Cold Warriors Question Nukes

Martin Hellman writes "George Shultz served as President Reagan's Secretary of State, and Bill Perry as President Clinton's Secretary of Defense. Henry Kissinger was National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to both President Nixon and Ford. Sam Nunn was Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee for eight years. Their key roles in the Cold War has led many to call them 'Cold Warriors.' That status makes their recent, repeated calls for fundamentally re-examining our nuclear posture all the more noteworthy. Their most recent attempt to awaken society to the unacceptable risk posed by nuclear weapons is an Op-Ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled Deterrence in the Age of Nuclear Proliferation. (That link requires a subscription to the Journal. There is also a subscription-free link (PDF) at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.) Key excerpts and links to other resources are available as well."

Comments

In the suicide-bombing age...

[fiannaFailMan]

...deterrence is obsolete. If people are so brainwashed by their religion that they think that they're going to be greeted by 17 virgins and everything will be better once this life is over, all bets are off.

Religion is the biggest threat to the survival of our species, folks. Time to wake up. Time to stand up to the "let's not offend the Muslims" crowd. Every time they claim to be offended by people in the western world exercising their western rights (whether it's to draw cartoons or write novels) we should tell them to go fuck themselves.

Re:In the suicide-bombing age...

[Wyatt Earp]

Religion is the enemy right now, sea lanes, industrial production, communications/control and minerals are the long term things to worry about, for all of those nuclear weapons for deterrence are still "useful".

Religion isn't the threat, ideology is, be it pan-Islamic, Maoism, White Supremacy, etc

Re:In the suicide-bombing age...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Suicide bombers are arguably the most dramatic example; but they are hardly the only ones who threaten the classic MAD/Deterrence model of nuke use.

For the classic model of nuclear deterrence to work, you must have two or more rational actors, with access to good information, with interests that would be unacceptably threatened by the use of nuclear weapons against them, and with access to nuclear weapons and the ability to perform reprisals with them. That is actually a fairly tight set of requirements.

Even during the Cold War, for instance, there were a few situations where technical and/or command & control glitches left some number of warheads in the hands of local officers with either false positives, or highly limited information. Since the ability to perform reprisals requires an emphasis on designing "fail-unsafe" systems that launch if the nation's infrastructure is damaged, you enormously magnify the potential costs of infrastructure glitches.

Another quite plausible attack on the classic deterrence model is the use of proxies or non-state actors(whether suicidal or not: it isn't hugely pertinent whether or not the chap who carried the bomb onto the plane is also on the plane when the trivial-for-an-arduino-hobbyist-with-$100 GPS/alteometer system triggers the bomb at perfect airburst altitude over a major city...) If you don't know who provided the bomb, you don't have anybody to perform a reprisal against, and thus your threat of reprisal is hollow, and does not deter an attacker with access to covert operators. Your basic "Hey guys, let's build a limited number of big, hardened, silos, trivially visible from orbit, from which to launch extremely dramatic ICBMs" strategy makes retaliation easy; but is increasingly obsolete. Even aside from the cargo planes and panel vans school of sneaking about, the steady proliferation of the expertise to build short to medium range missiles(or just the finished missiles) which can be launched from all sorts of improv platforms is going to make aggressor ID harder as time goes on.

