The Obsolescence of Deterrence

...It presents the international relations of the second half of the 20th century as simple and stable...

...This widespread collapse of the consensus in favor of deterrence saw the largest political demonstration in American history, an anti-nuclear rally that brought over 700,000 protesters to New York City in June 1982...

...So why go to war to disarm him...

...But the case for preemptive war cannot be dismissed with the easy and unexamined invocation of deterrence...

...Terror and paradox are not easy to live with...

...Twenty years later, the idea of nuclear defenses is not only widely accepted but is the official policy of the United States...

...Overthrowing Saddam because of his refusal to relinquish these weapons would be a clear demonstration to other tyrants that attempting to acquire WMD is a losing proposition: Not only do they not purchase you immunity (as in classical deterrence), they purchase you extinction...

...Most objected that this policy, aimed today at Iraq, was simply too reckless and costly, risking disastrous outcomes—from Black Hawk Down urban fighting in Baghdad to chemical and bioweapon attacks on American troops or Iraq's neighbors...

...As president, Reagan did everything he could to bolster deter-rence—his military buildup so outstripped the Soviets as to convince them ultimately to sue for peace in the Cold War—but only as a temporary measure in the absence of any substitute...

...He's a survivalist...

...But those are mere prudential objections...

...both sides knew that if they dared use their nukes first, they would be obliterated...

...Which explains Reagan's extraordinary enthusiasm for strategic defense, which he proposed with utter sincerity as a means of escaping the moral dilemmas of mutual assured destruction...

...The case for deterrence rests on the following syllogism: Weapons of mass destruction were not invented yesterday...

...He kept looking for an alternative different from that offered by the left, which was unilateral disarmament and surrender...

...We came more than once to the brink of Armageddon...

...We have that choice today with Iraq...

...And even under those circumstances, the best of circumstances, deterrence was psychologically debilitating, inherently unstable, and highly dangerous...

...Like all nostalgia, especially Cold War nostalgia, it depends on a memory that is highly selective...

...Opinion leaders, academics, physicians' groups, major media, and the Democratic party were so seized by fear of nuclear war that they frantically sought escape by either a ridiculous solution—a nuclear freeze (it passed the House of Representatives 278-149)—or a disastrous one: unilateral disarmament...

...inspections...

...War with Iraq might indeed be costly...

...According to Harvard's Dr...

...Had one thing gone wrong—for example, had Kennedy not ignored a particularly belligerent message from Khrushchev while acknowledging a more conciliatory subsequent message—the United States and the Soviet Union might well have reduced each other to a smoking ruin...

...His idea of ballistic missile defenses was greeted with the same skepticism that has greeted the Bush doctrine of preemption...

...Yes, deterrence worked in the past...

...It brought us closer to the abyss than any event in human history, and could very well have taken us over had the United States and the Soviet Union had different leaders at the time...

...We would be choosing to live in deterrence with Saddam...

...He will not in my judgment initiate an attack with a weapon of mass destruction, because it would lead to his own destruction if he did that...

...Because deterrence works...

...Is this the posture we wish to adopt toward Iraq and other rogue states...

...Why does the president feel, asks Zbigniew Brzezinski, that "deterrence doesn't work, when it worked with such murderous, dangerous tyrants as Stalin, as Mao Zedong...

...As the era of weapons of mass destruction dawns, the better approach is to deny them—forcibly if necessary—to very bad actors...

...The reason is simple...

...Not because preemptive disarming is too costly but because it is unnecessary...

...Of course, now that the Security Council has ordered Saddam to cough up his weapons of mass destruction or face "serious consequences," Kennedy and Levin and other leaders who had strenuously spoken out against the war have fallen silent, wisely not wishing to be seen as to the left of France on this issue...

...interests by America's overwhelming military superiority...

...Not surprisingly, the bishops found that deterrence, which rested, of course, on an American threat to launch a nuclear attack, violated just war theory: "It is not morally acceptable to intend to kill the innocent as part of a strategy of deterring nuclear war...

