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.

Thomas Schelling explains the dialogue of competitive armament in Arms and Influence:

Nuclear age communications were dramatized by the Soviet-American hot line, a leased transatlantic cable with teletype machinery at both ends. Some people hailed it as a notable innovation; others were simply astonished that, in an age when one can directly dial his mother 3,000 miles away to wish her happy birthday, facilities did not already exist for a more urgent conversation. The hot line is a reminder that even in the era of Telstar and radio-dispatched taxis, facilities for quick communication between heads of government may not exist unless somebody has thought to provide them.

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In fact, the germ of the hot-line idea has to be sought still further back. Neither Gromyko nor Herter, nor any modern writer on arms control, has expressed the problem more lucidly than Xenophon did in the fourth century before Christ. Mutual suspicion arose between the Greek army departing Persia and the Persian army that escorted them. The Greek leader called for an interview with the Persian, to try “to put a stop to these suspicions before they ended in open hostility.” When they met, he said,

I observe that you are watching our moves as though we were enemies, and we, noticing this, are watching yours, too. On looking into things, I am unable to find evidence that you are trying to do us any harm, and I am perfectly sure that, as far as we are concerned, we do not even contemplate such a thing; and so I decided to discuss matters with you, to see if we could put an end to this mutual mistrust. I know, too, of cases that have occurred in the past when people sometimes as the result of slanderous information and sometimes merely on the strength of suspicion, have become frightened of each other and then, in their anxiety to strike first before anything is done to them have done irreparable harm to those who neither intended nor even wanted to do them any harm at all. I have come then in the conviction that misunderstandings of this sort can best be ended by personal contact, and I want to make it clear to you that you have no reason to distrust us.

The upshot of this incident is chastening. The “personal contact” so established was used by the Persians to slay the entire leadership of the Greek host; and while we owe to their treachery one of the most rewarding books on strategy in print, we can lament that they did not get arms control off to a more creditable start. The mistake was apparently in thinking that the only way to take the danger out of distrust is to replace it with trust.

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Upon reflection almost anyone will agree that the communication that takes place between enemies is the most urgent and that what is “unnatural” in the modern era is the notion that in case of war there could be nothing legitimate for enemies to talk about.

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This was no novelty; Julius Caesar in Gaul, or Xenophon in Persia, understood the crucial importance of communication with the enemy and inflicted the severest penalties on subordinates who did not respect the personal safety of enemy ambassadors.

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The Soviets may not have realized when they lofted their first Sputnik into orbit that they were doing for American strategic forces what the Korean invasion had done earlier to Western military programs. They might have guessed it; and even if they did not, in retrospect they must be aware that their early achievements in rocketry were a powerful stimulus to American strategic weapon development. The American bomber buildup in the 1950s was a reflection of the expected Soviet bomber forces and air defenses; the “missile gap” of the late 1950s spurred not only research and development in the United States but also weapon procurement. Whether the Soviets got a net gain from making the West believe in the missile gap in the late 1950s may be questionable, but it is beyond question that American bomber and missile forces were enhanced in qualitative performance, and some of them in quantity, by American beliefs.

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The Korean War, in retrospect, can hardly have served the Soviet interest; it did more than anything else to get the United States engaged in the arms race and to get NATO taken seriously. The Soviets may have been under strong temptation to get short-run prestige gains out of their initial space successes; perhaps they lamented the necessity to appeal to a public audience in a fashion that was bound to stimulate the United States. Whatever political gains they got out of the short-lived missile gap which they either created or acquiesced in, it not only stimulated Western strategic programs but possibly gave rise to a reaction that causes the Soviets to be viewed more skeptically at the present time than their accomplishments may actually warrant.

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Samuel P. Huntington examined a number of qualitative and quantitative arms races during the century since about 1840, and he does find instances in which one power eventually gave up challenging the supremacy of another. “Thus, a twenty-five year sporadic naval race between France and England ended in the middle 1860s when France gave up any serious effort to challenge the 3: 2 ratio which England had demonstrated the will and the capacity to maintain.” He points out, though, that “in nine out of ten races the slogan of the challenging state is either ‘parity’ or ‘superiority,’ only in rare cases does the challenger aim for less than this, for unless equality or superiority is achieved, the arms race is hardly likely to be worthwhile.”

