The Wrath of Kahn
The post title is tongue in cheek. Herman Kahn was anything but wrathful and came across in his day as a remarkably cheerful strategist of the apocalypse and deep futurist. Long time readers have noted my admiration for Kahn’s metacognitive strategies but for those unfamiliar with Herman Kahn, he was one of those polymathic, individuals of the WWII generation who, like Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman, could jump into high level nuclear physics research without bothering to first acquire a PhD in the field (Feynman later received a doctorate, Dyson and Kahn never did). Kahn was noted for his forthright willingness to consider humanity’s long term prospects despite the worst calamities imaginable – unlike most optimists, he assumed the events most terrible could happen – but life nevertheless would go on. A position that caused many of his critics to go ape, including the editors of Scientific American.
I bring this up because his daughter, Deborah Kahn Cunningham, emailed to say that Kahn’s classic On Thermonuclear War
This could not come at a better time. The Obama administration is making grandiose gestures with America’s nuclear deterrent based less on a hardheaded and comprehensive strategic analysis than self-serving political showmanship, tailored to mollify a Left-wing base deeply resentful of the COIN strategy the administration is starting to take in Afghanistan. Nuclear weapons affect the strategic calculus across the entire spectrum of potential decisions, they’re not just shiny, anachronistic, bargaining chips but the overwhelming reason that great power war came to an end in 1945. Period.
Human nature has not made much moral progress since the end of the Third Reich but its very worst instinct for total destruction has, so far, been held at bay by the certainty of self-destruction.
We need someone to remind us again of how to think about the unthinkable.
May 13th, 2009 at 4:58 am
Amen, brother.
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American nuclear dominance is the cement foundation of absolutely everything. Break it up and the entire world we know comes down in a heap of rubble.
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No American nuclear dominance, everyone who has relied on our protection has to get their own.
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No American nuclear dominance, any bad actor who wants to challenge us or attack a neighbor has an incentive to get their own.
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Jim Bennett had this comment, on that point:
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http://tinyurl.com/qebts4
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Most importantly, no American nuclear dominance, and conventional war becomes a viable way to do things again.
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Even doing as much as Obama has already done has put hairline cracks in the foundation of the world. Already, people around the world are having to make serious decisions.
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Barack has already set in motion the deaths of many, many people, for no reason at all.
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Some people dream about a world without nuclear weapons. Some of us don’t dream. We read about that world, the world of Verdun and Passchendaele and Stalingrad and Kursk — a world without nukes.
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Nukes = Peace
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We need a t-shirt. That may help advance the meme.
May 13th, 2009 at 5:23 am
Zen and Lex,
Excellent post and follow on comment, as well as a capital idea for a t-shirt.
The problem with people dreaming of a world without nuclear weapons is that they are so focused on the tree that they won’t see the other trees falling on them.
May 13th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
how about a nice game of chess?
no, let’s play Global Thermonuclear War
May 13th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Unilateral Disarmament…
Barack Obama has shown himself willing and able to use all the powers of his office to get what he wants for himself and his supporters. He has exhibited the kind of ruthlessness that is an essential part of the……
May 13th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
It seems futile to try to inject some rationality into this thread, but I do love to charge at windmills.
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1. We are not going to put all the nukes down the garbage disposal tomorrow. Or today.
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2. How many nukes do you think are necessary? 10,000? 5,000? 1,000? 100? Why?
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3. What sorts of things do you plan to do with them? Under what conditions?
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4. Explain how deterrence works in the modern world.
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I suspect that if you actually read Kahn, you will find his books to be quaint and anachronistic, because they were written for quite a different world than we’re in now.
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The question of conventional arms is a good one, and one that will have to be considered in the nuclear negotiations. One of Russia’s concerns is the overwhelming conventional superiority of the United States. Why isn’t that the same to you as those nukes?
May 13th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
1. We are letting the ones we have decay, so sayeth Gates, and Obama is spending trillions on other stuff, but won’t spend the money to maintain our nuclear weapons. So, we are putting them down the garbage disposal.
