Rationale
for a study of City Annihilations
The coming crisis
One of the characteristics of international crises is that they come seemingly out of the blue. The Kennedy Administration, in the fall of 1962, was focused on the coming midterm elections, not the almost inconceivable possibility that the Soviets would try to sneak nuclear missiles into Cuba. President Truman was vacationing in Independence, Missouri on June 24, 1950 when North Korean soldiers stormed across the 38th parallel. The words “Pearl Harbor” are synonymous in the US with being caught unawares. And so on.
Crises are made more unpredictable by the fact that they are not distributed regularly over time. Some decades are filled with them. Sometimes years go by without one. We have lived in a fortunate time. For fifty years no nation that possesses nuclear weapons has fought a war in which its national interests were seriously at risk. The wars fought in that time that have involved nuclear powers – Korea, Vietnam, the Chinese-Vietnam border war of 1979, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Falkland Islands, the Gulf War, the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq – have all been secondary or peripheral for the nuclear power involved. Some crises have had the potential to put national interests at stake (Berlin, Cuba) but fortunately the moment when potential became reality never arrived.
It would be foolish, however, to rely on luck in international affairs. If we wish to plan responsibly, we must assume that sometime in the future – perhaps sooner, perhaps later – there will be a crisis that puts a nuclear nation's vital interests at stake.
When that moment comes, when the grim-faced men and women sit face-to-face around the table and consider their “options,” what arguments will be used to either promote or discourage the use of nuclear weapons? The arguments in favor will have to do with winning and intimidation. (They may also have to do with getting revenge, although likely that word won't be used.) The arguments against using nuclear weapons will probably be moral arguments and arguments about risk and rationality.
Morality is not enough
The mainstay of most anti-nuclear writing is morality. Read Helen Caldicott's Nuclear Madness and you find the argument again and again: using nuclear weapons would be wrong. Some writers even go so far as to argue that nuclear weapons themselves are evil. Neither of these arguments, however, seems likely to persuade people not to use nuclear weapons.
If morality were a sufficient deterrent to using nuclear weapons, then why did it fail to stop the US from using them against Japan? If moral arguments are enough, then why did those who opposed or feared the use of nuclear weapons feel compelled to create additional arguments like mutual assured destruction and so on? If moral arguments are enough why did Jonathan Schell, for instance, feel compelled to argue that nuclear war might mean the end of the earth – as well as being wrong? If moral arguments are enough, why are Just War arguments mentioned, by and large, only in specialized articles about the morality of using nuclear weapons and not in all strategic writing?
The answer is that necessity trumps morality almost every time. In a crisis where survival or vital interests are at stake people sometimes do what is wrong because it is necessary. They know it is wrong but they do it nonetheless.
Even though the morality argument is the one that people seem to reach for instinctively to discourage the use of nuclear weapons, it cannot be counted on to persuade on a reliable basis. It might persuade a small percentage of the time, but it would be naive to rely on it as the only bulwark against use.
Rationality is not enough
The risk/rationality argument says that people in a crisis will see the risks of using nuclear weapons and, evaluating rationally, will choose not to use them.
One way to think about situations in which nuclear weapons might be used is to divide them into two groups: those in which both nations have nuclear weapons and those in which only one of the nations has nuclear weapons. Let us address the second case – a nuclear nation and a non-nuclear nation – first.
At one time there were considerable risks associated with attacking many of the countries that did not possess nuclear weapons. Cold War alliances covered a surprising number of nations with extended deterrence. All of Europe was covered (East and West), almost all of the Middle East, all of South America, much of Asia and even parts of Africa. Since the end of the Cold War, however, most of this system of extended deterrence has been quietly dismantled. There was a time when the US could not have considered attacking, say, North Korea or Syria with nuclear weapons without also contemplating the possibility of nuclear retaliation from the Soviet Union. Today that is not so. There are many parts of the world in which nuclear powers might use nuclear weapons without the fear of military response from another nuclear power. A nuclear power, then, when confronted with a crisis involving a non-nuclear nation (with only a handful of exceptions), is now restrained only by morality.
It might be argued that even though the use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear nation might not lead to nuclear retaliation, it would lead to political consequences – or even sanctions – so serious that the nuclear power would be deterred. The recent war in Iraq demonstrates that a powerful nation may not be deterred from taking unilateral action even by very strong objections. And as a practical matter sanctions against a powerful nation have inherent difficulties. In the case of the United States, for example, much of the world's economy depends on the health of the economy of the US. Strong economic sanctions against a great power would necessarily harm the world's economy at large. Sanctions applied by the powerful against the weak have a modest track record at best. Why should sanctions applied by the weak against the strong be likely to work better?
The rationality/risk argument is more likely to be effective in the case of two nuclear powers confronting one another. But even here there are problems. By their nature crises tend to distort and limit rational thinking. I would feel much greater confidence in the strength of theories of rational choice if they could be shown to work on people who are under great stress. Conclusions drawn from the “prisoner's dilemma,” for example, would be more persuasive if the example were not of two people making decisions each in his quiet cell, but of two people who were simultaneously being tortured. Security studies often assume a calmness and an unemotional setting that real crisis decision-making does not exhibit.
