Chicago Tribune

A new nuclear threat

When facing irrational enemies, policy of mutual destruction won't work

By Louis Rene Beres

September 9, 2007

In the 1950s, the United States began to codify various doctrines of nuclear deterrence. At that time, the world was indisputably bipolar, and the enemy was obviously the Soviet Union. American national security was premised on a strategic policy called "massive retaliation." And though over time, especially during the Kennedy years, that stance was nuanced by "flexible response," the clarity of "good guys" and "bad guys" was never in doubt.

Today far more countries exist than in 1945, and there are many more axes of violent conflict.

In this multipolar world, Russia, which had assumed diminished importance in American strategic calculations after the Soviet Union fell, is back with a vengeance. Recently, President Vladimir Putin made stunning declarations about resuming Russian long-range bomber flights and about corollary plans to reinvigorate the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Putin's incentive to build a whole new generation of missiles is certainly linked to President Bush's plan to push ahead with ballistic missile defense.

Other major strategic challenges are erupting today, most of them only indirectly connected to nation states. They stem from the proliferation of virulently antagonistic substate guerrilla and/or terrorist organizations.

In the past, these insurgent adversaries could present difficulties in assorted theaters of conflict, but they never could pose a life-or-death threat to the American homeland. Now, with the expanding prospect of terrorist enemies equipped with weapons of mass destruction -- possibly nuclear ones -- we face a strategic situation that is both dire and unique.

From the policy beginnings of "massive retaliation" and "mutual assured destruction," all U.S. strategic policy has been founded on an assumption of rationality. This means we have expected that our enemies -- both state and terrorist -- will always value their continued survival more highly than anything else.

Today this key assumption can no longer be taken for granted. Confronted with jihadist enemies -- state and terrorist -- we now understand that our core threats to retaliate for first-strike aggressions might fall on deaf ears. In such circumstances, where we would no longer be able to assume enemy rationality, the entire logic of deterrence loses power.

This holds true whether we would threaten massive retaliation or the more graduated and measured forms of reprisal known professionally as "nuclear utilization theory."

What should we do? This is the single most important question that must be asked, not only by the president and his senior advisers, but also by each and every American who wants this nation to (literally) endure.

It is time to put this country's best strategic thinkers to work on a present-day equivalent of the Manhattan Project. This time the task will not be to develop a new form of super-weapon, but rather to identify and fashion a viable, comprehensive strategic doctrine. We are an imperiled country in an imperiled world. The only way we can begin to assure plausible survival is to approach strategic policy more systematically and expertly. This is a very difficult, intellectual task. We cannot expect it to be accomplished within the arenas of politics, especially in the hastily assembled campaign platforms of presidential aspirants.

Our best strategic thinkers, once convened, will have to recognize critical connections between law and strategy. From the standpoint of international law, which is always part of our own law via Article VI of the Constitution and relevant Supreme Court decisions, certain expressions of pre-emption are known as anticipatory self-defense.

Knowing about probable enemy irrationality, when would such military actions be required to protect the American homeland from all forms of WMD attack? And how would these defensive movements be compatible with conventional and customary rules?

Both Bush and his critics have already asked such hard questions, but, to date, the answers have been largely sketchy and narrowly adversarial. The timely issue of national sovereignty and U.S. right to anticipatory self-defense was brought up in a presidential debate (by Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, concerning Al Qaeda in Pakistan), but the unsurprisingly partisan analysis never rose to a sufficiently useful level. Our urgently required American strategic brain trust will also need to consider controversial matters of nuclear targeting. The issues concern differences between the targeting of enemy civilians and cities ("countervalue" targeting) and targeting of enemy military assets and infrastructures ("counterforce" targeting).

Most Americans don't realize that the essence of massive retaliation and mutual assured destruction was distinctly countervalue, nor would they likely feel comfortable with any open countervalue reaffirmations in the future. Yet in those relatively promising circumstances where enemy rationality can still be assumed, credible deterrence might well require countervalue targeting.

At first glance, such doctrine may sound barbarous. But if the only alternative were a distinctly less credible U.S. nuclear deterrent, then explicit, codified threats might well be the best available way to prevent millions of American deaths.

It is high time to put serious thinkers to work on these and related questions. Once again, we need a coherent, strategic nuclear doctrine, and we need it soon.

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Louis Rene Beres is a professor of international law at Purdue University and the author of "Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe In World Politics."