Matt Fulton | Writer + Filmmaker

The Death of Deterrence: The Utility of Nuclear Weapons in an Age of Fearless Foes

A nation’s security is often shaped by realities beyond its borders. Before the dawn of the Cold War, Americans saw themselves a privileged bunch, alone in a distant corner of the world untouchable by colonizing forces. The fortunate combination of Monroe Doctrine and the Royal Navy patrolling the waves prevented other nations from establishing any meaningful foothold in North America. This geographic isolation of the United States deterred European powers from projecting influence across the Atlantic for fear another closer enemy would take advantage of the vulnerability this military expedition would create at home. Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this reality created a strategic “shield” for the United States in so far as it could defend itself with only a miniscule military establishment. World War II and the challenge of the Axis powers forced the United States to change its outlook on the world, and in August 1949 this sense of security was shattered completely when the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb and developments in missile technology made it feasible to strike North America from far beyond the horizon.

For the next fifty years, the United States and the Soviet Union would create an arsenal of thousands of nuclear weapons placed in hardened silos below ground, on strategic bombers in the sky, and aboard ballistic missile submarines deep beneath the sea. With either nation capable of wiping the other—and the rest of humanity—from the face of the earth, a stalemate was created that prevented a more dangerous escalation of hostilities. It was a stalemate of fear called deterrence. Each side operated with the knowledge that if a first strike were ever ordered, the retaliatory response would be great enough to obliterate the opposing side’s economy, armed forces, and population. This idea ultimately became known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Despite their polar opposite views—democracy versus authoritarianism, capitalism versus communism—a wary peace was sustained between these superpowers during the Cold War. Today, although the Berlin Wall has fallen and scores of troops do not sit at all corners of the globe, poised for the outbreak of World War III, this understanding is still held by the great powers of the world—namely the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China.

However, the power to massacre millions of people has been democratized to wider, more nefarious club; it no longer rests solely with these politically stable nations and their otherwise sane leaders. The reality of this new millennium and the post-Cold War era is different and much more complicated. Asymmetric warfare, a conflict between two belligerents whose military power differs greatly, is now the rule rather than the exception on the battlefield. The enemies of the United States in the twenty-first century—non-state actors and rogue dictatorships—have adopted asymmetric warfare as their tactic of choice and have executed it successfully in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lower Manhattan. The reality of the twenty-first century is also that the arsenals of these contemporary foes are not limited to artillery shells, explosive belts, box trucks, and commercial airliners. Crude nuclear devices as small as a large suitcase, proliferation networks that serve as “supermarkets” for the knowledge and materiel to create these devices, and unconventional deployment methods to put the weapons on target, are all sought as measures to gain an advantage against the conventional military might of the United States. The gentleman’s rules of the Cold War no longer govern the reality of today’s global nuclear relationships, and deterrence is now as dead as the sense of security it provided for sixty years. Unlike the Soviet Union, America’s most unpredictable enemies today arguably do not share a fear of absolute annihilation. Indeed some may argue that, in many respects, death is greater than life. As terrorist organizations and rogue nations become the primary targets of the United States, the ability of large nuclear stockpiles and the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction to deter would-be adversaries proves irrelevant.

To begin our discussion, we must first define “deterrence.” During the Cold War, deterrence became the way by which the forces of communism and democracy ensured each other than an all-out war was unthinkable. Simply put, deterrence is qualified by nothing more than man’s fear of death. To accomplish this strangling fear and certainty that World War III would be a suicidal endeavor, a massive military establishment was necessary to make such destruction possible. Henry Kissinger, as secretary of state through the Nixon and Ford administrations, held the reins of US foreign policy for much of the 1970s and championed the idea of détente with the Soviet Union, or a normalization and thawing of relations between the two countries. As Paul Nitze explains in a 1976 article for Foreign Policy, Kissinger believed that “US military strength was...necessary to make détente work” (195). Détente would make a showdown with the Soviets unthinkable, rather than accomplish the daunting task of adequately defending ourselves and our allies in a nuclear war. “This view was supported by the proposition that any war between the Soviet Union and [the United States] would be nuclear and would inevitably result in hundreds of millions of casualties on both sides” (195). A discussion of how this view translated into the well thought out and tightly controlled numbers and deployment of nuclear warheads is outside the scope of this paper, but light can be shed on how the United States cast this assurance of absolute decimation in the end war that never came.

Key to any strategy in a nuclear conflict is a nation’s second-strike capability, that is, having a sizeable (and ideally larger) nuclear arsenal located in the air and at sea that can follow through after the opening volley of warheads and deal a crippling blow to one’s opponent. It made sound strategic sense to believe that the targets in a Soviet first strike would not be American cities but the network of Strategic Air Command (SAC) air bases and missile silos where this second-strike capability was housed. The goal for Moscow in this situation would be to rob the United States of the ability to respond by targeting Russian industry and population centers, thus forcing an end to the conflict on terms that would benefit the Soviet position. Therefore, being able to respond to a first strike was not only key to the survival of American society, but to keeping this assurance that any preemptive nuclear war would be a suicidal undertaking. To accomplish this, US defense strategists focused on five key points.

