THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE . . . AGAIN
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE . . . AGAIN By Charles Krauthammer One of the least lamented casualties of the Soviet Union's demise was the arcane specialty of nuclear doctrine. Those who had wasted...
...The world was lucky that the first nuclear power was as benign a nation as the United States...
...But it reflects the central paradox of deterrence theory: Generally speaking, the more nukes the better...
...Indeed, that is precisely what has happened between India and Pakistan—competing clandestine nuclear programs—to bring us to the current crisis...
...No matter how massive or how accurate it is, it cannot succeed in wiping out all of his weapons...
...Because the side that destroys the other side's arsenal will have some of its nukes left over to intimidate the other's population...
...It promoted not a panacea, not even a palliative, but a nullity...
...What exactly does that mean...
...But that does not necessarily mean that the subcontinent is more unstable...
...Because the nuclear genie is out of the bottle...
...Lee Butler, former head of the U.S...
...Conversely, each side fears that if it does not strike first, its nuclear arsenal could be wiped out in a first strike, leaving it naked to nuclear blackmail or to further nuclear attack...
...Even worse, imagine if Hitler had...
...Inconveniently for the doe-eyed arms controllers, this tends to happen at high levels of weaponry...
...That kind of talk disappeared when the Soviets had built enough rockets, airplanes, and subs—enough redundancy—to make a first strike futile...
...Small numbers make for a small target...
...Every newspaper and commentator in the country is saying gravely that now that India and Pakistan have acquired nuclear weapons, the subcontinent is an area of great instability...
...That intimidation could be enough to tip the scales of any war or even to induce the aggressed-against to a quick surrender...
...It is odd...
...We used the bomb to end a war, not to start—or win by threat—new ones...
...But it is reality...
...A first strike would thus bring on the incineration of your own homeland...
...As Saddam has shown, a determined tyrant can do this under even the most stringent inspection regime...
...And it is certain that even if neither side does in fact cheat, both sides will surely suspect each other of doing just that...
...They routinely exchange rifle and artillery fire in Kashmir...
...And if nobody attacks first, there can be no nuclear war...
...explains why the nuclear arms reduction agreements that so mesmerize the Clinton administration today are largely irrelevant...
...Yes, they are worth pursuing for their marginal economic savings and for reducing the stock of stuff that, if poorly tended, might be prone to accident or theft...
...It allowed us to go through the birth of the nuclear era in the most stable way: unilateral possession by a nonaggressive power...
...Now, thanks to India and Pakistan, deterrence theory is back...
...The essence of nuclear stability is the existence on both sides of a retaliatory or "second strike" capacity...
...Were the United States to engage in the folly of total denuclearization, it would surely wake up one day looking down the barrel of some nuclear-armed bad actor—Iraq or North Korea or Iran or who knows what other rogue state of the future...
...That was the fuel for the frenzied nuclear disarmament movements of the early '80s and for the American obsession with arms control today...
...And paradoxically, the situation will only begin to stabilize when both countries have deployed enough nukes—spread out in enough areas—that neither side can be sure of a successful first strike...
...Once the Soviets acquired theirs, however, a period of severe nuclear instability began...
...Huge, dispersed, mobile, and hardened arsenals of land-based and airborne nukes had the same stabilizing effect...
...You don't attack first...
...After all, the ultimate instability—and vulnerability—occurs when one side has nukes and the other doesn't...
...They could thus never be preemptively destroyed...
...Now, conventional wisdom holds that the way to nuclear safety is to reduce numbers...
...In a time of crisis—say, fighting breaks out over Kashmir—this presents each side with the opportunity to destroy the other's entire nuclear arsenal in one fell swoop at the beginning of the conflict...
...More precisely, it is not the numbers that are decisive, but how they are distributed and how invulnerable they are to preemption...
...It places a premium on preemption...
...The stakes are obviously higher...
...This would be very nice...
...Any war could be fought not just with conventional weapons but nuclear ones...
...He was regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency...
...Consider India and Pakistan...
...Strategic Air Command, to bring about (through gradual arms reduction) the total denuclearization of the United States...
...After all, India and Pakistan have been at each other's throats for 50 years...
