Beyond Deterrence

While the invasion of Ukraine is a body blow to worldwide hopes for peace, it is still an opportunity to reassess establishment thinking about nuclear deterrence.

 

You might say: odd time to bring this up, when possibly the only thing keeping Mr. Putin in check is the nuclear arsenals of the West, just as the only thing keeping us from giving even more military aid to Ukraine is Russia’s nuclear arsenals.

 

The major powers are still firmly wed to the paradigm that it is nuclear deterrence that will prevent catastrophe rather than cause it. They see the risk of fundamental change as unacceptable—even as the potential of nuclear war between Russia and the West may be rising to the Cuban Missile Crisis level.

 

Deterrence apologists argue that it has prevented world war for seventy years. So far, so good.  But we have also been almost miraculously fortunate. How long will our planetary luck hold? The world simply cannot continue forever with the instability of we-build/they-build arms races.

 

The nuclear powers obviously see change beyond deterrence as containing even greater risks than maintaining the status quo—an odd blindness to the reality that the avoidance of nuclear war is a vital (!) interest for each country shared by all—a universal fear of annihilation.

 

We have not worked hard enough to emphasize this shared interest as the basis for moving beyond the fatalism of deterrence by means of verifiable, reciprocal disarmament protocols. Yes, super-challenging. But are we trying hard enough? No, because it’s so much easier just to rely passively on how well deterrence works—until it doesn’t.

 

Unfortunately the eventual breakdown of deterrence is downright inevitable due to the complexity of command and control in combination with human misunderstanding and error at moments of high tension.  We are sixty years beyond the Cuban crisis without having faced this challenge as an international community.

 

Now we must add to the mix an isolated and deluded autocrat who has run into major unexpected obstacles with his cruel campaign to subdue another sovereign nation. Without knowing what Putin might do, President Biden and his NATO allies must walk the fine line between aiding Ukraine and slipping into World War III.

 

The ”idealism” of putting in place robust international institutions to pursue nuclear disarmament conforms more closely to the real choices the planet faces than the “realism” of the present paradigm. Our biggest problems, like the climate emergency, transcend the borders of nations. They require the resources and creativity presently being sucked into the rathole of war, attempted deterrence of war, and preparation for further war.

 

All nations, nuclear and non-nuclear, share a common interest in not being annihilated, and in reducing, ideally to zero, the possibility of a nuclear war that would have no winners and potentially affect everyone, either by nuclear winter or radiation carried by the wind. What sounds like a stick is really a carrot: with reciprocal nuclear disarmament, everyone wins. Who knows, it is even possible that some nuclear powers, even a pariah state like North Korea, might feel relief in letting go a terrible drain on their limited resources.

 

Given the global community’s vulnerability to the unilateral acts of dictators like Putin, we are all watching to see if the sanctions put in place so far might set some limits on his behavior. While sanctions failed to prevent war in Ukraine, in an increasingly interdependent global economic system, sanctions may have the potential in themselves to become an effective deterrent, even eventually replacing the unworkable nuclear deterrence system at the same time deterring nuclear violations. Sanctions are a potentially powerful stick.

 

Here the 57 nations, small as many of them are, that have ratified the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons may have some leverage upon other nations who have not signed or ratified the treaty. They can publicize and advocate for the treaty, as NGOs like the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons have done, creating an educational tool to mobilize civil society worldwide.

 

Each small incremental step toward the final goal is valuable, building confidence that further steps are possible, even unilateral ones. Ex-Secretary of Defense William Perry has suggested that the United States could abandon its entire land-based ballistic missile system with no loss of security.

 

Even as we admire Ukrainian courage, try to help, and mourn their losses with them, it is not too early to address and overcome the fatalism which has allowed the nine nuclear powers to rely on the tenuous instability of nuclear deterrence for so many decades. Our lives depend upon it.

 

 

 

The Tragedy of Ukraine and New Thinking

As we lock horns with the cruel and out-of-touch Putin, once again we’re at a moment that too closely resembles the Cuban crisis of 1962. We really don’t seem to have learned very much since then. Sixty years is a long time not to have figured out that nuclear chicken is a game with no winners.

