The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Some weeks back an analysis of Fred Kaplan in Slate online was examined as an example of precisely the wrong way for the US to approach the situation there. That that issue has subsided for now is of no satisfaction, although there seem to have been some intriguing public expressions of discontent by the religious there. Something that may auger well for the future if as a political dynamic it can be sustained. But in the broader view the Iranian situation provides a clear cut example of how a light touch towards interventions may actually reap dividends. There is next to nothing that the United States can do there, other than expressing rhetorical unease or worse. Therefore it is probably best that the US does nothing and is circumspect about the level of rhetoric that it uses. Others are better placed to exercise levers that may sustain opposition within and modify the nature of the regime. And now the regime is in a very difficult place indeed for legitimacy is often lost and rarely sustained at the point of a gun. Paradoxically the prospect for change for the better within the constraints and limitations of the Islamic Republic may have have increased considerably since last month.

Meanwhile, by contrast, let’s applaud a piece in Slate by Kaplan this week which discusses in a cogent and useful manner the nature of the round of talks in Moscow between Obama and Medvedev. Now, I wasn’t thrilled, to put it mildly, to see Obama uncharacteristically making some comments about Medvedev as against Putin. Such stuff smacks of rhetorical politics at its worst. I can’t tell, indeed who can be sure, what the relationship between the two most powerful Russians is, but the idea that comments will influence relationships appears highly unlikely. Indeed, as with Iran such rhetoric can serve to generate the very outcomes one least wishes for.

Kaplan notes that for decades, and in particular during the Soviet era, nuclear arms reduction talks often functioned as a means of opening up useful channels for dialogue between the superpowers.

Even during their heyday, in the 1970s and ’80s, the chief benefit of SALT, START, INF, and the assorted other nuclear negotiations wasn’t so much their specific outcomes as that they gave the superpowers something to talk about—a forum in which their diplomats could engage one another, exchange information, probe and sometimes expand the limits of cooperation—in an era when it was impossible to talk fruitfully about anything else.

But he also notes that curiously the very focus on nuclear negotiations can lead to unintended consequences.

It would have been a grave mistake if President Barack Obama had come to Moscow with an agenda that focused solely on strategic arms talks. One lesson learned from the bad old days: If nukes are all the two powers can talk about, relations very quickly devolve into fetishism.

Back then, at the height of the Cold War, many diplomats, politicians, think-tank denizens, and journalists immersed themselves so thoroughly in the esoterica of “nuclear-exchange” calculations, missile throw-weight ratios, and “hard target kill” probabilities that they came to confuse this bizarre, abstract world for the real one.

And he makes what I suspect is a key point when he notes that should one…

Dip into the archives of such journals as Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, International Security, even the op-ed pages of major newspapers from that era, … you will find serious-minded officials and scholars spinning elaborate, quantitative (and, therefore, presumptively scientific) scenarios in which the Soviet premier launches a nuclear attack against the United States—hurling thousands of nuclear warheads, which explode with the force of billions of tons of dynamite (thousands of megatons) and spread vast plumes of radioactive fallout, killing tens of millions of Americans—because the calculations suggest that his most potent nuclear warheads could destroy all our land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in a surprise first strike.

Such scenarios ignored a few basic facts: that U.S. submarines, prowling under the ocean’s surface and thus invulnerable to attack, would still hold thousands of nuclear warheads, which could be fired against the USSR in a devastating retaliatory blow; that some of the land-based missiles and bombers would survive the first strike as well; and that—above all else—the whole mathematical exercise simply did not reflect the way that any leader of an established power, including Russia, has ever thought about the use of force.

He points to a basic fact…

Certain calculations suggested that during the early 1980s, the Soviets did possess this theoretical “first-strike capability”—then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger warned of a “window of vulnerability.” Yet there is no evidence whatsoever—in the since-declassified Russian archives or anyplace else—that this “edge” altered the balance of power or emboldened the Soviets to take steps or issue threats that they otherwise might not have.

