To the editors:
Jean-Pierre Dupuy describes Daniel Ellsberg’s The Doomsday Machine as
a fantastic book, albeit one with an extraordinary omission: the index contains no entry for “deterrence,” a concept that is usually integral to any discussion about nuclear warfare. The word itself appears here and there throughout the book, but deterrence is never discussed as a key concept. Within the extensive literature on atomic weapons, such an oversight would be unprecedented. As it turns out, the omission was intentional.
Dupuy summarizes the main argument of the book thus: “In Ellsberg’s view, it would be a mistake to assume that attaining this paradoxical state of peace has been the objective of a nuclear-armed United States.”
Nuclear deterrence is indeed a key part of many nuclear discussions. Kenneth Waltz was a prominent international relations theorist and proponent of nuclear deterrence. In his famous debate with Scott Sagan, Waltz made the claim that:
Deterrence is not a theory … a little reasoning leads to the conclusions that to fight nuclear wars is all but impossible and that to launch an offensive that might prompt nuclear retaliation is obvious folly. To reach those conclusions, complicated calculations are not required, only a little common sense.1
Despite Waltz’s claim that it is merely common sense, deterrence is indeed a theory. This is also indicated by Ellsberg in his book, albeit indirectly. The theory’s accuracy can be tested by comparing its predictions with the observed behavior of states that possess nuclear weapons. The results of such tests, it should be noted, have often put the theory in poor light. Waltz suggested that in a relationship dominated by the logic of deterrence, “if no state can launch a disarming attack with high confidence, force comparisons are irrelevant. Strategic arms races are then pointless.”2 Strategic arms races are, of course, pointless. But it is also true that they occur. The most obvious example was the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, which resulted in the two superpowers stockpiling more than 70,000 nuclear weapons. In attempting to match the United States warhead for warhead, missile for missile, the Soviet Union eventually went bankrupt. These two states clearly did not behave in the fashion that the main deterrence theorist predicted they would.
The second reason not to place much emphasis on the idea of nuclear deterrence is that it seems to have little utility for the people responsible for managing nuclear arsenals. Published in 1998, Jonathan Schell’s The Gift of Time was based on a series of conversations with politicians and military leaders from the US, Europe, and Russia who had been responsible for formulating and implementing nuclear weapons policy. General Lee Butler was a former commander-in-chief of the US Strategic Command, a position in which he had planning and operational responsibilities for all US strategic nuclear forces. In the book, Butler observed,
The goal—the wish, really—might be to prevent nuclear war, but the operational plan had to be to wage war. After all, actual nuclear “deterrence”—which is to say a mental state of restraint brought about by terror of annihilation—was nothing that we could bring about by ourselves. In the last analysis, it was up to the enemy whether he would be deterred or not. What both sides had to do in the meantime was plan for nuclear war. Wish and plan collided at every point—psychologically, intellectually, but, above all, operationally.3
Based on his own experiences with military crises, Butler concluded that “as you entered the crisis, thoughts of deterrence vanished, and you were simply trying to deal with the classic imponderables of crises.” The Cuban Missile Crisis, he suggested, was a case in point: there was no real talk of deterrence during those thirteen days. As a theoretical concept, deterrence has little to do with the reality of nuclear weapons or nuclear warfare. This is precisely the point that Ellsberg makes in his book.
The conceptual irrelevance of nuclear deterrence might not be a big deal but for the very real potential for catastrophe that motivates it, because “the brute facts of military, political, and human reality are at odds with the basic presumption of nuclear deterrence.”4 To emphasize this flawed concept is to contribute to increasing the risk of nuclear catastrophe.
