The End of Deterrence
Our country has seemed pretty belligerent this year. President Bush decreed an “axis of evil.” He loudly pronounced America’s right to bomb preemptively anywhere, anytime, if it’s in our interest. And his escalating rhetoric about a U.S. attack on Iraq hasn’t ebbed one bit since Saddam Hussein began saying he’d allow weapons inspectors in.
Perhaps fittingly, as I drink my coffee out on the patio and contemplate these events, I am sitting over a ‘50s-era bomb shelter, a multiroom reinforced concrete labyrinth with vents and hatches that sits under half of my backyard, a testament to the Cold War fears--and the wallet--of my home’s original owner.
In a way, the country’s tough new posture doesn’t strike me as news. Rather, it seems a natural progression of the last dozen years as we’ve drifted away from the doctrines of the Cold War into unfamiliar strategic territory. The old doctrines scared some people enough to build bomb shelters. But they were at least widely discussed, which made our government’s actions understandable, if not universally accepted.
Now the president tells us we are abandoning the doctrine of deterrence. This is happening without public dialogue. Part of this is a practical problem driven home by the sudden need to deal with the attacks of Sept. 11. How do we apply deterrence to a group like Al Qaeda, which has no geography to retaliate against? Part of it is more elusive. Why doesn’t deterrence, a doctrine we were comfortable applying against the Soviet Union, and currently apply against China, not apply to Iran, Iraq and North Korea, the three nations in our president’s axis?
In the history of recent centuries, deterrence was a novel concept. Up until the last half-century, almost every new weapon that was developed was tried out. For that matter, so were nuclear weapons. We were willing to use them--against Japan, with horrifying consequences--so long as there was no other nation that could use them to retaliate against us.
But once the Soviet Union broke our monopoly in 1949, the concept changed. Nuclear weapons were then useful more for the threat that they posed. With the possibility of Armageddon hanging, both the Soviet Union and the United States more or less restrained themselves. And we citizens didn’t have to think all that much about the abstract threat of near-instantaneous annihilation. Those who just couldn’t put it out of their minds built bomb shelters, like the one under my backyard.
When President Reagan proposed his Star Wars defense against Soviet nuclear weapons, it divided the public. People like me were against it because we thought it couldn’t actually stop hundreds of Soviet missiles. But many people were relieved to hear a proposed alternative--however unrealistic--to the inherently ghastly doctrine of mutually assured destruction.
The world was changing. In March 1989, while on assignment for PBS’ “MacNeil/Lehrer News- Hour,” I stood on the steps of Magyar Televizio in Budapest as 100,000 protesters surrounded it with a list of demands for more democracy--demands that Hungary’s then-communist government allowed to be broadcast that evening. It seemed inevitable to me then that the world would soon be a very different place. Eight months later, the Berlin Wall came down.
That summer I was hired by an august science documentary series to produce an hour on high-tech U.S. weaponry. It was partly to be a kind of pornography for nerds, with lots of things flying around blowing up stuff. For journalistic seriousness, there would be a question: Can we really control these weapons?
Yet as I researched the film, it seemed to me a bigger issue was at stake. Like our nuclear forces, these high-tech weapons--designed to defend West Germany from invasion by the Warsaw Pact--were never intended for use. NATO’s Follow-on Forces Attack doctrine held that these weapons would answer any invasion by attacking deep behind front lines with so-called smart conventional weapons. But in the casualty-averse 1980s, the emphasis was not on fighting but on scaring off any attack.
Then events overtook us again. Iraq invaded Kuwait. The whole world got a look at how well American high-tech weapons worked. It also got a look at the U.S. fear of casualties, when U.S. forces stopped short of a potentially bloody battle to capture Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein--a mission that this year suddenly seems to have priority. The year of the Gulf War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But many people in the so-called military industrial complex were strangely pensive in their moment of seeming triumph. I remember having brunch with a source, a nuclear weapons scientist, in Washington during the winter of 1992. He said to me: “Everyone criticizes nuclear weapons, Mitch. But I love nuclear weapons. They kept the peace in Europe for 40 years. Now what?”
As those of us who covered such issues in the early and mid-’90s soon found out, the fear was that nuclear materials were leaking out of the former Soviet Union to nations against whom deterrence might not work. “We call them the Crazy Seven,” my source told me, implying U.S. policymakers feared that leaders in these nations were too irrational to be deterred. In March 1994, the North Korean nuclear crisis broke when the Clinton administration could no longer ignore the possibility that North Korea was manufacturing nuclear weapons--or according to some in the CIA, had already made them.
Proliferation created a brief boom in plot lines for cheesy Tom Clancy-style action pictures. But there was little serious discussion about how we should proceed in this dramatically changed world. The abstract danger that the world would be destroyed in a nuclear Armageddon had been replaced by the more easily imagined likelihood that one or two bombs would eventually go off somewhere. And if the nations trying to get these weapons were deemed too irrational or unstable for deterrence to apply to them, then they had to be stopped. The problem was how, because the logical alternative to deterrence is fighting.
What kept things in check at first was fear of casualties. At the end of his administration, the first President Bush sent U.S. troops to Somalia. President Clinton pulled them out when 18 were killed in one day. And that set the tone of the decade: The U.S. military could be used anywhere in the world on any sort of assignment--unless it would result in American casualties.
Against this backdrop, in a late-’90s world where India and Pakistan were testing nuclear weapons and North Korea was sending test missiles over Japan, Star Wars came back as National Missile Defense. But defense was only half the response to our undeclared abandonment of deterrence. The other part, offense, was still held in check by U.S. policymakers--as evidenced in the 77-day war in Kosovo, fought by announcing in advance that U.S. casualties were unacceptable. Opinion polls showed that the administration seemed to fear casualties more than the public did.
In February 2001, a colleague and I were invited to the classified side of the Department of Energy to address a national security panel on the topic “Public Perceptions of Deterrence.” The assembled generals and admirals and nuclear weapons physicists wanted to know from us why the media were not covering the great strategic changes underway. Where was the public debate, or even consciousness of what was happening?
We told the generals and physicists that if they wanted more press coverage, some of them would have to publicly speak about what was going on. But, as it turned out, we were again overtaken by events.
Whether or not Sept. 11 changed the public’s tolerance for American military casualties, it changed politicians’ perceptions of that tolerance. With the fear gone, and no commonly accepted alternative to deterrence in place, the natural drift is to attack. And that’s the direction that the talk, at least, has been heading, with Bush stating that we must “be ready for preemptive action when necessary.”
That’s a pretty definitive renunciation of deterrence. And although it had been discussed around the policy table for more than a decade, it caught most of us by surprise--which is the most troubling aspect of it, given that in our society major issues are supposed to be widely discussed. It’s easy to blame the media for this omission. After all, an interview with Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard N. Perle, lead theorist of the “no deterrence” doctrine, doesn’t easily fit into a Barbara Walters pre-Oscar special. But finally, it’s up to all of us. Do we agree that preemptive attacks are the best way to deal with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction?
Whether this new approach will have wider success isn’t yet knowable. It is a doctrine, after all--an article of faith. We may have good reasons for what we decide to commonly believe, but in the end it cannot be proved. Previously, under deterrence, and so far, in this new place beyond deterrence, no nuclear weapons have been used against people. With luck, whatever doctrine we settle on, my bomb shelter won’t be much help to anyone.
