A Dangerous World?

Threat Perception and U.S. National Security

Christopher A. Preble, John Mueller

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781939709417
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sicurezza nazionale

In 2013, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey stated that the world is "more dangerous than it has ever been." Is this accurate? Do we live in a world that is uniquely dangerous? Is it possible that the many threats and dangers promoted by policymakers and the media are exaggerated or overblown? In this timely edited volume, experts on international security assess – and put into context – the supposed dangers to American security. The authors examine the most frequently referenced threats, including wars between nations and civil wars within nations, and discuss the impact of rising nations, weapons proliferation, general unrest, terrorism, transnational crime, and state failures.

1. How Dangerous? History and Nuclear Alarmism

Francis J. Gavin

Nuclear weapons have been used twice, both times by the United States within the same week nearly 70 years ago. Since August 1945, even more destructive weapons—thermonuclear bombs and warheads—have been developed, and all manner of new delivery systems have been devised. Eight additional states have built the bomb, and many others have the capacity to do so. All the while, the world has witnessed innumerable geopolitical crises, international turmoil, and even war involving nuclear-armed states. Yet no nuclear weapon has been used in that time. Arguably, it has been more than 50 years since there was a real threat of thermonuclear war—the Cuban missile crisis. Other purportedly ominous threats—from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the fear of tipping points and the rise of terrorist organizations interested in weapons of mass destruction—have not resulted in a nuclear detonation.

Despite almost 70 years of nuclear nonuse, years in which the threat of a global thermonuclear conflagration has decreased enormously, the rhetoric of fear surrounding nuclear proliferation and nuclear use continues. The United States has taken the lead in fostering those worries and has pursued bold—and at times aggressive—policies, from global arms control to permanent alliances to threats of coercion and even preventive war, to meet such declared danger. That increasing response, however, seems out of proportion with what would seem to be the decreasing threats. How do we explain the puzzle?

Often, scholars have offered suggestions, focusing on what might be thought of as subrational explanations—such as bureaucratic or organizational politics, ideology, or the sway of parochial domestic considerations—to describe something that is otherwise a mystery: why so much attention, treasure, and blood to a situation that, at least on the surface, seems to warrant it far less than in the past, where the very medicine at times appears worse than the cure? One might argue that those very costly policies are what prevented nuclear tragedy, and such arguments could be right: it is hard to prove or disprove such a counterfactual. Still, the gap between the threat and the remedy seems large, especially given how aggressive U.S. counterproliferation policies have been in recent years.

To answer why the world—the United States in particular—has been alarmist, we need to understand how nuclear weapons influence international politics, both now and in the past. For example, why has there never been a thermonuclear war? That question is obviously extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to answer. We have enough difficulty making sense of things that have actually occurred. After all, despite the labors of countless scholars from around the world, assessing millions of pages of documents, no one agrees on what caused the First World War. The same can be said about the origins, course, and consequences of any number of other geopolitical events. Notwithstanding the confident claims of countless theorists, we don’t really know why we have never had a thermonuclear war. We are understandably eager to have an explanation for the most important nonevent in human history, if only to see if there are lessons that can be applied today to keep the streak going as long as possible. It is a daunting task, far more challenging than we acknowledge, and many of the research questions that we do focus on are merely proxies for that larger concern. In the end, many of our debates surrounding nuclear weapons—such as why states do or do not build the bomb, how they behave when they get it, or how and when deterrence works—are animated by our beliefs and desire to better understand why there has never been, and we hope will never be, a thermonuclear war.

This chapter moves beyond many of the deductive and theoretical assessments of those questions to find a better historical foundation for our analysis.¹ Instead of telling how history suggests the United States should think about Iran or North Korea’s nuclear program, nuclear terrorism, or the fear of nuclear tipping points and proliferation cascades, this chapter suggests three larger points. Wrestling with the history of the nuclear question can, we hope, contribute in a meaningful way to how we understand the consequences of the thermonuclear revolution and can perhaps even lead to more effective policies.

The first point pertains to method: all historical work involves an intense dialogue between the empirical and the conceptual. The evidence that historians find informs our theories of the world and vice versa, back and forth in an interactive fashion.² All good historians know that point, but many outside the guild, including important policymakers and international relations experts, have a different view of how we operate. Historians are often thought of as either storytellers or collectors of “data.” Policymakers see Michael Beschloss or Doris Kearns Goodwin on television, read Robert Caro’s magisterial biographies of Lyndon Johnson—or on the nuclear question, Richard Rhodes—and think of the historian as a sort of bard who weaves tales. There is also the image of the less famous, academic historian, who is working away in a dusty archive and collecting reams upon reams of documents that might be fed into the models and regressions of social scientists. Although outsiders cannot help but be impressed by the beautiful prose and the carefully crafted narratives, or by the stacks upon stacks of documents, there is little sense that important, serious arguments are being made or that there is an explicit conceptual framework or theory for understanding the world.³

