There is an interesting opinion piece today by Timothy Egan on nytimes.com about mutually assured destruction (MAD). MAD is a Cold War era policy that says essentially “if you nuke our cities, we promise to nuke your cities”.
Egan assumes, like many people do, that MAD kept us safe during the Cold War. But he criticizes the Pentagon for continuing to rely on MAD in an era where the greatest threats to United States security are terrorist organizations:
MAD makes sense in a rational world: the Russians or Chinese would never try to wipe us out, because we would then wipe them out. They want to live well and prosper, as do we.
But MAD makes less sense at a time when the enemies of civilization are cave-dwelling religious fanatics who target cartoonists and kill innocent children at soccer telecasts and think, if they die in nuclear Armageddon, a sexual reward awaits them in heaven.
The problem is that MAD doesn’t make sense in a “rational world”–and actually might make more sense when dealing with “cave-dwelling religious fanatics”.
Imagine a man comes home and finds that his neighbor has come into his house while he was gone and brutally raped and murdered his wife and children. The man is likely to want revenge of some kind. This is normal. He very well might want his neighbor to die for his crimes. But is the man going to respond by going sneaking over to his neighbor’s house, and doing the same to the neighbor’s family? Probably not. The neighbor committed an absolutely horrific crime–one that was outside of all standards of rational or reasonable behavior. To respond in kind would be an almost equally horrific act, that again attacks innocent bystanders and does not directly respond to the man who committed the original crime.
But the MAD policy would be like the man saying to his neighbor “if you brutally rape and murder my wife and kids, then I will brutally rape and murder yours”. If you kill millions of my people in an unprovoked attack, then I will kill millions of yours. Both statements are meaningless. Once my wife and kids are dead, I gain nothing by killing your wife and kids. Once my cities are destroyed, I gain nothing by destroying your cities. The threat isn’t credible. Besides, it would take a madman to kill his neighbors family, just like it would take a madman to launch a preemptive nuclear strike–and who is to say how the madman will react to a threat like that.
MAD isn’t a rational policy to deal with rational neighbors, as Egan suggests. MAD amounts to telling your neighbor “I think your crazy, well guess what, I’m crazy too!” MAD didn’t keep us safe during the Cold War. We were kept safe because the USSR and China weren’t ruled by sociopaths intent on global nuclear holocaust.
But here’s the odd thing. Now we are facing a threat from people who are perhaps a bit crazy–or at least willing to sacrifice themselves and countless innocents in order to achieve their aims. And there is an argument to be made that MAD actually does make sense in response to that kind of threat. This argument relies on several assumptions, that may or may not be true:
1) We have accurate enough information about the location of al Qaeda’s top leadership to be able to kill them with nuclear strikes–and the terrain in which they are hiding will not protect them from nuclear strikes.
2) Al Qaeda’s leadership believes that at least some of them must survive in order to continue to push forward their vision.
So imagine that al Qaeda were to get hold of a nuclear weapon, and that both of those assumptions are correct. We haven’t nuked al Qaeda because the of the international fall out for using nuclear weapons. But then al Qaeda sets off their nuke, destroying lower Manhattan. Suddenly using nukes against al Qaeda is on the table–as a retaliatory strike and not a preemptive one. If assumption #1 is correct, then using nukes on al Qaeda will effectively destroy them. Okay, so if al Qaeda’s leadership knows that, and if assumption #2 is correct, then our threat of nuking them might actually deter them from nuking us. Of course, if either of those assumptions are incorrect, then this logic falls apart, and MAD goes back to being just a bad policy.
In other words, Egan is exactly wrong. MAD is an insane policy that has no business in a rational world. But there might be a place for it against a fanatical enemy.
Continuing on a theme of making arguments that I find unpersuasive or repugant (and this one is particularly repugant to me but it is a line of reasoning that I am fairly certain some take at least in some form): lets be candid about human history — one people causing mass–die-offs of another people is not exactly foreign to our species. To acknowledge it as part of our nature — what’s the effect? Does it justify it. In a way it contextualizes it — violence between peoples, in some sense inevitable, eventually gives way to peace when a victory is achieved. From peace comes civilation flourishing. E.g. there was a lot of violence between the native American’s and white europeans initially. The violence petered down when white europeans killed and drove off most of the native americas. The remaining where quasi-converted to Americans. Isn’t a nuke and rebuild strategy kind of similar (except for the fall out). I hope that’s totally unpersuasive to anyone, but I think some people do reason like the above, so I’ll leave it as a comment and respond as though I believed it.