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In America we have been suffering from proliferation in recent years—of cigarette brands, not nuclear weapons—and smokers eager to try new brands are usually anxious to discriminate between mentholated and ordinary. As far as I know, there has been no collusion between cigarette manufacturers and their millions of customers on a signal, and there may not have been even among the manufacturers, yet there has arisen a fairly reliable color signal: mentholated cigarettes are to be in green or blue-green packages. I think by now the Soviet leaders have discerned that statements datelined Geneva are mentholated.

Disarmament advocates may not like the idea that any understandings with the Soviet Union on force levels are reached through the process of military planning and a half-conscious, inarticulate dialogue with the enemy, unenforceable when reached, subject to inspection only by unilateral intelligence procedures, and reflecting each side’s notion of adequate superiority or tolerable inferiority. Opponents of disarmament may not like the idea that the executive branch or the Defense Department, even inadvertently, may accommodate its goals to Soviet behavior or try to discern and manipulate enemy intentions. But the process is too important to be ignored and too natural to be surprising. Nor is it a new idea.

In 1912 Churchill was chagrined at the naval procurement plans of the Kaiser’s government, which was about to purchase a quarter again as many dreadnoughts as Churchill had expected them to. He wondered whether the Germans appreciated that the result of their naval expansion would be a corresponding British expansion, with more money spent, tensions aggravated, and no net gain to either from the competition. The Cabinet sent the Secretary of State for War to Berlin to communicate that if the Germans would hold to their original plan, the British would hold to theirs; otherwise Great Britain would match the Germans two-for-one in additional ships. Churchill thought that if the Germans really did not want war they would be amenable to the suggestion, and that nothing could be lost by trying.

Nothing was lost by trying. In his memoirs, Churchill displays no regrets at having had the idea and having made the attempt. He had not had a “disarmament agreement” in mind; he simply hoped to deter an expensive acceleration of the arms race by communicating what the British reaction would be. He did it with his eyes open and with neither humility nor arrogance.

Essentially, this process of discouraging the Soviets in the arms race is no different from trying to persuade them that they are getting nowhere by pushing us around in Berlin. In Berlin, as in Cuba, we have tried to teach them a lesson about what might have been called “peaceful coexistence,” if the term had not already been discredited by Soviet use.

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The principle of “containment” ought to be applicable to Soviet military preparation. However constrained they are by an ideology that makes it difficult for them to acknowledge that they are bested or contained, they must have some capacity for acceptance of the facts of life. Perhaps the American response can be made to appear to be a fact of life.

This is a kind of “arms control” objective. But it differs from the usual formulation of arms control in several respects. First, it does not begin with the premise that arms agreements with potential enemies are intrinsically obliged to acknowledge some kind of parity. (But since there are many different ways of measuring military potency, it might be possible to permit an inferior power to claim—possibly even to believe in—parity according to certain measures.) Second, it explicitly rests on the notion that arms bargaining involves threats as well as offers.

It may be impolite in disarmament negotiations explicitly to threaten an aggravated arms race as the cost of disagreement. But, of course, the inducement to agree to any reciprocated modification of armaments must be some implicit threat of the consequences of failure to agree. The first step toward inducing a potential enemy to moderate his arms buildup is to persuade him that he has more to lose than to gain by failing to take our reaction into account. (It could even be wise deliberately to plan and to communicate a somewhat excessive military buildup ratio relative to the Soviet force in order to enhance their inducements to moderate their own program. This sort of thing is not unknown in tariff bargaining.)

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A good many military facilities and assets are not competitive: facilities to minimize false alarm, facilities to prevent accidental and unauthorized acts that might lead to war, and many other improvements in reliability that would help to maintain control in peacetime or even in war.

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A missile-hardening race is not the same as a missile-numbers race. Getting across to the Soviet Union the kind of reaction they can expect from us, therefore, involves more than a quantitative plan; it involves getting across a notion of the kinds of weapon programs that appear less provocative and those that would appear more so. The Cuban affair is a reminder that there can be a difference.

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For the strategically inferior power there is a dilemma to be taken quite seriously: to maximize deterrence by seeming incapable of anything but massive retaliation, or to hedge against the possibility of war by taking restraints and limitations seriously.

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You get somebody’s attention much more effectively by listening to him than by talking at him. You may make him much more self-conscious in what he communicates if you show that you are listening carefully and taking it seriously.

