And if one is used, the victim nation will respond with massive retaliation, including city-busting heavy-duty revenge weapons. The nuclear nations have made it very clear that an “EMP” weapon is an unacceptable crossing of the nuclear threshold and will be treated very much the same as a conventional strike.
I wasn’t talking about deterrence. I was talking about MAD, the phrase used in the post I responded to. Yes, definitely, once MAD happens, deterrence has failed. An exchange of even 1/20th of the US or Russian arsenals would accomplish Assured Destruction, and would still leave 19/20ths of the arsenals available for other purposes.
Cut back on the snark, please, and “Please, please” pay more attention to what people are actually saying, instead of projecting your own interpretations.
Again, one more time, Assured Destruction is a deterrence theory; the application of the theory–which assumes, among other things, rational actors with complete information–is intended to prevent either side from initiating a nuclear strike by assuring that such an act will result in the complete destruction of the initiating nation and any subsequent effective retaliatory capability. There is no “19/20th of the arsenals available”; the initiating nation is functionally destroyed, and the intent of fielding such large arsenals and a variety of different delivery modes (e.g. the US “nuclear triad” of ICBMs, the Fleet Ballistic Missiles, and nuclear-armed penetration bombers) is at least ostentiably to assure a response regardless of any attempt at a disabling first strike. That’s not “projecting [my] own interpretations”; that is what the theory means and how it is applied. If you would like some references to read up on strategic defense and deterrence theory I would be happy to provide that to you, but don’t sit there and continue to spout nonsense pulled directly out of your ass.
As for the tenets of Assured Destruction, they have never been met in the real world, and while the general scheme of the theory has been intermittantly applied the full implications have never really made their way into strategic analysis. As a game theory, it is demonstrably unstable with more than two players, and the requirements of perfectly rational actors with complete information is essentially impossible to meet (which was the topic of Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War, which itself was largely the basis for Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb). Arguing that Assured Destruction “prevented nuclear war” is like arguing that the Tooth Fairy causes children’s teeth to fall out so she can collect them. Yes, childrens’ teeth do fall out and disappear to be replaced by coins, but cause and effect are not as they might appear to some.
I know that, sir. Everyone reading this knows that.
The thread is about an actual employment of nuclear weapons. It’s about nuclear war. Our discussion is about deterrence having failed. The missiles are in the air.
There could be. It’s entirely hypothetical, but it is possible. A mere 1/20th of our arsenal would really fuck up Russia, and 1/20th of theirs would really fuck up the US and/or NATO.
In practice, a launch would probably not hold a 95% reserve. On the other hand, in practice, a launch would probably hold some reserve. So, Diceman’s point, that Russia couldn’t afford to launch its entire arsenal at the US, because they would need to keep some in reserve in case the war expands to China, is of almost zero comfort to us. The could keep a 95% reserve, and still destroy the U.S. as a nation with a mere 5% of their assets.
You’re the one with digestive problems, sir. You are not responding to anything I’ve actually said, but only to material you, yourself, have imagined.
I vigorously disagree. If nuclear weapons were used, as deployed and readied, the world’s major nations would be destroyed. In the U.S. the ten biggest cities would be annihilated; in Russia, ditto. Hundreds of lesser targets would be destroyed. Hundreds of millions of people would die in the first days, and billions in the resulting chaos, as the food supply chain disintegrates. AD is absolutely guaranteed, and MAD as well. If that isn’t “Assured Destruction,” then the term has no meaning.
Disagree on the former, agreed on the latter. We have nutcases in North Korea, clearly violating the “rational actors” principle.
Once more, you are projecting. I never said any such thing. If you’re going to rebut me, try (“Please, please”) to rebut what I actually said.
However, I’ll give you a freebie here: I do believe that the MAD principle has been a successful deterrent for the past 70 years. The world’s high-level leadership knows that no one can win a nuclear war, only lose it. As of yet, no one has been willing to fight a war that they can only lose. MAD has worked.
It isn’t perfect. (What is?) It isn’t ideal. It makes hostages of us all. It’s intrinsically immoral. The whole point of this thread is how immoral it is to destroy billions of lives without any actual strategic purpose.
Those are all questions that could only be address at thesis if not textbook length. But to take a summary swipe at it:
Nuclear war was prevented, albeit just barely in several cases, because the individuals involved recognized that they held a power that no man is capable of responsibly wielding, or that it would be better (in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis) to capitulate and permit the opponent to ostensibly save face rather than go to a destructive (if not catacalysmic) war, or because individuals in the chain of communication (but not at the executive level) recognized that what appeared to be signs of an attack were actually software errors or training tapes. There are a number of circumstances in which the perception of an attack could have resulted in a pre-emptive response, and that danger still remains today and even exacerbated by deteriorating systems, reduced training and vetting, and the proliferation of nations with potential or realized nuclear weapon capability.
