Nuclear ‘Deterrence’: Why we must think again

Ken Coates (1981)

On May 7th 1981, while the Labour Party was spectacularly disproving all the newspaper reports about its imminent collapse, by winning landslide victories in one local authority after another, a small number of parliamentarians were still in session. The debate was on foreign policy. Denis Healey made a major speech. Next day, the headline on The Times did not concern Labour’s victories in the country, but ran as follows: “Healey backs Tories on nuclear arms and NATO”. The report went on “In his first important speech in the House of Commons since his appointment as foreign affairs spokesman last December . . . Mr Healey will have outraged a large section of the Labour Party by virtually promising opposition support for the main thrust of Conservative foreign policy”. The Times went on to cite Mr Healey as insisting “it was vital that the security enjoyed for 35 years and the conditions that had made that possible, should be maintained”. Obviously The Times was seeking to make trouble for Denis Healey, and some may think that its treatment of his speech exaggerated his conformity with Tory policy. But on the key question of deterrence, The Times was not inaccurate. For this reason, we ought to examine this question again.

Long ago, in his contribution to New Fabian Essays, Denis Healey stated his conviction that, while the Labour Party’s foreign policy normally contained an admixture of “sentimentalism” and marxism, the true state of the world meant that the best guide to it was Thomas Hobbes, who understood power politics. For Hobbes, fear was an indispensable component of the impulse to statehood, upon which depended the only resolution of the “war of each against all” which otherwise rent the society of natural man. I do not see Hobbes as the unmitigated reactionary so often parodied in textbooks of political theory, but if fear really were the ground-root of political organization, it would have certainly reached the point (in 1945, with Hiroshima) at which an international polity had become unavoidable. That polity we have not, but the fear has escalated year by year, to the point where it has almost negated itself as a social cement. Now states attempt to persuade us that the “unthinkable” option of nuclear war is really quite thinkable, and that we can expect to live through a “limited” war if only we lay in enough whitewash for our windows and canned food for the duration. This gruesome pretence has been unmasked for what it is by Edward Thompson’s magisterial pamphlet, Protest and Survive, and I have nothing to add to what it says. But the case against “security” based on nuclear deterrence does not rest on the obvious fact that it is perilous, but that it is also doomed to collapse.

When Bertrand Russell sought to explain the confrontation of the nuclear superpowers, back in 1959, he offered a famous analogy:

“Since the nuclear stalemate became apparent, the Governments of East and West have adopted the policy which Mr Dulles calls ‘brinkmanship’. This is a policy adapted from a sport which, I am told, is practised by the sons of very rich Americans. This sport is called ‘Chicken!’. It is played by choosing a long straight road with a white line down the middle and starting two very fast cars towards each other from opposite ends. Each car is expected to keep the wheels of one side on the white line. As they approach each other, mutual destruction becomes more and more imminent. If one of them swerves from the white line before the other, the other, as he passes, shouts ‘Chicken!’, and the one who has swerved becomes an object of contempt. As played by youthful plutocrats, this game is considered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of the players are risked. But when the game is played by eminent statesmen, who risk not only their own lives but those of many hundreds of millions of human beings, it is thought on both sides that the statesmen on one side are displaying a high degree of wisdom and courage, and only the statesmen on the other side are reprehensible. This, of course, is absurd. Both are to blame for playing such an incredibly dangerous game. The game may be played without misfortune a few times, but sooner or later it will come to be felt that loss of face is more dreadful than nuclear annihilation. The moment will come when neither side can face the derisive cry of ‘Chicken!’ from the other side. When that moment is come, the statesmen of both sides will plunge the world into destruction.”

We do not cite this passage out of piety. Russell’s parable is no longer adequate. Various things have changed since 1959. Some were beginning to change, at any rate in minds like Mr Henry Kissinger’s, even before that time. Others were rather evident to ordinary people, more or less instantly. Within the game of “chicken” itself, we had the Cuba crisis of 1962. Mr Khrushchev swerved. This persuaded certain shallow advocates of the game that deterrence actually worked. But rather more significantly, it also persuaded the more faithful apostles of the doctrine, true disciples of Thomas Hobbes, among Mr Khrushchev’s colleagues that considerably greater effort should be lavished on the perfection of a swerve-proof war machine. Consequently, the nuclear armament balance shifted, if not in the drastic manner announced by Washington alarmists, at any rate in the direction of something closer to effective parity.

