Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

36th Annual IFPA-Fletcher Conference on
National Security and Policy
Nuclear and Non-Nuclear Forces in 21st-Century Deterrence: Implementing the New Triad

December 14-15, 2005
Grand Hyatt Washington Hotel
Washington, D.C.

Session 3 - Lessons for the 21st Century from Cold War Deterrence

Address by Dr. Fred Iklé, Distinguished Scholar, Center for Strategic and International Studies; former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; and former Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

Dr. Iklé: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. This conference, Mr. Chairman, is dangerous. It’s dangerous not because of the perilous contingencies that we look at, situations where nuclear weapons may be used or are actually being used. It is dangerous because we are using old concepts. Cold War concepts were flawed even before the Cold War ended. It’s been as if we were riding on an old horse, in fact, on a skeleton of a horse. Now, this skeleton has a nice name, it’s called “deterrence.” Mr. Chairman, I apologize. This is kind of a lowbrow way of starting my remarks. Let me switch to highbrow.
[Laughter]

The great American philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, warned us that the excessive reliance on abstractions, or what he called “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” is a bad way to proceed in intellectual work. And that's what we do with the D word — “deterrence.” We discuss deterrence as something rather concrete, empirically observable. Or to put it another way, another highbrow way, we hypothesize. Somebody who has a lisp can’t use that word. [laughter] Now, it says here that I should talk about the lessons from the Cold War history. That can be fairly brief because nobody in this room is younger than 16. So we all remember at least a piece of the Cold War history. How did it get started on deterrence?

The Manhattan scientists made some predictions on the nuclear age that got started at that time. If there would not be an effective ban on nuclear weapons throughout the world (more effective than the Baruch plan could have been), then the Soviet Union would get nuclear weapons . They did so in five years. They would get to build far more powerful ones. They did so in eight years. They would get very large numbers of nuclear weapons. They did so in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s. Now, given these predictions, which all came true, the Manhattan scientists also concluded that the Soviet Union could launch an attack so large, our best air defense (this is before the missile era) our best air defense could not shoot down all incoming Soviet airplanes, bombers and what have you. So we had to rely on something else in addition to deterrence. We had to rely on the counter threat of retaliation. I stressed in addition , because at that time, we had air defense. In fact, around 1959, ’60, we spent quite a bit more on on strategic defense than on strategic offensive systems.

I used that statistic when I was in the Reagan Administration to defend the SDI project in debates with our friends up at Harvard. The Harvard friends were astonished. How could it be we spent more on defensive systems than on offensive systems? So I got out the data – and so they shifted the topic. [laughter] But that's important to remember. And all the thinking on deterrence or dissuasion was perfectly reasonable, concrete, fact-based. It didn't get into Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” But alas, this thinking metastasized into a library full of abstract excursions about different types of deterrence, extended deterrence, mutual deterrence, perfect deterrence, partial deterrence and so on. We all have sinned and contributed some volumes to that library full of papers and books.

Yet, having said all this critical stuff, one thing stands out from these 60 years, one stellar accomplishment that’s still with us: the dispensation of non-use, nuclear non-use. By now the public, and indeed the governments of democracies and maybe most other nations, have become so habituated to this non-use we think about it not explicitly, but implicitly, in the back of our mind, it is like the air that we’re breathing. We’re not prepared to operate in a dispensation of frequent nuclear use. We all know it, we are not prepared.

And since we’re so dependent on non-use, it means we should not give all the credit to deterrence. Deterrence, we learned painfully, does not prevent conventional attack, and does not stop a conventional defense, like the defense in Iraq against our building of democracy there. We learned that in 1950, Kim Il-Sung was not deterred. He had zero nuclear weapons, China had zero nuclear weapons. The Russians may have had none, or three, we had 300, at least ten times as many as the Soviet Union and maybe infinite if they had zero. Kim Il-Sung was not deterred, Stalin was not deterred from backing him up afterwards with his pilots and airplanes. China was not deterred entering the war across Yalu. And we had great losses.

