Unthinkable, but Not Unusual

Of course the Pentagon has scenarios for nuking other countries. That’s what generals are supposed to do. When they aren’t fighting, they’re planning ahead to the next fight.

But if, as the 19th century Prussian military strategist Karl von Clausewitz observed, “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” then come the real questions: What is the political end the Bush administration is seeking? Will continuing on to war achieve that end?

So far, the Bush team is hanging tough, even though such military scenario-izing is scarifying to the world, and maybe destabilizing to some allies. The Nuclear Posture Review, revealed first in the Los Angeles Times, lays out hypothetical circumstances for nuclear strikes against China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Russia and Syria. But no doubt if those countries had a freer press, their war plans against the U.S. would be exposed too.

There’s nothing new about such war planning. The late Herman Kahn was one of many military think-tankers who made a career out of armchair-strategizing about deterrence and overkill. He published two books, “On Thermonuclear War” and “Thinking About the Unthinkable.” In one exercise, he outlined 44 levels of military escalation, from “ostensible crisis” to “barely nuclear war” to “justifiable counterforce attack.” So eager was Kahn for precision that he even half-seriously suggested the creation of a computer-controlled “doomsday machine” that would eliminate the unreliable human factor in nuclear war fighting.

Happily, the politicians never surrendered to such Strangelovian suggestions, preferring to keep a human finger hovering just above the nuclear button all through the Cold War. Perhaps the political class remembered that World War I started in part because politicians surrendered their authority to a simpler technology--the technology of railroad-based mobilization. The issue in 1914 was getting one’s troops to the frontier before the enemy. In those days, that meant relying on intricate but inflexible railway schedules to move men and materiel to the battle zone.

As the Oxford historian Niall Ferguson argues in his 1998 book, “The Pity of War: Explaining World War I,” war mobilization created its own war momentum. The Russian army, for example, knew that it would be the slowest to mobilize, so its generals wanted to be the first to mobilize. Indeed, once the order to gear up for war was made, the Russian chief of staff said that he would destroy his telephone so that he could not receive a countermanding order. And so, Ferguson wrote, “war by timetable” commenced, and 10 million men died.

Today, George W. Bush faces the challenge of sticking to his reported plan of removing Saddam Hussein even as he seeks to tamp down brush fires in Afghanistan and Israel.

Assuming for the moment that Bush succeeds in all three of these missions, longer-term questions will remain. Specifically, how will the rest of the world react to these latest usages and considered usages of American strength, both conventional and nuclear?

Put simply, countries facing an American threat, real or imagined, face a choice: They can plan to accommodate, or they can plan to retaliate. And as the same Nuclear Posture Review reveals, the potential threat to the U.S. goes beyond the countries on the nuclear hit list. In all, 12 other nations have nuclear weapons programs, 18 have ballistic missiles, 13 have biological weapons and 16 have chemical weapons. No doubt the U.S. would be better off if these programs disappeared, but the problem with war-strategizing and deadly weaponizing is that every military, worldwide, can get into the grim game.

In response, U.S. military planners will no doubt develop more scenarios, planning tit for tat. That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. In the words of Georges Clemenceau, who led France to a Pyrrhic victory in WWI: War is too important to be left to generals.

Thus the task for Bush: He must demonstrate to a skeptical world that plans for winning wars today are in fact a plan for keeping the peace tomorrow. If he fails, then, with apologies to Clausewitz, politics will continue on into war, and then on to still more war.

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James P. Pinkerton writes a column for Newsday in New York.