Recalculating nuclear weapons utility
The journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), the sage of Baltimore, once wrote, “There is always an easy solution to every… problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” I interpret this to also mean there are certain conventional wisdoms, realities if you will, that everyone assumes is correct, regardless of whether the personally agree with them.
Take, for example, the issue of nuclear weapons. Regardless of whether you think they are just another item in a military toolkit or the ultimate expression of immorality and human savagery everyone starts and ends with the same assumption; namely that nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapon. States that have them can’t be ignored and when a nuclear state issues demands everyone else listens very carefully. They do so because the unstated background threat is do what I say or else. And the “or else” is if you don’t we will drop the bomb on you.
No sane person wants that, of course. Everyone remembers the two times nuclear weapons were used in war at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII. It is a very clear historical lesson whose (pardon the term) impact echoes to this day. Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped and the war was won. All very straightforward and simple. Or is it?
It turns out that we need to rethink, according to one academic. There is a very interesting and provocative article in the new issue of International Security journal. It is “The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima“ by Ward Wilson.
Wilson’s article focuses on the question were nuclear weapons militarily effective? Is it possible that the Soviet intervention alone coerced the Japanese and that nuclear weapons had no effect on their decision.
His bottom line is that the bomb dropped at Hiroshima was not militarily effective in terms of getting the Japanese to surrender and that it was in fact the Soviet intervention alone that compelled the Japanese to surrender.
If his thesis is correct then it has enormous significance for all the nuclear weapons states that base their rationale for having them on the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Wilson writes:
In the summer of 1945, Japan’s leaders had two strategies for negotiating an end to World War II: to convince the Soviets (neutral at the time) to mediate, or to fight one last decisive battle that would inflict so many casualties that the United States would agree to more lenient terms. Both plans could still have succeeded after the bombing of Hiroshima; neither plan was possible once the Soviets invaded. … Both plans for obtaining better terms—diplomatic and military—had a low probability of success, but each had some merit. Whether either plan was ultimately realistic is beside the point; the Japanese leadership believed that these were the only two options that offered any hope of securing better terms. Efforts on behalf of both options were being actively pursued at the end of July and in the first week of August 1945. When the Soviet Union intervened in the early hours of August 9, however, both of these options were invalidated. The Soviets could not serve as mediators if they were belligerents in the conflict; and although hard-liners might have been able to convince themselves that an all-out effort against one invasion was possible, no one would have believed that a decisive battle could be fought against two opponents at the same time. At a single stroke, all of the viable options for securing better surrender terms were eliminated.
As Wilson writes, it is not well remembered that although the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is generally presented as a horrifying event, whether Japanese leaders would have considered it appreciably different from other (conventional) attacks carried out that summer is unclear. The conventional attacks launched by U.S. bombers against Japan in the spring and summer of 1945 were almost as large as the Hiroshima bombing; they often caused more damage (and once caused more casualties); and given that sixty-six other Japanese cities were also attacked that summer, it may have been hard to differentiate the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
A central question for Wilson is this: This campaign of city attacks raises a troubling question for those who argue that nuclear weapons forced the Japanese surrender: If Hiroshima’s destruction caused the Japanese to surrender, then why is it that the destruction of sixty-six other cities that summer did not? True, the means used to destroy Hiroshima were different, but means are rarely more important than ends. How could these other attacks have failed to sway the Japanese leadership, but the Hiroshima bombing have been decisive?
Remember, that practically all theories of how nuclear weapons compel or deter other states is, thankfully, based on theory, not fact, notwithstanding incidents like the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Wilson concludes:
The field of nuclear threats is more firmly grounded than that of nuclear war because it rests on far more actual experience—there are many more historical data points to extrapolate from. But even so, the chief example of the effectiveness of nuclear threats must still be Truman’s warning on August 6 that unless the Japanese surrendered, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” If it is now admitted that this threat failed to successfully coerce, the odds of any nuclear threat working have to be recalculated.