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There was every sign that it was being carefully read within the government and by scholars, military commentators, journalists, and even students. No wonder the Soviet authors in their second edition reacted to some of the Western commentary, “corrected” some of the “misconceptions” of their overseas readers, and quietly corrected some of their own text. There are indications that some of the more extreme doctrinal assertions have been softened, as though in fear the West might take them too seriously!

This strange, momentous dialogue may illustrate two principles for the kind of noncommittal bargaining we are forever engaged in with the potential enemy. First, don’t speak directly at him, but speak seriously to some serious audience and let him overhear. Second, to get his ear, listen.

Thomas Schelling explains the dynamics of mutual alarm in Arms and Influence:

With every new book on the First World War it is becoming more widely appreciated how the beginning of that war was affected by the technology, the military organization, and the geography of Continental Europe in 1914. Railroads and army reserves were the two great pieces of machinery that meshed to make a ponderous mechanism of mobilization that, once set in motion, was hard to stop. Worse: it was dangerous to stop. The steps by which a country got ready for war were the same as the steps by which it would launch war, and that is the way they looked to an enemy.

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Railroads made it possible to transport men, food, horses, ammunition, fodder, bandages, maps, telephones, and everything that makes up a fighting army to the border in a few days, there to launch an attack or to meet one, depending on whether or not the enemy got to the border first.

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This miracle of mobilization reflected an obsession with the need for haste—to have an army at the frontier as quickly as possible, to exploit the enemy’s unreadiness if the enemy’s mobilization was slower and to minimize the enemy’s advantages if he got mobilized on the frontier first. The extraordinary complexity of mobilization was matched by a corresponding simplicity: once started, it was not to be stopped. Like rush-hour at Grand Central, it would be fouled up enormously by any suspension or slowdown.

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As a precaution against German attack, full mobilization might have been prudent. But full mobilization would threaten Germany and might provoke German mobilization in return. Partial mobilization against Austria would not threaten Germany; but it would expose Russia to German attack because the partial mobilization could not be converted to full mobilization.

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How different it would have been if the major countries had been islands, as Britain was. If a hundred miles of rough water had separated every country from its most worrisome enemy the technology of World War I would have given the advantage to the country invaded, not to the invader. To catch the enemy’s troop ships on the high seas after adequate warning of the enemy’s embarkation, and to fight on the beaches against amphibious attack, with good internal communications and supplies against an enemy dependent on calm seas for getting his supplies ashore—especially for a country that preferred to arm itself defensively, with railroad guns and shore batteries, and submarines to catch the enemy troopships—would have given so great an advantage to the defender that even an aggressor would have had to develop the diplomatic art of goading his opponent into enough fury to launch the war himself.

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The worst military confrontation is one in which each side thinks it can win if it gets the jump on the other and will lose if it is slow.

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If the weapons can act instantaneously by the flip of a switch, a “go” signal, and can arrive virtually without warning to do decisive damage, the outcome of the crisis depends simply on who first finds the suspense unbearable. If the leaders on either side think the leaders on the other are about to find it unbearable, their motive to throw the switch is intensified.

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But there are two ways to confront the enemy with retaliatory forces that cannot be destroyed in a surprise attack. One is to prevent surprise; the other is to prevent their destruction even in the event of surprise.

Radar, satellite-borne sensory devices to detect missile launchings, and alarm systems that signal when a country has been struck by nuclear weapons, could give us the minutes we might need to launch most of our missiles and planes before they were destroyed on the ground. If the enemy knows that we can react in a few minutes and that we will have the few minutes we need, he may be deterred by the prospect of retaliation. But hardened underground missile sites, mobile missiles, submarine-based missiles, continually air-borne bombs and missiles, hidden missiles and aircraft, or even weapons in orbit do not so much depend on warning; they are designed to survive an attack, not to anticipate it by launching themselves at the enemy in the few minutes after warning—perhaps ambiguous warning—is received. In terms of ability to retaliate, warning time and survivability are to some extent substitutes but they also compete with each other. Money spent dispersing and hardening missile sites or developing and building mobile systems could have been spent on better warning, and vice versa.