Silo launch crews (‘silo rats’), boomer crews, and B-52 crews routinely underwent exercises simulating nuclear attacks, but as far as I am aware none were put into the scenario where they actually believed they were under attack. Would they have responded the same in a real attack as they did in simulation? I don’t have any reason to believe they wouldn’t; the entire purpose of simulation is not only to train but to condition, and the personnel who are selected for those roles are partially selected for their ability to follow direction without argument.
How the US and the USSR differed in their application of nuclear strategy and application could fill volumes, but whereas the US was dependent upon their nuclear triad (ICBMs, FBMs, penetration bombers) to provide robust deterrent capability, the Soviets were more concerned with the ability to respond in the (in their minds) likely unilateral nuclear attack by the US. During the Reagan era (which also corresponded with a succession of Soviet leaders who were all on their deathbeds) the potential for an unprovoked attack was considered inevitable despite the fact that Reagan actual abhorred nuclear weapons and all they stood for, to the point of adopting a view of strategic defense systems that every single one of his military advisors recommended against and that were speculative at best. In other words, the Soviets were convinced that NATO would eventually attack (and if not them, the Peoples Republic of China who they had ironically provided initial nuclear capability) and that they needed to be able to respond sufficiently to assure that they had some kind of parity, while the Americans assumed that by showing enough force (interpreted by the Soviets as intent) that an exchange would be deterred.
In retrospect, the entire situation was a series of misunderstandings compounded by idoeological differences that, in the end, didn’t actually mean shit to the average citizen of either group, and that were exploited by groups on both sides to enhance their influence and power. We could, and can, do better than to face off in a game of brinkmanship that could, either through error, failure of judgment, or deliberate malfeasence, result in the deaths of tens or hundred of millions of completely uninvolved people and the general retardation of human progress.
Okay, let’s try this one out for size. What do you think the US nuclear arsenal (weapons and delivery systems) consists of? How many, what distribution, and which ones are available for an immediate retaliatory response or (should someone desire it) a preemptive first strike? What would 1/20th of that represent in terms of weapons delivered and cities or strategic assets destroyed? What would be the response capability of Russia before and after an attack?
As for (Mutual) Assured Destruction it is clear from your comments that you have no knowledge of its purpose, requirements, and application as a strategic deterrence theory beyond the USA Today infographic level. You want to assert that you are eminently knowledgeable about the topic even as every post displays fundamental ignorance about how the theory is applied and why it is or is not valid. The continued reliance on a “war didn’t happen, therefore it must somehow be ‘MAD’ that saved us” is a causal fallacy. You have not demonstrated, even in informal terms, how any particular theory or mechanism prevented NATO and the Warsaw Pact from going to war and engaging in a nuclear exchange.
It’s important that your enemies think you’ll nuke them, not that you actually follow through with it. At that point its too late anyway so it doesn’t matter what you do. Were I president, and it came to this, I wouldn’t see the point in nuking millions of Russians just out of spite. However I would make absolutely sure that everyone thought I would.
Exactly! It’s a kind of paradox. You wouldn’t actually do it…but you must never let anyone know you wouldn’t actually do it. This comes up in the discussion of the letter the British P.M. writes to the submarine forces. The very existence of the letter, and the doubt it raises in the minds of potential enemies, makes a first strike more likely. (Okay, at an almost microscopic level of differential probability, but, still…)
Hitler went on his rampage, in part because he thought the young men of England wouldn’t fight, and that was based, in part, on a university debate where that was the resolution. They turned out not to actually mean it, and some of the same lads went on to become Spitfire aces. Potential Hitlers should avoid making the same mistake. The P.M.'s letter to the submariners might well be, “Give them hell, boys.”
Frankly, I’m of the mind that such a bluff would be nigh impossible to actually pull off. Cold War politics wasn’t a game of poker where everyone’s allowed to walk away from the table after game’s end.
Conversely, there’s the curious case of Stanislav Petrov, who may have prevented a nuclear war by choosing not to report a U.S. launch warning which he believed (correctly, as it turned out) was a false alarm. That said, had he been (A) American and (B) incorrect, I would’ve been rightly pissed off – but not nearly as pissed off as in the OP’s hypothetical situation.
It is worth noting that the reason Petrov believed the alarm to be false alarm was because he’d worked on the development of the development of the software system that discriminated an attack and was aware that it had been deployed despite known problems that were similar to what he experienced on 26 September 1983. Because of this, he strongly strongly believed the warning was false even though he had no way of independently verifying the attack aside from the information from the Soviet early warning satellite system.
