1999 (11 page)

W
e live in a world with nuclear weapons. Since that fact is not going to change, we must learn to live with the bomb. We must also recognize that achieving our two most important goals, avoiding nuclear war and avoiding defeat without war, depends on the existence of the bomb. We cannot begin to build real peace unless we can deter the Kremlin leaders from engaging in nuclear war or nuclear blackmail. A structure of real peace can only be founded on the bedrock of nuclear deterrence.

Nuclear weapons revolutionized the way the world works. In the age of balance-of-power politics, war was an accepted tactic of statecraft. Armed conflict took place between armies and left civilian populations largely untouched. Not so today. A direct clash between the superpowers would almost certainly escalate to nuclear weapons. Over 400 million people in the United States and the Soviet Union alone would be killed in an all-out exchange. In the nuclear age, war can no longer be used as an instrument of policy by one superpower against the other. It is no longer an exaggeration to say that the next war would be a “war to end all wars,” because it would also end civilization as we know it.

Some analysts contend that since firing nuclear weapons risks catastrophic retaliation, no rational leader could ever contemplate their use and that therefore they are useless. That view is wrong.
While the great nuclear arsenals of the superpowers would have no
military
utility in a total war, they continue to have
political
utility in the American–Soviet rivalry: nuclear weapons can still be used to intimidate. What has been termed the unusability of nuclear weapons makes them more usable to the Soviet Union than to the West. As Stalin once said, “Nuclear weapons are things that can be used to frighten people with weak nerves.”

Soviet nuclear blackmail, not nuclear war, is the principal danger facing the United States and our allies in the remainder of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. If we hope to make progress toward real peace in the years before 1999, we must understand the meaning of superiority in the nuclear age and adopt the arms-control and defense policies needed to keep Moscow from acquiring it.

Ironically, the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons has spawned three contradictory ideas about how to avoid war. Some argue that total disarmament is the only answer to the nuclear dilemma. Others hold that the sole remedy lies in total military superiority. Still others contend that a perfect defense will make nuclear weapons obsolete. All three of these views are deceptive myths. Looking directly at a nuclear explosion would leave a person blind. Contemplating the horrors of an irradiated planet or a world ruled from the Kremlin has apparently left many people intellectually blind.

Those who believe in the myth of peace through disarmament argue that the source of all evil in the world is the arms race and that therefore absolute priority in superpower negotiations should go to arms-control talks. They contend that the United States should not link progress in arms control to progress on other issues. These talks should seek to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the earth or at least to reduce massively the current nuclear stockpiles of the superpowers. Total disarmament, in their view, would guarantee peace.

Arms controllers fail to understand the basic fact that since arms are not the cause of war, arms control cannot produce peace. War results not from the existence of arms but from the political differences
among nations that lead to the use of arms. An arms race has never caused a war, but aggressive powers with territorial ambitions often have. War becomes most likely not when a defensive power and an offensive power both engage in an arms race, but when a defensive power falls behind and loses the race. A buildup of arms is a symptom, not a cause, of political conflicts. While we should seek to alleviate the symptom, we must not ignore the disease.

A great reduction in the nuclear arsenals will not solve the nuclear dilemma. Since the 1950s, we have reduced the actual explosive power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal by a factor of twenty, but we still have enormous destructive power. Even if the two superpowers were to agree to destroy half of their current nuclear weapons, each side would still have over five thousand strategic warheads, each many times more powerful than the atomic bombs that wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A war between the superpowers would still bring the end of civilization. As Deng Xiaoping commented to me in 1985, “The United States and the Soviet Union now have the power to destroy the world ten times over. Would the world be any safer if they could destroy it only five times over?”

Those who call for the elimination of nuclear weapons are living in a dream world. People understandably long for the day when the threat of nuclear war will be lifted. Talking as if we could bring this about by an arms-control agreement to get rid of all nuclear weapons may be good politics, but it is bad statesmanship. If men were angels, we could ban the bomb. But they are not. We should not advocate arms-control policies that pretend that they are.

To sign an agreement with the Soviet Union to eliminate nuclear weapons would be a catastrophe. Our defense policy is decided in public; theirs is formed in total secrecy. Moscow could be sure that the United States would keep the agreement, but we would never know whether the Kremlin was breaking it. That would risk disaster. Cheating would give the Kremlin a nuclear monopoly and would imperil our national survival. Even if the Soviet Union did not cheat, banning the bomb is not in our interest. Moscow has overwhelming superiority in conventional forces. The West counters that edge with the threat of nuclear escalation. A world
without nuclear weapons would be a world under Soviet domination.

