Maybe We Should Take The North Koreans At Their Word

Maybe We Should Take The North Koreans At Their Word

 

Pyongyang has consistently said that its nuclear

weapons are intended to deter aggression. And, indeed, they do.

 

By Tad Daley

Tikkun Magazine

http://www.tikkun.org/

 

Tad Daley is the Writing Fellow with International

Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the Nobel

Peace Laureate disarmament advocacy organization. His

first book, Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a

Nuclear Weapon-Free World, is forthcoming from Rutgers

University Press in January 2010.

 

Shortly after North Korea exploded its second nuclear

device in three years on Monday morning, it released a

statement explaining why. "The republic has conducted

another underground nuclear testing successfully in

order to strengthen our defensive nuclear

deterrence."[1-see endnotes] If the Obama

Administration hopes to dissuade Pyongyang from the

nuclear course it seems so hell bent on pursuing,

Washington must understand just how adroitly nuclear

arms do appear to serve North Korea's national

security. In other words, perhaps we should recognize

that they mean what they say.

 

From the dawn of history until the dawn of the nuclear

age, it seemed rather self-evident that for virtually

any state in virtually any strategic situation, the

more military power one could wield relative to one's

adversaries, the more security one gained. That all

changed, however, with Alamogordo and Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. During the Cold War's long atomic arms race,

it slowly dawned on "nuclear use theorists" - whom one

can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS - that in the

nuclear age, security did not necessarily require

superiority. Security required simply an ability to

retaliate after an adversary had struck, to inflict

upon that opponent "unacceptable damage" in reply. If

an adversary knew, no matter how much devastation it

might inflict in a first strike, that the chances were

good that it would receive massive damage as a

consequence (even far less damage than it had inflicted

as long as that damage was "unacceptable"), then,

according to the logic of nuclear deterrence, that

adversary would be dissuaded from striking first. What

possible political benefit could outweigh the cost of

the possible obliteration of, oh, a state's capital

city, and the leaders of that state themselves, and

perhaps more than a million lives therein?

 

Admittedly, the unassailable logic of this

"unacceptable damage" model of nuclear deterrence -

which we might as well call UD - failed to put the

brakes on a spiraling Soviet/American nuclear arms

competition that began almost immediately after the

USSR acquired nuclear weapons of its own in 1949.

Instead, a different model of nuclear deterrence

emerged, deterrence exercised by the capability

completely to wipe out the opponent's society,

"mutually assured destruction," which soon came to be

known to all as MAD. There were other scenarios of

aggression - nuclear attacks on an adversary's nuclear

weapons, nuclear or conventional attacks on an

adversary's closest allies (in Western and Eastern

Europe) - that nuclear weapons were supposed to deter

as well. However, the Big Job of nuclear weapons was to

dissuade the other side from using their nuclear

weapons against one's own cities and society, by

threatening to deliver massive nuclear devastation on

the opponent's cities and society in reply. "The

Department of Defense," said an Ohio congressman in the

early 1960s, with some exasperation, "has become the

Department of Retaliation."[2]

 

Nevertheless, those who engaged in an effort to slow

the arms race often employed the logic of UD in their

attempts to do so. "Our twenty thousandth bomb," said

Robert Oppenheimer, who directed the Manhattan Project

that built the world's first atomic weapons, as early

as 1953, "will not in any deep strategic sense offset

their two thousandth."[3] "Deterrence does not depend

on superiority," said the great strategist Bernard

Brodie in 1965.[4] "There is no foreign policy

objective today that is so threatened," said retired

admiral and former CIA director Stansfield Turner in

1998, "that we would … accept the risk of receiving

just one nuclear detonation in retaliation."[5]

 

Consider how directly the logic of UD applies to the

contemporary international environment, to the twin

nuclear challenges that have dominated the headlines

during most of the past decade, and to the most

immediate nuclear proliferation issues now confronting

the Obama Administration. Because the most persuasive

explanation for the nuclear quests on which both Iran

and North Korea have embarked is, indeed, the notion

that "deterrence does not depend on superiority."

Deterrence depends only an ability to strike back. Iran

and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear

arsenals in order to deter potential adversaries from

launching an attack upon them - by threatening them

with unacceptable damage in retaliation.

 

Neither North Korea nor Iran could hope to defeat its

most powerful potential adversary - the United States -

in any kind of direct military confrontation. They

cannot repel an actual attack upon them. They cannot

shoot American planes and missiles out of the sky.

Indeed, no state can.

 

However, what these countries can aspire to do is to

dissuade the American leviathan from launching such an

attack. How? By developing the capability to instantly

vaporize an American military base or three in Iraq or

Qatar or South Korea or Japan, or an entire U.S.

aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf or

the Sea of Japan, or even an American city on one coast

or the other. And by making it implicitly clear that

they would respond to any kind of assault by employing

that capability immediately, before it's too late,

following the venerable maxim: "Use them or lose them."

The obliteration of an entire American military base,

or an entire American naval formation, or an entire

American city, would clearly seem to qualify as

"unacceptable damage" for the United States.

 

Moreover, to deter an American attack, Iran and North

Korea do not need thousands of nuclear warheads. They

just need a couple of dozen, well hidden and well

protected. American military planners might be almost

certain that they could take out all the nuclear

weapons in these countries in some kind of a dramatic

lightning "surgical strike." However, with nuclear

weapons, "almost" is not good enough. Even the barest

possibility that such a strike would fail, and that

just one or two nuclear weapons would make it into the

air, detonate over targets, and result in massive

"unacceptable damage" for the United States, would in

virtually any conceivable circumstance serve to

dissuade Washington from undertaking such a strike.