While some pundits assert that it is NATO’s expansion to the East that has caused Putin to react so irrationally, others explain that, no, his mind is somewhere back in another century, caught up in imperial fantasies of renewed Russian glory. Some argue that by not enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine we are slipping into an appeasing Hitler model, making WW3 more likely. Others argue the opposite, that we must avoid WW3 by the kind of delicate and creative restraint presently practiced by Biden and Blinken. 

In our helplessness we all want to at least have an opinion and even better to be right, but we sometimes fail to understand that the lead-up to war, escalation, is a system in which all sides participate, with roots in historical grievances and fears extending into the distant past. We project malign motives onto Putin and he projects malign motives onto the U.S. and NATO. In this projection we act in unawareness of our own darkness, conveniently forgetting that the U.S. too has attacked sovereign nations when we thought it was in our interest.

The nuclear nations are so based in power competition that so far—even after Cuba—they have not awakened to the possibility that their fundamental interests are compromised by the threat of annihilation. They refuse to see their shared interest in building a security system based in no one needing to possess WMDs rather than one that incentivizes every nation to want them.

Here are parts of a response to me (I had asked about nuclear policy) from one of our most intelligent and thoughtful U.S. senators: 

“ . . . as long as nuclear weapons exist, the potential use of these weapons cannot be ruled out, and the maintenance of a safe, secure, and credible nuclear deterrent is our best insurance against nuclear catastrophe. . . 

. . . malign actors who seek to upset global peace and security must remain convinced that the costs of attacking the United States—or our allies and partners—far outweigh any benefit they seek to derive. This policy, in fact, has prevented the use of nuclear weapons for over 70 years. .  .

. . . I fully understand the apparent paradox of the theory of deterrence—that we must build, maintain, and credibly prepare for the employment of these awful weapons, all in order to reduce the chances of their use. Until we achieve a nuclear-free world, this is almost certainly our best insurance against the nuclear catastrophe all of us rightly fear. . .”

These words can fairly be said to represent establishment thinking across Washington (and Moscow and Beijing). The problem with this thinking is its spirit of fatalism. It gives lip-service to the hope of a nuclear-free world, but other than that, no specifics about how to get there or how crucial it is to get there. And there are gigantic questionable assumptions: first, that the deterrence system is safe and secure, which assumes no mistakes forever—a bridge way too far—and second, that our weapons are good and non-threatening but the weapons of others are bad and are a threat.

Such reasonable-sounding but ultimately empty rhetoric indicates a collective mind-set that has been, to put it bluntly, stuck on stupid since the Cuban crisis. We can do better. How? 

First, accept reality out loud. There is no way out of the nuclear deterrence paradox, which is not “apparent” but all too real. Unless we actively change the paradigm, nuclear war lies ahead somewhere down the time stream, possibly within days or weeks in the present crisis, or within years as further conflict inevitable rises. Governments need to say, as I hope the United States government, to its credit, is saying to itself right now, first principle, nuclear war is off the table: how else can we respond? 

Second, have some faith in our own creativity. Is the “tragic realism” of nuclear deterrence really the best we can do? Most nations don’t think so—86 are signatories and 59 have also ratified the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The U.S. can make significant unilateral confidence-building moves, including former Secretary of Defense William Perry’s suggestion that we can retire our entire land-based ballistic missile system with no essential loss of security. Or bring home a Trident submarine to base and invite others to make similar small gestures of good will.

Third, the community of nations can prioritize the issue far more, by activating an ongoing conference of the nine nuclear powers through the U.N., or as many who are willing to participate, to take small steps in the right direction, starting from the premise that we never want to be this close to nuclear war again. Let’s not freak out about bad actors like North Korea. If suddenly the U.S. and NATO possessed zero nuclear weapons and North Korea made hostile moves, our conventional forces would be more than sufficient to deter their acting rashly. Verification of violations is no longer a technological hurdle, and we are finding out just how powerful economic sanctions can be when applied uniformly. Sanctions can become a far safer and more effective means of deterrence.

It is hardly my place, sitting safe in a warm house in rural Maine, to advise the Ukrainian people that they might have been better off had they chosen Gandhian forms of active nonviolent resistance. Zelensky himself has pleaded with the Russian people to do so, and his own countrymen and women have tried standing bravely in front of Russian tanks. Though Ukraine understandably has chosen to take up arms in response to Russian brutality, nonviolent tactics must never be forgotten, because they often work quite effectively, and can still be effective to creatively combat Russian occupation. The expert tactician of nonviolent political struggle Gene Sharp has suggested 198 ways to refuse cooperation with occupiers, tactics with a successful track record in Poland, the Philippines, and elsewhere, and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict published an expanded list last year.

