A Dangerous World?: Threat Perception and U.S. National Security

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Introduction

In February 2012, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained, I can’t impress upon you that in my personal military judgment, formed over 38 years, we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime, right now.¹ He was born in 1952. In 2013, he upped the ante: I will personally attest to the fact that [the world is] more dangerous than it has ever been.²

He is scarcely alone—or unusual. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, born in 1941, has testified that he has never experienced a time when we’ve been beset by more crises and threats around the globe.³ Sen. Lindsey Graham, born in 1955, explains, I’ve never seen the world more dangerous than it is now.⁴ From his perch on two congressional committees tasked with keeping Americans safe, Rep. Michael Turner, born in 1960, proclaims, The security environment is more dangerous and more uncertain than ever before.⁵ Sen. Jim Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, says he is unable to recall a time in my life where the world has been more dangerous and the threats more diverse.⁶ His Senate colleague, John McCain, born, like Inhofe, before World War II, agrees, The world is a more dangerous place than I have seen, and quietly adds the proviso in many respects.⁷

Such extravagant proclamations occasionally do generate some pushback.⁸ And a few systematic efforts emerged to examine and to warn against the dangers of threat inflation.⁹ However, for the most part, the alarmist pronouncements go rather blandly accepted and uncountered. The Defense Department’s Threat Reduction Agency never seems to come out with reports observing that there may not be, actually, all that many threats out there to reduce.

One could say that fear and anxiety are baked into our DNA. Our distant ancestors correctly perceived that a four-legged creature charging at them from a distance might be dangerous, and they were impelled by such emotions either to flee or to defend themselves. Thus, they lived to procreate. But getting the threats right is important. Unnecessary and excessive fear can be harmful to health and emotional well-being. Indeed, fully 18 percent of Americans already suffer from at least one form of anxiety disorder.¹⁰ Individual liberty can be threatened as well. Thus, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, James Madison noted what he called a universal truth: The loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger real or pretended from abroad.¹¹ Or, as noted writer and social critic H. L. Mencken acerbically declared, The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.¹²

The unkind might be inclined to suggest that General Dempsey and the many politicians and administrators who agree with his alarmism are motivated by political or institutional self-interest. However, it is highly important to evaluate their proclamations carefully. Do we live in a world that is uniquely or especially dangerous? From wars between states to wars within them, from crime and terrorism to climate change and cybermischief, we are beset by a seemingly endless array of threats and dangers. But is it possible that there is something to Mencken’s quip? Are many or most of the threats so prominently espied and promoted imaginary? This book seeks to carry out that task of evaluation.

The contributors ask to what degree, if any, the United States is actually threatened. Most of them argue that—from the standpoint of American national security—the world is safe and growing safer and that Americans enjoy a measure of security that our ancestors would envy and that many of our contemporaries do envy.

They approach that question from different angles, considering both the multiplicity of supposed threats and the wisdom or folly of the measures proposed to deal with them. They seek to put today’s perceived threats and dangers in full context and consider as well those that no longer loom. Together, they chip away at the common perception that U.S. national security is severely threatened and getting worse.¹³

The book begins with the two chapters about nuclear weapons. It examines fears that such weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists or other nonstate actors—or that ever more countries will acquire them.

In his chapter, Francis Gavin shows that such fears are not new and muses over the paradox that, although the threat of nuclear catastrophe has decreased enormously, alarmism about nuclear weapons persists. Some of this alarmism, he suggests, has been impelled by the fact that the United States has been concerned that the proliferation of such weapons might limit its own ambitions. He hopes that a better understanding of the history surrounding the weapons—including the impact that they have had on international relations—might produce better policy and calm public and official fears.

John Mueller agrees. Fears of rampant nuclear proliferation ignore the fact that most countries have never seriously aspired to possess such weapons, as well as that those countries that have taken them on have found them to be more trouble than they are worth. Moreover, the effects of the proliferation that has taken place have been substantially benign: possessors have used the weapons simply to stoke their egos and to deter real or imagined threats. However, aggressive attempts to stop proliferation have resulted in the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, terrorist and other nonstate actors have exhibited only limited desire to attain a nuclear capacity, and they will confront monumental difficulties if they try to do so.

