From Inference Review, November 2017:
Jean-Pierre Dupuy is Professor Emeritus of Social and Political Philosophy at the ÉcolePolytechnique in Paris and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.
What, Errol Morris once asked Robert McNamara, protected humanity from extinction during the Cold War?1 Was it deterrence? Not at all. “We lucked out,” McNamara replied.2 Mankind had come within inches of the apocalypse, McNamara added, and it had come within inches of the apocalypse twenty or thirty times.
Little has changed. Cassandra has, if anything, grown more alarmed. The risk of nuclear catastrophe, former Secretary of Defense William Perry remarked, “is greater than it was during the Cold War and most people are blissfully unaware of this danger.”3 Perry made these remarks in 2016, well after the Cold War ended, and well before Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un began exchanging lurid threats.
For more than half a century, nuclear strategy has been governed by the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, or MAD; but nuclear strategy is, in part, the expression of an older view of international affairs, one in which every state faces a world in which there is a temptation to launch military action and a threat against doing so. In a world in which states are more or less equal, each state is apt to conclude that its best strategy is to do nothing. No state can do better, although every state can do worse. The balance of power worked well during parts of the nineteenth century, and especially between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. When it failed, it failed dramatically.
To traditional strategies, MAD adds a new concern—what Carl von Clausewitz called the escalation to extreme. Before 1945, states might have thought of war as offering advantages denied by peace. This is no longer true. Among nuclear states, escalation involves an outcome desired by no state and feared by all.
MAD is, by definition, a strategy of deterrence. If, as a strategy, it does not deter, it is no good. It is the promise of a second strike, if a first strike is launched, that comprises the deterrence. Yet an analysis of MAD suggests that, as a strategy, it is ineffective. Having been attacked by a first strike, every state understands that if its threat was a bluff, once called, it cannot be executed, and if was not a bluff, once challenged, it cannot have been a deterrent. If MAD fails as a deterrent, the strategy is ineffective. And worse. The conditions under which it might succeed as a threat guarantee that it must fail as a strategy. When Austria-Hungary served Serbia with an ultimatum in the summer of 1914, it threatened war if its ultimatum was rejected. Its ultimatum was rejected, and it went to war. It did not threaten worldwide annihilation, and it was unable to bring it about. This is the difference made by nuclear weapons. No state sees an advantage in a global nuclear catastrophe; it is not among any state’s goals. But if a second strike is not a rational goal, of what use is MAD as a rational strategy?
“Of no rational use at all,” is one obvious answer. A number of strategic theorists, and even a few politicians, have argued that MAD requires madmen in order to succeed. Who knows what they will do? This is an idea made plausible in Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict; and made famous by Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War.4 Speaking to his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, Nixon remarked:
I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “For God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button,” and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.5If MAD requires madmen to fail, it also requires madmen to succeed. When it comes to nuclear strategy, madmen are needed all around.
Fate and the Tiger....
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