Abstract
Is nuclear deterrence still relevant to US policy?1 Compared with the heights of its prominence in the depths of the Cold War, nuclear deterrence has fallen into relative obscurity. Given the nature of the conflicts in which the United States is engaged, attention today in defense circles focuses on counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and high-level conventional conflict. So stark has the shift been that a blue-ribbon panel, appointed in the wake of embarrassing incidents within the US nuclear bomber force, found “a serious erosion of focus, expertise, mission readiness, resources, and discipline in the nuclear weapons enterprise within the Air Force” and a general lack of interest in nuclear matters within the Defense Department as a whole.2 The broader intellectual climate has been even less favorable than the neglect suffered within the defense community. Indeed, much of the focus that nuclear deterrence has received in recent years has been generated by the well-publicized effort to eliminate nuclear weapons, an effort that in one way or another has received the endorsement of President Obama and his Republican 2008 rival Senator John McCain, legions of former senior officials, as well as countless cultural, religious, and other influential figures. Someone not steeped in the intricacies of nuclear deterrence might be forgiven for thinking that the broader military’s lack of interest in nuclear deterrence and the testimonies against its necessity by its former high priests and practitioners, like Henry Kissinger, constitute pretty powerful evidence that nuclear deterrence is no longer relevant—or even needed.
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Notes
For a critique of this way of thinking, see Hans Morgenthau, “The Fallacy of Thinking Conventionally About Nuclear Weapons,” in Arms Control and Technological Innovation, ed. David Carlton and Carlo Schaerf (New York: Wiley, 1976), 256–264.
Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).
John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989)
John Mueller, The Remnants of War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992).
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
James J. Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 2008).
Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913).
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962)
Joseph Schumpeter, “The Sociology of Imperialism,” in Imperialism and Social Classes (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1955), esp. 55–98.
Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
For the classic argument along these lines, see Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: 1776).
David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (London: 1742), especially “Of the Jealousy of Trade”; and David Ricardo, On the Principles ofPolitical Economy and Taxation (London: 1817).
For an example of the practical influence of this way of thinking, see Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First—The Singapore Story: 1965–2000 (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 481 and 612, inter alia. Lee recounts the central importance of free trade in allowing formerly aggrandizing countries such as Germany and Japan to “grow through trade and investments. They cooperated and competed with other nations and were able to prosper and flourish without wars.” But Lee emphasizes that this beneficial development is contingent on the active maintenance of open markets and free trade. It is not a given.
For an analysis of this, see Samuel P. Huntington, “Why International Primacy Matters,” International Security 17, no. 4 (Spring 1993): 71–82.
Peter Liberman, for instance, argued that “ruthless invaders can, in fact, successfully exploit industrial societies, at least for short periods of time. Control over industrial societies, moreover, can be maintained for longer periods of time at relatively low expense.” Peter Liberman, Does Conquest Pay: The Exploitation of Occupied Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4.
See, e.g., Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). As Gilpin summarized, “A liberal international order requires strong leadership and cooperation among the major economic powers…. American leadership and interstate cooperation constitute the only possible foundation for an open and stable global economy.” 388.
Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986).
See, e.g., Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 156–157.
Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940– 1941 (New York: Penguin, 2007), 331–381.
For explications of this view, see, e.g., Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979)
John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001).
Robert Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era (New York: Routledge, 2005), 12. For another, similarly judicious argument akin to Jervis’s
Paul W. Schroeder, “Does the History of International Politics Go Anywhere?” in Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History ofModern Europe, ed. David Wetzel et al. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), esp. 277–284. For the classic anticipation of this argument
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, 1795.
Abbe de Saint-Pierre, A Projectfor Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe, 1712.
Jervis, American Foreign Policy in a New Era, 28. For more on the concept of the “security community,” see Karl W. Deutsch et al., Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957)
Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett, eds., Security Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Ibid., 16. For the classic description of states in anarchy, see Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948).