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The system that can react within fifteen minutes may be a potent deterrent, but it poses an awful choice whenever we think we have warning but are not quite sure. We can exploit our speed of response and risk having started war by false alarm, or we can wait, avoiding an awful war by mistake but risking a dead retaliatory system if the alarm was real (and possibly reducing our deterrence in a crisis if the enemy knows we are inclined to give little credence to the warning system and wait until his bombs have landed).

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We get double security out of the system that can survive without warning: the enemy knowledge that we can wait in the face of ambiguous evidence, that we can take a few minutes to check on the origin of accidents or mischief, that we are not dependent on instant reaction to a fallible warning system, may permit the enemy, too, to wait a few minutes in the face of an accident and permit them in a crisis to attribute less nervous behavior to us and to be less jumpy themselves.

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But there is a conflict, and a serious one, between the urge to have fewer weapons in the interest of fewer accidents and the need—still thinking about “accidental war”—to have forces secure enough and so adequate in number that they need not react with haste for fear of not being able to react at all, secure enough and so adequate in number that, when excited by alarm, we can be conservative and doubt the enemy’s intent to attack, and that the enemy has confidence in our ability to be calm, helping him keep calm himself. A retaliatory system that is inadequate or insecure not only makes the possessor jumpy but is grounds for the enemy’s being jumpy too.

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“Vulnerability” is the problem that was dramatized by Sputnik in 1957 and by Soviet announcements then that they had successfully tested an ICBM. Nobody doubted that the aircraft of the Strategic Air Command, if launched against Soviet Russia, could do enormous damage to that country, unquestionably enough to punish any aggression they had in mind and enough to deter that aggression if they had to look forward to such punishment. But if the Soviets were about to achieve a capability to destroy without warning the massive American bomber force while the aircraft were vulnerably concentrated on a small number of airfields, the deterrent threat to retaliate with a destroyed bomber force might be ineffectual. The preoccupation with vulnerability that began in 1957 or so was not with the vulnerability of women and children and their means of livelihood to sudden Soviet attack on American population centers. It was the vulnerability of the strategic bomber force.

This concern with vulnerability led to the improved alert status of bombers so that radar warning of ballistic missiles would permit the bombers to save themselves by taking off. And it led to the abandonment of “soft,” large, liquid-fueled missiles like the Atlas, and the urgent substitution of Minuteman and Polaris missiles which, in dispersed and hardened silos or in hidden submarines, could effectively threaten retaliation. An Atlas missile could retaliate as effectively as several Minutemen, if alive, but could not so persuasively threaten to stay alive under attack. In the late 1950s and the early 1960s the chief criterion for selecting strategic weapon systems was invulnerability to attack, and properly so. Vulnerable strategic weapons not only invite attack but in a crisis could coerce the American government into attacking when it might prefer to wait.

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If a city has a limited number of bullet-proof vests it should probably give them to the police, letting the people draw their security from a police force that cannot be readily destroyed.

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If one airplane can destroy 45 on an airfield, catching the other side’s airplanes on the ground can be decisively important while having more airplanes than the other side is only a modest advantage. If superiority attaches to the side that starts the war, a parade-ground inventory of force—a comparison of numbers on both sides—is of only modest value in determining the outcome. Furthermore, and this is the point to stress, the likelihood of war is determined by how great a reward attaches to jumping the gun, how strong the incentive to hedge against war itself by starting it, how great the penalty on giving peace the benefit of the doubt in a crisis.

The dimension of “strength” is an important one, but so is the dimension of “stability”—the assurance against being caught by surprise, the safety in waiting, the absence of a premium on jumping the gun.

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A vivid example of this dynamic problem is bomber aircraft. In case of warning they can leave the ground. If they leave the ground they should initially proceed as though to target; in case it is war, they should not be wasting time and fuel by loitering to find out what happens next. As they proceed to target, they can be either recalled or confirmed on their mission. (The actual procedure may be that they return to base unless confirmed on their mission, by “positive control” command procedures.) If recalled, however, they return to the relative vulnerability of their bases. They need fuel, their crews are tired, they may need maintenance work, and they are comparatively unsynchronized. They are, in sum, more vulnerable, and less ready for attack, than before they took off.

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Like the railroad mobilization of World War I, the bomber arrangements may enjoy simplicity and efficiency by ignoring the possibility that they may have to loiter or return to base. Like the railroad mobilization of World War I, the procedures may coerce decisions unless the procedures are compromised to facilitate orderly return to base.

