To the editors:
I agree with most of Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s comments in his superb and well-balanced review of Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine. Nonetheless, I believe he underemphasizes the book’s most fundamental flaw: Ellsberg’s claim about the role nuclear weapons play in preserving peace. Dupuy correctly points out that Ellsberg neither defines nor addresses nuclear deterrence, which is where most academic work is focused. By contrast, The Doomsday Machine is mainly concerned with command and control problems and nuclear war fighting capabilities.
Bernard Brodie proposed that, given the unthinkably high human and material costs of a strike, nuclear weapons cannot be used to advance policy. Instead, the threat of nuclear retaliation preserves peace.1 This is nuclear deterrence. Ellsberg fails to explore what kind of nuclear strategic arsenals are required to maintain such a policy. At the start of the book, using supposedly secret assessments attributed to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Ellsberg reveals that in the event of a US nuclear strike, the estimated casualties in Eastern Europe and the USSR would have been between 275 and 325 million people.2 But such assessments were far from secret. The enormity of nuclear costs was well understood by analysts between 1969 and 1979. The costs were clearly outlined in Bruce Russett and Bruce Blair’s Progress in Arms Control, which was published in 1978 and compiled from papers that had appeared earlier in Scientific American.3 In 1967, Robert McNamara conjectured that for deterrence to be stable, about 40 percent of the population is required to be at risk. This is precisely why advocates of deterrence claim that massive nuclear retaliation would not be used in the early stages of a conflict. In the academic community, Michael Intriligator, Kenneth Waltz, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James Fearon, Frank Zagare, and Mark Kilgour, among others, have wrestled with the conditions under which strategic deterrence and proliferation could preserve peace. Their assessments differ regarding the stability of strategic deterrence, the effects of nuclear proliferation, and the effects of new technologies. But all agree that a war strategy in which tactical and intermediate nuclear weapons are abundant and antiballistic technology has been perfected will likely lead to a nuclear war.
Ellsberg’s book has little, if anything, to say about the academic debate concerning deterrence. Despite assurances to the contrary, there is also a glaring absence of any formal solutions for preserving peace. Instead, Ellsberg shows that deterrence arguments did not guide policy in the US, the Soviet Union and Russia, or any other nuclear nations. If Ellsberg’s description is indeed accurate, the policy community was primarily concerned with command and control over ever more complicated nuclear devices, with the goal of minimizing the costs of a nuclear war. If policymakers really bought into the notions that decapitation is feasible, that unequal thermonuclear capabilities between states can lead to stability, that the capability to destroy an opponent’s weapons before launch secures peace, and that anti-ballistic capabilities can prevent a nuclear holocaust, then arguments for strategic retaliation with assured retaliatory destruction were invalid. And all formal notions of deterrence, as I understand the term, were abandoned.
The Doomsday Machine imparts enormous knowledge about the implications of adopting a war strategy and the risks associated with command and control. Informed readers will conclude that nuclear weapons are likely to be used in the event of war. Academic readers may well question why a policy of strategic nuclear retaliation has been replaced with a commitment to no-first-use.
I agree with Ellsberg that regional disarmament provides a partial path to peace. Global disarmament is far more elusive because it seems likely that non-state actors will eventually acquire nuclear capabilities. Academic analysts seeking peace in this new world are confronted with increasingly complex problems. But one cannot move away from Ellsberg’s book without being concerned that even the most promising analyses may not be considered and incorporated into policy assessments. Those analyses may become but a footnote in a post-nuclear-war world.
