Robert Jervis

Robert Jervis, in a book review called "Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying," admonishes us not to get so worked up about nuclear weapons. He's reviewing John Mueller's Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda for The National Interest and he seems to agree with much of what Mueller says about our over-reaction to the Bomb.

Jervis disagrees with some of Mueller's judgments about the importance of nuclear weapons, but he seems in accord with Mueller's basic point that we need to try to keep our hair on about nuclear weapons. He seems to believe we should just keep the weapons we have and stop worrying quite so much.

I find Jervis' position inexplicable and I may post a little something about that in the next few days. He seems to be one of those people who believes that nuclear weapons will never be used no matter what the circumstances, nuclear deterrence is far too strong to fail, and that nuclear weapons are not, in their current configuration, particularly dangerous.

I think Mueller is right that we initially invested nuclear weapons with greater emotional importance than they deserved. I don't think, however, that because we projected our own (rather odd) apocalyptic feelings onto nuclear weapons, that therefore nuclear weapons are not dangerous. They have the capacity to make any war in which they are involved immeasurably more destructive than anything humans have experienced to date. People who believe that nuclear deterrence cannot fail are making a fundamental mistake.

More important is that Jervis thinks that efforts to abolish nuclear weapons are misplaced. He writes:

I suspect, however, that overestimates are indeed more common. In a significant number of cases, our responses have made things worse, and the appropriate mantra would be "don't do something, just stand there." One such case mentioned in passing by Mueller is the movement for abolishing nuclear weapons that is now championed by President Obama. Leaving aside the fact that no one has ever tried to rebut the powerful argument made almost a half a century ago by the Novel Prize-winning student of strategic interaction Thomas Schelling, that just about the most dangerous number of nuclear weapons in the hands of the great powers would be zero, if the menace of these arms is overestimated, our efforts will at best be misdirected and the diplomatic resources would be better spent elsewhere.

Actually, I have recently taken on the task of rebutting Schelling's argument and the process is considerably easier than you might at first think. The result, titled "Stable at Zero" will appear as the final summarizing chapter in a book being produced shortly by the Stimson Center and perhaps as a journal article in the near future.

There is no excuse for anyone who has studied history to make the claim that nuclear weapons have created unique circumstances that make them essentially benign and safe. More to come . . .

UN Fellows

I presented to a group of younger diplomats from around the world yesterday at the UN, a fascinating experience. They all work in disarmament ministries (or the equivalent) and are smart, committed, well-informed and articulate. I asked at one point for views on the NPT and it was intriguing and enormously useful to be able to hear opinions from Slovenia, Switzerland, Russia, Egypt, Myanmar, Hungary, Nepal, Bangladesh, Poland, Iran, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, China, Korea, and several others all around one table. The variations and subtleties of emphasis were instructive and useful.

I was welcomed and there was a lively debate and I learned things, and that is always what I like best.

I hope that they can fulfill their promise, because their promise, it seems to me, is great.

Solved

I think I've solved the last piece of the puzzle. I think I can now make a strong, practical argument for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

It came to me in the car, actually. I was thinking about wars of extermination and the fact that nuclear weapons are really good tools for fighting wars of extermination. I've often said, if your goal is to fight a war of extermination you should use nuclear weapons, they're your best choice.

But this position (which I think is undeniable) leaves one with the uncomfortable objection, "Well, so you admit that nuclear weapons are good for something? They are useful. So if someone decided to keep them, you'd have to keep them, too."

I now have an iron-clad rejoinder to this objection. A rejoinder based on fact - on evidence. I'm at work on crafting this into Chapter Eight.

Deterrence and peacetime

People who spend some time thinking about the record of city destruction in wartime sometimes say that deterrence might not work in war but it works very well during peace. This is a funny thing to say: imagine a weapon that only worked in peacetime.

The claim for deterrence is that it works best when we need it least. And that as we get closer to war it works less and less well.

Fear and thinking

It’s hard to recreate the atmosphere that dominated the Cold War. Today there is a tendency to regard nuclear weapons as weapons that used to scare people but that seem relatively benign today. But the fear that informed those early discussions about these weapons was powerful. It was so strong that even a redeployment of missiles - just moving them around - could touch off a crisis that almost led to nuclear war.

 Emotions ran so high and the hysteria was such that Americans insisted that their children practice drills for responding to nuclear attacks.

 Shelters were built in towns and stocked with supplies. Signs - particularly visible bright yellow and black signs - were placed on buildings so people would know where the run to when the attack came. Emergency announcements were practiced on radio and television. Families built their own shelters in back yards and basements. To say that the fear reached a fever pitch is certainly accurate. To say that it reached hysteria might be too strong - but on the other hand, you could certainly argue that hysteria is exactly what it was.

The emotional impact of America’s vulnerability to nuclear attack was magnified by the fact that America had been so safe for so long. Surrounded by two large oceans on east and west and adjoining two friendly neighbors to north and south - the United States had faced no real threat to its homeland in more than 130 years. No living American had felt what it was to fear attack. No living American had ever even talked to a grandfather or grandmother who remembered the fear of attack from outside the country. The sense of safety was ingrained by generations of security. Into this confident sense of ongoing invulnerability the nation plunged into the fear of nuclear war. The notion of nuclear attack ripped psychic holes filled with doubt, anxiety and overpowering fear.

Perhaps no other event symbolizes the kind of group madness that can sweep over a fearful people as well as the McCarthy witch hunts of the early 1950s. Convinced that secret communists within the US government were subverting America and - worse yet - stealing the secret of the atomic bomb, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin held hearings across more than three years that falsely accused hundreds of loyal Americans of communist sympathies on the basis of innuendo and hearsay. The hearings destroyed lives, disrupted government, and brought hysterical fear and accusation into the heart of the governing process.

What was the result of pouring all this fear into the American psyche? Fear is a powerful motivator. Fear-filled people can perform feats of strength and stamina (not to mention speed) they find astounding afterward. Some forms of fear, it is claimed, help us to focus attention on important problems. (“Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”) But in general fear does not lead to clear thought. Ask five witnesses of a horrifying event what they saw and you will rarely get five identical answers. Putting pressure on a person, inducing fear in them, almost always leads to distorted thinking. The people in horror movies who are petrified with fear while we scream at them what they should obviously be doing (“Get out of there!”) are one popular example of how fear can confuse and incapacitate us. 

So given that Americans were deeply afraid of nuclear weapons, what affect did this fear have on judgments about nuclear war and nuclear weapons? How did the fear shape beliefs about what nuclear weapons were capable of or especially well-suited for? As we shall see, fear led American policy makers and nuclear strategists (as well as ordinary citizens) astray. Fear created a series of distortions and incorrect judgments that interacted to create a profoundly mistaken view of nuclear weapons. And this should not surprise us. Of course the fear of nuclear war warped thinking during the Cold War. It makes perfect sense. What would be surprising is if it hadn’t. The problem is that much of that Cold War thinking is still governing what we think and say about nuclear weapons. Mistakes were made in a time of fear and now they’ve become embedded into the debate. Our responsibility - now that we’re in a time of calm and greater security - is to root out the ideas that grew up out of fear and to create instead more realistic and sensible judgments.