In addition to this, proliferation of nuclear weaponry continued. This is discussed below, but even before we examine it, it is manifestly clear that it has complicated the rules of the game rather considerably.

The French allowed, if they did not actually encourage, public speculation about the thought that their deterrent was more than unidirectional, if their putative defenders ever showed undue reluctance to perform, in time of need, the allotted role. The arrival of the Chinese among the club of nuclear weapons states produced a possible three-way “chicken”, with both main camps holding out at least a possibility that, in appropriate circumstances, they might “play the China card”. But here the metaphor is mixing itself. Staying within the rules Russell advanced, we would have to express it like this: the Chinese “deterrent” could, at least in theory, be set to intervene against either of the other participants in the joust, unpredictably, from any one of a bewildering number of side-entries to the main collision course. As if this were not problem enough, the war technology has itself evolved, so that:

a. military costs have escalated to the point where nuclear powers are increasingly impotent if they are barred from using what has now become by far their most expensive weaponry; and

b. nuclear weapons technique aspires to (although it may very well fail to meet) infinitely greater precision in attack. This brings nearer the possibility of pre-emptive war, which is a perfectly possible abrupt reversal of standard deterrent presumptions. To these facts we must add another, powerful moment:

c. the stability of the world political economy, which seemed effectively unchallengeable in 1959, has been fiercely undermined by the collapse of the Keynesian world order, deep slump in the advanced capitalist countries, and growing social stress within the nations of the Soviet sphere of influence, which have not been able to evolve those democratic and consensual forms of administration which could resolve their political tensions in an orderly and rational manner.

In the interaction of these developments, we have seen the consolidation, amongst other delinquencies, of the doctrine of “limited” nuclear war. We can only reduce this veritable mutation in strategy to Russell’s exemplary folk-tale if we imagine that each participant car in the game carries smaller subordinate vehicles, which can be launched down the white line at even greater speed than the velocity of approach of the main challengers. These lesser combatants can, it is apparently believed, be set loose on one another in order that their anticipated crashes may permit time for the principals to decide whether it might be wise themselves to swerve or not. The smaller war-chariots are conveniently prevented from changing course to save their own drivers, because they are steered by remote control: of course, the assumption is that those involved in the “lesser” combat will necessarily be destroyed. Maybe their destruction can save their mother vehicles from perishing, although careful analysts think it more likely not.

Stated in this way, the game has become even more whimsical than it was in Russell’s original model. But stiffened up with precise and actual designations, it loses all traces of whimsy. The lesser vehicles in the developed game of “limited” war are all of Europe’s nations. Whether or not their sacrifice makes free enterprise safer in New York, or allows Mr Brezhnev’s successors time to build full communism (and we may well be agnostic on both scores) what is securely certain is that after it Europe will be entirely and poisonly dead, and that the civilisation of Leonardo and Galileo, Bacon and Hobbes, Spinoza and Descartes, and, yes, also Karl Marx, will have evaporated without trace.

At this point we can unravel the conventional doctrine of deterrence somewhat further. Advocates of this schema will often repudiate Russell’s fable of the chicken game. “It is a malicious travesty”, they will tell us. The vogue question which is then very commonly, posed by such people is this: “you complain about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: but would these events have taken place, if Japan then had the benefit of a possible nuclear response?” Let us worry this problem a little. First, some obvious points. Did the Japanese in this speculative argument possess an equivalence of weaponry, or not? If they were nuclear-armed, but with a smaller number of warheads, or inadequate delivery systems, it is possible that their retaliatory capacity could be evaluated and discounted, in which case the American attack would presumably have gone ahead. If, on the other hand, the American Government perceived that it might not avoid parity of destruction or worse, it would in all liklihood have drawn back. It might even have hesitated for fear of less than equal devastation. “Aha!” say the deterrent philosophers: “you have conceded our case”. Well, hardly. We must first pursue it, for a few steps, but not before pointing out that it has already become completely hypothetical, and already travesties many other known facts about the real Japanese war prospects in August 1945, quite apart from the then existing, real disposition of nuclear weapons. (There are some strong grounds for the assumption that the Japanese would actually have been brought to a very quick surrender if the nuclear bombardment had never taken place, or indeed, even had it not been possible.) But for the sake of argument, we are temporarily conceding this special case of the deterrent argument. Let us see what happens when we apply it further, as might Hobbes have done.