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If both sides are so organized, or even one side, the danger that war in fact will result from some kind of false alarm is enhanced.

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The fueling of missiles could have created a similar problem if solid-fueled missiles had not so quickly replaced the originally projected missiles utilizing refrigerated fuels. If it takes time to fuel a missile, fifteen minutes or an hour, and if a fueled missile cannot be held indefinitely in readiness, a problem very much like the bomber problem can arise. To fuel a missile is not a simple act of prudence, achieving enhanced readiness at the cost of some fuel that may be wasted and some potential maintenance work on the missiles themselves after the crisis is over. If the fuel begins to dissipate, or the fueled missile becomes susceptible to mechanical fatigue or breakdown, getting a missile ready requires a risky decision. The risk is that the missile will be less ready, after a brief period, than if it had never been made ready in the first place. It, too, like the aircraft burning fuel in the air, can coerce a decision; it can coerce a decision in favor of war once it is fueled and ready and threatens to become unready shortly. It can coerce a decision to remain unready by making it dangerous to put the missile into its mobilization process.

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Some observers thought this was a disadvantage, because the enemy could not be so readily coerced by American demonstrations, by getting ourselves in a position of temporarily increased readiness, by taking steps that showed our willingness to risk war and that actually increased the risk of war. There were some who thought that bombers were more usable in a crisis than instantly ready missiles, because they could dramatically take off, or disperse themselves to civilian bases, giving an appearance of readiness for war.

They could be right. What needs to be recognized is that the flexing of muscles is probably unimpressive unless it is costly or risky. If aircraft can take off in a crisis with great noise and show of activity, but at no genuine risk to themselves and at modest cost in fuel and personnel fatigue, it may demonstrate little. The impressive demonstrations are probably the dangerous ones. We cannot have it both ways.

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Civil defenses are often called “passive defenses,” while anti-missile missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, and interceptor aircraft are called “active defenses.” In an important sense, though, giving the words their ordinary meanings, it is the civil defenses that are probably the most active and the “active defenses” that would be the most passive. If we should install antimissile missiles around our population centers they would probably be quick-reacting missiles themselves, in a state of fairly continuous readiness, involving no dramatic readiness procedures and not being utilized unless threatening objects appeared overhead. One can imagine other kinds of defenses against ballistic missiles that did involve readiness procedures, that required decisions to mobilize in advance; perhaps short-lived orbiting systems that had to be launched in an emergency in anticipation of attack would have this character. But the systems currently under discussion or development appear to be relatively “passive.” They would sit still in constant readiness and fire only in response to the local appearance of hostile objects overhead.

The civil defenses would be a dramatic contrast. Shelters work best if people are in them. The best time to get people in the shelters is before the war starts. To wait until the enemy has launched his ballistic missiles (if one expects some of them to be aimed at cities) would be to leave the population dependent on quick-sheltering procedures that had never been tested under realistic conditions. Even if the enemy were expected not initially to bring any of our cities under attack, fallout from target areas could arrive in periods ranging from, say, a fraction of an hour up to several hours, and in the panic and confusion of warfare a few hours might not be enough. Furthermore, the most orderly way to get people into shelters, with families assembled, gas and electricity shut off, supplies replenished and fire hazards reduced, the aged and the sick not left behind, and panic minimized, would be by sheltering before the war started.

And that means sheltering before war is a certainty. There is a dilemma right here. If sheltering will be taken as a signal that one expects war and intends to start it, sheltering gives notice to the other side. Surprise would depend on not sheltering. A nation’s leaders must decide whether the advantage of surprise against the enemy is worth the cost of surprising their own population unprepared. This would be a hard choice.

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One type of defense against thermal radiation from nuclear weapons—and it is semantically unclear whether this is a passive defense or an active one—is smoke or fog injected into the atmosphere. A thick layer of smoke can make a difference, especially if anti-missile defenses could oblige the enemy to detonate his weapons at a distance. But a smoke layer could not be produced instantaneously after enemy weapons came in sight; it would work best if the smudge-pots were put into operation before the war started. This means that it is most effective if subject to “mobilization,” with the attendant danger that it signals something to the other side.

