Nuclear Asymmetry and Deterrence

Theory, Policy and History

Jan Ludvik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315525150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a broader theory of nuclear deterrence and examines the way nuclear and conventional deterrence interact with non-military factors in a series of historical case studies.

The existing body of literature largely leans toward the analytical primacy of nuclear deterrence and it is often implicitly assumed that nuclear weapons are so important that, when they are present, other factors need not be studied. This book addresses this omission. It develops a research framework that incorporates the military aspects of deterrence, both nuclear and conventional, together with various perceptual factors, international circumstances, domestic politics, and norms. This framework is then used to re-examine five historical crises that brought two nuclear countries to the brink of war: the hostile asymmetric nuclear relations between the United States and China in the early 1960s; between the Soviet Union and China in the late 1960s; between Israel and Iraq in 1977–1981; between the United States and North Korea in 1992–1994; and, finally, between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The main empirical findings challenge the common expectation that the threat of nuclear retaliation represents the ultimate deterrent. In fact, it can be said, with a high degree of confidence, that it was rather the threat of conventional retaliation that acted as a major stabilizer.

This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, cold war studies, deterrence theory, security studies and IR in general.

1
Toward a broader theory of deterrence

Enormous volumes have been written about deterrence since the emergence of strategic studies as the field accessible not only to military professionals but also to civilian researchers. It is no coincidence that the emergence of strategic studies in academia overlaps with the advance of nuclear weapons in the real world, and conscious study of deterrence as a major aspect of international politics in the second half of the 1940s. Lack of previous experience with nuclear weapons was a formative factor for the early study of deterrence. Military services lost their previous almost unchallengeable monopoly on the study of strategy. Unable to claim established expertise in the field that was new to everyone, soldiers had to admit civilians into their jealously guarded sphere. But the civilians had no better empirical experience than the military. What allegedly made a civilian expert superior to his military counterpart was the ability to work in a field that, lacking empirical evidence, started as almost purely theoretical.¹

Existing theories and the need of theoretical plurality

In those formative years, scholars from the so-called “first cycle of strategic studies” mostly addressed the practical problems related to American deterrence of the Soviet Union such as basing patterns of long-range strategic bombers.² Yet its practical orientation did not prevent the development of concepts that would play a central role in the study of deterrence in the years to come. By a coincidence, Albert Wohlstetter and his colleagues in RAND discovered the concept of second strike.³ Glenn Snyder theorized the distinction between deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment.⁴ Thomas Schelling coined the term “compellence” as a persuasive compatriot of dissuasive deterrence in the field of coercive strategies.⁵ Those are only a few examples. Considering the lack of empirical data, the progress made by early students of deterrence is as impressive as it is impossible to do justice to all the influential scholars in this brief review.⁶

At the beginning, scholarship was mostly guided by researchers’ intuition, qualified guessing, and illustrative examples. Nonetheless, this lack of scientific rigor soon came under sharp criticism. As a response, deterrence scholars increasingly turned to rigorous deductive methodologies, most importantly to game theory.

Drawing on several powerful simplifying assumptions, deductive rational deterrence theory established itself as a leading scientific product in deterrence scholarship.⁷ The principal assumptions taken by rational deterrence scholars generally include the rational actor assumption, the state as unitary actor assumption, and explanation of variation in outcomes by differences in actor opportunities.⁸ Logically coherent, rigorous, and parsimonious, rational deterrence theory has clear advantages. Yet it fails to grasp the complexity of deterrence in the real world. In fact, its heuristic value is limited at best. Using comparative case studies and advancements in the study of cognitive psychology, various scholars successfully highlighted the deficiencies of the dominant rational deterrence paradigm.⁹ Up until the end of the Cold War, the utility of rational deterrence theory was intensively discussed as it came under sharp criticism. But lacking an adequate theoretical replacement, its critics never really dethroned rational deterrence theory.¹⁰ The sudden lack of interest in the further study of deterrence that accompanied the end of the bipolar nuclear rivalry then left the debate open and incomplete, with unfinished results.

It is no surprise that during the formative years of the Cold War the study of nuclear weapons affairs mostly revolved around the crucial U.S.–USSR nexus. Correspondingly, the attention paid to small nuclear arsenals was limited. Initiatives in the theoretical study of the topic were mostly left to the nationals of emerging nuclear states, most importantly to French strategists.¹¹ Their ideas often met with skepticism in mainstream strategic studies.¹² Yet, the intellectual underpinnings of the French school of deterrence helped establish the existential deterrence theory, whose proponents were led by former national security advisor to President Kennedy and President Johnson, McGeorge Bundy.¹³ These existentialists, mostly following the rational deterrence theory dictum and assuming that it is irrational to risk nuclear destruction of even one of one’s own cities, hold that deterrence rests with the uncertainty that is always present in a nuclear relationship, even with small numbers. Accordingly, even a very high probability of a successful first strike against a very irresolute defender does not allow ruling out the threat of retaliation. This theorizing of the existentialists had only limited influence on the U.S.–Soviet deterrence modality. Nevertheless, its principal ideas are well reflected in the key debate about the effectiveness of deterrence with small arsenals, and particularly in what Vipin Narang calls existential bias.¹⁴