…
It would be difficult to argue that we view nuclear weapons today in the same way that observers in the 1950s or 1960s did. Against this evidence of a steady decline in importance, however, has always been balanced the argument that the bomb won the war in the Pacific. If nuclear weapons played no role in the surrender of Japan, perhaps it is time to conduct a serious, far-reaching review of the general usefulness of nuclear weapons.
No related posts.
There may be something to Wilson’s observation that a nuclear weapon is more like other military hardware than it is different. Yet recent history, military doctrine, and even the underlying tone of both your and his analysis suggests otherwise.
At the close of WWII, the extra (even, I would still argue, war-winning) punch of the nuclear attack vs. conventional bombing signified a capacity to dramatically up the ante in the then relatively new realm of “total war.” In other words, while it had been possible before (even as early as WWI) to level a whole city, civilians and all, by fire-bombing and heavy artillery bombardment, it had never been possible to do so in one raid, by one airplane. You could have the best air defenses in the world (and Japan’s were far from that by 1945) and it wouldn’t do a lick of good if only one plane with one bomb had to get through to do the job.
What nuclear weapons represented, therefore, was a paradigm shift in military hardware. Paradigm shifts tend to occur every generation or two, as offensive and defensive hardware swap preeminence (think jet planes, which were neutralized by SAMs, which were neutralized in turn by stealth bombers, cruise missiles and UAVs, etc). The real question, I think, is whether we are still subject to the Hiroshima/Nagasaki paradigm today. The answer is yes, at least until missile defense or “star wars” or some similar protective shield invalidates the disproportionate destructive power of ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads. In other words, although our armed forces have evolved to integrate tactical and strategic nuclear doctrine into their war-fighting plans, no one seriously doubts that a state with the split-second ability to overkill the enemy with 1,000 nuclear weapons (as either the US or Russia could still do today) holds an absolute trump card. Missile defense could, obviously, change all that.
The other possible dimension on which the paradigm may have shifted since 1945 is the increasing importance of international law and unacceptability of civilian collateral damage to mainstream state powers, coupled with the increasing use of terror tactics by non-state and rogue state actors. To the extent that wars today are increasingly lopsided contests between traditional states with nuclear arsenals on the one hand, and rogue actors with at most sporadic access to WMD on the other, neither side can truly “win” a conflict by playing the nuclear card. The powerful state either can’t or won’t use nukes against its elusive enemy, who is in any case shielded by hapless civilians, and the rogue actor, for its part, will never have the nuclear capacity to do much more than kick dirt in its adversary’s face.
In short, yes, nuclear weapons are weapons first and can be thought of like other tools in the military toolkit, for certain, limited purposes. At the same time, at least if we’re talking about traditional state-to-state conflict, there’s no real answer to a devastating nuclear first strike other than the two that world leaders already thought of 60 years ago: surrender and mutually assured destruction. The Japanese surrendered, and we and our Russian allies went MAD. We still are.
Comment on May 4, 2007 @ 6:59 am
I agree with David Isenberg’s main thesis that political and military strategists as well as the world public as a whole drastically need to rethink the utility of nuclear weapons. MORE IMPORTANTLY, the general debate on deterrence and the efficacy of the existence of these weapons SHOULD BE SOMETHING PUBLICLY DISCUSSED AND EXAMINED AS REGULARLY AS WE DEBATE OTHER HOT BUTTON ISSUES LIKE GLOBAL WARMING. The fact that such debates are not even considered credible in the Democratic and Republican presidential election cycle (after 1992 essentially) should scare the hell out of every thinking human being. Just because the Cold War ended and U.S. and Russian arsenals have been reduced doesn’t mean we should be so relaxed about the nuclear equation. Afterall both powers still possess tens of thousands of these weapons on hair trigger alert and accidents and miscalculations are NOT the anachronism of a bygone era–in 1995, Boris Yeltsin’s military detected what appeared to be a cruise missile launch from a U.S. submarine headed straight toward Moscow–a decapitating first strike. Yeltsin had virtually seconds to decide whether to order nuclear retailiation before he was vaporized. Luckily this “Black Brant Incident” turned out to be an innocent scientific sounding rocket launch from Norway.