For many, the single greatest state-based threat emanates from China—a country of sufficient size and potential wealth to directly challenge the United States in the future. Lyle Goldstein is sensitive to such concerns, and he considers some of the specifics of China’s military modernization, as well as the potential geopolitical flashpoints that could, in worst-case scenarios, lead to war. On balance, Goldstein suggests that U.S. policymakers’ reaction to China’s emergence as a global threat is premature and may prove counterproductive. Rather than seeking excuses to contain China’s rise on the assumption that such a rise will inevitably lead to conflict, Goldstein urges the United States instead to exploit opportunities for collaboration and cooperation. Any actual threat from China is minimal, he argues. Although there are insecurities and problems, China is neither out to attack the United States nor out to conquer East Asia, and any risks can be mitigated quite easily with appropriate hedging policies. Indeed, to the extent that legitimate dangers exist in the world, the two countries have many reasons to work together to reduce or eliminate them.

Three chapters consider nonstate and substate threats around the world including terrorism, insurgency, revolution, rebellion, crime, and general disorder.

Paul Pillar observes that these threats pale in comparison to traditional state threats, and he urges readers to reexamine their preconceived notions of what is required to keep the United States both safe and free. He voices dismay at the tendency to espy monsters abroad and then to conceive of America’s place in the world largely as one of confrontation against them. Noting a disconnect between how much alarm substate conflicts abroad often generate and how much danger they actually pose to U.S. interests, Pillar examines three varieties: the potential overthrow of a friendly regime, direct threats to the United States by substate groups, and trouble stemming from internal disorder itself. He cautions that the capacity of the United States to curb substate conflict is usually very limited and that intervention can often prove to be counterproductive or otherwise damaging.

Austin Long notes that concerns about a range of substate actors—rebels, terrorists, and bandits—are not new. However, in the aftermath of 9/11, the United States has greatly overestimated the threat they pose and has worked harder, not smarter to combat them. Although some new technologies enable substate actors to pose a greater threat than in the past, it is hardly an existential one. Moreover, technology actually affords crucial advantages to states if it is used wisely.

Peter Andreas questions whether crime poses a greater threat today than in the past because of the far-reaching effects of globalization. Individuals with nefarious intentions have always been adept at exploiting new technologies, advances in communications, increases in ease of travel, and enhanced access to information, but it is not clear that new technologies allow criminals to do harm on a greater scale than before. Moreover, police and other law enforcement officials, then and now, can use these same technologies to defeat the criminals. Furthermore, criminals have strong incentive to remain separate and disconnected, and accordingly they are unlikely to band together and thereby create a substantial security threat. They scarcely pose a power shift, notes Andreas, in which they are overpowering and bypassing states.

Four chapters examine nontraditional security threats.

Numerous U.S. officials have warned that cyberattacks, perpetrated by either state or nonstate actors, are the single greatest threat to U.S. national security—even, according to some, to the world system. Martin Libicki considers these claims. He finds that, although hackers and criminals are adept at exploiting the vulnerabilities in computer networks, remarkably few attacks have been effective. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to carry out an attack that has far-reaching consequences. The most probable attacks, in fact, would be more like a crime than a national security event, inflicting relatively low economic costs and few, if any, casualties. Libicki advises policymakers to focus on appropriate responses to possible attacks because poorly conceived, badly executed, and overreactive policies might cause more harm than the precipitating incident. It is also important to track possible cyberattacks to their true source, thus ensuring that punishment or retaliation is visited on the correct perpetrators.

Others worry about the national security risks posed by climate change. Mark Stewart considers those risks in context. Although the potential effects of climate change—including melting polar ice, rising sea levels, and other weather and environmental effects—could have national security implications, these effects will occur gradually, giving the United States ample time to adapt. Stewart assesses the likely costs of such adaptation strategies and concludes that they are modest relative to those imposed by traditional security threats.

In their chapters, Michael Cohen and Stephanie Rugolo agree that threats from abroad to U.S. security are low and declining. However, broadening the approach to security used in most of this book, they come to different conclusions about threats to human security in the United States that arise from domestic concerns. Cohen argues that, particularly in comparison with other developed countries, the United States is falling behind in such human security areas as health care, infrastructure, education, and income inequality. Together, he argues, these constitute risks to its long-term national security. Rugolo disagrees. Drawing on data compiled at the website HumanProgress.org, she documents the many ways in which the health, environmental, economic, political, food, community, and personal security for Americans is improving. She also argues that, although income inequality has increased, real incomes have risen across every income group. She anticipates that positive human security trends will continue, concluding that Americans are secure not only in the traditional sense but increasingly so with respect to human security.

