Chuckie Krauthammer: I Can Use Big Words Like "Deterrence"
By Chuckie Krauthammer comes not to praise nonproliferation, but to bury it:
The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitabily going to break down. The inevitable has arrived.
The six-party talks on North Korea have failed miserably. They did not prevent Pyongyang from testing a nuclear weapon and entering the club. North Korea has broken yet again its agreement to reveal all its nuclear facilities.
The other test case was Iran. The EU-3 negotiations (Britain, France and Germany) went nowhere. Each U.N. Security Council resolution enacting what passed for sanctions was more useless than the last. Uranium enrichment continues.
Right… well, the North Korea story hasn’t fully played out, but it’s not really fair to say that efforts have completely broke down yet. The Iran situation also has yet to play out, but both share one important commonality; the United States, under the recommendation of folks like Chuckie Krauthammer, decided to reject any and all multilateral efforts at nonproliferation in favor of… well, it’s not even clear that what the US tried can be referred to as a coherent strategy. In short, after the Bush administration spent years efficiently knifing the nonproliferation regime, Chuck is here to pronounce it dead.
Chuck goes on to repeat the “Iraq invasion scared Libya into giving up its weapons” story, a tale that Chuckie himself must know has been debunked so many times that is has ceased to be funny, but at least admits that “pre-emption” as a strategy is dead with regards to Iran and North Korea. So what do we get? Missile defense!
For the sake of argument, imagine a two-layered anti-missile system in which each layer is imperfect, with, say, a 90 percent shoot-down accuracy. That means one in 100 missiles gets through both layers. That infinitely strengthens deterrence by radically degrading the possibility of a successful first strike. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sitting on an arsenal of, say, 20 nukes, might recoil from these odds — given the 100 percent chance a retaliatory counterattack of hundreds of Israeli (and/or American) nukes would make Iran a memory.
Of course, one can get around missile defense by using terrorists. But anything short of a hermetically secret, perfectly executed, multiple-site attack would cause terrible, but not existential, destruction. The retaliatory destruction, on the other hand, would be existential.
Right. But here’s the thing (and I choose my words carefully…) you morally retarded nitwit; if Iran is sensitive to the cost of existential annihilation, then you don’t need even one layer of missile defense. If North Korea doesn’t want to get blown up, then aiming plenty of nukes at it will be more than enough to deter an attack. The “millenarian” line is an extraordinarily weak hook to hang missile defense on, especially WHEN IT STILL REQUIRES DETERRENCE TO WORK. At least Chuckie seems to understand that missile defense doesn’t take deterrence out of the picture; given the unlikelihood that a shield will be perfect, and the (incredibly likely) eventuality that Iran would figure out a means of delivering weapons other than by missile, deterrence is still necessary.
In short, for missile defense to work a deterrent relationship has to hold, but with a deterrent relationship missile defense is pointless. Chuckie would have us waste billions of dollars on missile defense while simultaneously gutting all of the multilateral tools of nonproliferation that have prevented five nuclear powers from becoming fifty.
I shouldn’t be surprised that someone who consistently betrays such monumental ignorance on basic security concepts manages to maintain a position as columnist for one of the two major foreign policy newspapers in the United States, but I am sad. I mean, I know he has the gravitas, and that he has a snide wit, but beyond that, he can have only one of two qualities; either a shameless willingness to deceive his readership, or a grasp on the issues upon which he writes that is so shaky that it crumbles at the first nudge. I’m betting a little from column A, and a little from column B