In 1974, the Indian Government exploded a “peaceful” nuclear device. Subsequently Pakistan set in train the necessary work of preparation for an answering technology. Since partition, India and Pakistan have more than once been at war. There remain serious territorial claims at issue between them. The secession of Bangladesh inflicted serious humiliation on the Pakistan Government. What possible argument can be advanced against a Pakistan deterrent? We shall instantly be told that the present military rulers of that country are unsavoury to a remarkable degree, that they butchered their last constitutionally elected Prime Minister, and that they maintain a repressive and unpleasant adminstration. It is difficult, if not unfortunately impossible, to disagree with these complaints, all of which are founded in reason and justice. But as co-opted theorists of deterrence, we must dismiss them. Our adopted argument is, that if India and Pakistan are to be held apart from their next war, the deterrent is necessary to both sides. Their respective moral shortcomings, if any, or indeed, if all that have ever been alleged, have nothing to do with the case.

Late in April 1981, Mr F.W. De Klerk, the mineral and energy affairs minister of South Africa, publicly admitted that his country was producing a quantity of 45% enriched uranium, which announcement signified that South Africa had the capacity to manufacture its own nuclear armament. This news was scarcely electrifying, since a nuclear device had already apparently been detonated in the South Atlantic during the previous year, and it had therefore been assumed, almost universally, that the South African bomb already existed. What should the black African “front-line states” then do? Deterrence positively requires that Angola, Zimbabwe and Mozambique should instantly start work on procuring their opposing bombs. After all, South African troops have regularly been in action outside their own frontiers, and the very vulnerability of the Apartheid State makes it perfectly possible that serious military contests could break out over the whole contiguous zone. To prevent such war, the Angolan or Zimbabwean bomb represents a prudent and uncontentious investment.

We can say the same thing about the States of the Middle East. To them we might add those of Central America. Would Cuba have been invaded during the Bay of Pigs episode, if she had deployed nuclear weapons? To cap it all, what about Japan? Her experience, surely, would seem to be the most convincing argument for developing an extensive arsenal of thermo-nuclear warheads.

Strangely, these arguments are not heard in Japan. President Mugabe has not voiced them either. Japan’s people have not escaped the customary scissions which are part of advanced industrial society, but if one thing binds them together, it is a virtually unanimous revulsion against nuclear weapons. African states repeatedly insist that they seek protection, not by deterrence, but by the creation of a nuclear-free zone. Clearly they have not yet learnt the lessons which are so monotonously preached in the Establishment newspapers of the allegedly advanced nations.

If we admit, as Thomas Hobbes might have done, that all nation states have an intrinsic right to defend their institutions and interests by all the means available to any, then nuclear proliferation is not merely unavoidable, but unimpeachable within the deterrent model. And it is this incontrovertable fact which reduces it to absurdity: and argues that Russell was in fact right to pose the question as he did. The chicken game will not only have a cluster of three nuclear states at one end, and a single super-state at the other, with the Chinese now able to intervene from a random number of side routes: but it will shortly have twelve to twenty other possible contenders liable to dash, quite possibly unannounced, across the previously single axis of collision.

Deterrence, in short, was in the beginning, a bi-polar game, and it cannot be played in a multi-polar world. It is therefore collapsing, but the danger is that this collapse will result in universal destruction if alternative approaches are not speedily accepted. There was always, of course, a much simpler rebuttal of the doctrine. It is, was, and has always been, utterly immoral. Unfortunately, this argument, which is unanswerable, is not usually given even the slightest consideration in the world’s war-rooms, although there is a fair deal of evidence that the people who staff these often find it difficult to avoid traumatic neuroses about the effects of all their devilish labours.

Be that as it may, the conditions that maintained “security for 35 years” have already been undermined, and Denis Healey needs to think again.