People in shelters cannot stay forever. The usual calculations of how long people should be able to stay in shelters—what the supply of rations should be, for example—relate to how long it might take radioactivity to decay, and cleanup procedures to dispose of fallout, so that the outside environment would be safe. But if we must envisage sheltering as a mobilization step, as something that occurs before war is a certainty, then the endurance of people in shelters is pertinent to the crisis itself. They may well have been in their shelters for two or three weeks without any war having started; and, like aircraft in the air, they coerce the nation’s leaders into decisions that reflect the inability of the country to sustain its readiness indefinitely. Of all the reasons for having people able to stay in shelters for an extended period, one of the most important would be to avoid any need to have a war quickly because the people couldn’t stand the suspense or the privation any longer.

De-sheltering would be a significant activity. It would be a dramatic signal either that a nation’s readiness was exhausted or that the crisis was becoming less dangerous.

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In fact, simply to avoid panic it could be essential to get the population busily at work on civil defense in a crisis, whether filling cans with water, shoveling dirt against fire hazard, educating themselves by television, or evacuating particular areas before panic set in.

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They are not part of our military organization and our weaponry, so we typically ignore them in discussions of our military posture. But there they are, and they could make the brink of war as busy and complicated and frantic as the mobilizations of 1914. We can hope they would not make it as irreversible.

The special danger is that the way these processes work will not be understood before they are put to test in a real emergency. The dynamics of readiness—of alert and mobilization both military and civilian—involve decisions at the highest level of government, a level so high as to be out of the hands of experts. “The bland ignorance among national leaders,” writes Michael Howard in describing the mobilization of 1914, “of the simple mechanics of the system on which they relied for the preservation of national security would astonish us rather more if so many horrifying parallels did not come to light whenever British politicians give their views about defense policy today.”

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In managing nations on the brink of war, every decision-maker would be inexperienced. That cannot be helped. Thinking about it in advance can and should make an enormous difference; but it did not in 1914.

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If all nations were self-sufficient islands with the pre-nuclear military technology of World War II, mutual deterrence could be quite stable; even a nation that had determined on war would not care to initiate it. With thermonuclear technology the danger of preemptive instability becomes a grave one; weapons themselves may be vulnerable to sudden long-distance attack unless they are deliberately designed and expensively designed to present less of a surprise-attack target. This in turn can imply a choice between weapons comparatively good for launching sudden attack and weapons comparatively good for surviving sudden attack and striking back. The Polaris submarine, for example, is comparatively good at surviving attack and striking second; the Polaris missile itself may be good for starting a war, but not compared with its ability for surviving attack. It is an expensive weapon compared with other missiles, and the expense goes into making it less vulnerable to attack, not into making it a better weapon for launching sudden attack.

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If both sides have weapons that need not go first to avoid their own destruction, so that neither side can gain great advantage in jumping the gun and each is aware that the other cannot, it will be a good deal harder to get a war started. Both sides can afford the rule: When in doubt, wait.

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The problem does not arise only at the level of thermonuclear warfare. The Israeli army consists largely of a mobilizable reserve. The reserve is so large that, once it is mobilized, the country cannot sustain readiness indefinitely; most of the able-bodied labor force becomes mobilized. The frontier is close, the ground is hard, and the weather is clear most of the year; speed and surprise can make the difference between an enemy’s finding a small Israeli army or a large one to oppose him if he attacked. Preparations for attack would confront Israel with a choice of mobilizing or not and, once mobilized, with a choice of striking before enemy forces were assembled or waiting and negotiating, to see if the mobilization on both sides could be reversed and the temptation to strike quickly dampened.

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During the Cuban missile crisis the Soviet Union apparently abstained from any drastic alert and mobilization procedures, possibly as a deliberate policy to avoid aggravating the crisis. The establishment of a “hot line” between Washington and Moscow was at least a ceremony that acknowledged the problem and expressed an intent to take it seriously.

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Ballistic missile defenses, if installed on a large scale by the United States or the Soviet Union, might preserve or destroy stability according to whether they increased or decreased the advantage to either side of striking first; that, in turn, would depend on how much better they worked against an enemy missile force that had already been disrupted by a surprise attack. It would also depend on whether ballistic missile defenses worked best in protecting missile forces from being destroyed or best in protecting cities against retaliation. And it would depend on whether ballistic missile defenses induced such a change in the character of missiles themselves, or such a shift to other types of offensive weapons—larger missiles, low flying aircraft, weapons in orbit—as to aggravate the urgency of quick action in a crisis and the temptation to strike first.