Even if we succeeded in eliminating the bomb, no agreement between the superpowers could abolish the knowledge of how to make the bomb. Nuclear weapons are based on simple principles of physics, and nuclear technology is within the reach of a dozen countries. Both the United States and the Soviet Union could assemble a new nuclear arsenal in a matter of days. A world without the bomb would be a world far more perilous than today's. A crisis between the superpowers would be like a showdown between two gunslingers at high noon: A quicker hand to the draw in assembling new nuclear weapons would lead to total victory. But while a showdown in the Old West might kill one person, a shootout in the nuclear age could kill one hundred million.

Calling for the “elimination of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth” is nothing more than a political applause line. When elevated to the level of a presidential policy, as occurred during both the Carter and Reagan administrations, it has clouded the public debate and diverted our efforts toward unrealistic goals. We must recognize that the “ban the bomb” syndrome has no place in a serious discussion of how to create real peace in the nuclear age.

Regaining total military superiority is another myth of peace in the nuclear age. Those who advocate this view contend that if the United States spends enough money and builds enough missiles it can regain the superiority it enjoyed from 1945 until the late 1960s. To achieve total offensive nuclear superiority, the United States would need to build strategic forces capable of destroying all of the Soviet Union's retaliatory weapons in a first strike. That would require construction of over a thousand new highly accurate land-based missiles. This idea fails the test of basic common sense. Since Congress has in the last eight years cut the MX-missile deployment from 200 to 100 to 50, and finally to 40, no one can seriously argue that it would provide the funds for building 1,000. Also, there is no way that the Soviet Union would acquiesce as the United States moved to gain total superiority. Whatever its economic problems, Moscow would spend the money needed to prevent the United States from attaining that decisive lead. Neither superpower can accept nuclear superiority by the other. The security
of one superpower cannot be based on the insecurity of the other.

A call for a perfect defense against ballistic missiles is just an updated version of the myth of perfect peace through total military superiority. A defense to protect the American people from nuclear attack by ballistic missiles would have to be perfect. Even if a defense were to stop 99 percent of enemy warheads, in an all-out war the remaining one percent would represent 100 nuclear bombs, which would inflict cataclysmic casualties on the American people. What is worse, the likelihood that we could build a 99-percent-effective defense is remote. Advocates of a total population defense call for us to create a “space shield.” But for now all we can realistically build is a space sieve. Research on a population defense should continue, but we cannot assume that it is the answer to our problem until we know what it will be able to do.

Even a perfect shield against ballistic missiles would not make nuclear weapons obsolete. It could not defend against nuclear bombs carried on long-range bombers. It could not defend against nuclear warheads carried on cruise missiles, which can be launched from any Soviet aircraft, ship, or submarine and which can fly so low that radar cannot detect them. It certainly could not defend against small nuclear devices smuggled into the United States. No one who understands the issue can seriously argue that the United States—whose borders are so porous that thousands of drug smugglers and millions of illegal immigrants cross them with little risk—could deploy a perfect defense against the bomb in the foreseeable future.

While we cannot make nuclear weapons obsolete by a perfect defense, a limited defense of U.S. strategic forces is possible now. It is also desirable. As we think about the role of strategic defense in deterrence, we must always make the distinction between a population defense, which is a dream in the next century, and a defense of U.S. strategic forces, which could be a reality in this century. We should pursue the Strategic Defense Initiative to enhance deterrence, not to substitute for it.

At the Reykjavik summit in 1986, the United States made the mistake of combining the myth of total disarmament and the myth
of a perfect defense and calling it a strategy. President Reagan agreed to Gorbachev's proposal that the United States and the Soviet Union eliminate
all
nuclear weapons in ten years. The President also insisted that after ten years each superpower be allowed to deploy a nationwide defense of its population as an insurance against Soviet cheating. What happened at Reykjavik was a classic example of an administration becoming a captive of its own rhetoric.

Our subsequent progress in arms-control negotiations has been in spite of, not because of, the Reykjavik summit. No genuine progress on the central issue of arms control—the strategic balance between the superpowers—will be possible until the mythologists of Reykjavik abandon the twin fantasies of eliminating all nuclear weapons and of making nuclear weapons obsolete.

There are those who contend that, since the United States cannot resurrect its nuclear superiority of the 1950s and 1960s, superiority does not matter in the nuclear age. That view is wrong. While the United States no longer seeks superiority, we must deny superiority to the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union clearly will do whatever is necessary to prevent the United States from acquiring total superiority. It is an open question whether the opposite is true. If there is an arms race between the superpowers, the United States can certainly keep up. The problem is that for the last two decades the Soviet Union has been racing and the United States has not left the starting line.

Those who make the argument that superiority does not matter overlook the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union have foreign policy objectives that are diametrically opposed. Whether a leader in Washington or Moscow wields nuclear superiority would have decisively different consequences for the world.

The United States is a defensive power. It has never been an offensive power. Circumstances, not a conscious plan, made the United States a superpower. If the Soviet Union had not threatened to subordinate Western Europe after World War II, the United States would have retreated into its prewar isolation. If it
were possible, most Americans would still like to return to the simpler days when the United States was on the periphery of world events.