Four chapters consider the claim that the nation’s economy is vulnerable to harm, that the fragility of the international economic order demands a proactive approach, and that U.S. national security strategy should be oriented toward a policy of active intervention to stop possible threats before they materialize, including threats that might undermine the global economy even if they never result in open warfare.

In this vein, Daniel Drezner considers the possible economic benefits of U.S. primacy. Some argue that U.S. security guarantees, both formal and informal, encourage other countries to defer to the U.S. government in trade negotiations or to otherwise extend preferences to U.S. businesses and consumers. Drezner finds some merit in the global public good provided by overwhelming U.S. military power. However, it is not obvious that military power is the primary driver of the benefit. Moreover, building and sustaining that power comes at great cost, and the benefits of military hegemony do not generally offset this expense.

Eugene Gholz explores the economic effects of warfare and of preparing to fight wars. When countries shift resources to the purchase of military goods, the result is not so dissimilar from other consumption binges, and conflict naturally transfers wealth from the tension-filled parts of the world to relatively peaceful, neutral parts. Although war itself may have many highly undesirable effects, tensions and war overseas do not necessarily harm the American economy.

Joshua Shifrinson and Sameer Lalwani examine the threats posed to the global maritime commons—loosely, the seas on which most global trade is conducted and the air above them. They scrutinize current U.S. strategy designed to deal with challenges in that area, a strategy that hinges on U.S. global hegemony or what others have called primacy, deep engagement, or dominance. They find that any threat is significantly overstated—in some cases nearly nonexistent—which strongly suggests that the United States is doing far more than it needs to. Moreover, American strategy encourages other countries to free-ride on the security guarantees provided by the U.S. military, and that imposes an unnecessary burden on U.S. taxpayers. They urge the United States to move away from attempts to dominate, or to command, the commons, and they suggest instead an offshore balancing strategy that shifts some of the costs of maintaining open access to the sea and air to the many countries that benefit from that access and that would be most harmed by disruptions to it.

Brendan Green agrees that the primacy strategy is flawed at its core because it greatly exaggerates the likelihood that a challenging great power hegemon will emerge. These exaggerated fears prompt the United States to spend massively on defense and to risk war to stop other people from fighting among themselves. Put another way, the threats that the United States confronts today are as much caused as solved by the primacy strategy, creating alliances that probably will not prevent conflict in the situations where it is most likely and are unnecessary in most other circumstances.

The book concludes with two chapters that consider the sources of threat inflation in the United States and what, if anything, can be done to counteract them.

Christopher Fettweis perceives a deep pathological impulse within the collective American psyche to exaggerate dangers. Many Americans have internalized the belief that the United States is not only an island of tranquility surrounded by a dark and dangerous world beset by continuous violence, but also an exceptional nation that is uniquely suited to bring order out of chaos and is thus indispensable to global security. Fettweis contends that, although there is precious little evidence to suggest that the United States is responsible for the pacific trends in the world, the empirical realities of those trends may eventually trump pathological geopolitical fear.

Benjamin Friedman sees threat inflation as a relatively recent phenomenon that can be explained by the structure of the international system within which the United States is the dominant power and by interests that have aligned to respond to—and profit from—that condition, including defense agencies and interests, politicians, policymakers, the defense industry, nongovernmental organizations, some foreign states, the news media, think tanks, and public intellectuals. In the process, they serially exaggerate the nation’s vulnerability to national security threats, and estimates of danger are more servants of policy preferences than their cause. Those efforts are not always successful with the public, and current conditions may favor the emergence of political interests prone to resist threat inflation. However, for the most part, the result has been an unbroken cycle of threat inflation.

It would probably be too much to hope that this book, by itself, could break that cycle. But the contributors to this volume try, in their own way, to do so. Although the world will never be free from dangers, we should aspire to understand them clearly. And a better understanding of what threatens and of the dangers that do and do not exist in the world might tame our tendency to overreact.

