Sheer luck or people who figured that pressing the button was such a huge deal they backed off?
Don’t get me wrong…nukes are scary and we have come terribly close to destruction.
It is historical fact thought that the things have pushed countries back from the brink.
Am I worried about nukes today? More than I ever was in the 70’s/80’s. I agree the more who have them increases the risk not to mention countries like North Korea or Iran or Pakistan having them. We were far safer during the Cold War in my view.
I agree as soon as one asshole throws one they are hugely destabilizing. Scary stuff.
That said because they are so reviled no one wants to be the first to toss one today short of a last resort. As such they remain a deterrent.
Again, you are confusing the actions of single individuals with the operation of a system. Assured destruction is intended to operate as a deterrent on a system level, i.e. that rational actors will make logical decisions based upon policy and doctrine to maximize outcomes. It isn’t supposed to require insight into the personal psychology of individual operators or intuitive and subjective judgments by individuals to work around fatal flaws in the system. Your statement above highlights the problem; if a leader or operator judges the consequences of response to be too great regardless of doctrine then he subverts the effectiveness of the system as a deterrent. This was the essential point of Kahn’s sarcastically proposed “Doomsday Device” (satirized in Dr. Strangelove); that the only way such a doctrine could be assured is by removing the highly variable human element.
Any system that relies upon people or subjective judgment cannot be perfect or foolproof, but the assumptions of assured destruction require perfection in discrimination and response. You can’t simply point be to the Cold War and say, “We didn’t die, therefore it must have worked.” You have to look at the individual incidents and see why they didn’t result in an exchange. Too often it was because a single individual used subjective judgment, personal insight, and empathy to subvert the rigorous and unbending doctrine of assured destruction. That is pure luck of having the right person in the right place at the right time, not a measure of systematic effectiveness of assured destruction as a deterrent.
I’d be just as, if not more, concerned about Israel pushing the button than the Pakis or The Dear Leader. Reading up on the Six Day War soon reveals how close Moshe Dayan and his paranoid zealouts came to doing just that.
A nation as fanatical about their supposed especial place in things as Israel and its Jews, coupled with their turbulent history, their renowned xenophobia and their unwillingness to reliquish any of their holy turf to the 350mil-odd ‘enemy’ who surround them and who want them expunged from the face of the Earth, is not exactly what I’d call a secure environment for a putative nuclear arsenal!
And to put into perspective for anyone who cites the US’ ‘influence’ over Israel as a the mediating factor in any potential Jew-Arab nuclear holocaust, refer to a recent Wikileak cable regarding China’s much focused upon influence over North Korea - ‘We have about as much control over what NK do as what the US has over Israel’. The implication is pretty obvious.
No. The chance of a nuclear war has been receding for the lasting twenty years and continues to do so with increased globalization. Pakistan and India might end up in a worst case scenario nuking each other but than it is unlikely that other powers will also nuke each other. And if North Korea goes psycho and starts nuking Korea only the Korean peninsula (and perhaps Manchuria and the Japanese Home Islands) will suffer devestation before the DPRK goes the way of the Dodo by the virtue of American ICBMs. In addition even if nuclear war did happen enough people would survive to rebuild a viable civilization (remember the Toba eruption).
The only way I see a “big” nuclear war taking place is if the world returned to a bipolar distribution of power. I don’t see this happening anytime soon, but eventually? It’s not too big a stretch to suppose that 100 or 200 years from now the world might be evolving towards a one-world state. You might then have either a situation in which a would-be global federation/empire is squared off against an alliance of holdouts, or else a world government is established and then some years later is faced with a secession crisis, leading to a world civil war.
Would the two sides use nukes or would MAD prevail? I’d say it depends in that before this point was reached there would almost certainly have been one or two smaller nuclear wars. First, it seems more likely than not that there will eventually be a regional nuclear war somewhere. Then, it may well be possible that there will be a “medium” sized nuclear war. Say one that pitted two major powers against each other but mercifully left the rest of the world (or one hemisphere) untouched. My guess is that a small, regional nuclear war would leave the impression that on a limited scale at least nuclear weapons would be rationally usable; while a “medium” nuclear war might brush up against the threshold of survivability: the two powers that fought it would be utterly destroyed while the rest of the world would be crippled for years (but not centuries) from the aftereffects, leading to the certain knowledge that civilization would not survive a larger exchange. In short, the actual knowledge of a real exchange would replace conjecture with experience to some degree, and the world would react accordingly.