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2. Tough to pick a number. The point is to send a message that you can annihilate anyone who crosses you, and that you have a range of types of warheads for use with various delivery systems. It is certainly in four figures.
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3. You plan to make it clear that anyone who initiates use of nuclear weapons, including by giving them to third parties for use against us or our allies, will suffer literal, physical, final and total annihilation as a society. Short of that, the destruction of major cities, millions of people, and catastrophic destruction generally.
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4. Deterrence works in the modern world because people are afraid of the prospect of 3, above, happening.
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Kahn was a think-out-loud writer. It has been a long time since I read him. What I liked about him was that he did not try to inject too much rationality into a discussion about people making decisions while living under the prospect of having themselves, their families, friends, countries and everything they knew and valued being incinerated. His discussion of nuclear deterrance as a game of chicken, where the rational guy — in sthe sense of bean-counting, utilitarian rationality — loses every time, seems to me to be as far from quaint and anachronistic as it can be.
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Deterrence works in the modern world the same way it worked in the Paleolithic world. The other band of cave men know that if they cross you, you will bash their heads in with rocks, so they go hunt elsewhere and bother someone else.
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Nothing has changed.
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Conventional arms do not keep the peace the way nuclear weapons do. People can talk themselves into waging war against a country with all the best conventional weapons there are.
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Nuclear weapons are sui generis. That is Latin. It means its own genus, or species. So, they get analyzed in a different way because they are different.
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Deterrence is about sending signals. Obama is sending all the wrong signals. He is projecting fecklessness and baseless idealism. It is perfectly "rational" to be outraged by this foolish, dangerous conduct.
May 13th, 2009 at 5:24 pm
Hi Cheryl,
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I realize this issue is near and dear to you professionally as well as politically, but our differences here are over policy and are not at all personal. I’m not sure if your above is entirely directed at me but let’s try not to be too condescending as the discussion progresses, I have been known to read a book or two in my time. 🙂
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Now as to your points:
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1. I realize that. I’m also aware that even after the cuts from a Cold War apex of around 50,000 nuclear warheads, the U.S. and Russia maintain comfortable margins from which nuclear arms levels can be safely reduced. The issue is that the strategic end goal of zero nuclear weapons is unwise in principle and would be globally destabilizing in practice.
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2. The minimum number of nukes is not fixed but relative.
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This is where anti-nuke advocates go wrong in their strategic thinking. The number is the level at which other advanced nations continue to see the prospect of trying to acquire strategic parity with Russia and the United States through an arms build-up as a) an uneconomic investment of scarce national resources and b) useless in a military sense because the U.S. could choose to maintain or widen the gap and retain first strike capabilities. The number of warheads depends on the GDP and national interests of potential competitors. Much less than now, far more than the anti-nuke crowd would be willing to accept.
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3. I think we’ve had this discussion more than once. The best use of nuclear weapons is deterring nuclear war and preventing great power war by the logic of escalation. Actual use of a nuclear weapons is of such gravity that it would be acceptable only in regard to existential threats or responding to a WMD attack that had caused catastrophic effects.
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4. I think we have done that previously as well, possibly more than once, to a greater degree than has the USG. Without writing a white paper in my own comment section I can state categorically that the world will calculate the utility of force differently in a post-nuclear world than in a nuclear one.
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We may not like the calculus.
May 13th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
1. The Jasons, a group of folks who know just a bit about nuclear weapons, say that our current designs should last a hundred years or longer.
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2. Well, the problem with your argument starts here. Your theory seems to be that you’re the baddest nation around if you’ve got nukes. But that doesn’t stop the terrorists (recall September 2001) or Somali pirates or the North Vietnamese or the Chechens or lots of other unfriendlies from causing trouble. So what is it that you think thousands of nukes will deter? BTW, we currently have about 3000 deployed, and the numbers are going down every day because George Bush agreed with Vladimir Putin that they would.
