Just when we thought that the
nuclear threat had ended with the cold war, we are jolted out of
our complacency by India's and Pakistan's pounding on the door of
"the nuclear club." And we have known for years that a terrorist
can carry a nuclear bomb into the country in a diplomatic pouch.
Will we have critical intelligence to respond appropriately to
these threats. If the past is any indicator of our good strategic
sense, don't count on it.
Truth, they say, is the first
casualty of war. To that casualty list, I would add "critical
intelligence." And when critical intelligence departs, logical
absurdity and farce abound unchecked. It is said that "Dr.
Strangelove" began as a serious Cold War drama, but that the sense of
comic absurdity so captivated the screenwriters, that they gave in
and produced instead a black comedy classic.
Unfortunately, Strangelovian thinking
persists. For example, near the end of the first Bush administration, I saw the Defense Secretary, one
Richard Cheney on the tube, defending the stationing of US
troops in Germany. (I understand that at the time, the "defense of
Europe" constituted some 40% of our military budget). As best I
recall, he remarked, in classic pentagonese, something like "We
must honor our commitments to maintain the force structure of the
NATO deployments.."
I had to check the calendar to assure
that I had not walked through a time-warp.
Now let's see: This "force structure"
was set up to protect Germany from Russian (then Soviet) troops. And,
sure enough, even as he spoke, the Russians were in Germany.
Why?
Because they had no "home" to go home
to. So, in order to maintain the stability of the Russian government,
the Germans kindly consented to allow the Russians soldiers to remain
awhile.
So it came to this: we were spending
billions to defend the Germans from an invasion from the army that
they had invited to remain on their soil.
Never underestimate the power of an
idea whose time has past -- but refuses to die. Such notions attain
their immortality through the institutions -- read "careers and
investments" -- that are established in their behalf.
For all that, we may now, at last,
have the opportunity to look back upon the institutionalized folly of
the Cold War in a manner which was impossible while we were in the
midst of it -- while critical dissent suggested a whiff of disloyalty
and "softness toward Communism." At the same time, these events are
close enough in time to be more than "merely academic," and thus we
might take warning and be reminded of our capacity to indulge in
collective folly and, who knows, even suspect that our current
"conventional wisdom" might be tomorrow's folly.
In this paper, I would like to
display, in retrospect, both the power and the absurdity of two
fixated ideas and mind-sets, which have contributed lavishly to the
squandering of our national treasure these past four decades. These
two paradigms are (a) "deterrence" against the "nuclear Pearl
Harbor," and second, (b) the "worst-case" assumption of Soviet
technical prowess and moral depravity, as allegedly manifest in the
1983 Korean Air Line tragedy. In both cases, the threats of
aggression were significantly outstripped by the threats of "defense"
gone awry -- by the psychological delusions and technological devices
which arose in response to the perception of strategic nuclear
threat. I will close with some thoughts on a new mind-set that may
lead us to bungle the Post-Cold-War as decisively as we did the Cold
War itself.
HYPERTROPHIC
DETERRENCE
If asked to identify in one word the
fundamental justification these past forty years, for the nuclear
arms race, the answer would have to be "deterrence." In other words,
the objective was to minimize the risk of nuclear war. What else
could possibly have justified this expenditure of trillions of
dollars? And yet, in fact, the runaway nuclear arms race, in
particular the priorities and strategies of our military budget,
significantly increased that risk. It is no small miracle that we
escaped annihilation during these past four decades. On a few
occasions, it seems, we came very close.
In January, 1988, I was asked by the
University of Redlands to teach an "Inter-Session" course in "Nuclear
War as a Philosophical Issue." In class, I asked my students: "with
over fifteen thousand nuclear warheads aimed at the Soviet Union, and
a comparable number aimed back at us, how would you rank the likely
causes of nuclear war, in terms of probabilities?" Ranking from most
to least probable, we developed this list:
Uncontrolled Escalation.
