The "D" Word VIII A: Deterrence and Rationality
In the last year of the Cold War, Herbert York [the first director of Lawrence Livermore, the second nuclear weapons design laboratory in the U.S.]. . .posed the question, how many nuclear weapons are needed to deter an adversary rational enough to be deterred? “[S]omewhere in the range of 1, 10, or 100,” [he said,] "closer to 1 than it is to 100.” Daniel Ellsberg, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017), 144
“Rationality” is crucial in deterrence theory. Deterrence won’t work without it. Everybody knows that, right?
You can’t expect to deter someone who is crazy or suicidal, for example, by threatening them with guns or nuclear weapons.
Also how about someone who isn’t irrational, just really stupid? Or not sufficiently imaginative?
There is a danger of circularity here, isn’t there? What does “rational” mean in nuclear deterrence theory other than “certain to be deterred by the fact that you are thought to possess nuclear weapons that you are apparently willing and able to use in reprisal”? How is this “rationality” otherwise to be demonstrated?
The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb in August 1949, four years after we exploded our first one. If we’d been thinking about attacking them preemptively to keep them from getting nuclear weapons—and the head of our Strategic Air Command, Curtis LeMay, had been urging us to do this—we might now rationally be deterred from attacking them because they also had nuclear weapons. Or not, if we thought we could keep them from using theirs.
Great Britain was the third country to get nuclear weapons. They got it done in 1952, in spite of the fact that after World War II we had decided not to share any of our knowledge about nuclear weapons with them. We haven’t ever attacked Great Britain with nuclear weapons—before or after they got nuclear weapons themselves. Not because we both had nuclear weapons and were rational and therefore deterred but, I expect, because we were friends.
If someone who was not our friend attacked us in spite of our having a nuclear deterrent, would they be, a fortiori, not rational?
On September 11, 2001, nineteen terrorists from four different Middle Eastern countries—fifteen from Saudi Arabia, the others from Lebanon, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates—hijacked four passenger airplanes in the eastern United States. Two of the airplanes were intentionally crashed into the two World Trade Center towers in New York City, which burned for a short while and then collapsed. Another was crashed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The fourth crashed in an empty field in Pennsylvania after the passengers tried to take the plane back from the hijackers. That plane had been headed, it is supposed, for the U.S. Capitol.
All the people on all the airplanes, and many more in the buildings that were struck, were killed. The total of the dead was close to 3000.
The terrorists were “stateless.” That is, they were acting not in the name of a particular country but in the name of an Islamic group founded in 1988 that called itself Al Qaeda, which means something like “the foundation.” They were fundamentalists. We may also justly call them “terrorists” not because they were stateless or because they were Islamic but because it didn’t matter to them that innocent people would die because of what they did, which can be taken as the defining feature of terrorists.
We may also call these terrorists suicidal. From what we have been told, they wished to die in the act, believing they would be rewarded in an afterlife.
The suicidal acts the terrorists performed were, it turned out, carefully planned. They had practiced over several months. Their actions were entirely purposeful and, in the attackers’ minds, fully justified. The terrorists were not deterred by the certainty of their own deaths.
Was their impulse, then, not rational?
It is better, I think, to see their impulse as the product of a kind of perfected rationality—rationality that had escaped the bounds of reason and lived experience. Instead of seeing their acts as irrational, it is better, I think, to see them as governed by a rationality that had become, in the expression of twentieth century language philosopher Kenneth Burke, “rotten with perfection.”
There can be no doubt that if people like these rational terrorists had managed to get hold of a nuclear weapon, our “nuclear deterrent” would have had no power to deter them from detonating the weapon, on the Mall in Washington D.C., say, if they could get it there, never mind that they would die in the act. If the weapon were as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb—a very small bomb by today’s standards—and detonated in the right place, it would destroy the White House, the Capitol, the Supreme Court building, and likely render the Pentagon inoperable.
They might be able to get it there in a Rider truck.