...we had nukes...

...He will certainly be as deterrable as the Soviets were...

...During the now warmly remembered Cold War, ban-the-bomb and disarmament movements erupted with dismaying regularity...

...Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a famous pastoral letter on nuclear war at the height of the controversy over the nuclear freeze and the deployment of American Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe (to counter the Soviets' installation of intermediate-range SS20s in their part of Europe...

...As Churchill memorably characterized the central paradox, "Safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation...

...There's no escaping this logic...

...The fact that we escaped is not an argument for the stability of deterrence...

...I have seen no persuasive evidence," argued Sen...

...The current deterrence school starts with the assumption that there is no stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, but there is no great need to worry because deterrence can deal with the problem...

...If he doesn't, there will be no escaping the choice: preemptive war or living with Saddam's weapons of mass destruction...

...It will mean that even such inherently undeterrable substate groups as al Qaeda will in time get these weapons...

...This is madness...

...John Mack, it was the cause of "widespread fear, sadness, helplessness, cynicism and anger...

...Ironically, the preemption option, if adopted, will serve as a higher form of deterrence...

...He was a provisional supporter of deterrence, but was never satisfied with it because ultimately he felt it was immoral...

...the risks need to be carefully weighed...

...WMD technology is spreading and coming within the reach of dozens of countries...

...Such was the stability, both strategic and psychological, of a balance of terror...

...BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER When President Bush enunciated his radical new doctrine of preemption, the forcible disarmament of rogue possessors of weapons of mass destruction, it was met with a mixture of disdain and consternation by a foreign policy establishment instinctively allergic to new doctrines...

...Who can object to SadCharles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...It is an argument for luck...

...The first problem with this argument is its nostalgia for containment and nuclear deterrence...

...You become open to precisely the kind of nuclear blackmail to which North Korea is today subjecting the United States (and Japan and South Korea...

...But the 21st century is not bipolar...

...This is the central question of our time, extending far beyond Iraq...

...It is also a terrible tempting of statistics...

...No people want to live in a hair-trigger situation in which their safety depends on the threat of the annihilation of millions...

...Preemption is a kind of pre-deterrence that stops the threat at an earlier, safer stage...

...However hyped these claims, the very fact that they were made, widely published and widely received, shows how traumatized the country had become by the very thought of living under the balance of terror...

...dam's unilateral disarmament, achieved through the painless means of U.N...

...What kept the peace with a hostile nuclear superpower was deterrence: The Soviet Union had nukes...

...The result will inevitably be a deeply unstable international structure that promises to break down at myriad points in the future, even the near future...

...They reached their apogee during the nuclear hysteria that swept Western Europe and the United States in the early 1980s...

...Saddam Hussein is infinitely weaker than such vast continental superpowers...

...Saddam can be...

...Twenty years later, the bishops are again invoking just war theory to argue for the immorality of a preemptive war on Iraq—"We fear that resort to war . . . would not meet the strict conditions in Catholic teaching for overriding the strong presumption against the use of military force"—a war whose very purpose would be to strip Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and thus escape the dilemmas (and immoralities) of deterrence...

...Indeed, the book that sparked the frenzy, Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth, perhaps the most celebrated book of the time, was an indictment of deterrence and a manifesto for disarmament...

...Taken together with other nonproliferation measures, such as export controls, preemption can be the most potent deterrent to proliferation...

...It is most unlikely, however, that Saddam will succumb to the patient prodding of Hans Blix and disarm peacefully...

...High suicide rates, teen depression, drug use, and anomie were attributed to the unbearable stresses of living under a nuclear cloud...

...Similarly on the secular left, the same people who for decades did everything they could to undermine deterrence have now all of a sudden discovered its virtues...

...It worked during the Cuban missile crisis...

...Starting with Saddam...

...If the Cuban missile crisis is evidence of the virtues of deterrence, God help us...

...How to deal with the inevitable proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to rogue states: preempt or deter...

