The Paradox of Defense

Thucydides understood the paradox of how defense could be considered aggressive more than 2400 years before the first nuclear explosion over Hiroshima.

Most Greek city-states did not have impregnable walls protecting them. Mutual vulnerability was already functioning as a deterrent to substantial warfare. No city-state could attack another without suffering painful retaliation. Each city-state, even the strongest, was exposed to the “second strike” capability of its opponents. A “first strike” would automatically trigger a response with “unacceptable damage” for the attacker, thus leading him to think twice before launching an attack.

As Thucydides described in his masterful history of the Peloponnesian War, the decision by Athens to greatly strengthen its city walls and extend them to its port of Piraeus, protecting a corridor for supplies, changed all this. Athens argued the wall was strictly defensive. Their adversaries, the Spartans, claimed that such substantial defenses around Athens and Piraeus would prevent countermeasures by the Spartan infantry, thereby enabling Athens to project force with its fleet and its infantry without fear of unacceptable retaliation. Land-based Sparta could not blockade Piraeus nor disrupt the flow of supplies behind the Athenian wall. Arguably, the Peloponnesian War, launched by Sparta and its allies in 431 B.C., was an early example of a “preemptive strike” by the enemies of Athens who had become greatly alarmed by its growing capabilities and its imperialistic rhetoric.

Now move forward two millennia. August 2009 marks the 64th anniversary of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The American objective was to break the will of the Japanese imperial government and its forces before the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands. A few days later, the stunned Japanese leadership surrendered unconditionally.

From 1946 to 1949, the United States enjoyed nuclear monopoly, until joined in the “nuclear club” by the Soviet Union. But despite the early strains of the Cold War, it soon became apparent to military planners and government leaders that nuclear weapons functioned best as a deterrent, as a retaliatory weapon of last resort. During the tense years of the Cold War, the macabre concepts of the “balance of nuclear terror” and mutually assured destruction (MAD) dominated superpower strategic thinking. Strategists in both East and West calculated that a nuclear war was “unthinkable” for it would have no victors or vanquished, but only hundreds of millions of scorched bodies among the ruins of civilization. An informal pact was reached to avoid mutual suicide..

The balance of terror functioned because whoever launched a first strike (with conventional or nuclear forces) would be faced with an immediate response of equal or more catastrophic proportions by the side that suffered the attack.

In the United States, this deadly logic became the doctrine of “massive retaliation,” fashioned by President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and it supported containment of the Soviets. It was based on three premises: First, because the Soviets had a clear edge in conventional forces adjacent to an exposed Western Europe, the US reserved the right to respond massively (code word for a nuclear strike) at a time and place of its own choosing to any Soviet invasion in Europe. Second, to maintain the territorial status quo in Europe and elsewhere, the vulnerability of both sides was guaranteed by agreements not to deploy anti-missile defenses around their major cities, thus exposing their populations to massive losses and utter catastrophe. Third, “hardening” of second-strike nuclear capabilities with missile silos, constantly-in-flight bombers, and submarine-launched missiles meant that a sneak attack would reliably be met by nuclear retaliation. So the Cold War did not cross the nuclear threshold, although it came close during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the two sides continued their tense confrontation, settling for what was called “peaceful coexistence.” Later, realizing the overwhelming dangers of enormous nuclear arsenals, Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev accelerated nuclear arms reduction by the two superpowers and emphasized the problems of proliferation.

After the collapse and dissolution in 1991 of the Soviet Union, Russia began an inward-looking, untidy transition to capitalism under Boris Yeltsin. The West’s main strategic concern in the 1990s was preventing the spread of Soviet weapons that had been based during the Cold War from Ukraine and Belarus to the Central Asian republics. Russia and the West cooperated in the orderly removal and relocation of these nuclear weapons to Russian soil.

Nonetheless, the chaotic pace of Russian transformation led to continuing concern that some weapons, enriched uranium and nuclear technologies might leak to third parties. Even before 9/11, official anxiety rose about nuclear weapons and material in the hands of so-called rogue states and, even worse, terrorist organizations of the al Qaeda variety.

In the early days of the 21st Century, the second Bush Administration took decisions and actions that clearly alarmed the Kremlin. The rhetoric of American “exceptionalism,” and the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq seemed to support a world view that the “single superpower” could not only dominate but control international dynamics.

A resurgent Russia, under the tough leadership of Vladimir Putin, soon began doubting whether the United States would continue to abide by the premises of mutual nuclear vulnerability, or was trying to consolidate its newly dominant position. Russian concerns escalated following NATO’s rapid enlargement, including a number of former Soviet satellites. More recently, the Bush Administration’s decision to place anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic (supposedly to neutralize missiles launched from Southwest Asian “rogue states), implied that the US was gradually imitating Pericles’s Athens by building new “walls” around its extended perimeter. By offering to “reset” Russian-American relations, the new, multilateralist Obama Administration may begin to allay some of the Kremlin fears.

The deadly logic of mutual nuclear vulnerability and its corollary of mutually assured destruction still applies in an era of proliferation, even involving highly revisionist adversary states such as North Korea and Iran. As long as a putative nuclear power faces the prospect of unacceptable damage through massive retaliation on its territory and people, it will have to realize that nuclear weapons can be used only for deterring, not for compelling action. An explicit American guarantee of Israel’s existence, for example, would go far to deter even a nuclear-equipped Iran from a direct attack on Israel – but would not deter it from continued financial and materiel support for Hamas and Hezbollah or from attempting to intimidate the Gulf States, for example.

While it may not be possible to prevent Iran or other states from acquiring nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems, the logic of deterrence still applies to nations and governments.

But nuclear proliferation will enter an altogether different logic and dynamic if nuclear material or weapons fall into the hands of non-state actors -- extremist and terrorist groups that are not organized and based territorially and cannot be threatened with focused and massive retaliation. While the danger is less of a terrorist-controlled nuclear bomb, and more of a “dirty bomb” that spreads radioactive material via conventional explosion, the consequences for our cities are still terrible to contemplate. So concerted international action to track, control, and destroy nuclear material needs to be a high priority for the major powers and international organizations.

If nuclear material is easily available and terrorist leaders continue to have a messianic and self-immolating vision, then we will face the nightmare scenario for years to come.