Side question: if the US did retaliate against North Korea with nukes, would they in fact launch ICBMs from the US, or would they probably use some of our more “theater” scale weapons, say nuclear armed cruise missiles launched by the Navy or Air Force?
Why would Pakistan and India wind up nuking each other? And before somebody starts the tired old story about “Pakistan’s Government Collapsing” please try to recall that Pakistan has a Civil Service and a whole Administrative setup which is not very easy to overthrow.
I have to wonder if the knowledge of the consequences of a full scale nuclear exchange would enable such individuals to be in a position where they could exercise their subjective judgement? Would the opinions or actions of those individuals have even been considered if the consequences were not as great?
IOW, there will always be a “right person in the right place at the right time” when it comes to MAD because whoever is in that position, unless that person is a madman, no one wants to be the one to destroy the world.
This is a very dangerous and tenuous assumption to make. While it seems reasonable to assert that anyone who would get to the position of such authority would be reluctant to rush headlong into a self-destructive scenario, the examples above are just an example of many such situations where either personalities or systematic flaws very nearly led to an exchange. Even rational actors, if ill-informed, may make decisions that are very irrational to someone with perfect knowledge, and when dealing with weapons that can destroy nations in literally less time than it takes to order pizza delivery, flaws in knowledge or assumptions can lead to very bad decisions. Going back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the belief that there were no weapons on the ground in Cuba and that the SS-4 missiles were not ready for deployment–that the entire effort was naught but a bluff charge–led to bringing the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of war. And as for rationality, Fidel Castro strongly encourage the Soviets to deploy and use the weapons that were, in fact, on the ground, even knowing that it would mean the destruction of Cuba. This much was not known in the West for nearly four decades until the Cuban Missile Crisis Conference in Havana in 2002; both that weapons were available and that Castro would have “pulled the temple down upon our heads.” When a decision maker and key proponent of the policy of assured destruction like Robert McNamara says things like, “In the end, it was luck. We were this close to nuclear war, and luck prevented it,” “In my seven years as Secretary, we came within a hair’s breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions,” and “They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations,” it is probably a good idea to go back and look at the assumptions.
Even if you assume rationality among the actors–suspect even with major nations as evidenced by apocryphal but credible stories about Andropov and Nixon–imperfect knowledge and the necessity of “dancing at the edge of the cliff” to demonstrate your willingness to retaliate combine to create an unstable cocktail of inference and bluff. There are too many instances of coming perilously close to that cliff to dismiss concerns that no one would ever really push the button (or that the system might fail in such a way to result in uncontrolled activation, as in “Plan R” in Dr. Strangelove). With more nuclear players–and many controlled by oligarchies that have little or no representation from the populations they speak for–neither rationality nor good intelligence can be assumed by default. And as more nations proliferate without mature command and control systems, the security of weapons becomes an even greater concern.
Please don’t accept the facile claim that “We didn’t die, therefore MAD worked,” (especially from people who don’t understand that “MAD” was a term coined by critics of Assured Destruction). Don’t just buy into the, “No one would be so irrational as to push the button.” Don’t accept appeals to the authority that “they” must know what they’re doing. Study up on applied game theory. Do your own critical analysis of the variety of positions and claims. Read Schnelling, Freedman, Wohlstetter, Kahn, Heuser. Consider the implications of “dancing at the edge of the cliff,” as a stable strategy for deterrence. Look into the history of nuclear security and Permissible Action Links. Form an opinion based upon critical analysis, skeptical reading of official and alternate accounts of escalation incidents, and a review of recent history toward an assessment of rational decisions with regard to war.
On the contrary. Now that the Sea Harriers have been decommissioned we now have no means of retaking the Falklands until we get the F-35. Britain would have to use nukes on Argentina. First on military targets, but then on civilian ones.
“Ever” is a long long time. A full scale nuclear war may be unlikely in our lifetimes, but we can’t say a thing about the 25th century. Or the 32nd or the 50th. We don’t even know the names of the countries that will exist then.
MAD worked so far. But so far meant the Cold War, and a basically two-sided standoff. Now things are different. The big question I find is whether the US or Russia will launch all their missiles in a pre-emptive attack, a retaliatory attack, or a pre-emptive retailiatory attack (launching on the belief that the other side has already launched). Let’s hope cooler heads prevail.