But the most serious objection to the effectiveness of the rationality argument is the larger argument that there is a destructive urge in human nature that matches and sometimes overwhelms the reasoning part of our brains. I would hesitate to put such an argument, given its speculative nature, were I not in the company of men whose judgment I trust. Here is Robert Kennedy in To Seek A Newer World, the book of policy positions published for his 1968 run for the presidency:
Those who disparage the threat of nuclear weapons ignore all evidence of the darker side of man, and of the history of the West – our history. Many times the nations of the West have plunged into inexplicable cataclysm, mutual slaughter so terrible and so widespread that it amounted nearly to the suicide of a civilization. The religious wars of the sixteenth century, the Thirty Years' war in the seventeenth century, the terrible excesses that followed the French Revolution these have been equaled and grotesquely outmatched in the modern twentieth century. Twice within the memory of living men, the nations of Europe, the most advanced and cultured societies of the world, have torn themselves and each other apart for causes so slight, in relation to the cost of struggle, that it is impossible to regard them as other than excuses for the expression of some darker impulse. Barbara Tuchman reminds us that the people of Europe were relieved at the outbreak of World War I: “Better a horrible ending than a horror without end,” said people in Germany. “Is not peace an element of civil corruption,” asked the great writer Thomas Mann, and war “a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope?” Englishmen cheered the news of war's outbreak all day and night, and Rupert Brook wrote:
Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour
Honour has come back
And we have come into our heritage
Perhaps only in Germany was similar enthusiasm to greet renewed combat in 1939. But the damage of the second war was greater, especially to noncombatants. The camps and ovens, the murders and mutual inhumanities of the Eastern front, the unrestricted bombing of cities (with deliberate concentration on areas of workers' housing), the first use of atomic bombs – truly this was war virtually without rules or limits. Its most important lesson for us is perhaps that we have no real explanation for it. We can explain how war broke out. We can understand our own response to the Nazi threat. But we have no reason for the fantastic disproportion between the combatants' war aims and the things that were done, none perhaps but the wrath of war described by Achilles in Book XVIII of the Iliad,
that makes a man go mad for all his goodness of reason,
That rage that rises within and swirls like smoke in the heart and becomes in our madness a thing more sweet than the dripping of honey.
The destruction of the two World Wars was limited only by technology. Now nuclear weapons have removed that limit. Who can say that they will not be used, that a rational balance of terror will restrain emotions we do not understand? Of course, we have survived into the third decade of the Atomic Age. Despite many limited wars and crises before 1914, Europe had known substantial peace for a century – and at its end saw war as deliverance. Nuclear war may never come, but it would be the rashest folly and ignorance to think that it will not come because men, being reasonable beings, will realize the destruction it would cause.
This argument is made stronger by the startling story told by Robert McNamara in the recent movie “The Fog of War.” McNamara met Fidel Castro at a conference for participants in the Cuban Missile crisis. They had gathered to review and reflect on the world's most dangerous crisis. Castro told McNamara that during the crisis there had been more than 150 usable nuclear warheads in Cuba and that at the height of the crisis he (Castro) had recommended to Khrushchev that those weapons be used to attack the US. “Didn't you know that that would lead to the total destruction of Cuba?” McNamara asked. “Oh, yes,” Fidel replied. Sometimes it seems, even when the danger is readily apparent, decision-makers make choices based on criteria other than rational analysis designed to maximize rewards.
The point is not subject to final proof, but I believe strongly that those who assume that rationality alone would be sufficient to prevent the use of nuclear weapons in a crisis ignore important realities.
If neither the morality argument nor the risk/rationality argument is certain to prevent the use of nuclear weapons in a future crisis, what arguments could be used to prevent their use? Or is the use of nuclear weapons inevitable?
Answers from History
For five decades history has been ignored and denigrated in strategic debates. Herman Kahn put the argument with especial vividness:
Despite the fact that nuclear weapons have already been used twice, and the nuclear sword has been rattled many times, one can argue that for all practical purposes nuclear war is still (and hopefully will remain) so far from our experience that it is difficult to reason from, or illustrate arguments by, analogies from history.
Kahn, as so often, is both vivid and wrong. The problem is that our eyes get drawn to the means – nuclear weapons – and our thinking is overwhelmed by awe and a sense of danger. We look down the row of weapons invented by man – spear, musket, canon, tank, bomber – we see the nuclear missile near the end and say, “Wow! There's never been anything like nuclear weapons.” Which is true. But beside the point. As Thomas Schelling has argued, it is not the means that matter, it is the end.
It is not true that for the first time in history man has the capability to destroy a large fraction, even the major part, of the human race. Japan was defenseless by August 1945. With a combination of bombing and blockade, eventually invasion, and if necessary the deliberate spread of disease, the United States could probably have exterminated the population of the Japanese Islands without nuclear weapons. It would have been a gruesome, expensive, and mortifying campaign; it would have taken time and demanded persistence. But we had the economic and technical capability to do it; and, together with the Russians or without them, we could have done the same in many populous parts of the world. Against defenseless people there is not much that nuclear weapons can do that cannot be done with an ice pick.