A better assessment of threats and dangers might also affect defense spending considerations. When running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, Newt Gingrich argued, Defense budgets shouldn’t be a matter of politics. They shouldn’t be a matter of playing games. They should be directly related to the amount of threat we have.¹⁴ This book assesses that threat environment—problems that lurk today and on the horizon. The exercise suggests that the United States—as it works its way out of, or away from, the costly 9/11-induced wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—is substantially free from threats that require a great deal of military preparedness or balancing behavior. It also appears to be substantially exaggerating dangers that may still lurk and thus to be overspending to confront real or imagined threats that seem to be of only very limited significance.

A few months after Gingrich’s observation, Greg Jaffe, the Washington Post Pentagon correspondent, mused, No one is rushing to discuss the implications of a world that has grown safer.¹⁵ This book may help provide a useful first step toward getting that overdue discussion under way.

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1. How Dangerous? History and Nuclear Alarmism

Francis J. Gavin

Nuclear weapons have been used twice, both times by the United States within the same week nearly 70 years ago. Since August 1945, even more destructive weapons—thermonuclear bombs and warheads—have been developed, and all manner of new delivery systems have been devised. Eight additional states have built the bomb, and many others have the capacity to do so. All the while, the world has witnessed innumerable geopolitical crises, international turmoil, and even war involving nuclear-armed states. Yet no nuclear weapon has been used in that time. Arguably, it has been more than 50 years since there was a real threat of thermonuclear war—the Cuban missile crisis. Other purportedly ominous threats—from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the fear of tipping points and the rise of terrorist organizations interested in weapons of mass destruction—have not resulted in a nuclear detonation.

Despite almost 70 years of nuclear nonuse, years in which the threat of a global thermonuclear conflagration has decreased enormously, the rhetoric of fear surrounding nuclear proliferation and nuclear use continues. The United States has taken the lead in fostering those worries and has pursued bold—and at times aggressive—policies, from global arms control to permanent alliances to threats of coercion and even preventive war, to meet such declared danger. That increasing response, however, seems out of proportion with what would seem to be the decreasing threats. How do we explain the puzzle?

Often, scholars have offered suggestions, focusing on what might be thought of as subrational explanations—such as bureaucratic or organizational politics, ideology, or the sway of parochial domestic considerations—to describe something that is otherwise a mystery: why so much attention, treasure, and blood to a situation that, at least on the surface, seems to warrant it far less than in the past, where the very medicine at times appears worse than the cure? One might argue that those very costly policies are what prevented nuclear tragedy, and such arguments could be right: it is hard to prove or disprove such a counterfactual. Still, the gap between the threat and the remedy seems large, especially given how aggressive U.S. counterproliferation policies have been in recent years.

To answer why the world—the United States in particular—has been alarmist, we need to understand how nuclear weapons influence international politics, both now and in the past. For example, why has there never been a thermonuclear war? That question is obviously extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to answer. We have enough difficulty making sense of things that have actually occurred. After all, despite the labors of countless scholars from around the world, assessing millions of pages of documents, no one agrees on what caused the First World War. The same can be said about the origins, course, and consequences of any number of other geopolitical events. Notwithstanding the confident claims of countless theorists, we don’t really know why we have never had a thermonuclear war. We are understandably eager to have an explanation for the most important nonevent in human history, if only to see if there are lessons that can be applied today to keep the streak going as long as possible. It is a daunting task, far more challenging than we acknowledge, and many of the research questions that we do focus on are merely proxies for that larger concern. In the end, many of our debates surrounding nuclear weapons—such as why states do or do not build the bomb, how they behave when they get it, or how and when deterrence works—are animated by our beliefs and desire to better understand why there has never been, and we hope will never be, a thermonuclear war.

This chapter moves beyond many of the deductive and theoretical assessments of those questions to find a better historical foundation for our analysis.¹ Instead of telling how history suggests the United States should think about Iran or North Korea’s nuclear program, nuclear terrorism, or the fear of nuclear tipping points and proliferation cascades, this chapter suggests three larger points. Wrestling with the history of the nuclear question can, we hope, contribute in a meaningful way to how we understand the consequences of the thermonuclear revolution and can perhaps even lead to more effective policies.

