A Reliable Deterrence System
We do not have a reliable theory of deterrence. We do not really have a trusty explanation of how deterrence works, that is, how and why humans behave the way they do, especially under crisis conditions, when they face life and regime-threatening dangers and when they are being backed into a corner and coerced to do things against their will. Nuclear systems should then be built on the assumption of "uncertainty," not certainty; on the possibility and probability of human breakdown and error and not on human omniscience and the prospects of total control. But American and Soviet nuclear policy was based instead on the assumption that deterrence and war fighting could be controlled if enough weapons of the right kind were available. These strategic aims drove the expansion of the nuclear arsenals on both sides.
What are some of the endemic uncertainties that strategists and political leader must confront in fashioning a reliable deterrence system? First, we should admit that we really do not know how adversaries will act in a crisis. Will they behave rationally and do everything to escape a nuclear exchange for which they have carefully prepared? Will one or both "blink" at the last moment and save themselves and their adversary from intolerable damage and untold human suffering? Can they count on saving their deterrence regime at the eleventh hour, while working feverishly to undermine its stability through volatile and provocative arms acquisition policies?
Second, will the organizational structure and bureaucratic procedures to maintain military and political controls work when they are needed most? What we know of organizational behavior and bureaucratic politics gives us pause that the command, communications, and control systems (C3) to direct nuclear forces will work when they are needed most. How dependable were these systems during the Cold War? How effective are they todayin the United States, in Russia, and among other real and would-be nuclear powers? As suggested by the works of several authors, including Bruce Blair and Scott Sagan, we came close a number of times to a nuclear exchange as a consequence of faulty intelligence or breakdowns of our C3 systems. Sagan reports that, in August 1962, a navigational error sent a B-52 toward the Soviet Union until a ground controller spied the mistake and recalled the errant bomber.
We learn from Blair that Soviet operational procedures deliberately favored a capacity for positive controls, that is, controls facilitating deliberate launches, over negative controls to prevent unauthorized launches. As Lawrence Freedman concludes in his review of Blair's book, "This risked having a system that was highly vulnerable to false information and moments of high tension."

Controlled Escalation
Third, strategists also like to talk about controlling escalation if hostilities were to break out. But how confident can we be that such control is possible in the fog of war or under the intense pressures of a crisis? Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which recounts the early days of World War I, affords us a vivid picture of all the things that can go wrong when strategy overtakes political aims and common sense. Should we have placed our faith in two doomsday machinesone Soviet, the other Americanthat offered the deceptive illusion that if deterrence were to break down for any reason, then these arsenals could be relied upon to limit damage, control escalation, and bring the war to a swift close on terms favorable to the prevailing side? Did we really believe that military and civilian targets could be so scrupulously differentiated through well-designed surgical strikes? Even if an adversary were able to insulate and sanitize military from civilian targets, would the receiving adversary keep these subtle discriminations in mind in contemplating its response as the warheads began exploding? What of "military" targets close to cities? And what about the fallout? Or near misses that fall on population centers? And what of unauthorized launchings or preemptive strikes occasioned by trigger-ready, launch-on-warning control systems?
But these elements of uncertainty are not the full story of the bankruptcy of separating nuclear strategy from politics. Deterrence and war-fighting theory, as such, offer no way out of the impasse between adversaries. Such no-exit thinking ossifies the political imagination in efforts to devise ways to surmount the political divisions between peoples and states. At best, deterrence buys time to undertake such efforts even as preparations to reinforce deterrence nullify or erode the impact of arms control and disarmament to stabilize a deterrence regime or to undermine responsible negotiations to ameliorate or end a political conflict. The governments of the United States and the Soviet Union had to risk their populations to save them. That seems to be a morally repugnant and odious position, however urgent and seemingly compelling the political exigencies that drove both sides to this strategy.
But didn't deterrence work? Didn't the United States and the West stop Communist aggression and a Soviet attack on Europe and its allies elsewhere? Didn't the United States and the West win the Cold War by standing tall and tough?
No simple or sound-bite response will suffice to address these important questions. The discussion is limited by space to the debatable propositions of whether so massive a nuclear buildup was needed to maintain mutual deterrence. A deterrent regime, arguably, could have been realized and maintained at much lower and less risky levels of nuclear might while both sides searched for a way out of their impasse.
The larger and more important point is that deterrence did nothing to surmount itself. The real causes for the Soviet collapse and the end of the Cold War lie elsewhere than in deterrence. They lie in the flawed Soviet social, economic, and political experiment. Where Moscow succeeded was, indeed, in matching the United States at the nuclear level. Where the Soviets failed was in their inability to respond to the demands of its ruling eliteand the needs of its deprived and oppressed populationsfor "more now," for economic growth and technological progress, and for national self-expression that would assure the diverse peoples of the Soviet Union representation in shaping their future, free of the Gulag and single-party control. National diversions, not nuclear deterrence, eventually destroyed the Soviet Union.
Loyalty to the Soviet regime could only be purchased by the overbearing exercise of the bureaucratic, military, and police power of the Soviet state. The Soviet Union was able to meet the resource and doctrinal needs of its nuclear strategy, but not the political needs and demands of its own population.

"By the Skin of Our Teeth"
We survived the Cold War but just barely, by the "skin of our teeth," as Thornton Wilder once wrote. We could have managed our nuclear and political affairs better on both sides; we could have been more attentive to the limits placed by politics on military strategy, force, and threats. Where Karl von Clausewitz cautioned that war is politics by other means and that the former must always be subordinated to the latter, the United States and the Soviet Union reversed this relation and made politics, nuclear war by other means.
Remembrances of the bitter past, like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, occasion reflection about the limits of force in realizing human aims and aspirations. Such reflections alone will not likely be enough to constrain enduring rivals to settle their conflicts peacefully. In light of the continued violence in the post-Cold War world, there is little basis for the belief that humans will, sometime soon, purge themselves of their perceived need to resort to violence in settling their affairs. Reflections on past errors suggest, however, a strong presumption in favor of the proposition that if force is to be used, then it should be the last, not the first, option to be exercised. Military strategy should be based on uncertainty, leaving a broad berth for the play of error, misperception, and human frailty to guard against unwanted and self-destructive resorts to violence. The aim of deterrence should beand not paradoxicallyan invitation to search for political solutions that surmount them and the implicit threats of force on which they rest. The atomization of the people of Hiroshima prompts us to reassess the limits of threatening death and destruction in attempts to impose our will on others. This sad experience casts doubt on the appealing but mischievous assumption that there are simple Roman solutions in an age of mass destructive weapons for ageless and intractable Greek problems.



Edward A. Kolodziej is a research professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-founder of the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security. He is the author or editor of ten books and more than a hundred articles and reviews on the role of force in international relations and on regional security systems, and he is one of the leading American experts on French arms and security policy. His recent research includes an edited volume on managing regional conflict. His current research looks at solutions to the problems of order, welfare, and legitimacy in the emerging world society.



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