Deterrence: Its Past and Future—Papers Presented at Hoover Institution, November 2010

possible.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

James E. Goodby

[This is an introduction to themes of this book and an effort to collect in one narrative the policy issues that arise in connection with a study of deterrence. It draws extensively on the ideas in subsequent chapters, which are identified by the authors’ names, but is not intended to be a consensus document. It is the sole responsibility of the author.]

DURING MOST of the cold war years, nuclear weapons dominated international relations. They were central to the bipolar structure at the heart of the global order of that era. The United States and the Soviet Union were usually described as the nuclear armed superpowers. In their hands, quite literally, rested the fate of civilization, and this was perceived to be the case by people around the world. Recognition of what these weapons could do impelled the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union to work out rules of behavior, especially in Europe, where the confrontation was most intense. These rules, both formal and tacit, caused the two governments to establish a special relationship. This common knowledge was critical to maintaining peace through nuclear deterrence but it emerged only after several years of dangerous confrontations.

In chapter 1, George Quester and Patrick Morgan describe the history of deterrence from an American perspective and show how American policymakers faced the problem of how to use—or not use—the most destructive force humankind had ever invented. The solution eventually adopted was to link the potential use of the new weapon with the overarching strategic concept of containment. The threat of unleashing a nuclear war supported the strategy and it was credible because the stakes were very high. Nuclear weapons thus became the foundation for Washington’s efforts to contain the expansion of Soviet power and influence. So thoroughly did this idea permeate American thought that deterrence became broadly understood as the expectation that the United States would retaliate with nuclear weapons in the event of any kind of Soviet attack on the United States, its allies, or its interests anywhere in the world. NATO’s strategy was based on the manifest determination to use nuclear weapons if Soviet conventionally armed forces crossed the line between East and West in Europe. It was a very clear position, with bright red lines.

The Soviet Union also saw nuclear weapons as essential to its security and status in the world. And each nation from time to time also hoped that its nuclear arsenal might have the additional benefit of compelling other nations to act in ways that would be more responsive to its geopolitical aims, whether American or Soviet. These hopes for nuclear diplomacy were generally not fulfilled.

The impact that nuclear weapons had on American life from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, and even into the early 1980s, is hard to overstate. For several years, culminating in the 1960s, a fear of nuclear annihilation hung over the United States and much of the world, permeating daily life. All of that has changed. The popular fascination with nuclear weapons began to ebb even before these weapons declined in importance in the political world. The impact of nuclear weapons on political thought and cultural life is minimal today in the United States, except in historical terms. But as with all entrenched habits of thought, the practice of nuclear deterrence during the cold war became so ingrained in American strategic thinking that some basic patterns of behavior persist even today. Deterrence, whether nuclear or otherwise, is frequently the default answer to a wide variety of national security problems. To some extent, as Michael Mazarr and this author suggest in chapter 2, these habits of thought have inhibited fresh thinking.

Morgan and Quester note that security management in the United States and elsewhere continues to retain elements of the cold war approach to deterrence. They also stress that the direction of change in the theory and practice of deterrence is not foreordained. There could be a slow decline in the relevance of deterrence as conceived during cold war times; or there could be a revival of the traditional big power balance-of-power paradigm. In this case, major nations might try to maintain the capacity for assured destruction based on a balance of nuclear forces, although probably at levels far below those reached during the cold war. Technological innovations, of course, as well as the continuing diffusion of power and the effects of globalization will prompt national defense establishments to adapt to change in ways that are unforeseeable. One thing seems clear: the U.S.-Soviet experience was unique and is not likely to be replicated.

The international environment today is radically different from what it was during the cold war. Transnational coalitions of sub-state actors have threatened to break the monopoly of states on the large-scale use of force. Nihilistic terrorists offer their allegiance to no national government. In this respect they are re-creating the international system of medieval times. The most immediate security threats that great powers face do not derive from other great powers, as had usually been the case in the long history of the Westphalian system, in which nation-states became the basic actors in international relations, supported by an array of norms designed to uphold territorial integrity and non-interference in internal affairs.