The first point pertains to method: all historical work involves an intense dialogue between the empirical and the conceptual. The evidence that historians find informs our theories of the world and vice versa, back and forth in an interactive fashion.² All good historians know that point, but many outside the guild, including important policymakers and international relations experts, have a different view of how we operate. Historians are often thought of as either storytellers or collectors of data. Policymakers see Michael Beschloss or Doris Kearns Goodwin on television, read Robert Caro’s magisterial biographies of Lyndon Johnson—or on the nuclear question, Richard Rhodes—and think of the historian as a sort of bard who weaves tales. There is also the image of the less famous, academic historian, who is working away in a dusty archive and collecting reams upon reams of documents that might be fed into the models and regressions of social scientists. Although outsiders cannot help but be impressed by the beautiful prose and the carefully crafted narratives, or by the stacks upon stacks of documents, there is little sense that important, serious arguments are being made or that there is an explicit conceptual framework or theory for understanding the world.³

Why does correcting those caricatures—even while acknowledging that there is some truth to them—matter? The answer touches on the second point: any historian working in the nuclear policy area immediately confronts an enormous, and in many ways intimidating, conceptual hegemon: the strategic studies literature on nuclear weapons and its influence on world politics. A powerful corpus of ideas, based largely on deductive reasoning, began to emerge almost as soon as the first atomic bomb was dropped. At that time, Bernard Brodie declared: 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.⁴

For almost 70 years, strategists trained in the natural sciences, mathematics, economics, and—most prominently—political science have been working to develop theories surrounding nuclear dynamics and statecraft. Several generations of that work have shaped the conventional wisdom, established the issues open for debate, and provided us with the framework with which to investigate those questions.⁵ Although there is some reason to question whether the strategists were as influential with policymakers as is often claimed,⁶ that body of work is extraordinary from an intellectual history perspective, both in its sophistication and its influence on public discussion. It is a literature, however, almost bereft of a historical sensibility and of the skepticism, comfort with uncertainty, and humility the study of the past brings with it. I have had more than one prominent scholar in the field tell me that we know all we need to know about how nuclear deterrence works and, by extension, about why we have never had a thermonuclear war. The power and certainty of that theoretical literature act as their own deterrent to rigorous and creative thinking about why and how states have made decisions about nuclear weapons over the decades.

That point leads to a third issue: the question of policy relevance. Policymakers would benefit from a greater understanding of this nuclear history, just as scholars should be willing to engage the concerns and interests of decisionmakers. Unfortunately, as a discipline, academic history has long been wary of power, believing it corrupts those scholars who try to court it and allows those in power to misuse the past for less than noble purposes. The standard position of even the most policy-empathetic historian when asked for his or her view on what the past tells us about a contemporary issue is it’s complicated, which, in the end, is not a very helpful answer. When people talk about policy-relevant work, they typically mean scholarship that provides accurate forecasts about the future and, if not theories, at least generalizable rules of thumb that are parsimonious. All of those demands cut deeply against the instinct and practice of the historian, who emphasizes historical context, unintended consequences, and the complex interaction of multiple forces. That poor fit, one would think, would provide powerful incentives for the historian to stay as far away from policy as possible.

Avoiding policy relevance in nuclear history, however, isn’t the right answer. Elsewhere, I’ve laid out what I think historians can contribute to policymaking: there is a whole set of insights and, perhaps more important, a sensibility that comes from studying the past, both of which are bound to improve decisionmaking.⁷ The potential contributions that can be made by historical work stack up quite nicely when compared with the efforts of other disciplines, such as economics and political science. Any effort to come to terms with why we have not had a thermonuclear war is bound to be of great and understandable interest to people in positions of great responsibility, whether a historian wants his or her work used in that way or not. Scholars mining archives around the world to understand how nuclear states made decisions about nuclear weapons and how the thermonuclear revolution affects statecraft, as well as national and international security, are bound to intrigue, if not help, decisionmakers. Such knowledge can usefully supplement, if not at times replace, the dominating, deductive views of the strategy world.

The Balance-of-Payments Deficit and Flexible Response

One of the virtues of historical work that is often missed in the deductive and theoretical literature on nuclear weapons is something I’ve called horizontal history, the connections between issues over space, as opposed to time. Social science scholars often focus like a laser on one particular issue, say, nuclear strategy or America’s relations with China, and see how it develops over time. But at the top levels of policy, all sorts of seemingly separate issues turn out to be interconnected in surprising ways. The story of how I stumbled into nuclear history, quite by accident, reveals both the persistence of horizontal history and the benefits of following the documents wherever they might lead. It all began with research on postwar international monetary relations.⁸

Beginning in the late 1950s, four successive presidential administrations (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon) strived to find ways to end the balance-of-payments deficit and ameliorate its effects. None of the macroeconomic tools (e.g., raising interest rates, restricting the domestic monetary supply, enacting new trade restrictions or capital controls, or devaluing the currency) were attractive to U.S. officials. Those measures would slow or even deflate the domestic economy, which was certain to be unpopular.