Vietnam is somewhat different. There the Viet Cong, so he was not deterred by our massive nuclear strength. And then interestingly in a reverse situation, the Soviet war against the Afghan resistance, I don't think it ever entered the Soviets mind that they might win the Afghan war by using nuclear weapons. They may have debated it, I haven’t seen any references in any declassified documents from Moscow. I remember when I was Undersecretary for Policy in the Reagan Administration, I was worried about Soviet escalation as a response to our use of the stinger missiles and other interventions to help of the Mujahedeen. Soviet escalation into Pakistan was a possibility, but I at least was not worried it would be a nuclear escalation.

A second limitation of deterrence is kind of obvious, yet we tend to forget it. Deterrence can only ward off deliberate attacks. Deterrence cannot dissuade an accident from happening. Now, all of you will recall several near-accidents in the last 50, 40 years. And obviously, we are all still here so they did not become real accidents. And some were quite serious near-accidents, and there may be others we never learned about. Why did we survive them all? Precautions, careful measures against accidents which kicked in before the accident went to full disaster is a partial answer. Good luck is the other answer, or maybe instead of “good luck” one might wish to say “the intervention of Providence.” Anyhow, we got this far.

So where do we go from here? A sound objective, in addition to making the best out of dissuasion or deterrence where it properly applies, is to keep the risk of accidents and mindless decisions so low that it wouldn’t start nuclear warfare. Or to be more precise, as low as feasible, given other objectives of deterrence. And that's a difficult balance at times. This relates to the question of escalation. We may have some nuclear event, that could be terrorist act, and you want to prevent, of course, that event from escalating. The best warning on that from history is still the mobilization structure that was in place in August, 1914. A terrorist act provoked one of the main participant empires in that escalation, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into their excessive response. Then the other two empires kicked in, the Russian Czar’s Empire and the German Empire. All these three empires were destroyed. The Austrian-Hungarian Empire was finished for good. And the Serbs, who backed the assassination (what was the assassin’s name? Princip, I think — he was executed), the Serbs who backed Princip came out as winners in the new Yugoslavia that was Serb dominated -- until Milosevic destroyed Yugoslavia.

So we don’t want to do that favor to future nuclear terrorists: to let him drive us into an escalation that will destroy the United States, Russia, and what have you, China and so on. And that means we have to be mindful of mindless decisions, and accidents that can happen. And that is a counterbalance, as I mentioned, to deterrence. It’s a very important subject and I would suggest this wonderful conference could have a follow-up where this topic is dealt with.

And third, to bring this all together, we want to keep in mind that prolonging the non-use dispensation is in our American interests. Indeed, you might say it’s in the interest of all democracies, or all nations that want to survive and that have rational, functioning governments. It would be in our interest, even if there was an incipient global Caliphate, the beginning of what the jihadist terrorists sometimes talk about. These Jihadists are willing to risk suicide when they act as suicide bombers, but if they want to build something like a Caliphate they create a target for retaliation and deterrence can then kick in. It’s an interesting point to keep in mind,.

So who would want to deliberately — not inadvertent — end the dispensation of non-use? I think it would be extremist anarchists who want to create a global anarchy, or a member of a crazed doomsday cult. Now, unless somebody here is a secret member of such a doomsday cult, I would say there's nobody here who should want the dispensation of non-use to end. And that imposes on us a broader way of looking at deterrence and dissuasion than we are usually engaged in.

It’s time to sum up. I return once more, as my last line, to advice on methodology. We need to move into this broader view of the importance of non-use, and of inadvertent attack. And we also must try to make things as concrete as possible, and keep away from adding to the library of abstract ideas and speculations about attack and counterattack, which can generate all kinds of numbers. We generated all kinds of numbers in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s about superiority, inferiority, parity. Remember the discussion about parity? It seems much less important today.

And the final advice — the don’t lisp word: let’s not do the hypothesizing that we have done in prior decades. Thank you.
[Applause]