Against non-combatants almost any means may be used. The capability to destroy cities has existed for thousands of years. Ask the Carthaginians. The difference is that today's means allow us to do so faster, more easily and while the defender's military is still intact.
So if cities have been destroyed for thousands of years and if the principal use of nuclear weapons is to destroy cities (not the only use, but the characteristic one), then what is required is a thorough study of city annihilations in history. If one seeks to seriously understand the practical and moral implications of using nuclear weapons (and perhaps find practical and moral arguments against their use) one must turn to history. How often have cities been annihilated in war? Does city annihilation win wars? Does it substantially further the aims of a war? Does city annihilation translate into usable diplomatic power? Does city annihilation have a moral component that, in the long run, makes the victor pay? Answer these questions and you are in a position to discuss, based on experience and knowledge, whether it makes sense to use nuclear weapons.
I have performed some work along these lines: outlining criteria for including or excluding cities which suffered damage in war, identifying nine city annihilations that meet the criteria, and studying two in depth – the destruction of Carthage and the collection of city annihilations that were a part of the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazm empire in 1220 (Merv, Bokhara, Nishapur, Urganch, Samarkand, and others).
Based on this work I am prepared to offer some preliminary conclusions. First, nuclear weapons make excellent weapons for wars of extermination. If you are involved in a war in which your goal is to annihilate your opponent, use nuclear weapons, they're your best choice. Those of us who oppose the use of nuclear weapons have to concede this point if we're to be taken seriously. In the case of wars of extermination, someone who opposes the use of nuclear weapons will have to argue that wars of extermination are wrong, not that the weapons won't be useful. Fortunately, there are very few genuine wars of extermination.
Second, there is no clear evidence that destroying cities leads to success in war. Atilla the Hun's annihilation of Aquilea in 452 was not decisive, the rest of Italy did not surrender after the city was razed. The results of the Battle of Chalons in the previous year were not invalidated: the military situation was still roughly what it had been before the destruction of Aquilea. It could be argued that – far from guaranteeing victory – Charles the Bold was defeated and killed at the battle of Nancy because he had annihilated Liege in 1468. The destruction of Magdeburg by Tilly in 1631 had little or no effect on the ultimate outcome of the Thirty Years War. Similarly, the Allied destruction of Hamburg (July 1943), Dresden (February 1945) and Tokyo (March 1945) did not bring the war in either Germany or Japan to an end. Destroying cities, on the evidence, doesn't win wars.
Third, destroying cities does not create reliable diplomatic leverage. Despite the fact that the Mongols carried out the most ferocious campaign of intimidation in the history of warfare, sacking scores of cities (and annihilating more than half a dozen completely), they still had to fight on for years: some cities simply would not be intimidated.
Finally, destroying cities leads to serious moral consequences. There is no study I'm aware of but I would be willing to guess that worldwide no single name is as recognized or reviled as that of the man who regularly destroyed cities in war: Genghis Khan. Would Truman have made the same decision about using nuclear weapons if someone had argued that his name might go down in history next to Genghis Khan's?
Further, it may be argued that using terrible means eats away at the moral sinews of a nation. It is widely agreed that the failure of the Roman Republic – the failure that changed the greatest civilization in the ancient world from a republic to a dictatorship – was the result of internal moral decay. Typically, this internal decay is ascribed to too much wealth and too much power. But Rome had been rich and strong for 100 years before the civil strife that led to the collapse of the Republic. On the other hand, the destruction of Carthage was followed almost immediately by the beginning of the collapse of the Republic. It may be that for forms of government that require a widespread sense of shared values – like republics and democracies – the use of terrible means can fatally harm the underpinnings of government.
These argument are preliminary. They may become stronger or weaker depending on the historical evidence that comes to light. But whether stronger or weaker they are likely to be far more powerful than any argument based on theory (the current lingua franca of strategic studies). What right-minded person, when faced with a new and novel problem, wouldn't willingly trade away a bucket of theory for just a thimble-full of real practical experience?
And there is one final argument. Taken as a whole the lessons of city annihilation work strongly against the use of nuclear weapons. Over the course of the last two thousand years there have been hundreds of occasions, perhaps thousands of occasions, when cities were in the hands of their enemies. Yet of all those cases only a handful of cities were utterly annihilated. Why is that? If it were necessary to destroy cities utterly to win wars morality would not stand before necessity. And in ancient times, at least, cities were much more valuable targets; they comprised a far higher proportion of a nation's resources, knowledge and population. But generals and kings have had the opportunity to destroy cities hundreds or even thousands of times in the past and have not. What conclusion does this lead to? The conclusion must be that annihilating cities is not very useful.
How can one argue persuasively for the use of nuclear weapons if the lesson of history is that it won't be very useful? Emotionally satisfying, perhaps, but wrong morally and practically not much help. The key to persuading someone in a future crisis not to use nuclear weapons lies in the rubble of cities long since destroyed.