First, it was necessary to have “a powerful counterforce capability—one sufficient to reduce the enemy’s offensive and defensive capabilities significantly and progressively below one’s own” (Nitze 197). Second, the US military must possess “Forces sufficiently hardened, dispersed, mobile or defended as to make a possible counterforce response by the other side disadvantageous—that is, such that a counterforce response would only serve to weaken the relative position of the responder by using up a far higher percentage of the attacker’s reserve forces he could hope to destroy” (197). Third, a sound policy would keep in mind “Sufficient survivable reserve forces, whether or not there were such a counterforce response, to hold the enemy’s population and industry disproportionality at risk” (197). Fourth, crucial were also “Active and passive defense measures including civil defense and hardened and dispersed command and control facilities, sufficient to ensure survival and control even if the enemy response to the initial counterforce attack were an immediate retaliatory strike on one’s own population and industry” (197). Fifth, the nation must have “The means and determination not to let the other side get in the first blow—i.e., to pre-empt if necessary” (198). This final notion was perhaps most sobering to any White House considering the end of the world as mankind knew it up to that point.

The massive military presence projected by the United States around the globe, the survivable second-strike force put in place by the Pentagon, and Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic championing of détente all made deterrence a real factor and a plausible way to stave off nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The policy of deterrence and the assurance of absolute destruction and that it guaranteed prevented conflict in multiple theaters during the Cold War. Three situations which each cover different nations, time periods, and regional actors will be discussed. Despite their differences, they hold in common the fact that the long-term results of war was seen as not worth its possible short-term gains. First to be featured will be the armistice talks between the United Nations, China, and communist Korean forces at the end of the Korean War; second will be the thirteen-day standoff in the Caribbean that was the Cuban Missile Crisis; and third will be the rarely discussed elevation of the US defense condition during the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt.

By 1953, war between the communist and democratic halves of the Korean peninsula had ground on for more than three years and came to involve twenty nations. That year, the Eisenhower administration entered office with a mandate to end this unpopular conflict in Asia. Talks between the United Nations Command and opposing communist forces had been stalled for a year over the contentious issue of POWs (Foot 92). In an attempt to force the communist side to agree to the terms of the armistice, President Eisenhower signaled his willingness to “break down the distinction between nuclear and conventional arms, and think of them...as simply another weapon in our arsenal” (94). Statements were also conveyed to the North Korean leaders, General Kim Il-sung and General Peng Dehuai, and to the Soviet foreign minister V.M. Molotov that it was of crucial importance that the new American position on the POW issue not be ignored. Reading through the lines, the communist forces could see that they were only one week away from an escalated and more deadly phase of the war. For Chinese leadership, an escalation of the war meant a US offensive into Manchuria with the possible use of a nuclear weapon. By 1951, China’s intervention into Korea had sapped a staggering forty-eight percent of its budget just as Beijing was about to begin its Five-Year Plan, which would have diverted substantial funds from defense to interior spending (108). Quite simply, an escalation of the Korean War with a nuclear weapon would have crippled China’s domestic resources and shattered its budget. The gains of a prolonged war with the United States were not worth the cost, and so shortly after Eisenhower’s ultimatum, an armistice was agreed upon.

In October 1962, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane discovered that Soviet missiles armed with nuclear warheads were being installed in Cuba merely ninety miles from the continental United States. Throughout the 1950s, US defense spending increased with an emphasis on strategic forces as opposed to conventional forces. By the beginning of the 1960s, the United States held a far superior nuclear arsenal to the Soviet Union, with more advanced warheads hosted on a diverse array of delivery platform and deployed in a forward-basing scheme that extended the American nuclear shield to European allies. Yet when the Soviet politburo made the decision to send nuclear weapons to Cuba they effectively evened the playing field against the United States’ strategic superiority. The Soviet Union manipulated the risk of war—or the likelihood that such a conflict would not end in America’s favor—to such an extent that the Kennedy administration found the risk intolerable, provoking a crisis that brought the superpowers possibly within hours of a nuclear exchange. The Cuban Missile Crisis is perhaps most interesting in that it shows how the Soviet Union was capable of deterring the United States from rash actions, with the White House fearing that an American invasion of the island would result in a Russian attack on West Berlin. During the crisis, President Kennedy is noted as saying that he was not prepared to fight World War III if there was a way out (Trachtenberg 146). The way out of the crisis came with the removal of Jupiter missiles from Turkey that were known by the Pentagon to be strategically ineffective. For Kennedy, just as it was for the Chinese a decade earlier, the cost of nuclear war was not worth the gains of keeping missiles in Turkey. In a bargain with Nikita Khrushchev, the US removed those Jupiter missiles from Turkey and the Soviets likewise withdrew their arsenal from Cuba.

