In the fifty odd years of living
with nuclear weapons some of the most incisive criticism of
deterrence has come from defence personnel (usually retired ones,
because of the restrictions on their speaking out while in uniform).
Perhaps the most prominent example of this phenomenon is General Lee
Butler, who served as Commander-in-Chief of the United States
Strategic Command, a position in which he had planning and
operational responsibilities for all US strategic nuclear
forces.
Given this background, Butler naturally focuses on
the problems with the process of operationalising US nuclear policy,
which is supposedly meant to deter adversaries. In The Gift of Time,
Jonathan Schell’s collection of conversations with people who have
thought deeply about matters concerning nuclear weapons, Butler
observes, “The goal — the wish, really — might be to prevent nuclear
war, but the operational plan had to be to wage war. After all,
actual nuclear ‘deterrence’ — which is to say a mental state of
restraint brought about by terror of annihilation — was nothing that
we could bring about by ourselves. In the last analysis, it was up
to the enemy whether he would be deterred or not. What both sides
had to do in the meantime was plan for nuclear war. Wish and plan
collided at every point — psychologically, intellectually, but,
above all, operationally.”
The dilemma for a military planner
arises from the fact that nuclear weapons are so destructive that
even one could not be allowed to slip through the defences, and yet
the classic military propensity for worst-case analyses had to take
into account the possibility that not one but several — and in the
case of the US and Russia, thousands of — nuclear weapons would be
exploded on one’s territory and on one’s military
infrastructure.
The worst circumstance the US military
planners could conceive of is the famous ‘bolt from the blue’
attack, when a full-scale nuclear attack is carried out in peacetime
with no strategic warning. Under such circumstances it was
conceivable that a significant fraction of the US nuclear arsenal
would be vulnerable to destruction. If military planners took this
to be reasonably likely, then they would have to recommend nuclear
forces large enough to ensure what they thought of as sufficient
destruction for the purposes of deterring the adversary.
Even within the theology of nuclear deterrence, what
suffices as adequate destruction to deter an attack is never clear.
All one can say is that in the eyes of US military planners, this
number has usually been greater than a thousand. Based on extensive
interviews, analysts at the Natural Defense Research Council
(www.nrdc.org) believe that current Strategic Integrated Operations
Plan (SIOP) has about 1000-1200 targets in Russia alone; some of
them are to be targeted with more than one nuclear
weapon.
Ensuring that the country would have over a thousand
nuclear weapons ready to be fired off even after a massive nuclear
attack is doubtlessly a difficult task. This has led to two
pressures. One was laying out requirements for more and more nuclear
weapons, the basis for the arms build-up. The second was the
construction of a decision-making process that “powerfully biased
the president...to launch before the arrival of the first enemy
warhead.” In other words, even if a country were to claim that it
was going to follow a no-first-use policy and would ride out a
first-strike before launching a retaliatory attack, the operational
requirements of what has been conceived of as adequate deterrence
push the country to in fact launch its nuclear weapons before it has
actually suffered any destruction from the opponent’s nuclear
weapons.
This posture brought with it great dangers,
especially in times of crises. Based on experience with military
crises, Butler concludes that “as you entered the crisis, thoughts
of deterrence vanished, and you were simply trying to deal with the
classic imponderables of crises.” As an illustration, he offers the
Cuban missile crisis where there was no real talk of deterrence in
the thirteen days the crisis lasted.
Butler is by no means
the only example of this phenomenon. Another retired military
officer who has spoken out and written extensively against nuclear
deterrence, is Robert Green, a retired British Naval Commander. For
Green, the central problem with nuclear deterrence is that it lacks
credibility and is impractical. As an example, he cites the
Falklands/Malvinas war where the nuclear-armed submarine “Polaris
had clearly not deterred Galtieri [the Argentinian General] from
invading.” In his assessment, if the UK had threatened a nuclear
attack, Galtieri would have very publicly called the bluff. He also
feels that “it is likely that the Polaris Commanding Officer would
have either refused the order or faked a malfunction, and returned
to face the court martial.”
It is too early for South Asia to
have its share of retired nuclear weaponeers and targeteers to turn
against deterrence. But we do have several retired military
personnel from both India and Pakistan who have spoken out publicly
against the ongoing nuclear weapons programmes. Barely a few months
after the May 1998 nuclear tests, a group of sixty-three retired
military personnel put out a joint statement against nuclear tests
and weapons, emphasising the fact that they were not “theoreticians
or arm chair idealists” and clearly understood the “destructive
parameters of conventional and nuclear weapons”.
The
impracticality of nuclear deterrence is an apt illustration of a
proverb in Tamil that says that the picture or description of a
pumpkin in a book cannot be used to make a curry. What starts out as
an exquisite — at least in the eyes of its votaries — theoretical
construct, turns out to be completely messy and irrelevant to actual
day-to-day military practice. Rather it turns even the normal
dangers that flow from military crises and war into extraordinarily
destructive ones. It is still not too late for India and Pakistan to
avoid these dangers.
