Not enough?

There's been a certain amount of huffing and puffing among some that the recent nuclear arms reduction treaty doesn't go far enough. (The agreement-in-principal that has been worked out (the details still need to be finalized) reduces delivery vehicles to 500 - 1,100, and warheads to 1,500 - 1,675. This from a previous ceiling of 1,700 - 2,200 warheads.)

Frankly, I'm not sure what people who wanted deeper cuts are thinking. It's been six months since Obama was elected president. To have a treaty at all in this amount of time is some sort of record. Obama has a deep and long standing commitment to nuclear disarmament, so clearly this is a first step. The US/Russian relationship is in tatters and in need of confidence building. Trying to jump from bad relations to deep cuts is unrealistic.

Far from being disappointing, I think the agreement is nothing short of remarkable, given the circumstances and the other problems on the US president's agenda.

We have a winner . . .

A winner has been announced in the Doreen and Jim McElvaney Nonproliferation Essay Challenge - the annual award given by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The $10,000 prize has gone to a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Anne Harrington de Santana, for an essay entitled "The Currency of Power." Although the final version of the winning essay will not be published until November, I was fortunate enough to be able to see an advance copy of the essay.

It is a brilliant work: creative, powerfully persuasive and important. It answers the question: how is it possible for nuclear weapons to be so highly valued but appear to have so few practical uses? Harrington's argument is original, convincing and certain to become one of the milestones in the field.

If you do not have a subscription to Nonproliferation Review, I suggest you sign up for one before November. You do not want to miss this important work.

Letters and comment

The letters (and my response) to "The Myth of Nuclear Deterrence" are up on the Nonproliferation Review's website. I recommend that you run right down to the corner drugstore and get a copy. (I'm kidding. I know it's not the fifties.) But you really should give it a look - if for nothing else to read Jeffrey Lewis' interesting piece on China, which I found thought provoking.

Here's a part of my response:

Finally, in arguing that nuclear deterrence might work, even though killing civilians doesn’t seem to have affected war’s outcome very much in the past, Tertrais notes that “Most modern states have less tolerance for human suffering and destruction than was the case until 1945.” It is certainly true that there seems to be less stomach for violence since World War II (although the Cambodians and Rwandans might see things differently). But even a cursory review of history will show that the lust for war ebbs and flows throughout history. We appear to be sailing through a period of relative calm now, with less destruction and less killing than sixty years ago. But these sorts of calms have come before.

At the turn of the 19^th century the European Victorians congratulated themselves on their civility and good manners. There might be wars in the colonies (fighting savages), they said, but there would never be savage war again in Europe. We have evolved too far, they said, our commercial interests are too intertwined, we are too cultured for the sort of brutal, rampaging war that engulfed all of Europe during the 1600s or the Napoleonic era. Massive wars like that, they confidently and complacently asserted, are gone forever. World War I disabused them with a savage fury.

Human beings have demonstrated, time and again, a lust for war that does not seem to fade or wear itself out. It is true that there have been times when we fight less. But the desire for war - and the destruction and killing that go with it - seems to be a savagery that only sleeps. When we think about the most destructive weapons yet created by man, this is a bit of history worth remembering.

Read the whole thing here.

Upcoming winner

The big $10,000 Doreen and Jim McElvany prize for the best essay on nuclear deterrence and nonproliferation is about to be announced. I have been lucky enough to to read the winning essay and it is very, very good. It is important work, intellectually interesting, and will reshape the debate on nuclear weapons. I cannot say more until the official announcement is made.

Keep an eye out for an announcement in the next few days here.

Deterrence: the Two Bobs

Imagine you lived in a town with two guys named Bob. No one ever used either Bob's last name but just simply said, "Well, Bob got in a snow mobile accident Tuesday." You had to just kind of figure out which Bob was intended. It would make for lots of confusion.

This is roughly what the current situation is with deterrence. There are two different concepts connected with deterrence - as different and distinct from one another as two different Bobs would be. Yet we often use them interchangeably without indicating which deterrence we're talking about.

The first deterrence is the larger, overarching concept of deterrence. Garden variety deterrence. This sort of deterrence could be defined as persuading someone not to do something by using a threat. So the child reaches for a cookie fresh out of the oven - still on the cookie sheet - and the parent says, "Don't touch that cookie or you'll be sorry." This is deterrence plain and simple. The parent doesn't grab the child's arm (preventive attack). The parent doesn't block the child with his hand (defense.) The parent issues a threat which then deters the child. (At least until the parent is out of the room.)

The second deterrence is a less general form of the larger concept. A specific subset. This is deterrence as it relates to nuclear weapons in the Cold War. In the Cold War the US and USSR were adversaries. Both had large arsenals of nuclear weapons. These arsenals were roughly the same size and presumed by most people to balance each other out. Both countries had the capability to obliterate the other.

This second form of deterrence inherits the characteristics of the first type of deterrence, but has three important qualifiers. 1) The presumption of balancing arsenals. 2) The presumption of arsenals large enough to obliterate an enemy. 3) The presumption that fear of obliteration plays a key role in decisions about the confrontation between the two adversaries.

Notice the differences. When I say, "Don't touch those cookies" there is no presumption that I will obliterate the child if the threat is ignored. There is no presumption that the child can mutually obliterate me once I take action. There is no presumption that either of us is thinking about obliteration.

It's worth pointing out that this second kind of deterrence is not "nuclear deterrence." There are any number of cases where nuclear weapons are used to deter that don't match this definition. When Israel uses nuclear weapons to deter invasion, its opponents have no balancing arsenals of nuclear weapons. When China (with its arsenal of 200) deters Russia, there is arguably no presumption that Russia will be obliterated. When North Korea deters South Korea, the fear of obliteration probably doesn't enter into South Korea's calculations. This second form of deterrence is a very specific concept that grew up in the 1960s and applies really only to one case in the current world: confrontation between the US and Russia. It is a very specific sub-case of the overall concept. 

This second kind of deterrence ought to be called something like "matching-large-arsenal-obliterating-deterrence." When people talk about "deterrence" here in the US (and particularly in connection with nuclear weapons), it is often this second type of deterrence that they mean. When I was at the University of Chicago recently we had a long discussion about the difference between deterrence and compellence. I said I was unimpressed with the assertion that deterrence is more likely to work that compellence. They spent the better part of an hour trying to get me to see sense. The problem, I've come to realize, is that we were talking about two different Bobs.

They were actually arguing that matching-large-arsenal-obliterating-deterrence is more likely to work than matching-large-arsenal-obliterating-compellence. They may be right about this. If both of you have the ability to obliterate the other, then it may be easier to maintain the status quo than to try to compel some sort of change. But proving this point has very little to say about the character of deterrence (the first kind, the larger, overarching, more general concept.) It doesn't even really have that much to say about nuclear deterrence, since there are - increasingly - more small arsenals in the world that are not balanced by another arsenal.

I really don't understand this completely. I need to spend some more time with it. But at least I've finally figured out that there are two guys named Bob in this town.