Ibid., 29–32, inter alia. This argument resembles a variant of the Hegelian argument laid out by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History. While Jervis does not predict that all other nations will necessarily track the development of what he refers to as the “leading powers,” it is clear that he sees the “leading powers” as representing the most advanced form of social organization. Fukuyama similarly argued that, while history would continue in the contests among nations and peoples, no other form of sociopolitical organization would supersede social liberal democracy and that the world would tend toward that form of organization over time. Fukuyama, The End of History, 64 and 311, inter alia. Hegel’s original argument is laid out in Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1953).
For a peerless description of this development, see Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005).
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986)
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: New American Library, 1958).
For an exceptionally insightful analysis on this point, emphasizing the implications of the military revolution brought on by World War II and the nuclear age for European autonomy, see James R. Schlesinger, European Security and the Nuclear Threat Since 1945 (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1967), P-3574. Schlesinger observed that Europe had been “hopelessly priced out of the game” by the need for sophisticated strategic forces and that the result after 1945 had been an increasing dependence on the United States (10). This, he saw, had led to the “ultimate strategic dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union” (25).
William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric, America’s Inadvertent Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
For a historical analysis of this development, see Martin Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics.
See, for instance, Plato, The Republic, trans. T. Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Book VIII
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Penguin, 1994); Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, trans. D. Lowenthal (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1965)
Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934–1961). For a more recent influential example
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage, 1987).
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. L. J. Walker (London: Penguin, 1970).
For a more recent example of this perspective, see Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 301–303.
Geoffrey Parker, The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
For a recent assessment of this dynamic, see Christopher Caldwell, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
See, for instance, Department of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, 2010, http://www.defense.gov/pubs/pdfs/2010_CMPR_Final.pdf (July 24, 2012).
For an analysis of the multiple causes of war, see Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War (Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), who conclude in their analytical survey of explanations of the causes of war that “there are multiple causal paths through which war can occur” (213).
See, for instance, Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (New York: Knopf, 1948). For a classic statement of neorealism
Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, PA:Addison-Wesley,1979).
See, for example, John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), esp. 3–12
Martin van Creveld, The Culture of War (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008). For “the passion of life to its top,” see Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Memorial Day Speech,” May 30, 1895.
Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 88–90.
Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin, 2006), 9.
For a similar assessment on the end of war, see Samuel P. Huntington, “No Exit: The Errors of Endism,” The National Interest no. 17 (Fall 1989): 3–11. As Huntington pithily but sagely advised, “To hope for the benign end of history is human. To expect it to happen is unrealistic. To plan on it happening is disastrous.”
Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), inter alia.
Glenn Snyder, Deterrence and Defense: Toward a Theory of National Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 14–16.
Such ideas were central to the whole thrust of Enlightenment thought on the free market, represented above all in Adam Smith’s Wealth ofNations. See, for instance, Bernard Mandeville, “The Fable of the Bees,” in The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997). For a modern appraisal
Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). A very clear example along different lines is the militaristic Society of Jesus, founded by the ex-soldier Ignatius of Loyola on the military model and commanding perfect obedience from its members to its Superior General and its ultimate commander, the Pope.
John H. Herz, “Idealist Internationalism and Security Dilemma,” World Politics 2 (1950): 157–158.
For an analysis of the role of differential growth rates in causing great power conflicts, see Dale C. Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).
Robert Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).
See, for instance, Robert D. Blackwill and Jeffrey W. Legro, “Constraining Ground Force Exercises of NATO and the Warsaw Pact,” International Security 13, no. 3 (Winter 1989–1990): 68–98.
For a similar assessment, see Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, 3rd ed. (Houndsmills, UK, 2003), especially the Conclusion. 458–464.
See interviews of former Soviet officials in John G. Hines et al., Soviet Intentions 1965–1985 (McLean, VA: BDM Federal, 1995).
For a history of some earlier moves toward nuclear weapons by US allies, see Kurt M. Campbell et al., eds., The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004).
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Colby, E. (2012). Is Nuclear Deterrence Still Relevant?. In: Lowther, A.B. (eds) Deterrence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137289810_4
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