The utility of using any nuclear weapons or threatening to use them (including deterrence) is not only morally indefensible but an illogical, nonviable construct. Nuclear Winter, which is not a theory anymore–it has been proven over the last 25 years after scientists have examined the atmospheric and climatic analogy of the impact of discharging millions of tons of debris and smoke into the skies from dozens of volcanic episodes in the geologic record. Example: Israel with its 100-200 nuclear weapons fails to deter an irrational paradise seeking jihadist willing to suiccide himself and the nation he launches his attack (fission bomb in the ship cargo hold) from against Israel. The Israelis destroy that jihadist and his supporting nation using several nuclear weapons. Result: Radioactive fallout spreads throughout the region and small scale climatic effects endanger agriculture and also precious water sources. Pakistan and Iran, impacted indirectly by Israeli’s nuclear strikes, retaliate against Israel with nuclear weapons and a regional climate catastrophe ensues–tens or hundreds of millions more die than those killed in the nuclear blasts. Conclusion: Nuclear weapons are not usable and do not have military or political utility when the entirety of global impacts are played out. So, setting aside the theoretical discussion about nukes, the obvious and overriding thing to remember is: Accidental, unintentional or inadvertent nuclear wars are not only still possible but probable (one almost occurred between India and Pakistan in 2000) and not just in the Third World. A “Sum of All Fears” type scenario whereby fanatical terrorists seek to have Americans and Russians destroy each other’s countries based on faulty causes and effects, while damaging to the global ecosystem, would send believers to paradise and destroy the majority of world population (heretics). This fear led astronomer Carl Sagan to oppose the creation of an asteroid deflection technology–while rationality dictates that such a technology would ensure the long-term survival of our species, the existence of extreme irrationality in the world (suicide terrorism, Jim Jones as well as Osama bin Laden types) dictates that the risk of purposeful deflection toward Earth is more likely.
Now, as to the historical argument about whether American nuclear strikes (isn’t it a little strange that U.S. leaders and citizens are so afraid of Iranian, North Korean and other “axis of evil” potential nuclear arsenals when only one nation has ever used nukes in warfare–America) in World War Two. Yes, other scholars over the decades have mentioned the huge Soviet attack (rivaling Nazi Germany’s immense attack of June 22, 1941 on the Soviet Union) on Japanese occupied Manchuria in early August 1945 as at least a contributing factor or even the main factor (Japan not wanting to fight the world’s two biggest powers–although Hitler, irrationality notwithstanding, declared war on the U.S. right after Pearl Harbor while he had been fighting Russia for six months) in explaining the Japanese surrender. While this is clearly debatable, it is also true that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were basically eqivalent (in terms of blast effects only–it was a quantifiable difference to suffer the radiation effects of the bomb that killed many tens of thousands years after the blasts) to the city destroying thousand plane raids of World War Two that were unleased on Japan and Germany (killing about as many people in a couple hours in cities like Dresden and Tokyo, due to the firestorm effects primarily). Today’s world arsenals routinely include nuclear weapons with explosive effects hundreds or thousands as times as strong as the A-bombs of 1945. Nuclear weapons today are disproportionate to any rational sound viable military strategy–in fact, their climatic and global impacts make them a scourge–a doomsday machine that potentially answers Hans Bethe’s cosmological question “Where Are They (intelligent aliens)? It may have been best stated by Henry Adams on April 11, 1862 after he witnessed the awful slaughter of the Battle of Shiloh: “I firmly believe (paraphrasing) that science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science will have the existence of mankind in its power and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.”
Nuclear weapons obviously cannot be disinvented BUT we homo sapiens had better get going on resolving this issue. It represents the proverbial ticking time bomb for our human civilization. In comparison, worrying about North Korea or Iran’s nukes is like worrying about Johnny playing with matches while in the basement Daddy’s huge loaded assault weapon collection sits unattended with the cellar light on.
Comment on May 4, 2007 @ 8:42 am