Despite the clear lessons offered by this history, many have embraced mythic pasts. According to these myths, the threat of extinction posed by an all-out nuclear arms race is sufficient to create a fundamental commonality of interest in mutual survival. Thus patient diplomacy can bring about a nuclear-zero world in which we “end the nuclear nightmare” once and for all. The genie can, in this view, be put back into the bottle after all. There is no serious evidence to support this view. A companion myth is one of benevolent world government, though even a cursory look at the United Nations shows how chimerical such a vision is in real life.
For those who harbor such beliefs, arms control has become a doctrine that transcends geopolitics. Like all utopian beliefs, it is based upon revelatory rather than empirical truth and is thus beyond refutation by concrete evidence in the form of actual events. Arms treaties are inviolate, leading supporters to deny or minimize violations, lest they lead to abandonment of the treaty. Each treaty stands as a step towards nuclear zero. There can be no steps backward on this path. There are, in this view, no undetectable clandestine caches, nor implacable enemies.
Arms-control doctrine further holds that nuclear war is unthinkable because “a nuclear war cannot be won,” and that if somehow a nuclear war starts, the use of even one weapon will inevitably lead to all-out nuclear exchanges. Thus only a truly insane leader could even seriously contemplate starting a nuclear war. And thus the concept of “nuclear superiority” is meaningless, because there can be no winner in a nuclear confrontation. Nuclear weapons are unusable, except to support “mutual assured destruction” as a deterrent to their ever being used. International institutions acting in accord with “world opinion” can mediate seemingly intractable differences between nations. And in saving the human race from mass self-destruction, geopolitics can be redeemed.
But such beliefs presume that our adversaries share our core civilizational values. They do not. These values are scorned by the likes of North Korea’s blinkered Stalinist dictatorship, attempting to use its nuclear bombs for blackmail and to expand international commerce with aspiring rogue nuclear powers. They are scorned by atavist Islamists seeking to seize power in Pakistan so as to gain control over its growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, already about 100 bombs. And they are scorned by the fanatical revolutionary clerics ruling Iran, who might well use nuclear blackmail to undermine the existing world order, starting in the oil-rich and turbulent Mideast. We continually imagine moderates in governments where they are a scarce commodity at best and an extinct species at worst.
During the Cold War doves imagined that each new Soviet leader might prove to be one who would liberalize the system and reach peaceful coexistence. When former KGB chief Yuri Andropov ascended to power upon the death of Leonid Brezhnev, for example, rumors promptly surfaced that Andropov, architect of the bloody suppression of the Hungarian revolt, was a closet liberal who liked scotch and jazz. In fact he liked neither, nor anything else Western and liberal.
Stir into this poisonous nuclear geopolitical brew a Russia that is a stagnant petrostate, consuming its natural resources as its population dies off at a younger average age by the year. Add a China that is determined to vault to preeminence on the world stage, restoring its long-lost greatness via economic primacy and cyber-dominance coupled with regional military intimidation. While neither Russia nor China is a plausible candidate to initiate nuclear war, any shift in the nuclear balance in their favor could alter their behavior during a major crisis, as happened with the former Soviet Union during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
We would do well under the circumstances to recall the words of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, speaking on the Senate floor about the Reagan administration’s response to the December 1981 Soviet crackdown in Poland: “We court great danger when we invite the contempt of totalitarians.”
If a powerful America is often the object of anger and resentment, it is also feared. But a weak America, far from engendering sympathy, will earn the contempt of allies and adversaries alike. Allies will seek alternative arrangements—including their own nuclear weapons—to secure their position. Enemies will plot potentially lethal trouble. Further, “setting an example” by our own steep arms reductions will not reassure smaller powers like India and Pakistan, who feel threatened and lack a superpower guarantor they trust.
A weak England and France invited Hitler’s contempt, and got World War II. A weak Depression-era America invited Japan’s contempt, and got Pearl Harbor. A weak JFK invited Nikita Khrushchev’s contempt at the Vienna Summit, and got the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis. A weak Jimmy Carter invited the Ayatollah Khomeini’s contempt, and got the 1979 hostage seizure. Ronald Reagan’s failure to respond to the 1983 Marine barracks bombing, and his efforts to negotiate the release of hostages, invited contempt, and got an upsurge in hostage taking and terrorism across the Mideast (while his bombing of Qaddafi in 1986 restored a measure of respect). George H. W. Bush’s failure to answer the Pan Am 103 bombing, and his failure to cap Desert Storm by finishing off Saddam Hussein, invited al-Qaeda’s contempt. So did Bill Clinton’s hasty departure from Somalia, and his serial failures to respond to escalating terror attacks by al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden saw himself as the strong horse and his adversaries as weak horses. The upshot was a series of attacks, culminating in the atrocities of September 11, 2001.
George W. Bush’s failure to respond forcefully to Syrian and Iranian roles in killing U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan invited Iran’s contempt, as had earlier failures of his predecessors to respond. Iran paid us back in the cruel coinage of American soldiers slain and maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan, by Iranian munitions (some Russian made) supplied to Islamist terrorists.
The threat from fanatics is only partially distinct from that posed by the clinically insane. Fanaticism is often considered a synonym for insanity in Western societies, whose people feel that no “rational person” would contemplate nuclear use. Thus anyone who does contemplate it is deemed insane. True, Hitler was both a fanatic and insane, but not all fanatics are like him. And “rational” people can commit supremely irrational—even insane—acts.
Because we are limited in our ability to see inside the human mind and precisely pinpoint who is crazy and who is a fanatic, we should instead focus on the more prosaic task of inferring intent from action. Where, as with Iran and North Korea, a pattern of activity indicates a penchant for risk taking and gambling, we should expect more of the same. Nor can we reasonably expect anything from negotiations with fanatics whom we cannot coerce at gunpoint. Such adversaries will repudiate voluntary commitments as long as they remain in power.
In 1962 one leader—Fidel Castro, a fanatical Marxist revolutionary—apparently did indeed contemplate an all-out nuclear war, even knowing it would obliterate his own island and captive subjects. His masters in Moscow thought better of the plan, and Nikita Khrushchev instead labored with President Kennedy to pull the superpowers back from the nuclear precipice. Many people do not regard Castro as insane; to the contrary, he remains widely lionized, despite ruling a country he has utterly impoverished. Thus can fanaticism and widely perceived rationality be joined in a leader who desires to use nuclear weapons.