This noteworthy debate took place between so-called proliferation optimists and proliferation pessimists and is yet to be resolved. Its origins can be traced to Kenneth Waltz’s influential and controversial contribution about the effects of nuclear proliferation on international stability.¹⁵ Waltz, drawing from his well-known neorealism and rational deterrence theory, argues powerfully that the general negative image of nuclear weapons proliferation is incorrect. In his view, deterrence is easy to achieve with nuclear weapons and almost certain to hold as no challenger will risk the threat of nuclear retaliation, however unlikely it may be. Waltz’s approach, soon labeled as proliferation optimism, does not lack support.¹⁶ Nevertheless, proliferation optimism remains the view of an influential minority, and has since been challenged by numerous more pessimistic scholars.¹⁷ The pessimists try to illuminate various deficiencies of this logic. Among them is the underestimation of the threat of preventive war in the early stage of nuclear arsenal development;¹⁸ the overestimation of the level of nuclear safety that can be easily reached by new nuclear states;¹⁹ the unreasonably low threshold for the ability to reach invulnerable second-strike forces;²⁰ the necessity to include the theory of nuclear operations into the predominantly structural realist logic;²¹ or the likely increase of the threat of nuclear terrorism.²² Others have highlighted that the positions of both optimists and pessimists are equally incomplete²³ and all sides generally agree that more thorough empirical research is necessary to confirm or disprove the presented arguments.

It is remarkable that this call to underpin the optimist-pessimist debate with empirical evidence is valid even in the debate’s key part devoted to proliferation’s impact on international stability. So far the evidence has been largely introduced in an illustrative fashion. Pessimists argue that proliferation undermines stability since preventive strikes were discussed almost from the time when it was recognized that nuclear weapons were a feasible option. Even before the United States successfully tested the first bomb in 1945, the allies targeted German facilities to prevent Nazis from its acquisition.²⁴ After the war, prominent leaders in the United States advocated preventive strikes against the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, first the United States and then the Soviet Union considered preventive options that would have taken out the Chinese nuclear program. In 1981, the Israeli air force destroyed Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear plant, then under construction. In 1994 a serious crisis arose between United States and North Korea over the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program and Washington was once again getting ready for a preventive strike. This evidence cannot be easily ruled out. However, the optimist position seems at least equally strong. Nuclear weapons were neither used, nor subject to attack, in any of the aforementioned cases. Whenever a strike took place, the targeted program had not reached its final phase. Thus optimists hold that prevention against a nuclear-armed country is close to impossible. The attacker cannot ever be sure of complete success. With some underlying possibility of nuclear retaliation always present, nuclear deterrence should make the world more stable. Systematic comparative historical examination is missing from the debate. The evidence tends to be limited as the authors draw predominantly from two cases: the U.S.–Soviet Cold War experience and the Indo-Pakistani nuclear rivalry.²⁵ Even though both cases are important ones, it can be argued that thorough exploration has been avoided of cases even more critical.²⁶

Lyle Goldstein’s Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction is a notable exception. Goldstein thoroughly examined five cases of nuclear dyads between hostile states: the United States and the Soviet Union in the early Cold War, the United States and China in the 1960s, the Soviet Union and China in the 1960s, China and India in the 1970s and 1980s, and Israel and Iraq in the 1970s and 1980s. To improve the validity of his research, he also added seven mini cases from other periods of the aforementioned hostile dyads, of U.S. relations with rogues in the 1990s, and of India and Pakistan in the 1990s. Goldstein – drawing on this substantial empirical dataset – argues that “radically asymmetric nuclear (WMD) relationships are fundamentally unstable, because nascent arsenals do not deter effectively,” and that a “given superior power’s propensity to attack the weaker state’s nascent nuclear (WMD) arsenal will substantially depend on the conventional balance, alliance dynamics, norms, and geography.”²⁷ Goldstein’s contribution is particularly valuable because he challenged the strongest claim of the optimists camp, namely that nuclear deterrence stabilized nuclear dyads because no war involving nuclear weapons ever happened. Most pessimists systematically examine how nuclear deterrence may fail when bureaucratic, psychological, organizational and other biases undermine its effectiveness. But Goldstein persuasively shows that nuclear deterrence might not effectively work at all in some hostile nuclear dyads and suggests that other factors, particularly conventional deterrence, better explain the lack of war between nuclear powers in radically asymmetric rivalries. Yet Goldstein’s research can benefit from further refinement. All the five cases he fully develops cover deterrence by small arsenals, yet for a more valid comparison, his research can be improved using a control case of deterrence with a more advanced nuclear weapons complex. Furthermore, his comparative framework is somewhat underspecified, and particularly the way conventional and nuclear deterrence overlap, enhance, or replace each other needs more clarification.

This task is as needed in deterrence scholarship as it is demanding. A common fallacy in security studies is to treat nuclear and conventional deterrence separately. Presumably, nuclear weapons have qualities that make the study of conventional deterrence in nuclear dyads irrelevant. Conventional deterrence is allegedly prone to miscalculation.²⁸ With conventional weapons, leaders are more likely ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Toward a broader theory of deterrence
• 2 The United States and China, 1959–1966
• 3 The Soviet Union and China, 1969
• 4 Israel and Iraq, 1977–1981
• 5 The United States and North Korea, 1992–1994
• 6 The United States and the Soviet Union, 1962
• 7 Putting the pieces together
• Index