Meanwhile we are desperate for a new paradigm where leaders turn to international institutions like the World Court to adjudicate difficult conflicts—as Belize and Guatemala have done to resolve an ongoing dispute about borders. Yes, many schemes have been tried and have failed, including the Kellogg-Briand treaty to outlaw war from 1928—which is still in force by the way. But the nuclear context adds the greatest possible urgency to the deliberations of diplomats and leaders.

Meanwhile one of the most galling aspects of Putin’s invasion is its utter irrelevance to any of the real problems the planet, including Russia itself, faces together. While Ukrainian suffering is horribly real, Putin’s nationalist motivations seem unreal, belonging to some other moment of historical time when the world was not challenged by transnational challenges like pandemics, the climate emergency, finding adequate clean sources of energy, and feeding all the children of the earth.

Our New Normal

 

Putin’s cruel invasion of Ukraine reminds us that there are leaders of countries—and not only Putin—who think and act according to the conviction that if they do not get their way, they might turn to nuclear weapons as a last resort. Or in the fog of war or extreme tension, someone might misinterpret events, beginning nuclear escalation inadvertently. The record of the Cuban Missile Crisis makes clear that we were fortunate to have Kennedy as President of the U.S. and Khrushchev leading the U.S.S.R., because they secretly negotiated a peaceful way out of the crisis, even as U.S. generals were pushing hard for an invasion of Cuba that would have resulted in global holocaust.

 

The brutality of Putin’s indiscriminate attack upon helpless civilians has appalled the world, but we still need to put ourselves in his shoes as best we can. He’s on record that the breakup of the old Soviet Union was a disaster, one that requires the restoration of the Russian Empire. In addition he is an autocrat who feels threatened by the Ukraine becoming a successful liberal democracy with strong economic and political ties to Western Europe and the U.S., whom he conceives as a single combined adversary. Historically, Russia has been invaded many times, in recent history by Napoleon and Hitler, and has responded to instability at its borders with consistent force—as we in the United States would also if we felt that our own stability was threatened by chaos at our edges. A further complication is the ethnic distribution of Russian-speaking or Russian-leaning citizens in the Ukraine, with more of those to the East and less to the West of the country, creating a web of contradictory loyalties—even as Ukrainian identity has been solidified by the invasion.

 

Anxiety, angry helplessness, moral outrage, blaming, and enemy-imaging would seem to be “normal” responses, along with “what-aboutism”: the U.S. also launched invasions in Iraq, Afghanistan and a number of other countries which many of us saw as unnecessary or unjustified. Putin himself has used what-aboutism to rationalize his choices.

 

The level of violence available to the nine nuclear states means that nuclear cataclysm would not lead to victory for anyone. In this new world, normality and even sanity depends upon knowing that my survival depends upon the survival of my adversaries, and their survival depends upon mine. To the extent that enough people—citizens, media, Putin himself—lose this sense of existential interdependency, we will keep moving closer to catastrophe.

 

Which is why the International Campaign to Ban Nuclear Weapons has worked so hard to get more nations to join the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—the only way to permanently end the nuclear possibility which will keep raising its head with every new great power conflict. Though 86 nations have ratified the treaty, none of the 9 nuclear states have signed on, indicating that those nine still think that nuclear weapons, possessing them, threatening to use them, or actually using them, are indispensable to their survival, when the exact reverse is true.

 

Which is also why a truly “normal” response to our planetary situation would be hundreds of millions of people in the streets demonstrating not only in favor of Ukrainian independence but also for the permanent prohibition of nuclear weapons, and for using the savings that result to  build a sustainable world.

 

War is a huge distraction from the unprecedented degree of planetary cooperation we must learn in order to address the climate emergency. Sadly, such cooperation is the opposite of the way Putin has chosen. Along with nuclear weapons, climate change equally makes the case that the new normal is that my survival depends upon you and yours depends upon me. This reciprocity, appearing in all the world’s great religions as the Golden Rule, far from being an impractical ideal with no relevance to great power conflict, has instead become, in the form of the twin nuclear and climate challenges, our fundamental planetary reality—our new normal. To the extent we learn to act from this understanding, a different world is possible.