Key Point: A small regional war, awful as it would be, would not destroy the United States nor threaten the end of the human race. A nuclear conflict of any serious size in the Northern Hemisphere, however, would effectively mean the end of the modern era.
Nuclear war, the exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more states in open conflict. It’s unthinkable. It can’t happen.
Right?
Wrong.
I’m going to focus here on a war that could involve the United States and its allies on one side, and Russia or China on the other. Nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan, or between a future nuclear-armed Iran and Israel, is unlikely but far easier to imagine than a global nuclear conflict. Indeed, this is one reason Americans don’t think about nuclear war very much anymore: they think it will happen somewhere else. (If a regional limited war takes place, however, you’ll know it: even a small exchange of nuclear weapons will create a global environmental catastrophe that will dwarf Chernobyl or Fukushima.)
A small regional war, awful as it would be, would not destroy the United States nor threaten the end of the human race. A nuclear conflict of any serious size in the Northern Hemisphere, however, would effectively mean the end of the modern era. Further human progress would be subordinated to the basic needs of survival for years, if not decades, to come. A war between India and Pakistan would kill millions and pollute the earth for an eternity. But it would not threaten to bring the entire global system to a halt, or potentially lead to the release of thousands of warheads against of hundreds of cities across the globe, the “unthinkable” war for which Americans spent decades preparing, and for which we still maintain an arsenal of strategic weapons deliverable by air, land, and sea.
So how do we begin each of the nightmare scenarios?
1. Mechanical Accident:
As terrifying as it is to think of a war generated by a random mechanical hiccup, it’s important to note that this is the least likely trigger for a nuclear war. If anything, during the Cold War the superpowers spent so much time assuring the security of their arsenals against accidental use that both the Americans and the Soviets started to wonder whether they had too many barriers in place that could prevent the intentional launch of the weapons in wartime. While the danger of an accidental launch of a strategic nuclear weapon is not zero, it is tiny.
That is, unless someone builds a “Doomsday Machine” that takes the human beings out of the loop. And who’d be crazy enough to do that?
Turns out the Soviet high command, in its pathetic and paranoid last years, was just that crazy. The USSR built a system called Perimetr, known informally in Russia as “the Dead Hand.” Perimetr was essentially a computer system that would watch for signs of nuclear attack and retaliate on its own if the Soviet leadership was struck first and wiped out. (I explained this is more detail for National Geographic, which you can watch here.) We’ve since asked the Russians if it’s still on, and they’ve reassured us, with complete confidence, that we should mind our own business. Let’s hope they’re just being rude.
2. Human Error:
As long as there are machines run by human beings, there are going to be accidents. War, however, will not begin because a bomber crashes or a silo catches fire; rather, the error will lay in the misinterpretation of an accident by fallible human beings.
History is replete with such incidents. In 1995, the Russians forgot that the Norwegians had notified them of a rocket launch to put a weather satellite into space. The Russian high command told President Boris Yeltsin that they had a confirmed rocket launch from NATO over Russia. Fortunately, no one in the Kremlin assumed that Bill Clinton was trying to start World War III with a single warhead from Norway. Moreover, the warm relationship between Clinton and Yeltsin made the Russian president skeptical that Russia was under what Cold War strategists used to call a “BOOB,” or “Bolt Out Of the Blue” attack.
Similar mistakes have been provoked by flocks of birds, random computer glitches, and the sun glinting off cloud formations (which was interpreted by Soviet computers as the fiery tails of multiple U.S. missile boosters). In each case, it was up to a human being to make the call: is someone really attacking us? Smart people in both Russia and the United States have prevented these mechanical errors from turning into Armageddon.
Nevertheless, the declassified files on these incidents won’t exactly help you sleep more soundly. In 1979, for example, NORAD, the joint U.S.- Canadian North American Air Defense Command, rousted White House advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski out of bed and told him that a massive Soviet nuclear strike was incoming. Or so they thought, anyway: they were giving him a heads-up while they checked it out. Brzezinski was minutes away from waking President Jimmy Carter and handing him the codes to Hell when NORAD called back and said: Oops, nevermind. The computers goofed. Our bad. We’ll fix it.
And then it happened again in 1980.
The Soviets, who got wind of all this activity, politely sent a note to Carter asking him, in effect: What the is going on over there? It was a good question, and we’d have asked the same thing.