("World War I Scenario")
Contagious War ("World War I
Scenario")
Unintended, Due to Malfunction.
("'War Games' Scenario")
Unintended, Due to Human
Error
Unintended, Due to Derangement.
("Strangelove Scenario")
Catalytic War ("James Bond
Scenario")
Pre-emptive Strike ("1967
Arab-Israeli Scenario")
Bolt from the Blue ("Nuclear Pearl
Harbor")
(The "Catalytic War," is a strike
brought about by a devious third power fooling one great power into
believing that it is being attacked by the other. "Contagious Wars"
occur when great powers get "drawn into" a war between client states
-- similar to "uncontrolled escalation." The "Pre-Emptive Strike"
might be the final stage of the Uncontrolled Escalation).
The exact order, of course, is open
to endless speculation and debate. However, we were quite settled on
the idea that the unintended war (the first five) were far more
likely than the last (the premeditated "Bolt from the Blue"). In
fact, given current technology, the "nuclear Pearl Harbor" was
judged, on reflection, to be virtually impossible. Why? Given current
technology, the historical Pearl Harbor attack would itself have been
impossible. The Japanese fleet could never have crossed the Pacific
undetected by satellites. But in addition to all that, preparations
for a first strike, under current conditions, could not plausibly be
kept secret. Strategic preparations would be detected by satellite or
communications monitoring. Furthermore, it is unlikely that
absolutely none of the several hundred or thousand officers with a
"need to know," would not "blow the whistle" on such preparations.
But note, too, that for a "bolt from the blue" to work, total secrecy
must not only be "merely possible" or even "plausible" -- it must be
confidently assumed to be absolutely certain, lest these preparations
trigger a pre-emptive strike. While some strategic planners might
believe that preparations for a first strike might plausibly
be kept secret, no one can reasonably argue the certainty of such
security. Lacking certainty, the danger of a pre-emptive strike
effectively precludes the unprovoked first strike. In short, two
improbabilities are required: (a) the ability to prepare for a first
strike without detection, and (b) total confidence in (the
improbable) (a). Thus, "nuclear Pearl Harbor," the product of two
improbabilities, is virtually impossible.
Now consider: in view of these six
scenarios, how did we allot our military appropriations? Answer:
Virtually in inverse order of the probabilities. The "triad" system
of deterrence, by far the largest share of the appropriations, had as
its objective the prevention of the virtually impossible "bolt from
the blue." (True, this "impossibility" was due, in large part, to the
existence of a deterrent. But, as I will argue, the scale of this
deterrence was beyond all reasonable justification). Still worse,
this hypertrophied nuclear war machine made each of the remaining
seven roads to Armageddon more likely. The smallest fraction of the
military budget was directed to the avoidance of inadvertent nuclear
war.
Undue attention to the deterrence of
the first strike (the least likely scenario) led to a "zero-sum," "us
vs. them" mind set. Thus, for years, any "gain" on our part was seen
as a "setback" for the Soviets -- and vice versa. But
surely, with unintended war by far the most likely threat, we were
actually in a "plus-sum" contest -- that is, we had far more to gain
by cooperation than by conflict, since our far greater interest,
avoiding war, was shared, while our lesser interest,
"prevailing," was contested. Of course, politicians often gave
lip-service to the "plus-sum" aspect of our confrontation.
Unfortunately, the military budgets did not reflect these sentiments.
And so, compounded by the habit of "worse case planning,"
opportunities for accommodation were overlooked, while the common
dangers mounted.
My claim that the arms race
increased, rather than decreased, the probability of nuclear war
might be demonstrated by the concept of "marginal deterrence" --
i.e., the deterrent value of the "next" nuclear weapon added to the
stockpile. (The idea is borrowed from the economic concept of
"marginal cost" -- the cost of producing the "next" item).
As most will agree, the deterrent
value of the "first" nuclear weapon is enormous. Consider how our
attitude toward Saddam Hussein would have been altered had we
assurance that he had just one nuclear weapon that could be targeted
on any city in the world. The "marginal deterrence" of his second
weapon would also be very large, though not as great as the first.