...At the moment, each has a very small number of nuclear weapons and an equally small number of missiles on which those weapons might be delivered...
...Consider the U.S.-Soviet example...
...That is where the India-Pakistan balance is now— about where we were in 1950...
...This sounds odd...
...Nobody attacks first...
...They fought three wars...
...When the numbers get very low, the nuclear balance becomes unstable...
...Many regimes can potentially make them...
...It is also very unlikely...
...Their skill was like conversational Latin: Its time had come and gone...
...It rewards striking first...
...Their nuclear weapons could never be found with any accuracy by the enemy...
...If the other guy has such a capacity, it is crazy to launch a preemptive nuclear attack...
...The United States and the Soviet Union might well have gone to war at some point in the last 50 years had the specter of nuclear annihilation not hung over both countries...
...These treaties do practically nothing, however, to enhance strategic stability...
...Yes, the situation is more dangerous today...
...Very low numbers thus encourage a "use it or lose it" mentality...
...Those who had wasted their youth studying the ins and outs of nuclear deter-rence—the peculiar logic of nuclear war and the kinds of policies and weapons that might make it more or less likely—went the way of the blacksmith in the age of Henry Ford...
...Imagine what the world would have been like in the late 1940s if Stalin had acquired the bomb before we did...
...This idea, trumpeted for its boldness, is simply crazy...
...Welcome once again—just when you thought it was over—to the unthinkable world of nuclear deterrence...
...Why...
...In the short run, the nukes are destabilizing—but not for the reasons being advanced in the papers...
...Indeed, nuclear weapons can actually be stabilizing...
...There is safety in numbers...
...In the same way, India and Pakistan might be less likely to go to war if that means not just Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard...
...The only problem is acquiring the materials and the brains to assemble the devices...
...And it is needed...
...Even worse is the movement today, led by such luminaries as Gen...
...This is true, however, only over the long run...
...Indeed, it is likely that even if both sides agree, one side or the other will cheat...
...It is not a happy prospect...
...They promote the single most important contributor to nuclear instability: the temptation to preemption...
...But conventional wisdom is wrong...
...It also Inconveniently for the doe-eyed arms controllers, nuclear stability tends to be established at high levels of wEAponry...
...policy today to try to rush in and get both sides to forswear the nukes: no further testing, no weaponization...
...Apart from the few days of the Cuban missile crisis, the most unstable period was the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the United States and the Soviet Union were just developing their nuclear arsenals...
...And under the nose of that agency, he built not one but two clandestine nuclear programs...
...Never in history would a Great Power have voluntarily put itself at such pointless risk...
...It sounds perverse to say it, but the fact is, now that the race is on, nuclear stability will only come to the Indian subcontinent when the respective nuclear arsenals have grown larger and more mature...
...Thus the most stabilizing factor in the nuclear equation between the United States and the Soviet Union was the submarine forces...
...That is how nuclear stability is established...
...And a small target is a tempting target...
...Or so it seemed...
...Result...
...And it is U.S...
...the loss of a few soldiers on the frontier, but the possible annihilation of one's major cities...
...If either side were foolish enough to attack the other, there would always be the submarines to bring Armageddon on the aggressor...
...Remember: Before the Gulf War, Saddam was a card-carrying, paid-up, cooperating member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty...
...Stalin might not have used the bomb...
...And when you suspect the other side of cheating, you suspect that it may have a first-strike capacity—which would spur you to cheat as well and develop a clandestine countervailing arsenal...
...But the very fact that he could might have intimidated us into surrendering large parts of Europe, or even more...
...This explains why the nuclear-freeze hysteria of the early '80s was so pointless...
...There would be enough left over for him to retaliate massively...
...There is no way to undo the knowledge of how to make the weapons...
...There was even talk in Washington in the early '50s of destroying the Soviet arsenal before it could be developed...
...The period of nuclear instability on the subcontinent is beginning...
...The subcontinent in the near term will be an area of great instability not just because, obviously, Pakistan and India are new at the nuclear game and thus will be prone to miscalculation, but because each side has so few nuclear weapons...
Vol. 3 • June 1998 • No. 40
