The "D" Word VI D: Last Tenets of Deterrence Theory
Let’s now look at the last two tenets of deterrence theory we set out at the beginning of this series.
4. You must be willing, and seen to be willing, to inflict the harm.
This is a non-technical question that affects the requirement of certainty for deterrence.
Does the other side think that when it came down to it, you might not use your nuclear weapons to retaliate?
If an attack on us were launched in spite of our huge nuclear deterrent, the people in charge of our deterrent could, conceivably, say to themselves, couldn’t they?, that since the deterrent has obviously failed to deter, the weapons have lost any legitimate purpose because killing vast numbers of innocent people and “killing” entire nations and maybe even human society itself are not legitimate purposes.
The Geneva Conventions adopted by the United Nations in 1949 recognized that intentionally killing civilians is a war crime. Since strategic nuclear weapons will kill mostly civilians and can’t avoid doing so, the use of them is therefore a war crime, right? Whether you are following orders or not. Anyone in the chain of command could decline to become a war criminal.
The missileers who launch the missiles are highly trained, however. We would hope so. In their training, they are automated as much as possible. One missileer-in-training who asked how he might know whether the person delivering the launch order was sane was washed out of training and discharged from the Air Force.
I expect we could almost certainly count on our missileers to execute the authenticated orders they received.
What if very large numbers of people in a Nuclear Weapons State were protesting the use of nuclear weapons--in a country that would allow such protests—protesting because, say, of the vast numbers of entirely innocent people who would be killed in a retaliatory attack? Might the party you hope to deter conclude that your weapons might not be used in a reprisal? Which would tempt them to conduct a first strike?
Unless they themselves had concluded that the deaths of millions of innocent people were unjustifiable?
The possessor of and believer in a “nuclear deterrent” might prefer to have unity on the question of whether we should retaliate after a first strike. But would we want to say such unity, if we had it in our country, would be a good thing? Or would we, as a democracy, think it would be better to have some differences of opinion? Isn’t that where new and better ideas come from—differences of opinion?
What about the country’s history here? Have its leaders seemed only to bluff the use of the nuclear weapons? Wouldn’t such a history increase the likelihood that your bluff might be called? You can bluff sometimes but not every time if you want the bluff to work.
And what if over time you have had the chance to use nuclear weapons and every time have not used them? The longer you haven’t used nuclear weapons in situations where they might have been used, does the efficacy of your threat diminish? Do you need at some point to demonstrate your willingness?
How, exactly, would you do this? And if you do, can you expect others to decide they need to demonstrate their willingness?
And what would you expect to happen next?
5. Your means of inflicting harm must appear to be something that can’t be defeated by a surprise first strike or a war of attrition.
We looked earlier at the requirement in the nuclear era of seeming to have a second-strike capability if you expect your deterrent to be “credible.”
But here’s another wrinkle.
In the late 40’s and early 50’s, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had both feared that the Soviet Union might try to defeat us by wearing us out with many small aggressions. That was one reason why, in the early 1950’s, President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had declared, in their New Look policy, that we would respond to any attack, on us or more likely on our allied countries in Western Europe, even with conventional weapons, with a massive “offensive retaliation” that would include nuclear weapons. They thought the threat of massive offensive retaliation might forestall the smaller attacks.
But was the US going to respond to an attack on, say, Berlin or Turkey that used conventional weapons with a masssive attack on Russia that used strategic nuclear weapons? The international law of war says retaliation should be proportionate. We’ve not always paid much attention to the international law of war, but even so, using a nuclear weapon to respond to an attack with conventional weapons seems unlikely.
Not impossible, of course.
Was President Eisenhower’s threat of massive retaliation credible? Some of our allies weren’t sure it was—if the attack had been made only on them, not on the United States itself.
Some European leaders, Winston Churchill was one, hoped the threat of massive retaliation was just a bluff. They had begun to imagine how a massive retaliation on the Soviet Union with our nuclear weapons might affect their own much smaller countries.
Was our “credible” deterrent really credible?
Was it even a good idea?
Our military leaders seem never to have doubted the efficacy and wisdom of deterrence, and still don’t. In a news conference in August of 2022, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Chas Richard, declared that they were now working “furiously” on a new version of deterrence theory.
“We have to account for three-party [threats],” Richard said. “That is unprecedented in this nation's history. We have never faced two peer nuclear-capable opponents at the same time [China now, as well as Russia], who have to be deterred differently…. Even our operational deterrence expertise is just not what it was at the end of the Cold War. So we have to reinvigorate this intellectual effort. And we can start by rewriting deterrence theory. I'll tell you we're furiously doing that out at STRATCOM [the Strategic Command that replaced the Strategic Air Command in 1992].”
Would you like to see what STRATCOM comes up with? I would.
I won’t get to.
And so it goes.
Until it doesn’t.