And so on for the tenth, the hundredth and the thousandth. The larger
the arsenal, the less the marginal deterrence of the "next" warhead,
so that eventually, say with the ten-thousand and first, the marginal
deterrence is virtually zero. (How much "relief" would we have felt
had we learned that the Soviets had retired one and only one of their
ten thousand warheads?) From this function of marginal deterrence, we
might plot the following (roughly hyperbolic) curve, with number
of deterrent warheads on the horizontal axis, and danger of
war due to a first strike (the inverse of "deterrence") on the
vertical axis:
Consider next the danger from
an unintended war (e.g., the "war games" and "Dr. Strangelove"
scenarios). The danger that any given warhead will detonate due to
malfunction, human error, or derangement is, admittedly, extremely
small. The danger that any of a number of warheads will inadvertently
detonate is an arithmetic function of the number of warheads. (No
"declining marginal probability" here). Thus that danger grew to
roughly 15,000 times the "extremely small" probability of each
detonating -- no longer an "extremely small" danger. Drawn against a
simple arithmetic x-axis, we would plot a gently rising straight
line. However, drawn against our logarithmic axis, we get an
ascending curve:
What, then, should be the optimum
number of nuclear warheads if our only objective is to minimize the
probability of nuclear war? (There were far better ways to minimize
that probability -- most prominently, just quit unilaterally as, it
turned out, Mr. Gorbachev did). Clearly the optimum number would be
the number indicated by the intersection of the curves, thus:
Now, of course, I can assign no
values to the y-axis. That would require the sort of data (possibly
classified) that I am unfamiliar with. (I wonder how much of those
trillions of dollars have been devoted to such research). So I am
unable to determine just where that intersection might be. The task
is further complicated when we seek to plot the "risk curves" for the
other scenarios. Still, I believe that the functions have some
intuitive value. Given this much, I find it very difficult to believe
that the intersection in question lies very far to the right side of
this graph. Surely all the psychological testing, the "permissive
action links," the redundancies and quality control of the electronic
components, were not so fabulously successful that the cumulative
danger of a catastrophic failure among 15,000 warheads was less than
the cumulative deterrence value of that many warheads. The record of
"broken arrows" and systems malfunctions testifies otherwise. No, the
stockpile of least danger must amount to not tens of thousands, or
even thousands, but more like hundreds or even tens of warheads.
Beyond several thousand is catastrophic folly. Beyond ten thousand
lies madness, brought about, I submit, by uncontrolled
techno-industrial "imperatives."
Missing from the above functional
analysis of "war dangers" is the calculation of "risks in
toto." With this we add, to the possible casualties of
a nuclear war, the actual (if "statistical") casualties of
nuclear weapons production: the uranium miners, the weapons
production workers, the "downwinders," ordinary citizens unfortunate
enough to live in the vicinity of weapons plants -- and, of course,
future generations. These dangers are also roughly in arithmetic
proportion to the amount of weapons production: the more weapons, the
more victims. This consideration, which is only now beginning to
receive even a fraction of the public attention it deserves, must
surely move that "optimum number of weapons" still further to the
left on the horizontal axis, above.
THE CASE OF KAL 007
On the night of August 31, 1983, a
Korean Airlines civilian airliner was shot down near Sakhalin Island,
with the loss of all 269 lives aboard. This tragic incident, I
submit, offers vivid evidence of cold-war thinking at work, of
dangerous distortions of mind-set, of the ready willingness to use
tragedy for political advantage, and, finally, it revealed for just a
moment, the administration's "psychological investment" in the
continuation of the arms race.