Why does correcting those caricatures—even while acknowledging that there is some truth to them—matter? The answer touches on the second point: any historian working in the nuclear policy area immediately confronts an enormous, and in many ways intimidating, conceptual hegemon: the strategic studies literature on nuclear weapons and its influence on world politics. A powerful corpus of ideas, based largely on deductive reasoning, began to emerge almost as soon as the first atomic bomb was dropped. At that time, Bernard Brodie declared: “Thus far the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on its chief purpose must be to avert them.”⁴

For almost 70 years, strategists trained in the natural sciences, mathematics, economics, and—most prominently—political science have been working to develop theories surrounding nuclear dynamics and statecraft. Several generations of that work have shaped the conventional wisdom, established the issues open for debate, and provided us with the framework with which to investigate those questions.⁵ Although there is some reason to question whether the strategists were as influential with policymakers as is often claimed,⁶ that body of work is extraordinary from an intellectual history perspective, both in its sophistication and its influence on public discussion. It is a literature, however, almost bereft of a historical sensibility and of the skepticism, comfort with uncertainty, and humility the study of the past brings with it. I have had more than one prominent scholar in the field tell me that we know all we need to know about how nuclear deterrence works and, by extension, about why we have never had a thermonuclear war. The power and certainty of that theoretical literature act as their own deterrent to rigorous and creative thinking about why and how states have made decisions about nuclear weapons over the decades.

That point leads to a third issue: the question of policy relevance. Policymakers would benefit from a greater understanding of this nuclear history, just as scholars should be willing to engage the concerns and interests of decisionmakers. Unfortunately, as a discipline, academic history has long been wary of power, believing it corrupts those scholars who try to court it and allows those in power to misuse the past for less than noble purposes. The standard position of even the most policy-empathetic historian when asked for his or her view on what the past tells us about a contemporary issue is “it’s complicated,” which, in the end, is not a very helpful answer. When people talk about “policy-relevant work,” they typically mean scholarship that provides accurate forecasts about the future and, if not theories, at least generalizable rules of thumb that are parsimonious. All of those demands cut deeply against the instinct and practice of the historian, who emphasizes historical context, unintended consequences, and the complex interaction of multiple forces. That poor fit, one would think, would provide powerful incentives for the historian to stay as far away from policy as possible.

Avoiding policy relevance in nuclear history, however, isn’t the right answer. Elsewhere, I’ve laid out what I think historians can contribute to policymaking: there is a whole set of insights and, perhaps more important, a sensibility that comes from studying the past, both of which are bound to improve decisionmaking.⁷ The potential contributions that can be made by historical work stack up quite nicely when compared with the efforts of other disciplines, such as economics and political science. Any effort to come to terms with why we have not had a thermonuclear war is bound to be of great and understandable interest to people in positions of great responsibility, whether a historian wants his or her work used in that way or not. Scholars mining archives around the world to understand how nuclear states made decisions about nuclear weapons and how the thermonuclear revolution affects statecraft, as well as national and international security, are bound to intrigue, if not help, decisionmakers. Such knowledge can usefully supplement, if not at times replace, the dominating, deductive views of the strategy world.

The Balance-of-Payments Deficit and Flexible Response

One of the virtues of historical work that is often missed in the deductive and theoretical literature on nuclear weapons is something I’ve called “horizontal history,” the connections between issues over space, as opposed to time. Social science scholars often focus like a laser on one particular issue, say, nuclear strategy or America’s relations with China, and see how it develops over time. But at the top levels of policy, all sorts of seemingly separate issues turn out to be interconnected in surprising ways. The story of how I stumbled into nuclear history, quite by accident, reveals both the persistence of horizontal history and the benefits of following the documents wherever they might lead. It all began with research on postwar international monetary relations.⁸

Beginning in the late 1950s, four successive presidential administrations (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon) strived to find ways to end the balance-of-payments deficit and ameliorate its effects. None of the macroeconomic tools (e.g., raising interest rates, restricting the domestic monetary supply, enacting new trade restrictions or capital controls, or devaluing the currency) were attractive to U.S. officials. Those measures would slow or even deflate the domestic economy, which was certain to be unpopular.

Policymakers looked instead for ways to dramatically reduce the amount of monies spent abroad. By far, the largest account they could control was the cost of stationing U.S. troops and their families overseas. Most of those troops were part of America’s commitment under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreement, specifically defending Western Europe from the Soviet Union. Not coincidentally, the countries with the largest balance-of-payments surpluses were the most obvious beneficiaries of America’s expensive military protection: West Germany and France. Reducing the U.S. conventional force posture abroad was, from a domestic political and economic perspective, an ideal solution. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson and many of their closest advisers not only were willing, but also at times appeared eager, to pull American troops from Western Europe.