The really spooky thing, though, is that Petrov wasn’t even scheduled to be on duty that night; he was covering for another officer who had little experience with the system. Of course, some will argue that there would have been more consideration up the line before the decision was made to go forward with a retaliatory strike, but it is worth noting that this occurred in 1983, when Yuri Andropov was on his deathbed and Soviet Premier Nikolai Tikhonov was unavailable, in the aftermath of the Soviet shoot down of KAL 007, and in the midst of Project Ryan, an intelligence operation with the mission to find signs of a NATO pre-emptive attach, and right prior to the Able Archer '83 exercise that the the Soviets went entirely apeshit over. In other words, there is every reason to believe that they would have accepted the warning on face value, notwithstanding the fact that in the face of an apparent attack every minute counts and there is little time to spend with second guessing or verification before your entire country is turned into a parking lot. And this is one of at least half a dozen incidents of similar severity.
This is the reality of nuclear conflict; a single mistake, a deviation from “perfect information” or “rationality” may spell the destruction of nations and the immediate deaths of tens or hundreds of millions of innocent people, with effects which may persist for decades. This is why Assured Destruction is not a reliable deterrence theory despite the post hoc claims that “it worked, therefore it must be right”.
I was with you until this point. Surely, you can’t believe that the fear getting nuked in retaliation isn’t always in the back of the minds of the leaders who make those decisions?
Let’s say, as a hypothetical, I want to burn down my neighbor’s house. But I know he’s got a flamethrower stored in his trunk, which he may use to burn down my house if I strike first. Naturally, I’m gonna be very wary about torching his abode, unless I think he’s bluffing or doesn’t have the balls to strike back. But if he doesn’t own that torch, what’s to stop me from burning down his house with reckless abandon?
(For the sake of argument, let’s assume the cops have been paid off, so no legal consequences will arise from this feud.)
The problem with this argument is that it is a grossly simplistic evaluation of a complex and poorly defined scenario. Assured Deterrence isn’t just about “the fear of getting nuked in retaliation”; the perquisites include a foreknowledge of opposition methods and response capability, specific intent in a given situation, and ability to discriminate and respond to a threat. As a deterrence theory to assure prevention an actual exchange these are requirements. If they aren’t met, the actual deterrence is a matter of luck rather than planning. And as Napoleon observed, it may be better to be lucky than good, but in the end actually skill trumps luck.
Napoleon never possessed the ability to utterly obliterate his adversary with the push of a button. When it comes to Global Thermonuclear War, only the first inning matters.
Maybe you’re too young to remember what the Cold War was actually like?
Re Petrov, from what I have read, he did report up the chain, after he continually began to get alarms, though with the health warning that the reading made no sense.
Now, the NORAD tape incident. THAT could have been bad.
No, I lived though the worst, most paranoiac years of the Cold War. But the point is, it wasn’t some abstract theory that absolutely prevented a nuclear exchange; it was some combination of luck, empathy, luck, and luck that prevented nuclear war during the darkest years. And those could return again with a vengeance given the increased number of nuclear capable nations. Relying on some theoretical “Oh, this highly presumptive theory saved us all” rationale to avert future nuclear exchange is lazy, sloppy, and stupid. We were more lucky than right in the past, and if we want to secure in the future we need to take a more proactive, preventative role.
Nobody’s claiming that M.A.D. was the sole reason for preventing a nuclear war. But you’re claiming that M.A.D. had NO effect whatsoever on the outcome, which is ridiculous.
What makes you think the world’s currently at risk of a nuclear exchange anywhere near the scale of 1954-89??? India & Pakistan may some day go at it, and North Korea is presently a major threat, but all the other “official” nuke states are tentative allies (recent unpleasantness with Russia notwithstanding) and China, the sole wild card, only wants to manufacture toys & bootleg DVDs for the rest of the planet.
Seriously – try watching some old movies like The Day After. That sort of future is extremely unlikely to happen, unless the geopolitical situation undergoes a dramatic, unexpected paradigm shift.
Here is the issue; you keep writing “MAD” but what you are actually talking about is fear of retaliation i.e. that if you strike the opposing nation may strike back. This is certainly an element of the deterrence theory of Assured Destruction (implicit in the requirement for “rational actors”) but by itself not sufficient for deterrence. Fear of retaliation informs the modes of how you establish both a deployment plan such that your opponent believes he cannot eliminate your counterstrike and retaliatory response capability (e.g. hardened underground silos, robust command and control systems, the fleet ballistic missile program, et cetera) and the means by which you assure communications and checks with your opponent (e.g. the “Hot Line”, treaty compliance verifications, intentional demonstrations of strategic capability, et cetera). That same fear deters, in theory, deliberate planning for a presumed disabling first strike. But the reality is that even some nation could completely and totally destroy another without concern for response, no responsible nation would, nor would a rational President or Prime Minister wish to be held up in history as the example of a genocidal maniac. Even with nations which are, um, less than responsible, such as North Korea or Pakistan, the value of a nuclear arsenal is in the political bargaining power it offers (which North Korea has applied very adeptly to get international aid while playing a shell game with facilities).