...The deterrence nostalgics reject it, preferring to live voluntarily under a new balance of terror...

...At least during the Cold War one could justify deterrence on the grounds that there was simply no other choice...

...The more fundamental objection was that in principle the idea of disarming Saddam Hussein and his ilk does not withstand scrutiny...

...To voluntarily choose it as the principle on which to rest our safety in this age of weapons of mass destruction is sheer folly...

...universal safety through universal deterrence...

...In contrast, the honest position on the dilemmas of deterrence was best exemplified by Ronald Reagan...

...It cannot be otherwise...

...We have half a century of experience on how to keep them from being used...

...Nostalgia for deterrence is not one of them...

...But in the past it was a play with very few actors...

...In October 1962, we came to within a single misjudgment, a single mis-communication, perhaps even a single overeager fighter pilot...

...It spent the better part of the Cold War not only trying to scare the hell out of the citizenry about living under deterrence, but trying to establish its fundamental immorality...

...Sometimes too much...

...Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee...

...While Saddam is thoroughly evil, he is above all a power-hungry survivor...

...A death penalty (political or literal) for the attempted acquisition of these weapons should concentrate the mind of those contemplating acquiring them...

...Therefore, when this hiatus of cozy consensus ends— as it inevitably will either when Saddam violates Security Council Resolution 1441 to the satisfaction of France, or when the United States loses patience with both Saddam's cheating and the Security Council's equivocation— the question of a war over these weapons of mass destruction will return...

...They could not be disarmed (preemption would have required a surprise American nuclear attack...

...Under such circumstances, the logic of deterrence argues perversely for increased proliferation—if everyone has nukes, everyone is deterred, and no one will use them...

...One cannot leave the subject of the opposition to deterrence during the Cold War without noting the hypocrisy of the antiwar movement's current newfound affection for deterrence...

...They were not...

...The world will not survive more than a very few missile-crisis equivalents before someone makes a blunder that precipitates catastrophic nuclear war...

...The case for deterrence, drawing on the bipolar Cold War, leads inexorably to a world of hyperproliferation...

...Deterrence nostalgics also conveniently forget its debilitating psychological effects...

...The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will certainly include increasingly unstable and unbalanced characters...

...When at the apex of the hysteria ABC screened The Day After, a film that depicted a nuclear attack on the United States, psychologists and counselors were deployed the next morning throughout the country, and especially in the schools, to try to calm the panic...

...President Bush has made it clear that if left with this choice, he will see to it that Saddam is forcibly disarmed by the American military and whatever allies join us...

...Yet it is plainly a huge bet against everything we know about human nature...

...And fuzzy...

...Safety through deterrence...

...The Soviets developed nuclear capability at a time when they were a great conventional superpower...

...Learned psychiatrists testified to the heavy psychological price America was paying for deterrence...

...Indeed, it is an argument for trying to escape deterrence and find sturdier ground for human survival...

...The idea of preemption is to deter states not from using weapons of mass destruction but from acquiring them in the first place...

...As Brent Scowcroft put it: "Threatening to use these weapons for blackmail—much less their actual use—would open him and his entire regime to a devastating response by the U.S...

...Indeed, making an example of Saddam...

...Containment of Saddam is so far working," said Sen...

...For fifty years, the peace of the world hinged on a balance of terror...

...You will be not only disarmed but dethroned...

...Had we had the choice of disarming the Soviets by more palatable means, say, a limited military operation like Israel's destruction of Saddam's Osirak reactor, it might have been a reasonable option...

...It takes the model of the bipolar late 20th century—two superpowers deterring each other and keeping the peace—and applies it to the 21st century...

...If you are merely deterring WMD use in war, it is already too late...

...Ted Kennedy, "that Saddam would not be deterred from attacking U.S...

...The balance of terror was imposed on us by necessity...

...There are good reasons to oppose war on Iraq...

...To rest strategic stability on terror and paradox is to ask a lot of a democratic society...

...In 1983, for example, the U.S...