One can go further. In the late 1960s, Soviet and Chinese armies confronted each other, and nearly went to war, over a territorial dispute along the Yulu River. Yet the Kremlin leaders backed off because Mao Zedong possessed a mere handful of nuclear weapons and they feared that he might launch them in response to an invasion.

I’d never heard of that confrontation, but it is indeed an educative one. Far from the experience of the Second World War and the near scorched-earth approach that the Eastern front/Great Patriotic War generated with a massive loss of life and resources inuring the Soviets to further mass casualties, they acted as rational players. And he usefully notes that contrary to media view of nuclear weapons as being activist tools their real value is in their deterrent effect.

This is the thing about nuclear weapons: It takes just a few of them to give their possessor the power to deter an attack. Beyond that, the math darts off into abstractions. (For instance, many are apprehensive about a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran, not because they expect either country to achieve “nuclear superiority” but simply because they might be able to resist pressure, as China did in the late ’60s, by brandishing a mere handful of them.)

But here’s the thing. There are always those who will take a, perhaps we could term it, perverse view of such matters. And Kaplan points to:

…today’s Wall Street Journal, nearly two decades after this Cold War remnant should have dropped out of the public discourse, Keith B. Payne argues in an op-ed piece that the arms accord outlined by Obama and Dmitry Medvedev—which calls for each side to reduce the number of its warheads to between 1,500 and 1,675 and the number of its missile-launchers to between 500 and 1,100—”has the potential to compromise U.S. security” because having “very low numbers of launchers would make the U.S. more vulnerable to destabilizing first-strike dangers.”

The irony is that Payne has form in such matters, as Kaplan recounts…

Within strategic circles, Payne is a well-known extremist. In 1980, he co-authored an article in Foreign Policy titled “Victory Is Possible,” by which he meant victory in a nuclear war is possible. In it, he wrote that “an intelligent United States offensive [nuclear] strategy, wedded to homeland defenses, should reduce U.S. casualties to approximately 20 million … a level compatible with national survival and recovery.” (As Gen. Buck Turgidson, the George C. Scott character in Dr. Strangelove, put it, “I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed up, but 10-20 million tops, depending on the breaks.”)

Funny. Except it’s clearly not. And here’s a further interesting paradox, as the numbers fall there is something of an argument that very low level exchanges would be survivable. Problem is that, as Kaplan has already discussed, we’re nowhere near such levels since both the US and Russia would even following the latest round of talks, should they be successful, retain considerable arsenals.

Kaplan sees this as an ideological attack from the Republican right, and he may well be right…

The Republican right can be expected to pick up on this line of attack—not because they agree with, or fully understand, its strategic implications. (However thuggish Putin might be, does anyone really believe that he would like to launch a nuclear strike against the United States or that he would venture such a loony risk?) The real agenda is to stave off a broader renewed détente with Russia, to keep up the pressure along its borders (especially in Georgia), and to forestall progress toward a U.S.-Russian policy to keep Iran from building nuclear weapons (which might make an attack on Iran unnecessary).

I think that last sentence, however much I might disagree with the earlier notion that Putin is ‘thuggish’, is central to this. One can be cynical and argue that for them it makes sense to paint Russia as an adversary rather than a partner, or one can take Kaplan’s line which is that in some respects they simply don’t understand the strategic implications.

But beyond that I think it’s key to recognise that for a very small minority such matters take a different line wherein we remain locked in the supposedly existential conflicts of the Cold War (and if one reads the last paragraph or two of Kaplan’s piece it is remarkable how even he reads this as a process where a near-adversarial relationship is now a given).

Payne’s original piece (copy here – worth reading in full) in Foreign Policy is an eye-opener – even for someone like myself who has never really been hugely exercised by nuclear disarmament, at least not since the mid to late 1980s (beyond believing that large states would retain them, that small states would most likely acquire them and that what is necessary in such a context is a strong international security framework to reduce the numbers held by the former and slow the acquisition by the latter).