The Yom Kippur War was one of several engagements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, but it was the first to include a direct nuclear threat. Fighting erupted on October 6, 1973 and by October 24th the Israel Defense Forces had encircled the Egyptian Third Army (Blechman and Hart 13). Negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union began in Moscow at the start of the conflict and the superpowers found that they had strikingly similar goals. Both wanted neither a crushing Israeli victory or a stunning Egyptian defeat. Moreover, the superpowers quickly realized that keeping their own bilateral relationship intact—be it from a recent thaw in tensions or a desire prevent war in Europe—was paramount in any settlement that might be reached (Sagan 163). Despite common goals and desires, the United States was unable to coerce Israel into ceasing hostilities against Egypt and as a result the Soviet Union placed airborne divisions in Eastern Europe and Ukraine on alert (168). In response, the United States ordered Strategic Air Command units around the world to Defense Condition (DEFCON) 3, a visible progression on a numbered scale toward imminent war. The message was clear to Moscow: Washington would not tolerate Soviet intervention on behalf of the Egyptians. Within two days, the crisis was solved. The threat of nuclear war and the unwillingness of the Soviet Union to engage in it to save its allies in Cairo, coupled with the mutual diplomatic goals of the superpowers, brought about a peaceful resolution to an otherwise deadly crisis.

All of these historical examples hold a single similarity in so far as one nuclear-armed nation was able to coerce another into finding a favorable resolution because they were deterred from further hostile action. The other nation was deterred from acts of escalation because their leaders feared the consequences of nuclear war. Simply, to continue further was a suicidal thought. It is clear from these cases that deterrence is relative, not only to the possible losses and gains of a conflict, but to the opposing side’s willingness to live. The Soviet elite enjoyed their official flats on Kutuzovsky Prospekt and their private dachas in the birch forests west of Moscow. They did not want to die, neither did the Chinese, and neither did the Americans. It was due to this balance of military might and human fear that prevented direct conflict for so long, even at times when conflict seemed certain. Yet this balance is no longer an assured fact of international politics. The main adversaries of the United States on the world stage are now terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea. In this new fight, the opposite reality reigns true.

Al-Qaeda—Arabic for “the Base”—is a militant Islamist movement that was created in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Its established goal under Osama bin Laden’s leadership was to purge Muslim lands of all Western influences and create a pan- Islamic caliphate stretching from Spain to Indonesia. Today, sixteen years after the September 11th attacks, the US military and intelligence community still engages al-Qaeda around the globe in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere. Members of al-Qaeda believe that do die a martyr in the execution of jihad is a beautiful act; they embrace death and actively seek it. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and al-Qaeda’s operational commander until his capture in Karachi, Pakistan in 2003, has stated that martyrdom is his ultimate goal. After his arrest Mohammed told US authorities, “This is what I wish. I wanted to be a martyr for a long time ... I will, God willing, have this by you” (Seper 2008). His will to die and his unwavering belief that to do so is done in his god’s name is a characteristic of all diehard believer’s in al-Qaeda’s fundamentalist ideology, a central tenant which is core even to the terrorist group’s more radical mutations. Born from the ash heap of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s deadly insurgency against the US occupation of Iraq, ISIS—or, the Islamic State—continues to inspire a particularly vicious breed of radicalism, beckoning would-be followers to jihad over social media despite its recent military defeat in the Syrian civil war. Central to al-Qaeda and ISIS’s media strategy has been a book chillingly titled, Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Phase Through Which the Islamic Nation Will Pass. Since its publication on the Internet in 2004 by a noted al-Qaeda propagandist operating under the nom de guerre “Abu Bakr Naji,” Management of Savagery has been utilized as a guide on how to best exploit religious and nationalist divisions in Western societies with the aim of stoking violence, fueling Islamist propaganda, and providing fodder to recruit new fighters for jihadist groups. Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, the current leader of ISIS and self-declared “caliph” of all Muslims, has imbued ISIS propaganda with explicit apocalyptic imagery and even seems to believe that it is his duty to bring Armageddon to fruition. Key to this dooming portent is an expressed desire to lure the “army of Rome”—which one could interpret as the “Christian” armies of the United States and Europe—to the small town of Dabiq in northern Syria, where an epic battle will commence and initiate the end of days (Wood 2016). Given the series of crushing defeats ISIS has suffered since 2014, one could argue that the risk of ISIS actually provoking Armageddon is decidedly low, however we must still consider the mindset of their zealot leaders and how our understanding of classical nuclear deterrence theory would do little to actually deter them. Were ISIS—or any radical jihadist group, for that matter—to either steal a nuclear device, construct a crude imitation of their own, or even cobble together enough radioactive material for a “dirty bomb,” could we say with any assurance that the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction would register in their minds the way it did with the Soviets during the Cold War? Would ISIS not welcome the United States’ retaliation? One might argue that, in fact, retaliation would be their desired goal, a spark that may well usher in Armageddon. On September 11th, al-Qaeda murdered three thousand Americans and the United States government spent nearly five trillion dollars exacting vengeance over the following fifteen years: over a billion for every man and woman killed in those attacks (Crawford). If a jihadist group succeeded in murdering even thirty thousand Americans in a nuclear explosion, we could scarcely comprehend the response.

