7. Utility: The Record

Utility: the record

(The seventh in a series of occasional short pieces designed to challenge accepted assumptions about nuclear weapons.)

If utility is the key to deciding whether to get rid of or keep nuclear weapons, it makes sense to ask: How useful have they actually been? Nuclear believers’ answer to this question is an unqualified “enormously useful.” They forced Japan to surrender at the end of World War II, they would say. They deterred attack by our adversaries who have nuclear weapons (and continue to do so every day). They cemented our alliances with Europe, with Japan, with South Korea, and with Australia. You could argue that they undergird the world order. And last, but not least, they have given the United States remarkable prestige over the last seventy years.

That’s no small collection of achievements. With that sort of record, the decision to keep nuclear weapons seems like a straightforward one. But when you start to poke around in the actual facts that are supposed back up that record, when you squint your eyes a little and block out the gauzy halo of reputation, a reality starts to emerge that is not quite so persuasive.

There is real evidence that dropping the bomb on Japan (twice) did not cause them to surrender. In fact, once you start digging into it, the evidence is pretty convincing that Japan’s leaders didn’t surrender because of Hiroshima. This is a long discussion and we won’t go into it all here, but two quick points. First, when a great power enters a war it always changes the calculations of every nation in that conflict. Like a fat man getting on a waterbed, the impact of the entry of a great power forces everyone to recalculate their chances of winning (or losing) and recalibrate their strategy. Great powers change the strategic balance. It makes perfect sense, therefore, that the entry of the Soviet Union (the possessor of the largest land army on the face of the earth in 1945) would change the strategic calculations of Japan’s leaders and affect whether they thought they could go on or not.

Second, no city destruction in the history of the world has ever forced surrender. Not Carthage, not Samarkand, not Liege, not Magdeburg, not Moscow, not Atlanta, not Richmond, not Louvain, not Guernica, not Chunking, not Rotterdam, not Coventry, not Hamburg, not Stalingrad, not Dresden, not Tokyo, not Pyongyang, not Hanoi. It would be remarkable if Hiroshima had done what no other city destruction in history had done. Nuclear believers claim that it did. —That it was a world-changing event. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In this case the proof is scarce and ambiguous at best. So even before getting into all the details of the historical record—the meetings and diary entries—there are strong reasons for doubting the nuclear believers’ version of events.

So: deterrence. As I said in another essay, there is no objective facts about deterrence, evidence about how it works, or even proof that it exists. Deterrence happens inside the brain of your adversary and there is no way to get in there to examine what’s going on. You might as well ask yourself what your adversary is dreaming about at night as wonder what’s happening in his or her head when deterrence is going on. We know as much about deterrence as we do about dreams.

Many experts and government officials believe very strongly in deterrence. You only have to prod them a little to measure the depth of their feelings on the matter. They respond with anger and denunciations. Or the more sophisticated ones respond with a carefully languorous disdain. But you’ll very rarely find a nuclear weapons advocate who’s willing to discuss the possibility that nuclear deterrence is different from what most experts assert. Nor will they willingly discuss the evidence. This absence of factual discussion is troubling. There are no dissertations on the failure of deterrence to prevent the war over the Falkland Islands. Or the question: if nuclear weapons could not prevent an attack on an island thousands of miles from the United Kingdom, why should we imagine that it can prevent an attack on and island (Japan) that is thousands of miles from the United States?

(Rudely, offended: “Well, of course extending deterrence over Japan works. Japan is a vital interest of the United States, while the Falkland Islands hardly matter at all to the British. They have more sheep than citizens.” And it’s true that Japan is a vital interest of the United States. But the British consider the Falkland Islands to be a part of their own nation. And people get tetchy when you attack their nations. Even far flung islands belonging to their nations. A little dust up at Pearl Harbor comes to mind, for example.)

The factual support for deterrence is quite shaky. It may be that deterrence “keeps us safe every day.” It may also be that a nuclear attack was never in the cards. In any event, the lack of any real understanding of the process makes claims associated with it doubtful. If I said, “I’ve invented some technology that allows me to control certain decision making processes in other peoples’ brains,” you might be intrigued. But you’d likely ask, “What’s your proof?” And there’s the rub. There are what appear to be instances of success. But there are also what appear to be conspicuous failures of nuclear deterrence. If nuclear deterrence has never failed, how did Stalin launch the Berlin blockade in 1948 when the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons? If nuclear deterrence has never failed, why did the Chinese join the Korean War in 1950 (after Truman had shifted nuclear-capable bombers to Guam and “craftily” let the redeployment leak to the press)? If nuclear deterrence has never failed, how did Kennedy decide to run the risk of world war during the Cuban Missile Crisis? If nuclear deterrence has never failed, how did Egypt and Syria launch a war against Israeli forces in the occupied territories in 1973? If nuclear deterrence has never failed, how did the Falkland Islands get invaded? There are any number of cases where there is at least a fair appearance of nuclear deterrence failure. That’s a troubling record for a process used to safeguard the lives of about 4.2 billion people worldwide.

It may be that nuclear weapons cement our alliances. But it would be surprising and remarkable if they did. Alliances are built on human relationships, on trust. No alliance that I can find in the historical record has ever been based on a particular weapon, a particular kind of technology.

And prestige is no evidence of practical utility. Toward the end of the third century BC, Ptolemy IV used Egypt’s considerable resources to built a naval vessel with forty rows of oars. It was a behemoth—the largest fighting vessel ever built in the ancient world. Most warships at that time had two rows of oars (biremes) or three (triremes). Ptolemy’s large warship was famous throughout the Mediterranean. It was taken as a reflection of Egypt’s wealth and power. But the giant craft turned out to be useless in combat: slow, clumsy, and unable to maneuver enough to have any effect in battle. The fact that something is prestige-laden is no proof that it is useful.

And of course the most damning evidence that nuclear weapons may not be so useful is that they have not, in fact, been used. In seventy odd years since 1945, with various nuclear-armed states fighting a multitude of wars, no one has yet been able to find a situation in which nuclear weapons seemed like just the right weapon. Perhaps that is the result of an emotional reluctance based on noble feelings and high moral values. But there could also be a more practical, pragmatic reason: they’re just not very useful weapons.

It may be that nuclear weapons are useful. But it is surprisingly tricky to bring real evidence to bear to try to prove the point.