Weak nations and terrorist groups successfully defying the will of powerful states represent one of the asymmetries that are so commonplace today in international security relationships. The deterrence paradigm does not work very well in such cases. Many threats are not military at all, but economic, as in the control of vital resources or the ability to damage international trade. Cyber attacks are an emerging new method of warfare that promises to be, at a minimum, disruptive, and very likely crippling in its effects.

In these circumstances, as Mazarr and this author argue, strategic thought must be jolted out of its familiar patterns. Military force should always be among the tools of statecraft but its use in deterrence mode is less relevant to today’s security threats. There is a pressing need to reassess the role of deterrence, in whatever form it may take, to fit the contours of the world as it now exists. Deterrence, including nuclear deterrence, will of course retain a prominent position in the American strategic posture but it must adapt to a future threat.

If deterrence means the threat of certain devastating punishment for transgressions, it already has become vaguer in its intentions and certainly less clearly defined for its political targets. Red lines are difficult to draw in a world less disciplined by a few big powers. Though threats to the security of the United States and other major nations are more numerous, they are less existential in character. Credible responses no longer rise to the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear deterrence is a tool that can be invaluable in a few cases, notably in deterring the use of nuclear weapons, but it does not have the central role that it had during the cold war.

Deterrence, even as a concept, will not be directly applicable in many of the threatening situations that the United States will face in the future. Indulging in the language of deterrence in cases where punishment cannot be carried out in any meaningful way—or would severely damage U.S. interests if it were attempted—undermines the credibility of American foreign policy. Looking at issues in a deterrent framework where other strategic approaches would be more productive diverts time and attention away from the realities of the issues being faced and the real solutions to them.

Most seriously, the common knowledge that the Soviet Union and the United States came to share during the cold war and which underpinned nuclear deterrence does not exist in many situations today. The attempted exercise of deterrence is likely to fall on deaf or uncomprehending ears. Mutual deterrence during the cold war, in fact, was a condition that satisfied the strategic needs of both of the prime protagonists. They were satisfied with the status quo and, each in its own way, wanted deterrence to work. The alternative was too grim to risk playing with fire. That condition often does not exist today. In fact, changing the status quo is an essential goal of countries like North Korea and Iran and incremental steps are their preferred method.

As Alexander George and Richard Smoke put it almost forty years ago in their book, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy, deterrence should be an integral part of a broader, multifaceted influence process. The case studies that Mazarr and this author present illustrate this point. They show that other tools of diplomacy, or bundled approaches, may serve as well or better than a resort to deterrence in a multifaceted influence process. The trick will be to ensure that one tool does not work against another.

Negotiations involving the control of armaments can be important in reducing nuclear dangers. This type of diplomacy, as well as conflict resolution, would be crucial in the transition from the current international security environment to one in which nuclear weapons and their role will be much reduced. To shift from an environment in which nuclear weaponry is seen as a source of strategic stability to one in which its role is greatly diminished will require carefully coordinated actions. A protracted effort involving many nations will be necessary.

In chapter 6, John McLaughlin, Edward Ifft, and James Acton examine some of the contemporary issues that arise in considering how to use arms control techniques in continuing the transition from a nuclear deterrence-dominated national security strategy to a strategy that is less dependent on nuclear weapons. They identify and discuss several categories of military hardware and capabilities for which rules of the road will be necessary among nations. These include virtual nuclear arsenals, ballistic missile defenses, offensively oriented missiles and aircraft, and conventional forces. Regional political settlements and security arrangements also come into play.

Virtual deterrence. The ability to produce nuclear weapons will exist even if deployed nuclear weapons are eliminated. This may provide a safeguard against breakout or cheating, but will also need to be subject to arms control constraints and monitoring.

Ballistic missile defenses. This is one of the categories of weapons that ultimately could facilitate a shift away from the strategic dominance of offensive nuclear forces as the principal deterrent against major security threats. One of the questions that will have to be decided at some point when the technology is more advanced is whether the objective of cooperative defenses should be limited to providing insurance against rogue states or terrorists. That appears to be the current U.S. plan. But defense dominance was the stated goal when the Reagan administration launched its Strategic Defense Initiative in 1983. The idea was that a heavy ballistic missile defense system would shift the advantage to the defense and make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. Deep reductions in offensive nuclear forces were to be part of the transition.

