Channeling the Elders

If you wish to espouse a weakly conceived and difficult to defend policy propositions in a limited space, there’s no better strategy than finding a figure of age and respect to hand down the pronouncements from on high. That way, they acquire a certain gravity without actually having to make any sense. Witness Melanie Kirkpatrick, who decided to sit down with former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and saw fit to publish the results in an op-ed. As arguments, Schlesinger’s comments make little sense. As pronouncements, however, they acquire the quality of ageless wisdom. Ageless wisdom, of course, does not need to be defended, and doesn’t particular need to be coherent.

Kirkpatrick’s interview of Schlesinger begins with a series of cliches, then goes downhill. We learn that nuclear deterrence takes place everyday, and thus that if nuclear weapons went away wars would suddenly break out all over the place. Schlesinger doesn’t give us any indication of where these wars might happen, and neither does Kirkpatrick. Similarly, neither Kirkpatrick nor Schlesinger indicate why they believe that the massive conventional superiority that the United States enjoys over any opponent or plausible combination of opponents would fail to deter aggression; it’s almost as if spending as much on defense as every single other country in the world combined isn’t worth the trouble. I find Schlesinger’s assertion that Iran and North Korea are immune to deterrence particularly puzzling, especially in the context of his claim that nuclear deterrence is operative every single day. Seriously, does the old man think that the Russians are about to invade Poland?

Here’s something else I don’t get; Schlesinger suggests that one of the dangers of a reduced US nuclear posture is that more countries around the world will decide to go nuclear. One of his solutions to this problem is that the United States ought to try to convince Japan to develop nuclear weapons. This “idea” has also been proposed by Charles Krauthammer and a few others on the right. Setting aside the basic contempt for international non-proliferation institutions (which Japan continues to strongly support), I find this logic befuddling. I suppose that it’s logically possible that selective early proliferation could prevent even more widespread proliferation, but I’m not sure how it works in practice. Japan isn’t the leader (or even a major player) in a multilateral alliance system; while you could argue that French, British, and US possession of nuclear weapons obviated the need for, say, German and Italian nukes, it’s unclear to me exactly who the Japanese would prevent from going nuclear. All of Japan’s neighbors except for South Korea already have nukes, and the South Koreans are probably MORE likely to acquire them if the Japanese proliferate. It’s an idea that doesn’t make the faintest amount of sense to me, except perhaps in that it undercuts aforementioned Japanese support for the global non-proliferation regime.

Schlesinger’s discussion of RRW is just silly, but then most such discussion verge on the absurd. I doubt very much that the Russians are actually modernizing their warhead stockpile at any reasonable speed, and in any case nuclear weapons don’t fight one another. Assuming any reasonably sized nuclear force, concerns about the reliability of US warheads (which are in any case overblown) disappear in a cloud of atomic dust. It’s revealing that the “reliability” advocates never really bother to construct any hypotheticals about why warhead reliability might matter; they would all sound something like this. Maintaining some research-oriented capability to build new nuclear warheads is probably necessary if you don’t envision complete nuclear abolition, but I suspect that the core capability can be kept at a pretty low level, far below what’s envisioned by most RRW advocates. That said, I would certainly trade RRW for a dramatically reduced nuclear stockpile, and a guarantee that warhead design would concentrate on long term reliability, rather than on operational and tactical versatility.

I should say that I’m broadly sympathetic with Schlesinger’s suggestion that we will never be rid of nuclear weapons. I can’t get past the problem of verification; any scheme to reduce the number of nuclear weapons to zero runs up against major incentives to deceive and defect. Were I Russia or China, I would never trust the United States to eliminate all of its nuclear weapons, and given US conventional superiority, Russia and China have even more incentive to deceive than we. I don’t see a way around this; while we have monitoring institutions that can fix the number of nuclear warheads within a particular range, I don’t see how any set of inspections could be intrusive enough to assure complete security. And while I would concede that the threat of retaliation isn’t the only, or even the most important, reason that nations have refrained from using nuclear weapons since 1945, I’m convinced that it’s part of the explanation. The best I could hope for in terms of a nuclear future is for the major powers to adopt a standard of minimal safe deterrence (the details of which can vary), and substantially reduce their nuclear stockpiles. I also think that there’s an outside possibility that the United Kingdom may give up its nuclear weapons in our lifetime, but that depends on the particular international position of the UK and on its relationship to France and the United States.

That said, there’s certainly a huge distance between a minimal safe deterrent posture and where we are now. Moreover, there’s probably some value to nuclear abolition as rhetorical aspiration; the Chinese have been calling for abolition for a long time, even as they pursue moderate increases in their own nuclear arsenal. Most importantly, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (which holds nuclear abolition as an aspiration) has been remarkably successful; it has provided the means through which nuclear proliferation can be monitored, and has at least contributed to the decision of most nuclear capable countries not to go through with weapon development.