Deterrence, but Updated: Where missile defense comes in-crucially
The U.S. nuclear deterrent worked for 40 years against the Soviets, so why won’t it work now against lesser powers, armed with drastically fewer nuclear weapons than Moscow? Once the cruder, practical arguments against a U.S. missile defense are cleared away-it simply won’t work, it’s too expensive, etc.-the most sophisticated and best case against a defense hangs on this argument: Nuclear deterrence worked without a missile defense for decades, making a defense now at best superfluous, at worst a destabilizing force.
This argument has been made, in various forms, by Michael Kinsley, Thomas Friedman, Robert Wright, Christopher Hitchens, and a slew of Democratic politicians. Fancier than the average soundbite, it is the Belvedere vodka of anti-missile-defense arguments. But the case for nuclear deterrence made by these new, liberal Dr. Strangeloves is shot through with misunderstandings, beginning with the fundamental question of how-and how well-deterrence actually worked against the Soviets. Deterrence essentially involves convincing a state that the costs of a given action will be higher than any potential benefits. It is not nearly as easy as it looks, especially in the post-Cold War world.
A small circle of conservative defense strategists has in recent years updated Cold War deterrence theory, and perhaps foremost in this circle is Keith Payne, a scholar who runs a small think tank called the National Institute for Public Policy. Payne has worked closely with defense analysts who now occupy the top levels of the Bush administration, and has written a new book-The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction-that is an essential text for understanding the reasoning behind the administration’s push for missile defense. (Asked whom to talk to about the current state of deterrence theory, one nuclear expert quipped, “If you talked to Keith Payne, you’ve talked to everyone.”) Properly understood, deterrence is more subtle and less foolproof than the simplistic version advanced by Kinsley & Co., and certainly requires a missile defense to bolster it.
Opponents of missile defense misunderstand the purpose of the U.S. nuclear deterrent in the Cold War at the most basic level. As former CIA director Jim Woolsey has written in NR (June 19, 2000), the deterrent was never primarily to dissuade the Soviet Union from launching a city-busting, out-of-the-blue nuclear strike against America (although that was important). It was meant to deter a conventional attack against Western Europe. The West didn’t have the conventional arms to oppose such an attack on the ground, so the United States always let the possibility of its first-use of nuclear weapons hang in the air, a not-so-subtle way to discourage the Soviets from rolling their armor across the Fulda Gap.
The problem for the U.S. in today’s international environment is precisely that its deterrence policy did work in the Cold War. It demonstrated that a nuclear force can make the potential costs of war too high even for an adversary who possesses an overwhelming conventional advantage. Today, the Fulda Gap is much less important than simply The Gap, and it is the U.S. that may need to project an overwhelming conventional power, probably in the Middle East and Asia. The nuclear deterrence that worked against the Soviets can now readily be turned against the United States. Is America, as Keith Payne asks, willing to absorb greater costs-perhaps entire cities destroyed-than the Soviets? Unlikely. Will the stakes in a foreseeable crisis be higher for the U.S. than they were for the Soviets? Unlikely again, since the Soviet Union was contending over the fate of Europe, while the United States may be contending over the fate of Taiwan.
Some missile-defense critics acknowledge that the U.S. will be deterred by new nuclear states. “The possession of nukes would probably give a dictator more leeway in world affairs, [and] great powers might be less inclined to confront such a dictator,” wrote Robert Wright, a dogged opponent of missile defense, recently in Slate. This is precisely the effect that the United States has to fear in the post-Cold War world, and its massive nuclear force is powerless to counter it. In fact, the size and structure of the force probably never had quite the importance attributed to it. Arms-controllers during the Cold War obsessed over tiny adjustments in the U.S. and Soviet missile forces, and deterrence became mostly about number-crunching game theory-Gradgrind does nuclear weapons.
As Payne points out, this niggling over the specific mix of weapons was a luxury, possible only because the strategic situation with the Soviets was fairly stable. The Soviets were a revolutionary power, but generally showed little taste for provoking a major war and had a bureaucratic power structure and a decision-making process that we understood fairly well. So, deterrence theorists assumed away all the really nettlesome questions about the Soviets, about their goals, their ideology, their culture. Cold War theorists, Payne writes, “derived grand conclusions about deterrence based on the one factor that is relatively easily measured, i.e., the balance of nuclear forces.” Not every U.S. adversary for all time will be as well understood, or as predictable.