MARCHING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION….ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS BAN
President Obama’s Plea For “A World Without Nuclear Weapons”! Marching In The Wrong Direction
By: Louis René Beres with Generals (Ret.) Thomas McInerney and Paul E. Vallely
In this week’s column, Professor Beres is joined by two very distinguished military figures, Generals (Ret.) Thomas McInerney and Paul E. Vallely.
National security policy should never be based upon wishful thinking. With this in mind, there are now very grave dangers inherent in President Barack Obama’s idealized visions of world politics. This is especially the case in urgent matters of nuclear strategy, nuclear terrorism and nuclear war.
To be sure, the Nobel Peace Prize (fairly or unfairly) confers status and prestige, but it does not automatically bestow a mantle of sound judgment. We mustask, therefore, the following core question: What sort of national security policy can we expect from a president who seeks “a world free of nuclear weapons?”
On its face, this condition of denuclearization would seem to be a reasonable and laudatory objective. Actually, however, considering present and probable nuclear proliferation by North Korea, Iran and possibly by their proxies, it is entirely unrealistic. Indeed, for the United States, any policy based on such an implausible objective would be unacceptably perilous.
In his very important article, published in the Spring 2009 issue of Air and Space Power Journal, VADM Robert R. Monroe (USN/Ret.) observed correctly: “Like it or not, tens of thousands of nuclear arms exist around the world, and neither they nor the know-how and capability to make them are going to disappear. Knowledge, once gained, cannot be washed away by treaties – let alone by unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament. For generations to come, our lives and civilizations will depend on effectively countering these threats.”
Vice-Admiral Monroe, whose distinguished Navy career spanned the Cold War as well as the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, is right-on-the-mark. In matters of national security policy, every intellectual failure may be dense with implication. President Obama, by failing to identify serious strategic threats and objectives, has ignored the basic expectations of national survival logic in an anarchic world. Before a safer America could ever be born from any presumed policy of worldwide nuclear disarmament, a gravedigger would have to wield the forceps.
True, any further nuclear proliferation should be curtailed, but, ironically, this proper goal would actually be degraded by the president’s proposals. By themselves, nuclear weapons are neither good nor evil. In certain circumstances, these weapons may even be indispensable to national security and deterrence. Undoubtedly, the nuclear stalemate between this country and the former Soviet Union played a critical role in preventing World War III. And however “ambiguous,” Israel’s implicit nuclear deterrent is required for that tiny country’s capacity to simply endure.
The utterly naïve nuclear hopes of President Obama and his advisors represent an elaborate fiction. What we require, instead, is a complex and nuanced model of international relations that reflects, realistically, the prevailing passions and principles of all our potential enemies in world politics. Such a conceptual model, wherein strategic threats and opportunities would be called by their correct names, would be drawn not from Mr. Obama’s preferred philosophical visions, but rather from the informed and indisputable awareness that America’s multiple enemies, still crouched in the bruising darkness, often remain stubbornly opposed to peace with the United States.
When Pericles delivered his Funeral Oration, with its praise of Athenian civilization, his perspective was inner-directed. As recorded by Thucydides, Pericles remarked: “What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes.” Later, in Rome, the philosopher/statesman Cicero inquired: “What can be done against force without force?” Today, a president of the United States must still understand that in a world of international anarchy, a world originally bequeathed to us after the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, purposeful foreign policy must aim above all at maintaining and improving the country’s relative power position.
Make no mistake, America needs nuclear weapons for deterrence. More precisely, we need to continually upgrade and refine these weapons, as well as their associated strategic doctrine. We need to recapitalize our national nuclear deterrent, and ensure that we can maintain all essential global power projection capabilities. This means, at a minimum, a re-examination of nuclear targeting doctrine, this time with regard to current threats from other countries and their proxies. It also means preparing for a world in which both our national and sub-national enemies may sometimes be irrational. In all of these matters, the president’s current glide path to a nuclear-free world is counterproductive.
President Obama may wish to distance himself from the prior Bush administration’s defense policies, but a key concern of U.S. strategic doctrine must still be preemption. Like it or not, there are major threats on the horizon that may still call for anticipatory self-defense. In our uncertain strategic future, where enemy rationality cannot always be assumed, and where the essential effectiveness of national ballistic missile defense would be too low, the only reasonable alternative to an American preemption might still be surrender or defeat.
Sea power should maintain its proper place. Observing actions of Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, future enemy missile launches could come from container ships off our shores. Launches against Israel could likely also come directly from Iran, so a modernized U.S. anti-missile fleet capability should be positioned in the Mediterranean, Red and Arabian seas. For Israel, its current Dolphin class submarines may have to be upgraded, and so may its ever-improving system of ballistic missile defense.
A nuclear threat to American cities need not come from enemy missiles. It could also come from cars and trucks, and from ships used only for “dirty-bomb” dispersals. Ballistic missile defense would be of no use against any such attacks.
Could we make enemy states and their surrogates believe that proxy acts of nuclear terrorism would elicit an unacceptable retaliation against them directly? Perhaps we could, but functional answers can never emerge from an indisputably futile plan for global nuclear disarmament.
America’s strategic doctrine must rest on the idea that significant threats of war and terrorism may now derive from a “clash of civilizations,” and not merely from narrow political or ideological differences. This does not mean that President Obama is wrong in his expanding emphasis on negotiation and diplomacy, but only that he should also acknowledge that some of our principal enemies will be unresponsive to traditional deterrent policies. These enemies, sworn to certain otherworldly ideals of Jihad, will be animated not by the ordinary secular promises of hegemony, wealth and privilege, but rather by decisive expectations of power over death.
Today, most social scientists and strategists are fond of assuming “rationality” in their decisional calculations, but even a cursory glance at the “real world” reveals obvious inconsistencies. Plainly, when one looks at modern international relations, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Freud assuredly trump Plato and Cicero.
Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” Some of our Jihadistenemies could come to resemble the suicide bomber writ large. Such enemies, Mr. Obama should understand, may not concede even an inch to such conventionally accepted international norms as compromise, coexistence and peaceful settlement.
If launched at any time of grave national instability, an act of nuclear terrorism against the United States could have near-existential consequences. To prevent the “Ryder truck scenario,” which could involve either a radiological or “real” (authentic chain reaction) nuclear weapon, President Obama’s strategic policy would have to hold the state sponsors accountable. This policy, of course, should initially offer these states a suitable diplomatic option.
If, however, such an option should fail, the president must then make clear that any terrorist proxy nuclear explosion in this country would certainly elicit an unacceptably damaging retaliation. This means, among other steps, that we (1) unambiguously target these sponsor states; and (2) plainly and regularly discuss war-game retaliatory options with our National Command Authorities. Although the circumstances are different in several key respects, this “exercising” was done with evident success during the Cold War.
As VADM Monroe observed, nuclear weapons are not simply going to go away. Despite his personal wishes and visions, the president of the United States must now learn to base our national strategic policy on precisely this sort of sober understanding. Soon, therefore, Mr. Obama should begin to construct a broad, coherent and compelling strategic plan from which specific policy options could be extrapolated and implemented. This plan should prepare to deal effectively with both our national and sub-national adversaries, some of whom might sometimes even be willing to act irrationally. The task, both intellectually and politically, will be stunningly difficult, but the alternatives would all be catastrophic.
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University. He is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press.
Thomas McInerney, Lt. General (USAF/Ret) is co-author (with MG Paul E. Vallely) of The Endgame: Winning the War on Terror. General McInerney is retired Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force.
Paul E. Vallely, Major General (USA/Ret.) is an author, military strategist and Chairman of Stand Up America and Save Our Democracy Projects.
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