Policymakers looked instead for ways to dramatically reduce the amount of monies spent abroad. By far, the largest account they could control was the cost of stationing U.S. troops and their families overseas. Most of those troops were part of America’s commitment under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreement, specifically defending Western Europe from the Soviet Union. Not coincidentally, the countries with the largest balance-of-payments surpluses were the most obvious beneficiaries of America’s expensive military protection: West Germany and France. Reducing the U.S. conventional force posture abroad was, from a domestic political and economic perspective, an ideal solution. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson and many of their closest advisers not only were willing, but also at times appeared eager, to pull American troops from Western Europe.

That account was at odds with the standard accounts, which claimed the Kennedy administration had increased American conventional forces and developed more nimble nuclear packages as the basis for the strategy of flexible response. Contemporary observers certainly had reason to believe that story was true, as Robert McNamara laid out the strategy, thereby incorporating many of the views of the strategy community, in a secret speech to NATO and in a public version in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the spring of 1962. Yet the documents leading up to and after both speeches painted a different picture from the public rhetoric. No one really seemed to buy the core logic of the strategy, and McNamara himself was one of the leading advocates throughout the 1960s for steep U.S. troop withdrawals.

There was a striking contradiction: the United States embracing a strategy that required more conventional forces while actively seeking to bring American troops back from Europe. And that wasn’t the only such case. U.S. policy on tactical nuclear weapons, for example, pulled in all sorts of different directions and was never really resolved at the highest political levels. The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) did not really become all that more flexible, and, as far as one could tell, U.S. nuclear strategy was still largely based on the massive, preemptive strike articulated by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles a decade earlier.

The man responsible for implementing strategy in Europe, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, General Lyman Lemnitzer, actually forbid the use of the term flexible response throughout SHAPE [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe] and Allied Command Europe. Lemnitzer complained that so many of [his] people didn’t really know what flexible response meant.⁹ And the official history of America’s nuclear command-and-control effort contends that to the extent it amounted to a doctrine, it was open to different interpretations, and it is not easy (if at all possible) to find a single coherent, clear statement of it, even among authoritative pronouncements of the President and the Secretary of Defense.¹⁰ When Nixon’s secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, examined the war plans, he and his team were stunned to see the rigid, massive SIOP everyone thought had been discarded by the Kennedy administration.

The documents did not comport with the received wisdom in the largely deductive strategy literature.¹¹ The literature was clean, crisp, and driven by a powerful logic. But the policies themselves were messy and pulled in different directions.¹² That history teaches us to be skeptical of bureaucratic political explanations for something as important as nuclear policy.¹³ When one reconstructs U.S. national security policy on the basis of the documentary record, one gets a sense that on the questions that truly matter—and issues of war and peace, especially nuclear war, certainly qualifies—what the president decides actually matters and is almost always carried out.

And in that case, an underlying strategic logic was driving those policies. The flexible response doctrine was as much about nuclear nonproliferation vis-à-vis America’s allies—West Germany, especially—as a nuclear deterrent strategy versus our adversary. After Great Britain and France developed their own nuclear capability, it was only natural that West Germany would also be interested in those weapons. The prospect was deeply unsettling, not just to the Soviets but to the rest of Europe as well.¹⁴ By strengthening extended deterrence, the flexible response strategy was aimed at reassuring the West Germans and lessening their desire for their own nuclear forces. It also allowed a nonproliferation policy that, under the cover of an alliance strategy, did not overtly discriminate against the key target, the Federal Republic of Germany (i.e., West Germany). That—as much as anything the Soviets were doing—was the driving logic of the strategy. A search in the archives to explain U.S. international monetary policy came, most unexpectedly, to reveal the enormous gap between the rhetoric and reality of U.S. military strategy in Europe. It also encouraged a reexamination of many of the core precepts of the strategic studies literature.