As President Reagan envisioned it, defense dominance would require close U.S.-Soviet collaboration in building ballistic missile defenses. Succeeding presidents also have endorsed such cooperation. Ballistic missile defense cooperation appears to be an essential part of a U.S.-Russian contribution to an effort to eliminate nuclear weapons. Recent NATO discussions and discussions with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are encouraging in that regard.

Nuclear delivery vehicles. As further background for this discussion, it is worth repeating here the points made in a paper written by David Holloway that appears in a previous book in the Hoover Institution series, Reykjavik Revisited: Steps Toward a World Free of Nuclear Weapons (Hoover Institution Press, 2008):

It will be very difficult to verify the numbers of non-deployed warheads. It is much easier to verify the number of delivery vehicles that could carry these warheads. . . . Limits on the number of launchers and delivery vehicles would help to restrict the capacity of either side to break out of an agreement by reconstituting its forces rapidly . . .

Although the Bush-Putin Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty of 2002 (SORT) contained no restrictions on such delivery systems, the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) of 2010 does limit ballistic missiles, their launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments.

Limits on conventional forces. Deterrence in the form of conventionally armed military forces, especially those of the technologically advanced nations, may substitute for nuclear deterrence. Although this is a promising possibility it raises the question of whether the elimination of nuclear weapons would make major conventional war more likely. Clearly a world without nuclear weapons will not be achieved in the absence of rules that affect conventional forces, as well as nuclear. And such rules will be at least as complicated as those that would regulate nuclear forces. The qualitative differences among the nations regarding equipment held by their respective military, naval, and air forces present difficulties in establishing equivalence.

Regional security arrangements. A global commitment to a world without nuclear weapons will necessarily involve regional, as well as global, arrangements. Agreements that are global in scope (regarding nuclear weapons, for example) might apply to the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, but not always to states in conflict-ridden regions, and vice versa. In the view of this writer, nuclear-free zones might be a better approach in regions where nuclear confrontations occur.

Conventional arms agreements would almost certainly accompany agreements on very deep nuclear reductions in several regions of the world. A conventional forces treaty, now in a state of suspension, already has been negotiated in Europe. Similar agreements very likely would have to be negotiated in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Western Pacific.

As was the case in Europe, confidence- and security-building measures may prove to be a necessary precursor to conventional arms limitations. Some of these already have been negotiated in the Middle East, South Asia, and Northeast Asia. A broader agenda, including political and economic issues, probably would be an integral part of the discussions.

Turning from the transitional process to a world with zero nuclear weapons to what such a world would look like, Sidney D. Drell and Raymond Jeanloz point out in chapter 3 that even then nuclear deterrence remains possible. After nuclear weapons have been disassembled or dismantled, they note, the knowledge of how to make them will remain. Indeed, it probably can never be driven out of the world. As they point out, even as this knowledge makes cheating on the agreement a danger, it also provides a means of responding: other nations, threatened by the cheater, can also rebuild their nuclear arsenals. To this end, an agreement might include the right to maintain elements of a nuclear-weapon infrastructure. Thus, even as nuclear weapons were eliminated a kind of deterrence—virtual deterrence—would remain in effect.

Each former nuclear-armed state will know that any other former nuclear-armed state will be able to reconstruct a small arsenal in weeks or months if disassembled components are retained. Even if nuclear weapon components were to be completely eliminated, a small arsenal of primitive weapons could be rebuilt over perhaps a year or more.

A responsive nuclear infrastructure would include not only the physical infrastructure but, perhaps even more important, the knowledge infrastructure in the form of highly skilled scientific and technical personnel. This infrastructure, of course, will become the focus of verification as agreements are put in place to reduce nuclear weapons to the range of hundreds around the world and it will remain so after nuclear weapons have been eliminated.