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3. This is not even close to current American policy.
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4. Please provide examples. It’s vacuous to claim that something works because it works.
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Golly, I guess I’ve missed something. We have developed laws of war. There was that guy Clausewitz who said something about war tending toward total war, but we have to keep it from going there because all sides lose that way.
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The rest of what you’re saying is circular. See #4. This is the problem with a lot of deterrence thinking. There is a real difficulty in analyzing why something doesn’t happen. It could be that snapping my fingers does indeed keep the elephants from coming into the room. Or maybe not. Proof (or a persuasive argument) that deterrence works needs more than an assertion that it does.
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President Medvedev issued a joint statement with Obama calling for decreases in nuclear weapons. Does that make him feckless too? And, as I pointed out above, President Bush continued the decreases that started with other presidents. Ronald Reagan almost agreed with Mikhail Gorbachev to eliminate nuclear weapons by 2000. Baseless idealism?
May 13th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Hi Mark –
My last comment was addressed to Lex. Let me respond to you now.
1. I’m not sure your statement can be proved. In any case, I’m not seeing a lot of evidence for it, except that before there were nuclear weapons, there were some pretty devastating wars.
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2. I agree with relative. That’s why what Obama and others I consider rational are saying that we must negotiate our way down in such a way as to maintain stability. As to the rest of your argument, the US also maintains an enormous lead in conventional arms, as I noted above. Other countries have noticed this.
3. "The best use of nuclear weapons is deterring nuclear war and preventing great power war by the logic of escalation." Yes. The first is what many people are now saying. I’m not sure about the second part, would need to kick it some more before I would agree or disagree.
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We agree in so many respects, I’m not quite sure how you got off on the wrong track. 😉
May 13th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
1. Sec. Gates says we need to upgrade. Jasons or Gates? (yeah, I know who they are) If in doubt on something of life or death gravity, like keeping your weapons functional, go with keeping them functional. Anyway, Obama did not draw on that kind of reasoning, he is drawing on a moving-toward-abolition reasoning, at least verbally.
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2. Nuclear deterrence does not have to stop everybody. Nothing does that. I think thousands of nukes deters people from even building conventional capabilities since it makes no sense to do so. Problems that are not even on the table are not there because it makes no sense so put them there. The fact that all we have to worry about is nuisances like the Somali knuckleheads is a benefit of nuclear dominance.
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3. It does not matter if it is not American policy. We could do it, and if we can, no one knows whether we will, and no one wants to risk it. If New York were destroyed with a nuclear weapon, it is not possible to predict what our "policy" would be if we could identify the culprit. We invaded Iraq because of 9/11, in retrospect, an act of random and disconnected violence just because we were pissed. What would we do about a radioactive crater in lower Manhattan. Policy schmolicy.
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4. Examplse of deterrence working … . OK, so prove to you that all kinds of things that did not happen did not happen for the reason I say they did not happen. Probably not possible to do. Try it this way. We have had a massive falling off in the scale and intensity of conventional military conflict since Hiroshima. When countries that are in conflict get nuclear weapons, conflicts descends to the subconventional level. I suppose you could say, "ah, yes, but how do you KNOW that all that did not happen because people just decided to be nice?" My response is this. The correlation between nuclear weapons and great power peace is so strong and consistent, it is manifestly foolhardy to do anything to disturb that situation unless you have some strong case that there is some other cause. There is no such case. The burden of proof is on the person who claims that American nuclear predominance is not the cause of the outbreak of peace. No other factor can explain it.
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"We have developed laws of war. " They are ignored by anybody who benefits from ignoring them. There is no sovereign, so there is no law beyond agreement. Even in civil life agreements are breached out of mere convenience or greed. I know, I work those disputes to buy my groceries. If lives and survival are on the line? Parchment barriers.