3. A Show of Force:
As we move from mechanical errors to human agency, things actually get scarier. Machines can make mistakes, but absent an international crisis and additional confirming evidence, no one goes to war on the say-so of a malfunctioning HAL 9000. While journalists and nuclear safety experts have written some excellent books about accidental detonations and other risks, I worry far more about a conscious decision to use nuclear weapons.
The worst mistake to make about nuclear weapons is to believe that they are ordinary arms, available for military use like any other. (This is sometimes called the “conventionalizing” of nuclear weapons.) The second worst mistake, however, is to believe that nuclear weapons are magic, and that using them solves problems that are otherwise politically or strategically intractable. This second error is what leads people into thinking about things like “demonstration shots” or nuclear shows of force, in which a nuclear weapon is exploded near, but not in, a conflict.
The fallacy at the center of this concept is the classic strategic error of assuming the predictability and controllability of inherently unpredictable and uncontrollable events. A nuclear show of force rests entirely on the hope that enemy leaders will clearly see a demonstration shot for what it is and not overreact. But misperception is a key part of international relations, and it is pure folly to assume that a nuclear explosion will have a clarifying, rather than a panicking, effect on the enemy.
4. We’re Dragged into it by Someone Else:
Sometimes, your worst enemies are your friends.
Even if the United States has no plans to involve itself in a nuclear conflict, U.S. allies or other powers might have ideas of their own. South Korea, for example, a few years back floated the idea that the United States might want to consider returning tactical nuclear arms to the Korean peninsula, a notion from which the Americans quickly distanced themselves. (We removed them all from South Korea in 1991, and they’re not going back.) If Iran gets a bomb Turkey or Saudi Arabia might follow suit. In each case, the presence of a nuclear weapon might be part of a smaller nation’s national defenses, but it is more likely to be bait for the U.S. to intervene before things go nuclear.
5. The “Sore Loser Scenario”:
Finally, there are paths to nuclear war that rely on the most durable source of war there is: human stupidity. If the major powers don’t bumble into a nuclear war, or get dragged into one by their friends, they can always just choose to launch one themselves.
During the Cold War, NATO’s strategy was actually quite simple. We can’t defeat you, we told the Soviets, and so if you invade Western Europe, you will be placing us in a position where we will have no choice but to repel you with battlefield nuclear weapons. You Soviets, having been nuked, will have no choice but to respond, at which point the U.S., Britain (and maybe even France) will turn the USSR into glass, even as you will do the same to us. So let’s not take that fateful step, because the first rifle fired in Wurzburg will inexorably lead to the last missile that falls on Vladivostok.
This chain of deterrent logic no longer applies to possible conflicts with Russia or China, in part because there is no longer a large battlefield between the U.S. and its nuclear opponents. If war breaks out over some smaller issue, there will be no way to pull back or even stabilize a military standoff, and a military loss by China or Russia is highly likely against a far superior (yes, even today) American force.
If China, for example, decides to press a claim in the Pacific and precipitates an open conflict with the United States at sea, it will almost certainly lose. At that point, China will have to make a choice: surrender whatever was at stake, or remove the U.S. fleet from the conflict by nuclear force. Likewise, if Russia and NATO come to blows in Europe – a scenario I thought ridiculous in the 1990s and now must reconsider – Russia will also lose, and like China will have no set of buffer states around it to prevent the fight from spilling back into Russian territory.
I call this the “sore loser scenario,” since the use of nuclear arms will serve only to make the victor pay a price equal to one the loser feels has already been suffered. Theoretically, the loser lashing out against the winner might create a kind of nuclear reset, but only the most optimistic Chinese strategist could hope that an act of the magnitude of a nuclear attack on a U.S. carrier could produce a military draw. (Put another way, it’s not a demonstration or a show of force if it involves instantly incinerating 5,000 U.S. military personnel.) The United States will be forced to respond, and then we’re off to the races.
Whether the Chinese really believe they could get away with this is unclear. But the Russians do, at least to judge by their own writings. In fact, the “sore loser” concept is embedded in Russian military doctrine. Russia is acutely aware of its conventional weakness; even as they torment Ukraine right under NATO’s nose, the Russians know that they have no chance against NATO without nuclear weapons, a role reversal between NATO and Russia whose irony has not gone unnoticed in the Kremlin. And so Moscow’s strategy, as analyst Nikolai Sokov and others have pointed out, is to use nuclear weapons in a “de-escalatory” capacity: that is, when they’re losing a war, they’ll engage in a limited nuclear attack to get the enemy to back down.
No comments:
Post a Comment