It really does start with the heading… Victory is Possible.

Nuclear war is possible. But unlike Armageddon, the apocalyptic war prophesied to end history, nuclear war can have a wide range of possible outcomes. Many commentators and senior U.S. government officials consider it a nonsurvivable event. The popularity of this view in Washington has such a pervasive and malign effect upon American defense planning that it is rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for the United States.

Recognition that war at any level can be won or lost, and that the distinction between winning and losing would not be trivial, is essential for intelligent defense planning. Moreover, nuclear war can occur regardless of the quality of U.S. military posture and the content of American strategic theory. If it does, deterrence, crisis management, and escalation control might play a negligible role. Through an inability to communicate or through Soviet disinterest in receiving and acting upon American messages, the United States might not even have the option to surrender and thus might have to fight the war as best it can. Furthermore, the West needs to devise ways in which it can employ strategic nuclear forces coercively, while minimizing the potentially paralyzing impact of self-deterrence.

What of this?

Strategists cannot offer painless conflicts or guarantee that their preferred posture and doctrine promise a greatly superior deterrence posture to current American schemes. But, they can claim that an intelligent U.S. offensive strategy, wedded to homeland defenses, should reduce U.S. casualties to approximately 20 million, which should render U.S. strategic threats more credible. If the United States developed the targeting plans and procured the weapons necessary to hold the Soviet political, bureaurcratic, and military leadership at risk, that should serve as the functional equivalent in Soviet perspective of the assured-destruction effect of the late 1960s. However, the U.S. targeting community has not determined how it would organize this targeting option.

A combination of counterforce offensive targeting, civil defense, and ballistic missile and air defense should hold U.S. casualties down to a level compatible with national survival and recovery. The actual number would depend on several factors, some of which the United States could control (the level of U.S. homeland defenses); some of which it could influence (the weight and character of the Soviet attack); and some of which might evade anybody’s ability to control or influence (for example, the weather). What can be assured is a choice between a defense program that insures the survival of the vast majority of Americans with relative confidence and one that deliberately permits the Soviet Union to wreak whatever level of damage it chooses.

No matter how grave the Soviet offense, a U.S. president cannot credibly threaten and should not launch a strategic nuclear strike if expected U.S. casualties are likely to involve 100 million or more American citizens. There is a difference between a doctrine that can offer little rational guidance should deterrence fail and a doctrine that a president might employ responsibly for identified political purposes. Existing evidence on the probable consequences of nuclear exchanges suggests that there should be a role for strategy in nuclear war. To ignore the possibility that strategy can be applied to nuclear war is to insure by choice a nuclear apocalypse if deterrence fails. The current U.S. deterrence posture is fundamentally flawed because it does not provide for the protection of American territory.

It is the final two paragraphs which are most revealing…

An Armageddon syndrome lurks behind most concepts of nuclear strategy. It amounts either to the belief that because the United States could lose as many as 20 million people, it should not save the 80 million or more who otherwise would be at risk, or to a disbelief in the serious possibility that 200 million Americans could survive a nuclear war.

There is little satisfaction in advocating an operational nuclear doctrine that could result in the deaths of 20 million or more people in an unconstrained nuclear war. However, as long as the United States relies on nuclear threats to deter an increasingly powerful Soviet Union, it is inconceivable that the U.S. defense community can continue to divorce its thinking on deterrence from its planning for the efficient conduct of war and defense of the country. Prudence in the latter should enhance the former.

What strikes me as fascinating is that, much as Kaplan notes in his own piece about such analyses in general, this discussion paper is abstract. There are remarkably few details as to the actual impacts of the weapons used. There are no projections of likely deaths, rather a sort of fudging as to what might be acceptable. In other words there’s no empirical basis to the paper. Now, some will perhaps say that that is missing the point, but I’d argue that it is precisely by rooting such discussions that we can see how incredible the idea of a survivable nuclear exchange would be.

And beyond that there’s this…which at the time Payne was writing had not been publicly theorised.