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Medvedev, holding a weak hand, is getting his potential enemy the USA to weaken itself in exchange for nothing but words. That is not fecklessness, that is winning the lottery.
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The question of decreases, or the total number or type of weapons we should have, or even what our declaratory policy should be, are all open questions.
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The problem with Obama is that he says unreasonable and Utopian sounding things, then he proceeds to act in a way that suggests he actually believes them.
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That is dangerous and he should stop it.
May 14th, 2009 at 1:18 am
The main reason to fund the RRW program is to make sure we continue to train people who know how to design and maintain nukes. Our nuclear stockpile is not going to decay or lose its deterrent function if we don’t design a bunch of third-generation nukes; doing so arguably makes it harder to hold what’s left of the nonproliferation regime together.
So while the program may or may not be a good idea, the sky isn’t going to fall anytime soon if we stop funding it.
May 14th, 2009 at 4:50 am
This is addressed to Cheryl – Regarding your observation/comment "I suspect that if you actually read Kahn, you will find his books to be quaint and anachronistic, because they were written for quite a different world than we’re in now." here are some pertinent excerpts (my emphasis added) from Thomas Schelling’s introduction to the soon-to-be-republished On Escalation: … But the book is not only about conduct in a nuclear war. Its analysis of crisis management, “escalation” of threats and diplomacy, was in 1965 the best in print. And that character of the book helps to make it remarkably current after more than four decades since its publication. When this book was first published there was only one nuclear “confrontation,” that between east and west, or USA and USSR. (I intend no offence to Britain or France, nor to China whose nuclear test had just occurred.) Now that confrontation is in remission, but there is a Pakistan-India face-off and the possibility of small-nation nuclear crises or small nation-large nation crises. I know of no better preparation for future nuclear dangers than this book. It’s forty-five years old but is a classic that will never be out of date. I recommend it not only to those who, were it 1965, would find it essential in thinking about the most dangerous issues in international affairs, but to those in a dozen or more nations now to whom nuclear weapons are a new concern and preoccupation. This is a genuine classic that, I’m afraid, will never be out of date.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:35 am
We’re still really at the age of deterrence.
May 14th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
I haven’t read the book, so I can’t really reply to number 12, except to say that crisis management is always a current subject – but that doesn’t depend on the "nuclearity" of the crisis.
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What is out of date (and perhaps even quaint) is the two-player nature of the Cold War. Game theory tells us that multi-player games are much more complex, usually don’t have solutions even if their two-player counterparts do.
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As to training people to design weapons – why? We don’t need to make them smaller, like we thought we did for a while to put them in multiple numbers on missiles. (and then, fecklessly?, took them off again) We know how to make them, and a number of tricks to vary the applications. If the knowledge is so easy to procure that we need to worry about all those little guys we’re deterring (or maybe not), then we don’t need to train new designers. Even the first nuclear weapon, Little Boy, was never tested, so simple was it to design.
May 14th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
DKC — Thanks for the tip on Kahn/Schelling.
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Here’s the Amazon page: http://tinyurl.com/qyxxps
May 14th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Cheryl has not read the book, yet she feels qualified to tell people what they would find should they themselves read the book (quaint and anarchistic etc). There is a word for the trait that Cheryl displays here, but I will refrain, except to say that Cheryl does not do her credibility any favours.
No doubt she has her own personal reasons for taking her position.
May 14th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Cheryl: "As to training people to design weapons – why? We don’t need to make them smaller, like we thought we did for a while to put them in multiple numbers on missiles. (and then, fecklessly?, took them off again) We know how to make them, and a number of tricks to vary the applications."
Making and maintaining nuclear weapons is a lot more difficult than putting together a wheelbarrow; in other words, it takes more than having some design schematics and manuals. You need highly trained people with something close to hands on experience.
What makes you think we no longer use MIRVs? Or that modern thermonuclear warheads are as simple as the earliest uranium-based fission bombs? I’ll also point out that (1) "Little Boy" was produced by some of the finest minds in nuclear engineering (another area we’re now hurting in) and (2) the Russians couldn’t reproduce even that weapon with access to its design schematics; they had to have large teams of scientists adapting US designs.