With the recovery of the doomed
aircraft's "black box' by the Russians, and the release of the
relevant files, we can now conclude that the destruction of that
airliner was indefensible. But it was an act of negligent homicide,
provoked by pilot error, not of cold-blooded murder. The essential
facts are these: At the time, a US Air Force surveillance plane (a
Boeing 707) was flying a figure-8 pattern, in and out of Soviet radar
range, due east of Sakhalin Island, a strategic Soviet military
installation. Completing its mission, it headed for its home base,
out of radar range. KAL-007 then entered Soviet radar range at about
the time and place the Air Force plane might have been expected to
reappear. It then proceeded to fly over the southern tip of that very
narrow island. It is clear now that the plane was off course, due to
navigational error. The Soviets were thus faced with a deadly
dilemma: either shoot down a plane that they were not entirely sure
was on a spying mission, or allow it to leave their air space,
possibly with vitally important military information on board.
As so often happens in such cases,
had any of a number of circumstances been different, the catastrophe
would have been averted. First of all, (a) the fighter
pilots had no tracer bullets that might serve as warning shots, (b)
they chose the safer approach from below, whereas from above they
would likely have recognized the markings and the 747's telltale
"hump," (c) the fighter pilots, again showing undue scruple for their
own safety, did not fly ahead of the KAL and thus identify
themselves. Finally, (d) since the airliner was to leave Soviet
space within a couple of minutes, the decision had to be made on the
spot.
We know now that our intelligence
agencies were aware of all this within hours of the event. Yet they
somehow couldn't resist this opportunity to "bash the Russkies." So
we had the spectacle of the pilots' air-chatter replayed at the
Security Council. And, from a prepared script, Ronald Reagan
read:
What can be said about
Soviet credibility, when they so flagrantly lie about such a
heinous act? What can be the scope of legitimate mutual discourse
with a state whose values permit such atrocities? And what are
we to make of a regime which establishes one set of standards for
itself, and another for the rest of humankind? The brutality
of this action [must] not be compounded through silence
or the cynical distortion of the evidence now at hand. .
. (Quoted verbatim from a news clip, included in the TV docudrama,
"Tailspin: Behind the Korean Airline Tragedy." I have emphasized
passages which, as the story develops, appear sadly
ironical).
Not content with that, he escalated
the rhetoric and piled it on:
There is no way that a pilot
could mistake this for anything other than a civilian airliner.
They deny the deed, but in their conflicting and misleading
protestations, the Soviets reveal that, yes, shooting down a
plane, even one with hundreds of innocent men, women, children and
babies, is a part of their normal procedure, if that plane is in
what they claim as their air space. This was the Soviet Union
against the world, and the moral precepts which guide human
relations among people everywhere. It was an act of barbarism,
born of a society which wantonly disregards individual rights and
the value of human life, and seeks constantly to expand and
dominate other nations. [ibid.]
Could that incident have been not
murder but a tragic blunder? Is it possible that modern,
sophisticated technology could fail, causing the death of over
two-hundred innocent civilians? Our official line was that this
explanation was not credible (Note the Reagan quote, above). Then,
five years later, in July, 1988, we shot down the Iranian Airbus, in
what was essentially a morally equivalent blunder. "Instrument and
human error," we concluded. Certainly not intended.
Finally, the alleged "crime" simply
made no sense. Even when we attributed the basest moral degradation
to the Soviet government and military, we at least "trusted" them to
be intelligently calculating in the pursuit (by any means) of their
perceived self-interest. What could they possibly have gained by a
cold-blooded destruction of a civilian airliner? And what could they
have lost? Just read the world press following the event.
Poor old Ronald Reagan may have
believed every word of that script that was prepared for him. But his
intelligence advisors knew differently. So why did they "milk" this
tragedy for all it's propaganda payoff?
Now the matter gets speculative, but
nonetheless interesting for all that. The truth is that KAL 007 (and
later the Iranian Airbus) went down because of technological and
human failure, in the face of a falsely perceived threat. Time and
technological imperatives forced a decision by a local commander
which, upon further review and reflection, might have been overruled.
The lives of the KAL passengers were lost as a result not of Soviet
cruelty and viciousness but of the inadequacies of their equipment
and personnel, and the exigencies of the moment. And so too, the
lives of the passengers of the ill-fated Iranian Airbus.