Three big questions stood out: (a) Did the United States care far more about stemming the spread of nuclear weapons than the strategic literature had recognized? (b) Relatedly, was its focus simply on particular complexities surrounding nuclear weapons and West Germany, or was there a broader concern with nuclear proliferation writ large? and (c) Could U.S. nuclear strategy be seen as both a tool of nuclear nonproliferation and an effort to deter the Soviet Union? What did the documents reveal?

The Gilpatric Commission and Nuclear Proliferation in the 1960s

The archival record—specifically Roswell Gilpatric’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library—revealed unexpected, surprising insights relevant to contemporary debates over nuclear proliferation. As McNamara’s deputy, Gilpatric was involved in both the deliberations over balance-of-payments-inspired troop withdrawals and the status and strength of U.S. nuclear forces. After Gilpatric left office, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked him to chair a committee charged with determining how the United States should respond to China’s detonation of an atomic device in October 1964. China’s nuclear status was deeply disconcerting, and top policymakers wondered both how to react to China specifically and what effect the test would have on nuclear proliferation more generally. There was no agreement within the administration over what to do—some advocated preventive attacks; others suggested negotiating with China—so the president created an external blue-ribbon group to provide answers.¹⁵

The so-called Gilpatric Committee looked beyond the question of how to respond to China’s acquisition of nuclear weapons to the whole issue of how the United States should think about and deal with nuclear proliferation. Up to that point, the general attitude of most U.S. policymakers was that although the spread of atomic weapons was regrettable, the United States could do little to stop it. The American experience with France had been influential—all the United States had received in return for its efforts to halt its nuclear program had been mistrust and enmity. Some, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, suggested that since proliferation was inevitable, the United States should get ahead of the curve and provide nuclear weapons to friendly aspirants like India and Japan. In the end, few people thought much could be done.

The Gilpatric Committee helped transform that attitude. First, the committee explored the consequences of a proliferated world and the costs of preventing it. The committee analyzed options ranging from aggressive rollback of nuclear states (including preventive action against allies) to a fully proliferated world (aided by the United States). It investigated difficult political issues: Should China be attacked or appeased? What would happen to American power in a proliferated world? How could West Germany be kept nonnuclear? Should the French and even the British be coerced out of the nuclear business? Was it necessary to escalate military activities in Southeast Asia to demonstrate to allies like Japan and Australia that the United States would stand up to nuclear-armed bullies like China?

The archives reveal a story of a fairly dramatic, and by no means inevitable, shift in global U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy. The Gilpatric Committee had recommended that the United States make nuclear nonproliferation a far higher priority and use every policy short of preventive action to achieve the goal. President Johnson personally intervened to make that policy shift happen, and it laid the groundwork for the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which remains the bulwark of nonproliferation efforts to this day.¹⁶

Those insights were at odds with the strategy literature. The politics of the German question, the worries over the spread of nuclear weapons, and the policies needed to assure allies were as important as, and at times more important than, the strategic nuclear rivalry with the Soviets during the 1960s and 1970s. That disparity not only puts the nuclear question in a different light, but also provides a different view of the Cold War and its relationship to the nuclear question.

According to the strategy literature, the history of the Cold War was often synonymous with the history of the strategic nuclear rivalry between the superpowers: any change in strategy, whether it was the New Look or flexible response or mutually assured destruction or détente, reflected a change in Cold War realities. But there were other, powerful forces at work that were driving nuclear dynamics. For example, most of the nuclear aspirants of the postwar period—be they France or Great Britain, India or Pakistan, China or Japan, Israel or Egypt, South Africa or Brazil—were motivated less by Cold War dynamics than by their own regional security or desire for prestige. Furthermore, the United States and the Soviet Union had powerful incentives to work together to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, regardless of their other conflicts. The main picture of nuclear nonproliferation from the mid-1960s onward is that of Russians and Americans working together to keep allies and ideological fellow travelers such as West Germany, Japan, China, and Yugoslavia down.