As Drell and Jeanloz stress, countries that cheat by building secret arsenals would also require an active surveillance program with direct access to and servicing of any concealed nuclear warhead, or components, in undeclared sites in order to maintain confidence in the effectiveness of such weapons; it is not feasible to sustain a concealed stockpile of effective and reliable nuclear weapons by passive means alone. Stockpile surveillance activities thus would become the target for international monitoring efforts in any verification system and would take on heightened importance in a world without nuclear weapons.

Perhaps the key political issue in making a world without nuclear weapons a global enterprise will be just how level the playing field may be as between formerly nuclear-armed states and those states that have, or may in the future build, advanced civil nuclear power programs. In the option where the elimination of nuclear warheads is defined as disassembling components but not destroying them, the playing field is tilted toward the former nuclear-weapon states. They can reassemble nuclear weapons, possibly in weeks, depending on whether key components have been retained. For states that have no experience in building nuclear weapons, the time lag is most likely a year or longer. Of course, even without a special right to retain infrastructure, former nuclear-weapon states would have a big head start over former nuclear-weaponless states.

As Drell and Jeanloz point out, legally, a world without nuclear weapons would have been achieved by disassembling warheads; technically, there would still be a significant two-tier system in place. The goal of eliminating nuclear warhead components would very likely be insisted upon by non-nuclear-weapon states. The less ambitious option will almost certainly be the first step into the post-nuclear weapons world, but it would be seen by most of the world as an interim step. Much discussion between the nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states will be necessary on this critical issue.

Analysis of a world free of nuclear weapons also raises the issue of stability, as Holloway writes in chapter 8. One aspect of this is the idea that major advantages can be derived from small increases in nuclear weapons capabilities when the world’s inventory of nuclear weapons is very small or non-existent; the same change has less impact when stockpiles are very large.

During the cold war practice of nuclear deterrence as between the Soviet Union and the United States, the physical existence of nuclear weapons was only the starting point for the process of reinforcing strategic stability. Common knowledge—shared understandings about the consequences of failure to observe certain rules of behavior—is an essential part of deterrence. The terms of the deterrent bargain were clear to both sides and it came close to breaking down only when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev began to act autonomously in Cuba and Berlin.

These same considerations would apply in a world where nuclear deterrence was based on reconstitution capabilities. Just as it took Moscow and Washington some years to work out their explicit and tacit bargains, so it would take several years for them and for other nations involved to work out the ground rules for a stable relationship. If anything, the task should be somewhat easier in a world moving away from the specter of instant incineration than in the danger years of the early cold war confrontation.

As Christopher Ford points out in chapter 4, on reconstitution, far from being a disadvantage, the common knowledge that reconstitution is an available option for any formerly nuclear-armed state is itself a deterrent against an attempt at unilateral breakout. History shows that deterrence of any kind is not a fail-safe tool of state policy. A nation could decide that its national interests would be well served by a first strike—a surprise attack—aimed at achieving an irreversible advantage over an adversary. Any system of deterrence is vulnerable to catastrophic failure in just this way. In a world without assembled nuclear weapons, the deterrent requirement would be to convince any conceivable adversary that a retaliatory strike of comparable force, or greater, will be inevitable if a surprise attack were ever attempted.

Ford stresses that there will be many challenges in sustaining weaponless deterrence. Precautions should be taken to ensure that reconstitution capabilities are adequate and are seen to be so by other countries. Preemption or preventive war has been cited as a threat to reconstitution. It will also be a deterrent against illicit reconstitution. Hardened nuclear facilities and effective non-nuclear military forces that can deter through their own quite visible capacity to retaliate presumably will be retained by former nuclear-weapon states.