But this is exactly what our
"conventional Military-Industrial wisdom" could not admit to us, or
even perhaps to themselves. The tragedy of KAL 007, as we now know,
tells us that the Soviets were not malicious, calculating, evil
supermen with infallible Star Trek technology. Instead, they were
weak and fallible human beings whose inherently limited technology,
coupled with perceived strategic necessities, controlled the Soviet
operator's responses as much or more than the operators controlled
their technology. And as we discovered with the Airbus tragedy (not
to mention numerous "broken arrow" incidents), our machines
controlled us as well. In short, the machines and command structures
designed to "defend" us against "the perfidious Russians," and,
reciprocally, to defend them against us -- these devices became a
common "enemy" to us both. In those everlasting words of Walt Kelly's
Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us!" As one reflects upon all
this, and upon the aforementioned obsession with "Nuclear Pearl
Harbor" and the attending casualness regarding "nuclear accidents,"
it seems ever more amazing that we did not blunder into a nuclear war
and oblivion.
Now that was the very last thing that
our Military-Industrial Complex wanted us to contemplate. Instead,
they went about their business of concocting enemies and ordering
weapons for scarcely imaginable conflicts, while the greatest threats
to our "national security"-- neglect of our education, our public
institutions, our infrastructure, our research and development, in
short the abandonment of our future -- continued, and continues,
unabated. "Worst-case" assessments of the opposing "threat," were
used by both sides to justify huge budgets and to enhance careers and
investments. As the late Kenneth Boulding once remarked to me, the US
and Soviet military-industrial establishments developed a mutual
symbiotic alliance against their own respective civilian populations.
In short, had we been wise enough to
notice, KAL 007 could have exposed the myth that captivated us for
four decades at the cost of trillions of dollars of our national
treasure. We would have seen that the technological, economic, and
institutional imperatives set up to defend our national independence
and prosperity threatened to take them away. But to acknowledge all
this, we would have had to give up the comforting notion that all the
world's troubles, and ours, were "their" fault -- that, as President
Reagan once claimed, "the Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that
is going on. If they weren't engaged in this game of dominoes, there
wouldn't be any hot spots in the world." ("Reagan's World, Republicans' Policies Stress Arms Buildup," Karen Elliot House, the
Wall Street Journal, June 3, 1980.)
Rejecting such a bald-faced,
self-serving rationalization might have caused us to entertain the
thought that we might be our own worst enemies. That we have been
all-too ready to spot the mote in the Soviet eyes, while ignoring the
beam in our own.
The application of all this to the
nuclear arms race is, I trust, abundantly clear. Focusing on the
"external threat" of the Soviets (which, I do not deny, has had some
validity, more or less, in the past), we tolerated assaults of our
own making upon our own populations. The production of tens of
thousands of nuclear warheads, and the dreadful radioactive
devastation which followed, were justified by the myth of Soviet
power and technological prowess. Suggestions of military weakness and
tactical error on their part --- either in their strategic nuclear
attack and defense capabilities, or in their air defense facilities
on Sakhalin Island -- were heresy to the "nuclear priesthood" and, by
extension, to polite political debate. The implications of such
hypothetical weakness on the part of the Soviets -- i.e. that our
machines and institutions had become common threats to us both,
greatly exceeding our mutual threats to each other -- these
implications were downright subversive to the established order.
WHO WON THE COLD
WAR?
A funny thing happened on the way
to Armageddon.
The "other side" got smart, let go of
the tug-o-war rope, and sent us sprawling.
For forty years, each side was warned
of the terrible things that would result if "our side" quit the arms
race. Then, finally, one side did. And nothing terrible
happened.
So who won the cold war?
Those inclined to ask this question,
generally regard it as rhetorical. It's obvious: We won!
