6. Obviously True
(The sixth in a series of occasional short pieces designed to stimulate new ideas and challenge accepted assumptions about nuclear weapons.)
Why do we believe in nuclear deterrence? It’s not something we can see (like snow) or measure (like gravity). Why do we so completely believe in it?
The case for nuclear deterrence is not constructed from the record of the Cold War. As evidence, the series of Cold War crises that involved nuclear weapons is deeply ambiguous. What can you say about a kind of threat (nuclear deterrence is a kind of threat) which is “proved” by a series of cases from history where no explicit threat is ever issued? (Go back and check. There is not a single Cold War crisis over nuclear weapons where the threat is unambiguous.) Imagine a murder trial in which all of the photographs of the crime scene are blurred and indistinct. How can you rely on evidence from cases where the phenomenon is not even unambiguously present? (Attempts to build a case for nuclear deterrence using statistical analysis from Cold War crises are brave, but unpersuasive.)
One way to understand the nature of peoples’ beliefs is to challenge them. When I built a relatively compelling case that Japan’s leaders surrendered at the end of World War II not because Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but because the Russians declared war, advocates of nuclear weapons responded by saying, “While you may be right about that historical case, nuclear deterrence is so obviously true that whether this particular group of people surrendered because of nuclear weapons or not makes no difference.” Or some said, “The devastation of a nuclear war is so obvious, and would be so tremendously destructive, that it makes no sense to doubt that nuclear deterrence would work.” And some said, “Those weapons were not as powerful as the weapons today. No one could doubt the ability of today’s weapons to deter.”
What’s interesting about these responses is the way they blithely privilege belief over evidence. Here is (possibly) a historical case where nuclear weapons did not have a unique psychological power, did not coerce an opponent, were not decisive. Yet nuclear believers didn’t leap to debate the evidence, instead they argued that somehow Hiroshima doesn’t weigh as evidence about nuclear deterrence. It is almost as if, for them, the evidence doesn’t count. —Almost as if nuclear deterrence were more like a religious faith rather than an experiential phenomenon where evidence could be gathered and debated.
If you were trying to build a case that belief in nuclear deterrence is more like a faith than an empirical position, one piece of evidence is that there is no robust debate about the existence of nuclear deterrence. There is no large camp that claims that nuclear deterrence works robustly and a smaller, less well funded camp that argues that nuclear deterrence simply doesn’t exist. With climate change there are those who say it is real and a (much smaller) minority that say it isn’t. But at least there is a debate based on evidence about the nature of the phenomenon. That is not the case with nuclear deterrence. As a panel at the Brookings Institute in January of 2019 demonstrated, the debate goes on within very narrow parameters with little serious challenge to the assumptions that underlie that discussion. [See, for example, Hugh Gusterson in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “The Blinders on the US Nuclear Policy Establishment.”] Just as no one in Christendom dared doubt the existence of God in the 1100s, it is generally judged to be career suicide to suggest a radical challenge to nuclear deterrence. When was the last time a politician ran for office with “doubts about nuclear deterrence” as one of his or her major campaign themes?
If nuclear deterrence were a phenomenon, it could be argued about and debated. But it is not. The lack of debate about the facts makes nuclear deterrence theory seem much more like an article of faith, something assumed, rather than a phenomenon.
If William James were alive he might ask, “What is the experience of nuclear deterrence like? Do those experiencing a nuclear deterrence threat get cold and clammy? Do they feel an ethereal calm as they realize they must give in? Is it a sort of dread? A kind of willingness to submit?” We claim that nuclear deterrence is a process that acts on human beings. But there is no generally agreed upon description of what it is like to feel nuclear deterrence operating inside you. We have at least vague (albeit contradictory) descriptions of love or rage or victory. We know enough to be able to say, for example, that greed is like a hunger. What does nuclear deterrence feel like?
The reason experiences of nuclear deterrence are so hard to describe, I would argue, is that it is for the most part a faith, not a feeling. It is an assumption—a belief, not an experience.