That account was at odds with the standard accounts, which claimed the Kennedy administration had increased American conventional forces and developed more nimble nuclear packages as the basis for the strategy of “flexible response.” Contemporary observers certainly had reason to believe that story was true, as Robert McNamara laid out the strategy, thereby incorporating many of the views of the strategy community, in a secret speech to NATO and in a public version in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the spring of 1962. Yet the documents leading up to and after both speeches painted a different picture from the public rhetoric. No one really seemed to buy the core logic of the strategy, and McNamara himself was one of the leading advocates throughout the 1960s for steep U.S. troop withdrawals.

There was a striking contradiction: the United States embracing a strategy that required more conventional forces while actively seeking to bring American troops back from Europe. And that wasn’t the only such case. U.S. policy on tactical nuclear weapons, for example, pulled in all sorts of different directions and was never really resolved at the highest political levels. The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) did not really become all that more flexible, and, as far as one could tell, U.S. nuclear strategy was still largely based on the massive, preemptive strike articulated by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles a decade earlier.

The man responsible for implementing strategy in Europe, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, General Lyman Lemnitzer, actually “forbid the use of the term” flexible response “throughout SHAPE [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe] and Allied Command Europe.” Lemnitzer complained that “so many of [his] people didn’t really know what flexible response meant.”⁹ And the official history of America’s nuclear command-and-control effort contends that “to the extent it amounted to a doctrine, it was open to different interpretations, and it is not easy (if at all possible) to find a single coherent, clear statement of it, even among authoritative pronouncements of the President and the Secretary of Defense.”¹⁰ When Nixon’s secretary of defense, James Schlesinger, examined the war plans, he and his team were stunned to see the rigid, massive SIOP everyone thought had been discarded by the Kennedy administration.

The documents did not comport with the received wisdom in the largely deductive strategy literature.¹¹ The literature was clean, crisp, and driven by a powerful logic. But the policies themselves were messy and pulled in different directions.¹² That history teaches us to be skeptical of bureaucratic political explanations for something as important as nuclear policy.¹³ When one reconstructs U.S. national security policy on the basis of the documentary record, one gets a sense that on the questions that truly matter—and issues of war and peace, especially nuclear war, certainly qualifies—what the president decides actually matters and is almost always carried out.

And in that case, an underlying strategic logic was driving those policies. The flexible response doctrine was as much about nuclear nonproliferation vis-à-vis America’s allies—West Germany, especially—as a nuclear deterrent strategy versus our adversary. After Great Britain and France developed their own nuclear capability, it was only natural that West Germany would also be interested in those weapons. The prospect was deeply unsettling, not just to the Soviets but to the rest of Europe as well.¹⁴ By strengthening extended deterrence, the flexible response strategy was aimed at reassuring the West Germans and lessening their desire for their own nuclear forces. It also allowed a nonproliferation policy that, under the cover of an alliance strategy, did not overtly discriminate against the key target, the Federal Republic of Germany (i.e., West Germany). That—as much as anything the Soviets were doing—was the driving logic of the strategy. A search in the archives to explain U.S. international monetary policy came, most unexpectedly, to reveal the enormous gap between the rhetoric and reality of U.S. military strategy in Europe. It also encouraged a reexamination of many of the core precepts of the strategic studies literature.

Three big questions stood out: (a) Did the United States care far more about stemming the spread of nuclear weapons than the strategic literature had recognized? (b) Relatedly, was its focus simply on particular complexities surrounding nuclear weapons and West Germany, or was there a broader concern with nuclear proliferation writ large? and (c) Could U.S. nuclear strategy be seen as both a tool of nuclear nonproliferation and an effort to deter the Soviet Union? What did the documents reveal?

The Gilpatric Commission and Nuclear Proliferation in the 1960s

The archival record—specifically Roswell Gilpatric’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library—revealed unexpected, surprising insights relevant to contemporary debates over nuclear proliferation. As McNamara’s deputy, Gilpatric was involved in both the deliberations over balance-of-payments-inspired troop withdrawals and the status and strength of U.S. nuclear forces. After Gilpatric left office, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked him to chair a committ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. How Dangerous? History and Nuclear Alarmism
• 2. Nuclear Alarmism: Proliferation and Terrorism
• 3. China’s Putative Threat to U.S. National Security
• 4. The American Perception of Substate Threats
• 5. The Management of Savagery: Policy Options for Confronting Substate Threats
• 6. Transnational Crime as a Security Threat: Myths, Misconceptions, and Historical Lessons
• 7. Dealing with Cyberattacks
• 8. Climate Change and National Security: Balancing the Costs and Benefits
• 9. It’s Coming from Inside the House
• 10. Human Security in the United States
• 11. Bucks for the Bang? Assessing the Economic Returns to Military Primacy
• 12. Assessing the “Threat” of International Tension to the U.S. Economy
• 13. It’s a Commons Misunderstanding: The Limited Threat to American Command of the Commons
• 14. Security Threats in Contemporary World Politics: Potential Hegemons, Partnerships, and Primacy
• 15. Delusions of Danger: Geopolitical Fear and Indispensability in U.S. Foreign Policy
• 16. Alarums and Excursions: Explaining Threat Inflation in U.S. Foreign Policy
• NOTES
• CONTRIBUTORS