There is also the "star wars" concern: Were some rational actor locked in a classic deterrence scenario to develop an anti-missile technology that actually worked, their opponent would no longer have a viable deterrent, which would upset the equilibrium(as would a rational; but misinformed actor who thinks he has an effective anti-missile system, or an irrational actor who believes
There is also the sticky issue of the potential for proliferation and increased use of smallish, tactical nuclear devices. International opinion on the use of strategic nuclear devices, particularly against population centers, is pretty uniformly negative. It is less clear how a situation involving something on the scale of a Davy Crockett style device would be handled. It's a nuke, and it would place considerable destructive punch in the hands of quite light forces; but it is smaller than some perfectly-legal-and-above-board conventional explosives. Even in a simple "two powers, clear attribution" scenario, it isn't clear that such devices would escalate to a full-scale strategic armageddon; but they would certainly make conventional warfare extra ugly. Perhaps of greater interest to today's major powers, such devices would be a godsend to the scruffy proxy-forces of the world: All the power of a GBU-43 or some sort of particularly nasty cluster/carpet munition, in a delivery system not much larger than a simple mortar, and capable of being broken down and hand carried by a small team, whatever rickety pickup trucks are the local favorite, etc. Easy to hide in a populated area against anything but a house-by-house operation(unlike the aircraft or heavy artillery you would ordinarily need to deliver such firepower); but capable of inflicting ghastly casualties on even advanced military forces...

So. Yeah. I can't really blame them for being concerned...

Re:In the suicide-bombing age...

[Runaway1956]

Someone who happens to be on target. The mewling idiots complain about "religion" being a danger. And, within the past 100 years, we've seen that ATHEISTS rank among the cruelest, most inhuman monsters on earth.

It's "ideology" that is the real threat. Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, and Joseph Stalin never went to a Christian mass, and they certainly never took an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. Ideology. Any time some sumbitch starts thinking that he knows what's good for the rest of humanity, we are in trouble, no matter his religion, or lack of.

Re:In the suicide-bombing age...

[sjames]

That's dangerously close to the no true Scotsman fallacy. They were exposed to religion in childhood and did bad things so they're not REAL atheists! Many if not most avowed Atheists were exposed to religion in childhood by religious parents.

A Christian could as easily claim that since mass killing is against the teaching of Christ, the crazy Christian killers weren't really Christians.

Re:Large arsenals is a waste of money

[Nyeerrmm]

From what I gather, it would be far more unstable for us to have 50-100 nukes than the huge number we have right now.

The problem is that there are only 2 countries with very large numbers of weapons, while a lot of countries have ~100. The two-party balance is theoretically stable (or at least it appears to be given the past 60 years), while a multi-party balance leaves a lot of room for alliances and power plays that could start nukes flying. The most dangerous part of a 'Road to zero' nuclear reduction plan is the time when everyone has a few hundred.

The other problem is that with ~100s of weapons, it is conceivable for a country to 'win' a nuclear war, since it would be conceivable to eliminate the enemies capabilities while inflicting serious damage. However, with the ridiculous number we have now, there is simply no way to attack the other country and keep from being wiped out yourself.

Or at least thats the theory. I'm no expert on the matter though, I just learned from my roommate who is in grad school for these kind of things.

Re:We don't need them anymore

[salesgeek]

We can do pretty much anything* we need to with precision guided conventional weapons.
* Except make making victory impossible for the enemy.

FTFY.

Until the other guy doesn't have nukes, you are pretty much stuck with having them. Nukes are largely responsible for preventing the next every 20 years or so ginormous war that was happening up until 1945. While I don't like having stuff around that hand the earth off to the cockroaches, it beats having 50 million people killed in five years every two or three decades.

Re:Like Robert McNamara

[erice]

Did you actually read the article? They aren't complaining about what they did in the cold war. They are saying that those strategies don't make any sense *now*. And they are right, although like any committee opinion, they did not state it forcefully enough.

Why do we have *any* nukes pointed at Moscow? Russia is not our enemy. Who else then? There are no nation states with motivation to nuke the US that have the means to do so. Who are these missiles supposed to deter? The only purpose these weapons ever had was deterrence. If they aren't any good that then they actually make us less safe by making nuclear war by accident possible when it wouldn't happen deliberately.

72 white raisins...

[Namarrgon]

I believe the Koran itself doesn't actually specify how many virgins; that was mentioned in the Book of Suran instead as a fifth-hand recollection of something Mohammed said. Also, there's no mention of them being specifically available only for martyrs.

There's also some doubt about the virgin part. Some scholars believe that the word "hur" is better translated as "white raisin".