 

In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Iran and

North Korea would not intend for their nascent nuclear

arsenals to deter only nuclear attacks upon them. If

the entire nuclear arsenal of the United States

disappeared tomorrow morning, but America's

conventional military superiority remained, it still

would be the case that the only possible military asset

that these states could acquire, to effectively deter

an American military assault, would be the nuclear asset.

 

The "Korean Committee for Solidarity with World

Peoples," a mouthpiece for the North Korean government,

captured Pyongyang's logic quite plainly just weeks

after the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003. "The

Iraqi war taught the lesson that … the security of the

nation can be protected only when a country has a

physical deterrent force …"[6] Similarly, a few weeks

earlier, just before the Iraq invasion began, a North

Korean general was asked to defend his country's

nuclear weapons program, and with refreshing candor

replied, "We see what you are getting ready to do with

Iraq. And you are not going to do it to us."[7]

 

It really is quite a remarkable development. North

Korea today is one of the most desperate countries in

the world. Most of its citizens are either languishing

in gulags or chronically starving. And yet - in

contrast to all the debate that has taken place in

recent years about whether the United States and/or

Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran - no

one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike

on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere

possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable

damage upon us in reply.

 

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about UD is that it

seems every bit as effective as MAD. North Korea today

possesses no more than a handful of nuclear warheads,

and maintains nothing like a "mutual" nuclear balance

with the United States. In addition, the retaliation

that North Korea can threaten cannot promise anything

like a complete "assured destruction." To vaporize an

American carrier group in the Sea of Japan, or a vast

American military base in South Korea or Japan, or even

an American city, would not be at all the same thing as

the "destruction" of the entire American nation - as

the USSR was able to threaten under MAD.

 

And yet, MAD and UD, it seems, exercise deterrence in

precisely the same way. Astonishingly, it seems that

Washington finds itself every bit as thoroughly

deterred by a North Korea with probably fewer than 10

nuclear weapons as it did by a Soviet Union with

10,000. Although UD hardly contains the rich

acronymphomaniacal irony wrought by MAD, it appears

that both North Korea and Iran intend now to base their

national security strategies solidly upon it.

 

There is very little reason to suppose that other

states will not soon follow their lead.

 

President Obama, of course, to his great credit, has

not only made a nuclear weapon-free Iran and North

Korea one of his central foreign policy priorities, he

has begun to chart a course toward a nuclear weapon-

free world. In a groundbreaking speech before a huge

outdoor rally in Prague on April 5th, he said, "Today,

I state clearly and with conviction America's

commitment to seek the peace and security of a world

without nuclear weapons." (Unfortunately, he followed

that with the statement that nuclear weapons abolition

would not "be achieved quickly, perhaps not in my

lifetime," suggesting that neither he nor the nuclear

policy officials in his administration fully appreciate

the magnitude and immediacy of the nuclear peril. Do

they really think the human race can retain nuclear

weapons for another half century or so, yet manage to

dodge the bullet of nuclear accident, or nuclear

terror, or a nuclear crisis spinning out of control

every single time?)

 

The one thing we can probably say for sure about the

prospects for universal nuclear disarmament is that no

state will agree either to abjure or to dismantle

nuclear weapons unless it believes that such a course

is the best course for its own national security. To

persuade states like North Korea and Iran to climb

aboard the train to abolition would probably require

simultaneous initiatives on three parallel tracks. One

track would deliver foreign and defense policies that

assure weaker states that we do not intend to attack

them, that just as we expect them to abide by the world

rule of law they can expect the same from us, that the

weak need not cower in fear before the strong. Another

track would deliver diplomatic overtures that convince

weaker states that on balance, overall, their national

security will better be served in a world where no one

possesses nuclear weapons, rather than in a world where

they do-but so too do many others. And another track

still would deliver nuclear weapons policies that

directly address the long-simmering resentments around

the world about the long-standing nuclear double

standard, that directly acknowledge our legacy of

nuclear hypocrisy, and that directly connect nuclear

non-proliferation to nuclear disarmament.

 

The power decisively to adjust all those variables, of

course, does not reside in Pyongyang or Tehran. It

resides instead in Washington.

 

[1] The Washington Post, May 25, 2009.

 

[2] Quoted in Daniel Lang, An Inquiry Into Enoughness:

Of Bombs and Men and Staying Alive (New York: McGraw-

Hill, 1965), p. 167.

 

[3] Quoted in Ibid., p. 38.

 

[4] Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971 -

first published in 1965), p. 274, quoted in Sarah J.

Diehl and James Clay Moltz, Nuclear Weapons and

Nonproliferation: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara,

California: ABC-CLIO, 2002), p. 34.

 

[5] Quoted in The Nation, Special Issue Containing

Jonathan Schell's interviews with several nuclear

policy professionals and intellectuals, February 2/9,

1998, p. 40.

 

[6] Quoted in Securing Our Survival: The Case for a

Nuclear Weapons Convention, Tilman Ruff and John

Loretz, eds. (Boston: IPPNW, 2007), p. 37.

 

[7] Don Oberdorfer, PBS, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,

October 9, 2006, quoted in Jonathan Schell, The Seventh

Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York:

Henry Holt, 2007), p. 141.

 

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