As the
possibility grows that Russian and American, or NATO, forces will inadvertently
clash over or in the Syrian chaos, it is hard not to be reminded of Eric
Schlosser’s electrifying 2013 book Command and Control, a comprehensive
account of the development and deployment of nuclear weapons over the last sixty
years. It might be the most frightening book you will ever read.
Schlosser
walks us through the bizarre ambiguities of deterrence, always in the context
of the tension between the need for fail-safe mechanisms to prevent misuse and
the even more pressing military need for split-second readiness. This tension
has left an all too lengthy trail of close calls, misunderstandings, hair-raising
false alarms, and one-micro step-away-from accidental thermonuclear
detonations. Our planet’s having been spared apocalypse—so far—approaches the miraculous.
The
threat of mutually assured destruction has almost certainly had a major role in
preventing yet another world war—again, so
far. Given the inability of the victorious powers at the end of World War
II to trust one another enough to see where an all-out arms race would end up,
they chose instead to slide down the slippery slope of adversarial
proliferation .
Even
as safety specialists focus upon protecting the weapons from the possibility of
detonation by someone who has lost his mind, they deny the stark insanity of the
deterrence system itself. Nuclear protocol remains so hair-trigger that it feels
as if the weapons possess a kind of almost-independent eagerness to show what
they can do.
Pick
your poison: the knife-edge Cold War balance of terror, where at least elite
forces like the Strategic Air Command took enormous pride in their
professionalism, or the present era of bored, restless crews in missile silos
smoking dope and cheating on readiness tests.
Only
if we face such realities honestly can we hope to change them, beginning with
foundational principles congruent with our actual condition:
In
the pre-nuclear world, international relations emerged from the conflict of
national interests. In a post-nuclear world, national self-interest is intimately
connected with planetary self-interest. The possibility of even a small number
of nuclear detonations anywhere on earth causing “nuclear winter” underlines this
radical change.
In
both the pre-nuclear and post–nuclear world it has been of primary strategic
interest to try to psyche out the mentality of the “enemy”—almost always
leading to projective distortions like “they support brutal regimes, we do not.”
In the post-nuclear world, the desire not to appear weak common to all sides in
a conflict has become a recipe for psychological war—credibility—sliding into
real war. Diplomacy must found itself both upon the shared threat of nuclear
winter and admitting the universal tendency toward macho posturing. The only way anyone wins is if everyone
wins.
In
a pre-nuclear world, greater strength in arms made victory a strong likelihood;
in a post-nuclear world, victory is a phantom. Schlosser’s book is full of military
leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere, General Curtis Lemay of SAC first among
them, who entertained the folly of believing that total victory was possible in
a nuclear war. Only President Kennedy pushed back against Lemay’s relentless
pressure to launch an air attack on Cuba during the Missile Crisis of 1962,
which would almost certainly have started WW3.
A
half century later, there is still no person on earth possessing sufficient
wisdom to be able to make sensible decisions once a nuclear war begins, just as
no military or civilian commander can say with assurance that the thousands of
nuclear weapons around the globe will never be involved in an accident that
tips us into a war that no one can win. Past time to convene an international
conference that pushes the nine nuclear nations to accelerate a reciprocal,
verifiable disarmament process. It is perfectly possible to do, and crazy not
to.
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