Would this enhance stability or lead to a reconstitution arms race? It could go either way, and that is why an active diplomacy is so critical in the transition from a grand strategy in which nuclear deterrence is the centerpiece to a strategy in which deterrence plays a lesser role. It should not be so difficult, having made the long march from where the world is now to where the world ought to be, to create rules that would regulate and constrain activities that bear directly on the reconstruction of nuclear arsenals. The use of nuclear deterrence to reinforce an international order created to allow the elimination of nuclear weapons is obviously paradoxical and counter-intuitive. But in such a world the Reagan-Gorbachev conclusion that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought would have more time to sink in. In chapter 5 on maximizing decision time for national leaders, Ford argues that more should be done now to configure nuclear forces so as to reduce the incentives for exercising launch-on-warning options. He calls for ballistic missiles defenses and greater survivability for command, control, communications, and intelligence systems.

Holloway in chapter 8 and Ifft in chapter 7 analyze the political bases for any successful program to reduce nuclear dangers while maintaining effective deterrence against cheating. Fundamentally, governance within the international system is the key question. There are two facets to it: first, the systems of governance put in place to manage the international regulation of armaments should contribute to the growth of mutual confidence; second, there will have to be significant improvements in the geopolitical environment before a world without nuclear weapons can be achieved.

Whether mutual confidence really is felt will depend on compliance and how it is enforced. Who makes decisions about compliance is a complex issue. Many compliance issues are ambiguous, requiring fine judgments and technical precision. Very likely, new organizations would be established to deal with the verification process in moving to zero nuclear warheads.

In the end, the question of enforcing compliance will determine the success of a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons on a global basis. This may prove to be a judicious mix of national countervailing actions to negate the effects of illicit activity and international sanctions or military operations of various kinds.

A consideration that is fundamental here is effective use of warning time. Holloway underscores the crucial importance of the warning/response nexus. If detection of illicit activities is provided early enough, several types of actions could be taken. Absent early warning, the options would be very limited.

Holloway suggests that the concept of strategic stability should be broadened. He argues that it should now take much more explicit account of political factors and of the causes of potential conflict. He believes that the concept should include the overall state of the political relationship and the capacity of countries like Russia and the United States to manage any conflicts of interest that might arise between them.

This will be the key to successful governance of the international system. Institutional arrangements will emerge over the years to serve the needs of nations embarked on the quest to enter and stay in the post-nuclear-weapons era. But the fundamental requirement will be a conviction that cooperation with the other countries is in the national interest of all those engaged in the nuclear reductions enterprise. The spirit required for that has appeared only rarely in the past, the short-lived Concert of Europe being the best known example. But this is why former Secretary of State George P. Shultz depicted the coming years as The Age of Diplomacy.

As the nation that was in the vanguard of the nuclear era, perhaps the United States should have been the first to contemplate its end. And this has happened in the United States, more so perhaps than in other nuclear-weapon states. There are no settled answers to the policy issues raised in this introduction. Debate about many of them has hardly begun. This book is intended to contribute to the necessary dialogue that may, in time, lead to a consensus that a world without nuclear weapons is a practical enterprise among nations.

C H A P T E R  1

How History and the Geopolitical Context Shape Deterrence

Patrick Morgan and George Quester

DETERRENCE WAS a well-known practice in international politics long before the twentieth century. It began to take on elements of what was to become cold war deterrence long before the cold war appeared, and thus before the appearance of nuclear weapons. Efforts to develop a robust theory of deterrence early in the cold war led to treating it as an abstract phenomenon, basically the same everywhere. In this paper we highlight ways deterrence has been shaped by surrounding conditions and circumstances. We also note how a way of practicing deterrence can become deeply rooted, making it difficult to change or eliminate.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1945 nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed quickly by the Japanese surrender ending World War II, it was hardly surprising that many analysts saw nuclear weapons as setting up something qualitatively new and different in the role of weapons: deterrence. Bernard Brodie’s book, The Absolute Weapon,1 written directly after Hiroshima and published early in 1946, has been quoted many times since on his prediction: Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.

The basis of deterrence was of course the painful punishment that faced the launcher of a war. Glenn Snyder later offered a more elaborate distinction, in his 1961 book Deterrence and Defense,2 between deterrence by denial (the military manner in which aggressions had been deterred in the past, by the prospect that an aggressive attack would be rebuffed so that it would be foolish to initiate one) and deterrence by punishment (the new mechanism by which, even if an aggressive attack could succeed militarily, the loser could inflict retaliatory punishment as a last gasp on the cities of the winner).