No discussion of the United States’ contemporary adversaries would be complete without accounting for Iran and North Korea. Volumes have been committed to the questionable rationality of these “rogue regimes” and US intelligence analysts routinely revise classified profiles on what exactly makes their leaders tick, which factions inside Tehran and Pyongyang currently hold the most influence over their nations’ policies, and so forth. It is from this debate over rationality that we can attempt to understand how Mutually Assured Destruction may deter these regimes. Since the overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in 1979, Iran has been governed by a strict religious theocracy under the leadership of an Islamic cleric, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The machinations of power in Tehran have since settled into three vaguely defined and often intractable factions: the reformists, the pragmatic conservatives, and the hardliners. For our purposes, the hardliners mostly consist of fundamentalist clerics and officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which serves as a kind of “Praetorian Guard” meant to ensure the survival of the regime at all costs. In some discussions, initially brought to light after the election of Iran’s former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, these hardliners have voiced a desire to bring about the return of a mythical figure in Shiite Islamic eschatology known as the “Expected Mahdi.” As Iranian scholar Mehdi Khalaji notes in a 2008 policy article for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “For Twelver Shi’ites, the Mahdi is believe to be the twelfth Imam,” and will be in hiding, “until God decides to make him appear, rise, and establish a just world government at the end of days” (34). It must be noted that while the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has sought to resolve disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, the threat of a future war in the Persian Gulf cannot be dismissed. If such a conflict ever came to pass, could the United States rely on deterrence theory to prevent a hardline faction of the Iranian regime from lashing out with a weapon of mass destruction? Although Iran does not currently possess a nuclear weapon the regime still holds the scientific capability to build one over the course of a year, and the IRGC already possesses sizeable stockpiles of biological and chemical agents, as national security analyst Anthony Cordesman has estimated with some certainly. The same could be said for North Korea under the autocratic leadership of Kim Jong-un. Much discussion has been made regarding Kim’s state of mind, whether or not he is a “rational actor,” and the US intelligence community seems to believe that he is (Youssef 2017). Of course, despite how the media may paint the admittedly dangerous situation in East Asia, the North Korean military does not pose an existential threat to the United States, yet the United States does pose one to North Korea. If war broke out on the Korean peninsula, as it easily may, could the United States be sure that, facing the annihilation of his regime, Kim Jong-un would not order a nuclear first-strike against the US mainland, or an overseas territory such as Guam, or an ally such as Japan or South Korea? In such a scenario, as the communist Chinese government indeed feared in 1951, a cycle of escalation could quickly come to consume the entire region. Given the tenuous and often volatile stability of these two nations, the strength of classical nuclear deterrence theory—the very concept of Mutually Assured Destruction—proves quite hollow.

In the twenty-first century, the United States is at war with radical ideologies that do not, as a matter of doctrine and rules of engagement, discriminate between cities and military installations. To these modern foes, a nation’s standing army is its civilian population and it is by their god’s divine will that they war against it. Terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIS and rogue, apocalyptic dictatorships like Iran and North Korea are America’s principle adversaries on the world stage and they cannot be deterred with the nuclear arsenal that has shielded us for decades. The reason is that deterrence works only in so far that those being deterred fear the threat of annihilation awaiting them if they escalate military action to the use of a nuclear weapon. It is clear from our discussion of these contemporary enemies that those who may challenge the United States today do not fear death and may, in fact, invite it. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States were deterred from acts of aggression that may have led to conflict because they were inherently rational actors and, like all rational human beings, their leaders had a will to live. It may well have been a fluke, a stroke of pure chance that mankind made it through the Cold War without a nuclear confrontation, but it cannot be discounted that deterrence theory was the glue holding civilization together despite our self- destructive urges. Today, against enemies that are neither rational nor valuing of human life, the threat of nuclear war is no longer enough to dissuade acts of aggression. As the United States redefines its stance on twenty-first century battlefields and confronts new challenges to its role as the world’s sole superpower, its leaders must not ignore this cold truth…

Deterrence is dead, and it will no longer carry us to victory.

Works Cited

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Copyright © 2017 Matthew Fulton. All rights reserved.