Despite mutual desire to avoid all-out war, large powers can find themselves involved in a nonnuclear crisis that evolves into a nuclear one. Thus the 1973 Yom Kippur War—unlike the Cuban confrontation 11 years earlier—began not as a superpower nuclear power play but rather as a regional war over lost territory. The superpowers involved themselves when the United States sought a primary diplomatic role, and the Soviet Union—eager to reestablish influence in the region that had been lost when its prime client, Egypt, sundered their alliance relationship a year earlier—sought a military role as well as a diplomatic one.
The Soviet Union, smarting from having to back down in the face of overwhelming nuclear strategic superiority in the Cuban Missile Crisis, had vowed never to be caught in a similarly weak military position again. It accelerated over a quarter century of nuclear and conventional force buildup, as America, at least, partially pulled back. As its arsenal swelled, the Soviet Union became more aggressive in moving across the global geostrategic chessboard.
The second nuclear confrontation between the superpowers—in the Mediterranean in 1973 rather than the Atlantic in 1962—ended differently than did the first, in no small measure because in the interim the strategic superpower nuclear balance had changed. The eventual diplomatic compromise reached did not restore the Soviets to their former strong position, but spared them a replay of their humiliation of 1962.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War crisis confirmed a hard truth about a power’s perception of the strategic nuclear balance: the balance matters if any power in a major confrontation acts as if it does. For such action will have consequences that affect how a crisis unfolds and how it ends. The United States responded sharply to Soviet escalation and prevailed, because the Soviets had not attained the position Brezhnev foresaw he would attain in 1985. Yet thus fortified, albeit ultimately his prediction for the USSR proved the polar opposite of what transpired, Brezhnev acted more boldly than did Khrushchev over Cuba, at least in part because of the vast increase in the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
And superpowers’ actions can have long-lasting consequences beyond those envisioned at the outset, as was the case with the Suez Crisis of 1956. The failure of the U.S. to back its allies (Britain, France, and Israel) against a Soviet client (Egypt) triggered a series of disastrous events that unleashed both secular and religious hyper-aggressive tyrannies, waves of terrorism that spread globally, demoralization and thus weakening of key American allies, and independent nuclear proliferation by allies. The reverberations of Suez continue today, to the detriment of American ability to influence events in the Mideast.
Deterrence did eventually prevail during the Cold War. The massive uncertainties unavoidably attendant on launching a large-scale nuclear attack provided real-world deterrence far more credible than a deterrent threat to commit reciprocal suicide if attacked. Deterrence cannot reliably work against the truly insane, even those with small nuclear arsenals. What will be tested, should Iran go nuclear or Pakistan’s arsenal fall into jihadist hands, is whether fundamentalists can transcend their ideology and accept deterrence. It is a proposition imprudent to test if we can avoid it. Preventing fanatics from obtaining nuclear weapons beats relying on a calculus of deterrence.
There is a further danger in relying upon retaliatory deterrence alone: the potential for a terror state to engage in nuclear blackmail by proxy. A common fear among those who assess potential nuclear threats is that a terror state transfers several bombs to a terrorist group. The group sets off one bomb in a major American city. It then announces that there are bombs already placed in several other cities, and that if America retaliates against any suspect group or state, or if any nuclear search team approaches the hidden weapons, more bombs will instantly be detonated. It is far from clear that any American president would order nuclear retaliation under such circumstances.
Securing the existing global nuclear arsenal, and thus preventing sale, gift, or theft of nuclear weapons, necessarily entails nuclear-capable states cooperating and nuclear-aspirant states being denied access to nuclear status.
A constant companion to mythic pasts has been the fantasy future of rapidly moving towards a nuclear-free world. Some Manhattan Project scientists joined disarmers in the aftermath of the bomb’s use to end World War II. Ronald Reagan, to the consternation of Lady Thatcher, sought to strike such a bargain at the 1986 Reykjavik summit. His idea was checked only by Mikhail Gorbachev’s insistence that Reagan limit missile defense to the laboratory. Reagan refused, and the moment was gone. And Reagan, at least, hedged his offer by insisting on retaining a robust missile defense program, as a national security insurance policy against clandestine nuclear cheating.
The latest movement pushing for nuclear zero includes former senior national security officials who served American presidents over the past 40 years. In an article published as this book went to press, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft set eight criteria for moving to lower levels, in the process rejecting the idea leaked by the Obama administration for a rapid push to a U.S. nuclear arsenal of 300 weapons.
They argue for retaining sufficient, diversified forces; stronger verification; extending force reductions to the growing arsenals of proliferating powers; factoring in missile defense and conventional long-range strategic forces; sustaining alliance guarantees to discourage allies from proliferating; and avoiding the mirror-imaging trap of assuming our enemies share our values, and the perspective on nuclear weapons that our values encompass.
Their viewpoint is a more carefully framed position than that taken by those who wish to rapidly reduce America’s arsenal to 300. But two large problems face those following this gradualist prescription. First, until we know the size of China’s arsenal, and know more about sophisticated nuclear weapons that China and Russia are testing and deploying, we should not entertain further reductions. Second, the cause of rapid disarmament gains momentum from prestigious officials advocating it, and may lead to a stampede of popular opinion. Let a single nuclear weapon detonate anywhere, and the cause will pick up potentially irresistible momentum. Cautionary advocacy of gradual reductions could well fall by the wayside. What is needed is action to bring about positive regime change in hostile states and, if necessary, preventive action to delay nuclear club membership in aspirant hostile states in the interim.
Well-crafted arms agreements can contribute to strategic stability, if arms control is viewed as an essential foreign policy tool rather than an always-paramount goal—an inherently good end in itself. Establishment of hot-line channels of communication, arrangements guarding against accidental war, verifiable arms reductions, notification of maneuvers, and careful information sharing can all enhance security.
Yet we must “trust but verify.” The closer we move to nuclear-free status, the higher confidence we must have in our means of verification. And as verification will never imaginably be ironclad, we will need to hedge against nuclear surprise. This will require newer technologies that can provide superior means of detection, defense against, and disarming of nuclear cheaters. Such technologies must also be fully able to deter conventional and unconventional nonnuclear threats, to provide a full spectrum of national and global security.
A strategy based on past failures will itself fail, and a sufficiently serious failure in nuclear arms policy can destroy Western civilization. Between mythic pasts and fantasy futures lies the perilous present. Fundamentally, nuclear policy must be defensive in orientation: nuclear policy makers should resist reaching for the nuclear-zero stars, and instead concentrate on avoiding the nuclear Armageddon abyss. Unless the West changes policy soon, a Doomsday scenario looks increasingly likely.