But most observers, when referring to deterrence after 1945, had indeed been focusing on what Snyder outlined as deterrence by punishment. The invention of nuclear weapons, which could deliver tremendous destruction in a very small package slipped past enemy forces by airplane, missile, or submarine, presumably made all the difference. Deterrence was thus a concept discussed much more often after 1945, especially after 1949 when the Soviets detonated their own atomic bomb and Americans had now to be concerned about mutual deterrence.

Yet it is important to note that the word and the concept had existed before 1945, amid experiences that seem like a dress rehearsal for what we lived with in the cold war and which might offer important lessons on future deterrence. And for the non-nuclear world which existed before 1945 (and for any non-nuclear world we may have in the future) such deterrence also depended heavily on anticipations of pain and punishment. Even today, when North Korea threatens Seoul with conventional attack, or Hezbollah similarly threatens Israeli cities, the deterrent impact is what the targeting jargon labels counter-value, the punishment of civilians.

Pre-nuclear deterrence

Important earlier examples can be found in the thinking about conventional aerial bombardment that emerged during (and even before) World War I, then in the years between the world wars, and during the escalation of aerial bombing in World War II when the great majority of strategic planners knew nothing about nuclear weapons.

The actual experience of aerial bombing in World War I, as shown in photographs, seems very minor and quaint to a world that has experienced the destruction of Coventry, Hamburg, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. The photos sometimes show the horrible destruction inflicted by a Zeppelin attack as one or two flattened units in a row of London townhouses, looking like the missing teeth in a young child.

But the public reaction to the World War I bombings often verged on panic, and future air war was expected to be waged with bigger bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas.3 The predictions—in the plans of British air marshals like Hugh Trenchard, in the derivative publications of Giulio Douhet in Italy,4 and from a host of other writers in the 1920s and 1930s—presumed the existence of the destructive equivalent of 1945 atomic bombs, causing populations perhaps to be ready to surrender after such attacks, or causing governments to hold back some of such attacks for fear of matching retaliation.

Actually, the public in London bore up much better under the massive 1940 Blitz than it had under the German Zeppelin and winged bomber attacks of 1914–1918, as the British government had over-estimated how many hospital beds it would need for an air assault by an order of magnitude.5 But, if the reality before Hiroshima did not support what Brodie and others projected for the deterrent impact of nuclear weapons, the important point is that the assumptions guiding planners before 1941 often came close.

Immediately after World War I, planners in the Royal Air Force had also speculated extensively about using air control retaliatory bombings on insurgent native villages as a means of asserting political control over colonial territories, ideas tested in British Somaliland and in the Northwest Frontier regions of today’s Pakistan. The practice of deterrence here was thus not limited to symmetrical confrontations where each side possessed an air force, but could be especially plausible where the weaker side had no means of parallel retaliation.6

To see how the somewhat premature assumptions about air-delivered mass destruction were circulated, and not only among nongovernment theorists, one must look closely at the initial phases of World War II, or of World War I, to find the German and British governments avoiding aerial bombing campaigns for fear of responses in kind.

The outbreak of World War II saw the Royal Air Force stringently restricted on the targets it could attack, with one target-set ruled off limits simply because it entailed private property. Even after the fall of France and the initiation of the Luftwaffe attack on Britain, Hitler initially imposed a strict ban on bombing British cities in favor of RAF air bases as the major target. This German emphasis on a counterforce attack could be explained as seizing the apparent opportunity to defeat the RAF and open Britain up for an amphibious invasion. But Hitler’s orders also stemmed from a great aversion to seeing German cities bombed, based on the pessimistic assumptions of the 1930s as to what such bombings would do to civilian life and morale.7

The eventual escalations to the all-out bombings of cities we remember are typically blamed on the Nazi dictator, but a close reading of the escalation sequence suggests that Winston Churchill made more of the key decisions. The mutual deterrence that makes limited war possible failed in World War II, but it is easy to forget that it held for almost a year because of each side’s somewhat exaggerated view of how bad unlimited air war would be.