Putting Today’s Nuclear Proliferation Fears in Perspective

Those findings raised new questions with respect to current nuclear policy. Was the dramatic shift in nuclear nonproliferation policy during the 1960s the correct choice? And what were the lessons for contemporary policy? On the one hand, theorists such as Kenneth Waltz, Robert Jervis, and others argued that nuclear proliferation was not to be feared. While few strategists went as far as Waltz to actually welcome or encourage the spread of nuclear weapons, the consensus was that proliferation was not the end of the world. Those theorists explained that nuclear weapons had powerful deterrent effects. Very few political goals were worth a nuclear war, and although states might push their claims to a certain point, they would back off far short of nuclear war. By that logic, nuclear deterrence was a stabilizing force in international politics.¹⁷

The debates over new nuclear threats took on added urgency in the public mind in the 2000s. The 9/11 attacks on the United States and the focus on access to weapons of mass destruction by so-called rogue regimes—highlighted in the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy—seemed to push American policy toward an even more aggressive, almost preventive, nonproliferation strategy. The threat of a rogue nuclear state or the acquisition of a weapon by a nonstate actor was seen as not simply dangerous but likely. The war against Iraq, as well as threats against Iran, appeared to be driven in large measure by a fear that the post–Cold War world faced new and more dangerous types of threats than any the Russians and Americans had faced.

Those views seemed, at best, alarmist. The unlikely use of one or two crude fission bombs, no matter how horrific, could never compare with the threat of a full-scale thermonuclear exchange between the superpowers, a nightmare that seemed at times in the late 1950s and early 1960s to be terrifyingly plausible. Furthermore, Mao’s China was far more rogue than Iraq, Iran, or North Korea. The People’s Republic of China had fought U.S. forces in Korea, supplied the Viet Cong, threatened Taiwan and its other neighbors, and attacked democratic India. It had undergone domestic upheaval that had led to millions of deaths, and Mao himself had used highly irresponsible rhetoric about prevailing in a nuclear war. If ever a state was resistant to deterrence, it was not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Iran of the mullahs, but Mao’s China. Yet the United States had not overreacted, had not launched preventive attacks, but instead had learned to live with a nuclear China while dramatically strengthening its global efforts to limit proliferation. Its reward was not the so-called tipping point of nuclear weapons in Japan, Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere but was an adversary that built few nuclear weapons, remained deterred, and, in short order, became a de facto ally.

Did that mean the George W. Bush administration’s policy was both folly and a radical break from the past? It certainly seemed that way at first blush, though the Bush policy shared important historical antecedents.¹⁸ Nuclear weapons were terrifying, to be sure, and they should be at the top of the policy agenda for any U.S. president. But policymakers appeared to overstate the threat posed by so-called rogue and nonstate actors, at least compared with far better-armed nuclear challengers (i.e., the Soviet Union) from decades earlier. Worse, by overstating or misrepresenting both the past and the present, there was a danger of the medicine being worse than the cure.

Looking deeper, it became clear that that preventive instinct, the desire to inhibit nuclear proliferation, was not, in fact, new. American policymakers had seriously considered preventive action under three administrations led by Democrats: specifically, the Soviets in the 1940s, the Chinese in the 1960s, and the North Koreans in the 1990s.¹⁹ What was going on here? Mira Rapp-Hooper and I undertook research that convincingly demonstrated that deep similarities existed between those preventive inclinations over time, administrations, and even structural shifts in the international system. And as we examined the issue in greater detail, it became clear to us that the United States had been willing to brandish coercive measures short of military action to prevent proliferation, even against its own allies.²⁰ From France in the 1950s to Pakistan, South Korea, and Taiwan in the 1970s, the United States went to great lengths—short of the use of force—to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.

Defensive realists and strategists did not have very compelling answers to explain that persistent American inclination to limit proliferation, in the same way they did not understand why the United States continued—and in some cases expanded—its security assurances and nuclear umbrella after the Cold War had ended and the Soviet Union had collapsed. Did the United States simply not understand the compelling and stabilizing logic of nuclear deterrence? Did U.S. policymakers not see that nuclear weapons prevented wars and lesser military interventions and favored the status quo?

Or could it be that since the dawn of the nuclear age, American policymakers fully understood the power of nuclear deterrence and recognized, first, as a superpower and then as a global hegemon, that deterrence could be oriented against the United States? Despite being the world’s strongest state, with overwhelming superiority in every conceivable form of power, from economic to soft to conventional, the United States did not especially prize stability or the status quo. What it understandably wanted was the freedom to act in the world as it saw fit, even if it meant using military force or intervening in the internal