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In fact a case can be made that some instability can induce prudence in military affairs. If there were no danger of crises getting out of hand, or of small wars blowing up into large ones, the inhibition on small wars and other disruptive events might be less. The fear of “accidental war”—of an unpremeditated war, one that arises out of aggravated misunderstandings, false alarms, menacing alert postures, and a recognized urgency of striking quickly in the event of war—may tend to police the world against overt disturbances and adventures. A canoe can be safer than a rowboat if it induces more caution in the passengers, particularly if they are otherwise inclined to squabble and fight among themselves.

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If war breaks out a nation can rearm, unless its capacity to rearm is destroyed at the outset and kept destroyed by enemy military action. By the standards of 1944, the United States was fairly near to total disarmament when World War II broke out. Virtually all munitions later expended by the United States forces were nonexistent in September 1939. “Disarmament” did not preclude U.S. participation; it merely slowed it down.

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Since weapons themselves are the most urgent targets in war, to eliminate a weapon eliminates a target and changes the requirements for attack.

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In the event that neither side had nuclear weapons, asymmetrical lead times in nuclear rearmament could be decisive. Whether it took days or months, the side that believed it could be first to acquire a few dozen megatons through a crash program of rearmament would expect to dominate its opponent.

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It might not be essential to possess nuclear weapons in order to destroy nuclear facilities. High explosives, commandos, or saboteurs could be effective. “Strategic warfare” might reach a purity not known in this century: like the king in chess, nuclear facilities would be the overriding objective. Their protection would have absolute claim on defense. In such a war the object would be to preserve one’s mobilization base and to destroy the enemy’s. To win a war would not require overcoming the enemy’s defenses—just winning the rearmament race.

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Some kind of international authority is generally proposed as part of an agreement on total disarmament. If militarily superior to any combination of national forces, an international force implies (or is) some form of world government. To call such an arrangement “disarmament” is about as oblique as to call the Constitution of the United States “a Treaty for Uniform Currency and Interstate Commerce.” The authors of the Federalist Papers were under no illusion as to the far-reaching character of the institution they were discussing, and we should not be either.

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The operations of the Force raise a number of questions. Should it try to contain aggression locally, or to invade the aggressor countries (or all parties to the conflict) and to disable them militarily? Should it use long-range strategic weapons to disable the country militarily? Should it rely on the threat of massive punitive retaliation? Should it use the threat or, if necessary, the practice of limited nuclear reprisal as a coercive technique? In the case of rearmament, the choices would include invasion or threats of invasion, strategic warfare, reprisal or the threat of reprisal; “containment” could not forestall rearmament unless the country were vulnerable to blockade.

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Keeping large forces stationed permanently along the Iron Curtain is a possibility but not one that brings with it all the psychological benefits hoped for from disarmament.

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Nevertheless, if the Force is conceived of as superseding Soviet and American reliance on their own nuclear capabilities, it needs to have some plausible capability to meet large-scale aggression; if it hasn’t, the major powers may still be deterred, but it is not the Force that deters them.

A capability for massive or measured nuclear punishment is probably the easiest attribute with which to equip the Force. But it is not evident that the Force could solve the problems of “credibility” or of collective decision any better than can the United States alone or NATO collectively at the present time.

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The knottiest strategic problem for an International Force would be to halt the unilateral rearmament of a major country. The credibility of its threat to employ nuclear weapons whenever some country renounces the agreement and begins to rearm itself would seem to be very low indeed.

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This is, of course, aside from the even more severe problems of political control of the “executive branch” and “military establishment” of the world governing body. If we hope to turn all our international disputes over to a formal procedure of adjudication and to rely on an international military bureaucracy to enforce decisions, we are simply longing for government without politics. We are hoping for the luxury, which most of us enjoy municipally, of turning over our dirtiest jobs—especially those that require strong nerves—to some specialized employees. That works fairly well for burglary, but not so well for school integration, general strikes, or Algerian independence. We may achieve it if we create a sufficiently potent and despotic ruling force; but then some of us would have to turn around and start plotting civil war, and the Force’s strategic problems would be only beginning.