Even earlier, at the outset of World War I, the German Navy saw some opportunities to hurt Britain if Zeppelin airships were allowed to attack British cities. The Kaiser held back permission for a lengthy period, in part because Buckingham Palace, former home of his grandmother Queen Victoria, might be damaged and in part because similar attacks might be directed against the western cities of Germany. To repeat, we may think of the damage that might be inflicted by World War I airships or airplanes as quaint and trivial, but it was not seen this way by civilians under attack at the time. The air attacks of World War II dwarfed by orders of magnitude those of World War I, and were in turn dwarfed by the nuclear and thermonuclear weapons which set the stage for interesting developments in deterrence theory.

Pre-World War I theories

Even before World War I, we find examples of futuristic speculation about weapons of mass destruction. H.G. Wells is often credited with predicting nuclear weapons in 1914 in his book The World Set Free,8 predicting bombs based on nuclear reactions and claiming that their massive destructiveness would drive the world to maintain peace. While physicists could dismiss this book as one of Wells’s science-fiction products offering just a very general hunch about what real science had in store, it is interesting to explore what Wells saw as the deterring strategic implications of huge bombs delivered by air.

Even earlier Alfred Nobel, when moving to endow the Nobel Peace Prize in 1890, foresaw that the explosive power in dynamite would soon be dwarfed by huge expansions of destructive power and predicted that this growing capability for mass destruction would make war impossible by deterring it: Let the sword of Damocles hang over every head and you will witness a miracle. War will instantly stop.9

Maritime deterrence

Leaving aside destruction delivered by air, a parallel discussion of deterrence occurred in the British debates about the uses of naval power. All Britishers agreed it was essential that the British fleet be able to repulse any foreign navy, and even to be able to destroy any hostile fleet. Amid the tremendous growth in international trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, British analysts were more than a little divided on how much British naval power should target commercial ships in a future war. Some British liberals felt that trade should never be attacked, as this would needlessly increase civilian suffering and the general pain of war.10 Foreign governments, including importantly the United States, pressed continually for protection for neutral shipping in a war.

But the analysts planning future applications of naval power were much on guard against any such restrictions on what could be attacked, because the navy was not just for preventing invasions across the English Channel (in what would in the cold war be called defense or deterrence by denial) but was also for forcing concessions from other states by interfering with their trade (what we would today call deterrence by punishment or simply deterrence).

The growth of and consequent dependence on trade to maintain prosperity had thus made the world’s seaports and their hinterlands as vulnerable to sudden inflictions of suffering as by the bombers of the next century. And inflicting suffering had been identified as a crucial focus of military power.

This is illustrated quite well in the argument against restraints on British naval options put forward in 1911 by Sir Julian Corbett, who argued that exempting foreign trade from attack would eliminate the great deterrent to adversary behavior.11 To appease British moral feelings, Corbett chose to approvingly quote at length writings by a Prussian General, Von der Goltz, about land warfare. Von der Goltz had noted, After shattering the hostile main army, we will still have the forcing of a peace as a separate, and in certain circumstances, a more difficult task . . . to make the enemy’s country feel the burdens of war with such weight that the desire for peace will prevail;12 (i.e., even if you defeat an opposing army, opposing civilians might insolently refuse to obey your orders unless you are free to punish these civilians). Corbett’s lessons are that it is crucial for the British Navy to be able to defeat its naval opponents, but it must then be free to do more, to harass enemy commerce and coastal cities.

Deterrence in law enforcement

Thus concepts of deterrence emerged without nuclear weapons. But what is shared with the cold war pattern of discussions about nuclear deterrence is the necessity of painful punishment. An analogy to domestic law enforcement emerges in explanations as to why criminals have to be imprisoned. In a case of murder, one simply defends ordinary people by locking up the criminal. But why imprison an embezzler? Once he has been convicted, surely no one will trust him with their funds. The purpose of imprisonment here is not simple defense, but punishment, warning other potential embezzlers that they face a drastic worsening of their quality of life if caught committing a similar crime.