After the attack by the terrorists on September 11, 2001, we instantly increased our readiness to launch the ICBMs we had and the B-52 bombers we had on alert at Barksdale and other air force bases, already fueled up and loaded with strategic nuclear weapons, and to launch the missiles in our submarines, which we could now very quickly launch against…whom, exactly?
It’s important to recognize that this kind of “rationality,” the kind that is “rotten with perfection,” can take hold of any of us, not just terrorists.
From what we now know about the plan for general nuclear war developed at the end of the Eisenhower administration by our Joint Strategic Targeting Planning Staff, this kind of rationality had taken hold in the JSTPS. In The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017),1 Daniel Ellsberg reports that in 1961, when he was working on nuclear war planning at the highest levels in the Pentagon, he learned that the Strategic Air Command predicted that executing the operational plan that the JSTPS had drawn up for “general nuclear war” would kill six-hundred million people. Three-hundred million in China and the Soviet Union, regardless of which of them had attacked us. Three-hundred million would be killed in countries that were outside the borders of the Soviet Union and China, with some millions of deaths occurring in the countries of Western Europe, our NATO allies.
The single nuclear bomb that fell on Hiroshima—a small nuclear bomb by today’s standards—killed, eventually, 70,000 people. The vast majority of those killed were, no doubt, as they would be in a general nuclear war, civilians, school children, old people.
In his memoir My American Journey (2003), General Colin Powell reports that while he was Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the end of the Cold War, he was shocked to learn that the JSTPS had targeted 40 strategic nuclear weapons on Kiev, which we all know now is the capital of Ukraine. Each of these bombs would have been at least ten times more powerful that the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
How many bombs, then, should we expect had been targeted on Moscow?
In his 2020 book, The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War, the investigative journalist Fred Kaplan claims that at that time 640 strategic nuclear weapons were targeted on Moscow and its environs.
Seems high to me, but not beyond belief. Not if we are talking about the kind of rationality we are talking about.
The same kind of rationality can be seen in our thinking about nuclear deterrence today. In a document entitled Guide to Nuclear Deterrence in the Age of Great-Power Competition, published in October 2020 by the Louisiana Tech Research Institute in Bossier City, Louisiana, the contributors argue the importance of maintaining our readiness to use our “deterrent” in a case in which our “deterrent” has failed, if you follow. Our purpose in using it, the guide says, would be to preserve our “way of life.”
Preserving our “way of life” is not what the theory of Mutual Assured Destruction predicted would follow from a failure of deterrence, is it?
The Guide sets out what it claims is needed to conduct a “limited” nuclear war. President Eisenhower didn’t believe a limited nuclear war was possible. But President Kennedy and the presidents who followed him wanted options. They directed the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff at Strategic Air Command Headquarters in Omaha to develop nuclear war plans that offered some. Like “counterforce” attacks that focused only on military targets with “countervalue” attacks on cities to follow, if seen to be necessary.
General George Lee Butler, the last Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command (1991-92) and first CINC of the Strategic Command that immediately replaced it discovered that the operational plans of that time still offered, when you considered the actualities, no such option. The devastation from a counterforce attack would have been total.
The writers of the Guide make no reference to President Reagan’s and Mikhail Gorbachev’s dictum in 1986 that “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
The members of the JSTPS and the writers of the Guide could not be said to be irrational but had they lost touch with reality? Perfected rationality of this kind can lead to outcomes that in this way of thinking may be entirely justifiable but also, if acted upon, will result in what is evil and absurd.
Finally, what would we want to say about the “rationality” of the passengers on the fourth hijacked airplane, the one that crashed into the field in Pennsylvania while headed to Washington D.C. These people, when they learned about the fate of the other airplanes, decided to attack the hijackers in control of the airplane even though doing so all but guaranteed their own deaths and those of the other innocent people in the plane with them.
About the courage and humanity of those people, I can think of nothing to say that might suffice to honor them as they deserve.
Next: Deterrence and Rationality II
See pp. 2-3, and Chapters 1,6,9.