuclear defense in Europe by building expensive conventional forces in NATO. During the next couple of years McNamara became associated with the idea that nuclear weapons were not “useable” at all in the sense that Eisenhower and Dulles had intended. Undoubtedly the traumatic October of 1962—the “Cuban Missile Crisis”—contributed to some of Kennedy’s key advisers’ and Kennedy’s own revulsion against nuclear weapons.

The contrast between the Eisenhower and the Kennedy-Johnson attitudes toward nuclear weapons is beautifully summarized in a statement of Johnson’s in September 1964. “Make no mistake. There is no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon. For 19 peril-filled years no nation has loosed the atom against another. To do so now is a political decision of the highest order.”

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It is worth a pause here to consider just what might be the literal meaning of “no such thing as a conventional nuclear weapon.” Specifically, why couldn’t a nuclear bomb no larger than the largest blockbuster of World War II be considered conventional, or a nuclear depth charge of modest explosive power for use against submarines far at sea, or nuclear land mines to halt advancing tanks or to cause landslides in mountain passes? What could be so awful about using three “small” atomic bombs to save the besieged French at Dien Bien Phu (in Indochina, 1953), as was discussed at the time? What could be so wrong about using nuclear coastal artillery against a communist Chinese invasion flotilla in the Gulf of Taiwan?

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(The analogy to “one little drink” for a recovering alcoholic was sometimes heard.) But both lines of argument arrived at the same conclusion: nuclear weapons, once introduced into combat, could not, or probably would not, be contained, confined, limited.

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The case of the “neutron bomb” is illustrative. This is a bomb, or potential bomb, that, because it is very small and because of the materials of which it is constructed, emits “prompt neutrons” that can be lethal at a distance at which blast and thermal radiation are comparatively moderate. As advertised, it kills people without great damage to structures. The issue of producing and deploying this kind of weapon arose during the Carter administration, evoking an anti-nuclear reaction that caused it to be left on the drawing board. But the same bomb—at least, the same idea—had been the subject of even more intense debate fifteen years earlier, and it was there that the argument was honed, ready to be used again in the 1970s. The argument was simple, and it was surely valid, whether or not it deserved to be decisive. The argument stated that it was important not to blur the distinction—the firebreak, as it was called—between nuclear and conventional weapons; and either because of its low yield or because of its “benign” kind of lethality it was feared, and it was argued, that there would be a strong temptation to use this weapon where nuclears were otherwise not allowed, and that the use of this weapon would erode the threshold, blur the firebreak, pave the way by incremental steps for nuclear escalation.

The argument is not altogether different from that against so-called peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs). The decisive argument against PNEs was that they would accustom the world to nuclear explosions, undermining the belief that nuclear explosions were inherently evil and reducing the inhibitions on nuclear weapons. The prospect of blasting new riverbeds in northern Russia, a bypass canal for the waters of the Nile, or harbors in developing countries generated concern about “legitimizing” nuclear explosions.

A revealing demonstration of this antipathy came with American arms controllers’ and energy-policy analysts’ universal rejection of the prospect of an ecologically clean source of electrical energy, proposed in the 1970s, that would have detonated tiny thermonuclear bombs in underground caverns to generate steam. I have seen this idea unanimously dismissed without argument, as if the objections were too obvious to require articulation. As far as I could tell, the objection was always that even “good” thermonuclear explosions were bad and should be kept that way. (I can imagine President Eisenhower: “In any energy crisis where these things can be used on strictly civilian sites for strictly civilian purposes I see no reason why they shouldn’t be used just exactly as you would use a barrel of oil or anything else.” And Dulles: “Somehow or other we must manage to remove the taboo from the use of these clean thermonuclear energy sources.”)

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There is typically the notion that to provide equipment is much less participatory than to provide military manpower; we arm the Israelis and provide ammunition even in wartime, but so much as a company of American infantry would be perceived as a greater act of participation in the war than $ 5 billion worth of fuel, ammunition, and spare parts.

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Arms control is so often identified with limitations on the possession or deployment of weapons that it is often overlooked that this reciprocated investment in non-nuclear capability was a remarkable instance of unacknowledged but reciprocated arms control. It is not only potential restraint in the use of nuclear weapons; it is investment in a configuration of weapons to make nations capable of non-nuclear combat.

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With the possible exception of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, this buildup of conventional weapons in Europe was the most important East–West arms understanding until the demise of the Soviet Union. It was genuine arms control, even if inexplicit, even if denied—as real as if the two sides had signed a treaty obliging them, in the interest of fending off nuclear war, to put large amounts of treasure and manpower into conventional forces. The investment in restraints on the use of nuclear weapons was real as well as symbolic.

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Iraq was known to possess, and to have been willing to use, “unconventional” weapons—chemicals. Had chemical weapons been used with devastating effect on U.S. forces, the issue of appropriate response would have posed the nuclear question. I am confident that had the President, in that circumstance, deemed it essential to escalate from conventional weapons, battlefield nuclear weapons would have been the military choice. Nuclear weapons are what the Army, Navy, and Air Force are trained and equipped to use; their effects in different kinds of weather and terrain are well understood. The military profession traditionally despises poison. There would have been strong temptation to respond with the kind of unconventional weapon we know best how to use.

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There is much discussion these days of whether or not “deterrence” has had its day and no longer has much of a role in America’s security. There is no Soviet Union to deter; the Russians are more worried about Chechnya than about the United States; the Chinese seem no more interested in military risks over Taiwan than Khrushchev really was over Berlin; and terrorists cannot be deterred anyway—we don’t know what they value that we might threaten, or who or where it is.

I expect that we may come to a new respect for deterrence. If Iran should, despite every diplomatic effort or economic pressure to prevent it, acquire a few nuclear weapons, we may discover again what it is like to be the deterred one, not the one doing the deterring. (I consider us—NATO at the time—as having been deterred from intervening in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.) I also consider it crucial that Iran’s leaders, civilian and military, learn to think, if they have not already learned to think, in terms of deterrence.

What else can Iran accomplish, except possibly the destruction of its own system, with a few nuclear warheads? Nuclear weapons should be too precious to give away or to sell, too precious to waste killing people when they could, held in reserve, make the United States, or Russia, or any other nation, hesitant to consider military action.

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They will conclude—I hope they will conclude—over weeks of arguing, that the most effective use of the bomb, from a terrorist perspective, will be for influence. Possessing a workable nuclear weapon, if they can demonstrate possession—and I expect they will be able to do so without actually detonating it—will give them something of the status of a nation. Threatening to use it against military targets, and keeping it intact if the threat is successful, may appeal to them more than expending it in a purely destructive act. Even terrorists may consider destroying large numbers of people as less satisfying than keeping a major nation at bay.

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