That said, a more vexing question arises: "Are the losers, the
Russians, entitled to our charitable assistance?" Both questions
are profoundly misconceived -- both beg insupportable and scarcely
examined assumptions. Both betray a seemingly indelible Manicheanism
in the national American thought-process: an insistence upon seeing
the world as a contest between opposing forces of good ("our side")
and evil ("their side").
In point of fact, both the US and the
USSR "lost" the Cold War, as they bled each other to exhaustion
through an unrestrained forty-year Potlatch. The result was a Russian
economy in ruins, and an American economy polarized and
uncompetitive. And at the same time, both sides "won," with the
ending of this extravagant travesty, though we can take no credit for
that closure. The other guy did it. The only "winners" were the
Germans and the Japanese who, to their enduring advantage, we
excluded from the arms race -- a result of our "unconditional
victory" in the last great war.
Yet the Republicans insists upon
claiming credit for "winning the Cold War," while the Democrats, poor
saps, say "no you didn't -- we did." It's like asking, "who 'won' the
Los Angeles earthquake?"
To the nonaligned onlooker, it must
be a fascinating spectacle: For over forty years, a succession of US
administrations have charged the Soviet peoples to throw the
Bolshevik rascals out. To protect itself from the aforesaid
"rascals," the US has spent over four trillion dollars. Now the
long-suffering peoples of the former Soviet Union have thrown the
rascals out, and they have done so at a dreadful economic cost and
political risk to themselves. Our response, while verbally generous,
has been fiscally miserly -- words, after all, are cheap.
A Russian friend expresses the hope
that the American leadership will not be moved to help, through
feelings of "charity." "Every country," she writes, "must solve its
own problems. Nobody can help if you have no self-respect and can't
feed your own."
But it's not a matter of "charity."
We forget that the Russians are our moral creditors. The peoples of
the former Soviet Union deserve, not our charity, but our gratitude.
They offer the entire world, at last, an opportunity to devote its
resources to life, not to annihilation. Aid to the all the new nations of the
former Soviet Union at this crucial moment would constitute our part
in a cooperative exercise of mutual sacrifice for the sake of a
priceless dividend. The former Soviet states' contribution is being paid in
economic misery and political risk. The West's reciprocation may be
accomplished simply by investing in the recovery of its new global
partners, utilizing some of the enormous resources previously devoted
to threatening their annihilation -- resources now made obsolete by
the courageous initiative of our former adversaries.
To sum up: "hypertrophic deterrence"
and the KAL 007 incident both exemplify "the mote-beam phenomenon" --
namely, the universal tendency to exaggerate the vices of our
adversaries while discounting our own. Thus, while devoting full
attention to deterring a "first strike" ("their" fault), we ignored
the peril of an unintended nuclear war (our responsibility).
Similarly, two morally equivalent disasters -- KAL 007 and the
Iranian Airbus incident -- were given radically different
interpretations: respectively, their "act of barbarism" and
our "tragic and regrettable failure of technology and
judgment."
Now that the Cold War is over, it is
quite possible to recognize, in retrospect, the workings and the
consequences of "mote-beam" distortion during that unfortunate era of
recent history. The far more difficult task, of course, is to
recognize such self-righteous distortions while they are at work. The
remedy is familiar and dates back to the dawn of moral reflection:
philosophers call it "the moral point of view," psychologists call it
"mirror-image thinking," and religious teachers call it "the Golden
Rule." In the simplest terms, this remedy is nothing less than a
capacity to become a critical spectator of one's own behavior as well
as the behavior of one's adversary. And this entails a willingness to
see oneself, and one's common peril, from the perspective of an
intelligent adversary.
Can we learn from such misadventures
as "hypertrophied deterrence" and the KAL-007 incident? Neither
history, nor current political rhetoric give us much cause for
encouragement. Still, the situation is not hopeless. The remedy --
critical intelligence applied to moral reflection -- is perpetually
at hand, should we have the good sense and moral stamina to put it to
use, and should we be willing, for once, to learn from the history of
our folly.
Copyright 1994 by Ernest
Partridge