Continuing geopolitical problems

In discussions of the geopolitical nature of strategic problems, one encounters a wide range of meanings attached to geopolitics. At times, this simply refers to a general need to know something about geography when developing a military strategy in pursuit of national interests. More narrowly and precisely, as developed by Halford Mackinder13 and others, it is an emphasis on how the continents are shaped in relation to the oceans.

By this narrower definition, throughout the nineteenth century Britain faced the problems of what its diplomats and military planners had styled the great game, as Imperial Russia was seen as having an inherent advantage in conventional military power because of its central location on the Eurasian continent. From this central position, once railroads or other transportation routes were enhanced, the Tsar’s forces could strike in any direction, toward Korea and Japan, or into China, or toward India or Turkey, or toward Scandinavia, etc., with the seaborne forces of the British Empire hard-pressed to race around to counter the thrusts. The military advantage of holding the central position on this very valuable continent might, in the worrisome view of Mackinder and British government planners, allow Russia to dominate all the resources of the Eurasian continent and then to threaten Britain itself.

While Alfred T. Mahan14 (also a geopolitician because of his emphasis on the global geography of where salt water and the continents meet) had seen naval power as offering Britain inherent advantages, Mackinder rebutted this by seeing the inherent advantage in conventional warfare as going to whomever, from St. Petersburg, or later from Moscow, controlled the central position on the world’s largest continent.

By this interpretation, in the cold war the United States inherited the burdens of the great game from Britain. Given the Soviets’ (and their satellites’) central position, the opposing alliance might need even larger armies to hold back those unpredictable thrusts, a task that might impoverish the West. The alternative adopted after 1945 was thus extended nuclear deterrence, deterring conventional aggressions not by expensive defenses (denial) but by the prospect of escalation to punishment.

In the long British contemplation of the uses of sea power, there is a fascinating parallel to this Eurasian problem in British concerns about another potential adversary in the central position in another continent. The United States was—at least until 1900—intent on liberating Canada and pushing British influence out of Central America and the Caribbean.

The favorite British solution for the security of Canada would have been that the Canadians reinforce their local defenses, just as the favorite American solution for Western European security in the cold war was sometimes that NATO enhance its conventional defenses. But the Canadians often defaulted on whatever they had promised London, just as NATO later often defaulted on its promises to Washington.15

For the protection of NATO members during the cold war, the fallback was repeatedly the reliance on flexible response threats of nuclear escalation. For British concerns about Canada’s security, the fallback was the British Navy’s capability for harassing American commerce and attacking American coastal cities.

Just as nuclear attacks on Moscow and Leningrad would not have stopped Soviet tanks from occupying all of continental Western Europe, British naval attacks along the lines of the 1814 burning of Washington, D.C., would not have stopped American forces from occupying all of Canada. But the threat of such punishment could work to stop the American ground forces’ potential from being exploited.

Thus if Corbett and others were ready to speculate about the deterrent impact of British naval power, given how much the world relied on oceanic trade and how many of the world’s cities were on the oceans, there were real enemies, from the British point of view, that needed to be deterred.

If the United States inherited the great game after 1945, two grand factors came together to strongly shape our cold war thinking. One was the new availability of an extremely potent form of mass destruction. The other was the geopolitical problem that, except for the atomic bomb, would have given Moscow enormous advantages in conventional military capabilities.

Confusions in problems of morality

All discussions of alternative uses of military force or alternative versions of deterrence have therefore had to confront some fundamental concepts of Western morality, by which targeting civilians directly is immoral and collateral damage is to be minimized, not maximized.16 In today’s jargon, counterforce targeting has been legitimate and appropriate while counter-value targeting contradicts our morality. One result, as with the Corbett example, is that such a counter-value emphasis on imposing suffering is typically imputed first to others. Another result, confusing much strategic analysis, is that target planners are called upon to pretend to be seeking military targets, i.e. counterforce targets. (Any pain that is inflicted—any counter-value impact, that is—will be labeled inadvertent