Regardless, even in the limited sense that the tenets of Assured Destruction were (inconsistently) applied to US nuclear deployment and strategic planning, the decision about how to handle a crisis and when to make the decision to launch or retaliate against a perceived attack is one that has to be made in spare minutes, with generally very incomplete and possibly incorrect information due to the dreaded but inevitable ‘fog of war’. People, even presidents and prime ministers, are not the perfectly rational actors with complete information and assured response which underlies the theory of Assured Destruction, and even a cursory review of the Cuban Missile Crisis will show that a string of poor decisions and misunderstandings let to the escalation, and the advice of an almost incidental presidential advisor which caused Kennedy to respond to a more conciliatory message and ignore the more aggressive one, offering to “untie the knot” by removing IRBMs from Italy and Turkey (which were already scheduled to be removed shortly anyway with the Titan II and Minuteman ICBMs coming on line).
The most likely scenario for a nuclear exchange isn’t two nations dispassionately going to war and electing to escalate up to a nuclear response. It isn’t even the Cuban Missile Crisis scenario of a string of misunderstandings and poorly considered posturing resulting in leaders too fearful to back down and trying to make by-the-minute decisions with incomplete or incorrect information (e.g. the US belief that there were not nuclear weapons in Cuba). The most likely scenario is either a failure in control–either a systemic bug which gives a false alert such as with the Petrov incident, or an accidental release of nuclear weapons to local control and then into the hands of malcontents–or a failure in understanding the situation and empathizing with the opponent; say Pakistan and India going at it over control of the Indus Waters and both posturing to the point of unintentionally provoking one side into an accidental or false alarm launch, followed by retribution. Given the poor state of knowledge over controls and the apparent lack of Permissible Action Links on Pakistani or other nascent nuclear weapons, it is entirely possible that someone might acquire or by accident deploy and use a nuclear weapon. Even with our layers of controls and accountability, the United States Air Force accidentally transported AGM-129 cruise missiles across the country with the nuclear warheads still installed (were supposed to be removed at depot and stored), with no one being aware until the receiving crew chief noted that the weapons were installed. (Even if they had been lost and fallen into the hands of ‘bad people’ the PAL inhibits would have prevented their direct use, but they could be disassembled and used as source material for other weapons or reverse engineered by another nation such as Iran, giving them the kind of compact and powerful weapons which are well suited for delivery via cruise or ballistic missile instead of the more crude weapons they could design with only limited testing.)
Another possible but less likely scenario–favored by action-thriller novels and films–is a non-state actor acquiring or fabricating a nuclear weapon and using it to intentionally provoke a conflict. The necessary skills and experience are available on the open market (as the Pakistan-North Korea exchange demonstrated), and potentially loss of weapon grade material or centrifuges to enrich and purify material have actually happened. See Project Sapphire in which highly enriched uranium, originally intended as fuel for the Soviet ‘Alfa’ class attack submarine, was found several years after the fall of the Soviet Union, left in unobserved storage in a barn in Kazakhstan secured by a cheap padlock and only secured via covert agreement between the US and the newly liberated Kazakhstan.
Yes, we are not on the kind of hair-trigger alert that we were in the brinksmanship between the Soviet Union and the United States during certain intervals of the Cold War. And yes, both Russian and American active arsenals and stockpiles of nuclear weapons and delivery systems have been substantially reduced. But make no mistake; those LGM-30G ‘Minuteman III’ and UGM-133A ‘Trident II’ missiles in silos and submarines have targets which include Russian and much of the other former Soviet Union still loaded, and the SS-18 ‘Satan’, SS-19 ‘Stiletto’, SS-27 ‘Topol-M’, and SS-29 ‘Yars’ ICBMs (some road or rail mobile) and SS-N-23 ‘Skiff’ and SS-N-30/32 ‘Bulava’ no doubt have targets including many US cities and strategic targets. Other nations have deployed nuclear weapons and there is no doubt they have targeting instructions for their enemies. The probability that an exchange could happen–either by accident or unintentional escalation–increases with proliferation of nuclear-capable nations, regional unrest and arguments over vital or strategic resources, and increased lack of scrutiny over weapon controls.