But I find it odd that we’re having this argument, as I mostly agree with you. The RRW program gets justified on the grounds of maintaining current deterrent capabilities, but a lot of it seems to be about next-generation nuclear weapons that we don’t really need–nor necessarily want.
May 14th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
PS: it is true that we <a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1076839.html">de-MIRVed a number of missiles to comply with the START II limits, but that’s not the same thing as abandoning MIRVs entirely</a>.
May 14th, 2009 at 6:32 pm
Barnett weighs in:
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http://tinyurl.com/o99dm3
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Amen, brother.
May 14th, 2009 at 11:19 pm
Humans have this fundamental problem: they’re stupid. Nuclear weapons have a fundamental asset: a rollicking fireball from hell translates into any language. That helps clear the stupidity hurdle. Certain actors, no matter how loose their turbans are, will understand the bright hot fireball and completely miss the nuanced, rational strategies that seek to gently massage them into a virtual symposium under the leafy Groves of Academe. The vaporized remnants of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini Atoll speak louder than any softer strategy. It’s probably a moot point anyway. For Russia to give up the only thing that keeps it from being a polar Mexico when the force multiplier of its nuclear arsenal is the only thing that keeps it from the tender mercies of its neighbors would take an outburst of Gorbachev-level romantic idealism that the current Russian leadership seems unlikely to supply or sustain.
May 15th, 2009 at 1:26 am
I read Kahn’s "Thinking about the Unthinkable" and it definitely changed my understanding nuclear weapons. Before, I was typical in my thinking that nuclear weapons would mean "the end of the world" if ever used. I now know this is far from the truth.
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That aside, I support building tactical nukes that could be used on the battlefield and especially would like to see nuke sized explosions that don’t result in fall-out and/or radiation.
May 15th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I guess, as to the difficulty of building nukes, I’ll reference Little Boy (again) and the weapons designers’ assurances that we don’t need to test their new designs.
I do find it amusing that all the Jack Bauer fans all of a sudden find nuclear terrorism not a problem, now that they need to dismiss that argument so they can keep their nukes. (See Jack, er, Tom Barnett.)
I did make it sound like we were abandoning MIRVs entirely, and I apologize. I know we’ve still got them (although my sense of some of the commenters is that we will have to pry their cold, dead fingers from their last nuke), but we and the Russians have many fewer than we had before we (fecklessly?) negotiated their numbers down.
Nuke-sized explosions that don’t result in fallout or radiation would have to come from conventional explosives. You can’t eliminate those characteristics from nukes. And you’d need an awful lot of conventional explosives.
It’s those cold dead fingers that bother me. The more vehement advocates of keeping our nukes don’t really seem to have a program, just a reaction. We have treaty obligations, including working for disarmament under the NPT. We have other treaty obligations (signed by George Bush) to get the nuclear numbers down. Some of the arguments seem to be that we must have infinite numbers of nukes, with no limits. That led to the arms race that was one of the factors in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. A big buildup (or perhaps even building all those RRWs – we would have to build a lot of facilities as well) might do the same for us, not to mention touching off an arms race with the Russians, Chinese and whoever else feels that macho urge. And that would make us need more!!!
If the program is to keep the status quo, sorry, won’t work. We’re doing some stupid things (along with the Russians), like maintaining missiles on alert status, that are more likely to result in an accident than to protect us. And the land-based missiles destabilize the balance, because you’ve got to shoot them off quickly, before they’re destroyed.
For Seerov, Kahn was writing forty years ago. We now know that even a few tens of nukes are likely to cause nuclear winter for everyone. They really are different from other weapons in their destructive power, sui generis.
And I’ll remind everyone, once again, that Obama didn’t say this is going to happen tomorrow. He said maybe not even in his lifetime.