The "D" Word VI A: More Wrinkles in Deterrence Theory--the Certainty Requirement
In the previous posting I introduced some tenets of deterrence theory and noted a few wrinkles in the first requirement—that reprisals must threaten significant harm if they are to deter.
Let’s now look at the other requirements.
2. The harm must be believed by those you wish to deter to follow with a very high probability (ideally—but never, of course—with certainty) if they do the thing you want to deter.
Research on deterring crime (where, it has to be said, deterrence has hardly been a success story in the United States) has found that the most important factor in deterring crime is a high likelihood of being caught. The high liklihood of being caught has been shown to be much more important than, for example, the severity of the punishment if the person does happen to get caught.
Pasting a photograph of eyes on the door of the refrigerator in the break room can keep people from stealing your lunch. Maybe it’s not always necessary to be caught. Being seen might do it.
People suffering from some kinds of mental illness or who are in the grip of overwhelming emotion or need may not be concerned at all about the liklihood of being caught. But those who are able to weigh options seem to be deterred, more often, when they are pretty sure they will get caught.
Public figures who want to appear to be “tough” on crime are all too likely to urge, first of all, “tougher” (i.e. more severe) sentences. Today, more severe sentences means spending more time in prison, not being drawn and quartered. Our Constitution prohibits punishments that are “cruel and unusual.” Our Supreme Court’s ideas about what meets that standard have changed over time. Being put to death by lethal injection still doesn’t meet the standard.
Severe sentences may be a way of being tough on the criminals who do get caught. They may bring greater satisfaction, or what is often called “closure,” to survivors of crimes. Though not always.
Sometimes, it turns out, a more severe sentence is not what survivors want. They want different things, it turns out. They don’t always get what they want. Not if they want an eye for an eye. But not even when, as sometimes happens, they want a less severe sentence than what the prosecutor is asking for. Or something different from mere imprisonment.
The “restorative justice” movement has been working since the 90’s to develop other possibilities for survivors.
In any case, while more severe sentences can be tougher on criminals, they have not been found to be a way of being tough on crime.
When it comes to creating a high liklihood of being caught, how are we doing? In 2020, according to the Marshall Project, about half of the murders committed in the United States were solved, 47% of assaults, 30% of rapes, and 27% of robberies. In 2020, the number of murders reached a high not seen since 1990 though there had been no significant reduction in sentencing severity or practice.
Two ways of being tough on crime are 1. preventing it and 2. reducing the reasons for it. Neither has anything to do with deterrence. Both can reduce crime, and maybe even nuclear attacks. Neither has anything to do with generating fear or being tough.
More with being smart and wise.
The significance and severity of the harm that will be suffered if nuclear weapons are used in reprisal is usually not in question. The nature and extent of the harm may be underappreciated, but the significance is not doubted.
The nature and extent of the harm may be underappreciated because the harm is almost always described in abstract terms, like tons of TNT equivalent, or rads of radiation, or degrees of heat, or pounds per square inch of pressure. No mention of the lived experience, or the aftermath. The lived experience is not invoked because, while the harm caused by a use of nuclear weapons is calculable, it may not be imaginable.
To get help imagining it, we might want to ask the hibakusha what it was like. The hibakusha are the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who survived the bombs dropped on those cities. A few are still with us. They were young children when it happened to them. They say that you can’t know what it was like unless you were there.
Some writers have tried. In a very affecting book entitled When the Wind Blows (Schocken Books, 1982), a British graphic novelist named Raymond Briggs tried to imagine it from the point of view of an older British couple that had survived World War II. Cormac McCarthy in his novel The Road (Knopf Doubleday, 2006) makes a powerful and honest effort to imagine it. His book stays honest until the end, I’d say. What he does at the end may be what he thought he had to do to make the story tolerable.
When it comes to imagining the lived experience, we each have to do the best we can.
As was shown in earlier entries in You Might Want to Know, President Truman did not object to dropping the first-ever atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A couple of days after it fell, he was shown photographs of what that bomb had done to the city. The next day the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki without his explicit approval, and immediately after that President Truman decreed that no other atomic bombs be used without his explicit approval.
In a meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission in 1948, President Truman said, according the chairman of the AEC David Lilienthal,
I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to….You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon…. It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people and not for military uses. So we have got to treat it differently from rifles, and cannons and ordinary things like that.
Assuming someone has decided it would be okay to use nuclear weapons today, when both sides in a conflict have them, how might they think they might get away with it?
An ambush? A sucker punch? That’s the kind of thing we need to think about here. A surprise first strike is what it would be called if nukes were involved.
How do you keep that from happening?
One way would be to strike first yourself in a preemptive first strike. That would be “prevention,” strictly speaking, not “deterrence.” It would also run a risk of serious moral harm, wouldn’t it? What would be your moral standing in the world if you attacked a country that hadn’t yet attacked you? What if it wasn’t entirely clear afterwards that the people you attacked “pre-emptively” with nuclear weapons weren’t actually about to attack you with them?
General Curtis LeMay, Commander in Chief of our Strategic Air Command after 1948, was convinced we could get away with a surprise first strike on the Soviet Union and should conduct one. He believed this even after 1949 when the Soviets acquired the atomic bomb, after 1955, the hydrogen bomb, and after 1957, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles to deliver their bombs. He called it his “strategy of preemptive counterforce.”
Later in the 60’s, General LeMay might have come to realize—other military leaders certainly had—that even if we executed a surprise pre-emptive first strike on the Soviet Union, they would, with a high enough probability, have a “second-strike capability.”
As soon as we came to believe that, and if they thought the same thing about us, neither one of us would be thinking we could get away with it by executing a surprise first strike.
That should help with deterrence, shouldn’t it? Both ways.
Next: More Wrinkles in Deterrence Theory