“Once my wife and kids are dead, I gain nothing by killing your wife and kids”
-I have no idea how this stuff works, but I’d always imagined we detect ICBMs in air and while they’re still in flight we launch ours. Hopefully they detect our missile and can call theirs off mid flight because otherwise the people who launched them won’t be able to get far enough away fast enough (ok, maybe they’re in a secure location or something but all their familly and friends aren’t). Is that totally off base. There are reasons (many) that I don’t have a nuclear launch key yet.
“I have no idea how this stuff works, but I’d always imagined we detect ICBMs in air and while they’re still in flight we launch ours.”
There are basically three delivery systems for strategic nuclear missiles: planes, land launched missiles (ICBMs, LRBMs, MRBMs, etc.), and submarine launched missiles (SLBMs). Planes are the easiest to “call back”, for obvious reasons, but the current best guesses are that only a small fraction of any major power’s nuclear weapons stocks are designed to be loaded onto planes. I don’t know if the capabilities exist to destroy land-launched ballistic missiles in-flight exists, but I wouldn’t count on it–although, as you say, ICBM rocket launches are fairly easily detected from satellites (ICBMs travel in low-orbit, practically in space, and it takes a pretty big explosion to get them that high).
The real problem are SLBMs. SLBMs aren’t designed to be in flight very long–after all, the idea is that I park a submarine off your coastline and shoot them off, so they aren’t travelling half-way around the world. The launches are not as easily detected as ICBM launches, and there is very little forewarning–much less time to kill them in flight, even if that technology existed (which I doubt, but am not 100% about…) And right now, my understanding is that most of the United States’ strategic missiles are loaded onto subs.
Mike. I think you’re going to have to elaborate on why you don’t think MAD worked in the cold war. You insist that it is crazy and didn’t work, but you supply no evidence to support that.
True, a destroyed US gains nothing by also destroying soviet cities, but it does gain something if the Russians are too scared to launch a first strike. Why isn’t the threat credible?
As for the terrorist case, it’s not at all clear that the al qaeda leadership would be deterred by the threat of nuclear weapons. They do come from an environment where martyrdom is almost expected. Furthermore, they are probably spread out, so no nuclear bunker-buster is going to destroy the entire organization. Maybe you could kill a few figureheads, but so what.
Tactical nuclear weapons were an extensive part of cold war planning and weapons development. One doesn’t hear much about them now, as accuracy has replaced explosive-power for most tactical weapon systems, but the capability still exists. If the war on terror could have been won with a single B61 dropped from a fighter-jet, I’m sure the Bush administration would have done it. Particularly if it happened shortly after 9/11.
“True, a destroyed US gains nothing by also destroying soviet cities, but it does gain something if the Russians are too scared to launch a first strike. Why isn’t the threat credible?”
I’ve always found that the best analogies for international politics come from the playground, so let’s go there.
Day 1: Billy is the playground bully. He tells the new kid, Tommy, “Give me your lunch money, or I’ll hit you”. That’s a threat. Tommy’s new, however, and doesn’t actually believe that Billy will do it. The threat isn’t credible (yet). So Tommy refuses. Billy hits him. Turns out that the threat wasn’t credible to Tommy, but it was predictive.
Day 2: Billy tells Tommy “Give me your lunch money, or I’ll hit you.” Tommy remembers being hit yesterday. That threat is extremely credible. Tommy gives up his lunch money.
Day 3: Tommy tries a new tactic. Billy tells Tommy “Give me your lunch money or I’ll hit you.” Tommy says “if you hit me, I’ll kill you.” Now, Billy has to decide whether Tommy’s threat of homicide is credible. The problem is that the threat is too extreme to be credible. There is no reason for Billy to believe the threat, because it would take someone truly demented to follow through with it. The threat isn’t credible, therefore Billy hits Tommy anyway.
MAD isn’t a credible threat, because it’s a monstrous response. It’s too much, just like Tommy threatening murder in exchange for a beating isn’t credible. And if a threat isn’t credible, if the other side doesn’t believe it, then it’s worthless.
If you want to read a formal game-theoretic analysis which comes to the same conclusions read Robert Powell–I believe this is covered in his book “In the Shadow of Power”. If you want evidence beyond that–well, I can’t offer any, but neither can defenders of MAD. After all, the argument is about why someone else failed to act–and ultimately, human motivations are complicated things.
“Tactical nuclear weapons were an extensive part of cold war planning and weapons development.”
This is definitely true, and as far as I know the United States still has stockpiles of tactical nukes. For those keeping track at home, a tactical nuke is a (relatively) low-yield nuclear device delivered by plane or by short or medium range ballistic missile, with the purpose of taking out supply depots, air fields, or massed reinforcements. (You wouldn’t want to drop one on an active battlefield, for obvious reasons.) As you say, they aren’t especially useful in the War on Terror, but I think you’re right that if the United States had thought it could have obliterated al Qaeda with one of these on Oct 1, 2001, we would have done so.