Shared understandings and
deterrence
M V Ramana
The Daily Times
Thursday, September 12, 2002
Last month, in an interview to The Times of Oman,
Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan stated that he considers “nuclear
weapons as weapons of peace.” His reasoning was that “In spite of
various conflicts... there hasn’t been any war... Because... the
consequences will be catastrophic for both sides.” In a somewhat
similar vein, speaking on national television on 28 May 1998,
Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif expressed his opinion
that “had Japan possessed a nuclear bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
would never have been destroyed.”
Both these statements are
expressions of belief that nuclear weapons can deter attacks by
other countries. The claim is that a country that possesses nuclear
weapons can respond to any attack with a hugely destructive nuclear
attack and so no country dare attack it. By extension, it has been
argued that fear of “mutually assured destruction” prevents two
nuclear weapon states from going to war with each other. It is this
belief that is offered as the military argument for the possession
of nuclear weapons.
The statement one often hears is that
‘deterrence works’. As proof of that, we are offered the fact that
the US and the Soviet Union did not go to full-scale war. But that
is not the real issue. The real question to be answered is can
deterrence fail?
It must be clear that deterrence is a
purely psychological concept since it is premised on the reactions
and attitudes of the adversary, who must be sufficiently terrified
about the damage that would result from nuclear retaliation to not
attack. It is not as though there is anything physical that can be
measured to figure out if the other side is deterred. (As an aside,
it may be mentioned that there is no such thing as a “deterrent”.
Those who speak of a deterrent are guilty of reification, treating
an abstraction as if it substantially existed as a concrete material
object.)
What constitutes the level of damage sufficient to
deter has never been clear. Even believers in deterrence admit this.
This comes out clearly in the course of a February 1960 statement
about what would be the minimum arsenal needed to deter the Soviet
Union by General Thomas Power, then Commander-in-Chief of the US
Strategic Air Command. “The closest to one man who would know what
the minimum deterrent is would be [Soviet leader Nikita] Mr.
Khruschev, and frankly I don’t think he knows from one week to
another. He might be able to absorb more punishment next week than
he wants to absorb today. Therefore a deterrent is not a concrete or
finite amount.” In other words, the notion of deterrence is an
automatic prescription for continued arms build up.
Apart
from the amount of nuclear punishment, each party in the deterrence
game also needs to be aware of what the other’s limits are — the red
lines that when crossed will provoke a military response,
potentially nuclear. This requires knowledge of the complicated
signaling that countries may engage in to convey messages to the
other. Together these have sometimes been termed “rules of the road”
to live with nuclear weapons.
Developing a suitable set of
rules demands a set of shared understandings about nuclear weapons
and war strategy. Political scientist Joseph Nye argued in the 1980s
that such a nuclear learning process by the US and Russia led to a
“core of consensual knowledge that both countries share to a large
extent”. These, according to Nye, were the basis of their efforts at
avoiding nuclear war, crisis prevention and management, and arms
control.
This raises a number of questions. What happens when
such a set of shared understandings is absent? David Holloway, yet
another political scientist, has sketched out the contingent — and
perilous — process through which such an understanding came about in
the case of the US and Soviet Union. He also points out that it was
the absence of such an understanding that “proved to be an irritant
in [Soviet] relations with China, and contributed to the breakdown
of the Sino-Soviet alliance”.
The second question that
occurs is what happens when the political leadership changes to one
that does not share the same set of understandings. A recent example
of such a transition is the coming to power of the Bush
Administration in the US, with a different set of ideas about the
role of nuclear weapons, arms control and multilateral treaties.
These ideas have brought about the demise of the very arms control
treaty that Nye cites as an example of the result of a shared
understanding of the problem of arms race stability between the
superpowers — the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty.
The final
question is who is it that has to share these understandings. This
is the hardest since it goes to the heart of the problem with not
just deterrence but realist theories of international relations in
general. The problem is that states are not unitary objects with one
set of ideas. Even without going into the issue of individuals with
differing perceptions and desires, it must be clear that policies
are set by a multitude of institutions, each of which has different
interests of its own.
To illustrate this with a South Asian
example, the Lahore agreements between Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif
and Vajpayee were an exercise in setting down some kind of nuclear
risk reduction measures, a result of the new situation that the two
leaderships found themselves in the wake of the 1998 nuclear tests.
But at the same time, the Pakistani military was involved in
occupying the Kargil heights, clearly revealing the lack of the same
sense of danger that prompted the Lahore process.
There are
thus a number of reasons that suggest possibilities for the
breakdown of nuclear deterrence. If deterrence does fail, the
consequences will be catastrophic. And the more countries accumulate
massive destructive potential to shore up deterrence, the more
catastrophic will be the consequences of failure.