The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

To make his muddled prescription for deterrence a shred more persuasive, Mr. Draper ignores or misreads a lot of history and grossly misrepresents my own long-held views. My “Bishops, Statesmen and Other Strategists,” in last June’s Commentary, detailed the confusions in the declaratory strategy dominant in the West for twenty years, that to deter any Soviet use of nuclear weapons we must threaten to annihilate civil society in the East, even though that would lead to ending it in the West—and possibly life on earth. If our threats of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) failed to deter a nuclear attack, even one confined enough to leave us an obvious continuing stake in survival, slogans like “Deterrence Only” and “Use, Never” imply directly that we should not use nuclear weapons in response. In short, we’d have to give up; there would be no “exchange,” only the Soviet use. But even without such slogans, threats to bring on the apocalypse have been increasingly transparent, a bluff made only more visible by the relative growth of Soviet nuclear and nonnuclear forces; and by the fact that the US has always intended to deter a nuclear attack (or even an overwhelming nonnuclear attack) on an ally, and not only a nuclear attack on itself.

Even if we were to bite off our tongues, as Draper recommends, rather than talk about moral issues raised by threatening to blow up the world, such a ruinous bluff would be recklessly imprudent. By undermining the credibility that we would respond at all, it raises the chances that the Soviets would choose to use nuclear weapons to avoid some more plausible disaster they might face, for example during the course of unexpected troubles in a conventional invasion. But some proponents of MAD would also increase the chance that we might use our own nuclear weapons by mistake since, to give suicidal threats a semblance of conviction, they have proposed that we launch our ICBMs automatically in response to electromagnetic indications that the Soviets have launched theirs. Finally, advocates of MAD threats who oppose any attempt to increase our ability to set bounds to the harm done to either side, not only increase the probability of nuclear war by accident or choice, but make the devastation that would result more extensive.

To deter attack, instead of threatening to annihilate noncombatants on both sides, we should prepare to respond by targeting combatants and their essential support in ways appropriate to the given contingency: (1) The West has long needed urgently to improve its conventional forces so that they can be expected to defeat a nonnuclear attack on any interest critical for the West. For this purpose we need to improve our ability to deliver nonnuclear weapons precisely on military targets from safer extended ranges. (2) The prospect of losing key elements of their conventional or nuclear power should deter Soviet attack as much as the risk of losing Soviet bystanders: their past behavior makes clear that they value military power at least as much as Soviet bystanders. (3) By attacking key elements of Soviet military power, we would most directly interfere with Soviet conduct of war and so hasten its end. (4) Just as the prospect of losing key parts of their military power would discourage an initial attack, so still greater expected losses would deter continuing attacks. (5) In any case, we don’t want to destroy bystanders in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union: it’s wrong, they do us no harm, and many are potential allies. Finally, (6) such a policy of deterring attack and bringing the war to conclusion quickly by emphasizing response against military targets does not require that the Soviets “agree” to follow the same policy, though Draper falsely claims that is “the nub of my argument.” It is neither the nub, nor any part of it.¹ The Soviets have reasons of their own to avoid letting violence mount without limit. They’ve always taken enemy military forces as their principal wartime targets and have never shown an interest in suicide or assuring an enemy that he could destroy them. Even if they waste military effort by destroying our harmless bystanders, we are still better off ending the war as rapidly as we can by targeting their military forces.

In the December Commentary, I said that “even rhetorical wars should be limited and discriminate…I do not hold that proponents of the now standard Western threats to destroy population on both sides of the Iron Curtain would prefer to surrender (or, still less, to execute such threats) rather than to deter. It is their way of trying to deter.” I hoped proponents of MAD threats might avoid saying that those who emphasize response against military targets actually prefer war to deterring it.

A wan hope. Some (not all) contributors to The New York Review persistently suggest just that. So Draper. He thinks it’s odd, since I said it was hard to resist answering his distortions, that I did—at several points. Nothing odd about that. Things that are hard to resist are easy to do. On the other hand, I took careful aim. I wasn’t tempted to make the wildly inaccurate swings that are at the core of Draper’s own angry and blustering polemic.

Like many advocates of MAD threats, Draper holds a technological determinism foreclosing choice in nuclear policy and he shares their sloppy treatment of the key role of uncertainties and risks. He presents an extreme version of “launch-on-warning” that suggests we might launch our missiles irrevocably on the basis of signs of reversible preparations by the Soviets to launch an attack.² He frequently states without qualification that “once they [nuclear forces] are used, they can only effectively destroy both the Soviets and ourselves,”³ and assumes implicitly that even in a regional conflict with Soviet forces, if we respond to their use of nuclear weapons by attacking military targets, we would have to attack all or almost all Soviet military forces and facilities including those inside large cities.⁴ On the other hand, sometimes he asserts only that “any nuclear war will bring with it the risk of mutual annihilation,”⁵ that is, it may end that way. Draper says it would be irrational for the US to annihilate itself on behalf of Europe, but fails to note that suicide does no more on behalf of oneself.

Draper never seriously considers the possibility that if the Soviet Union uses nuclear weapons in a limited way, and we respond in kind, we would both continue to have the strongest incentives to keep their use well short of total mutual annihilation. He merely asserts that the losing side is “bound to…overcome some disadvantage by a process of escalation.”⁶ Even if escalation made things vastly worse? If it meant “suicide”? The end of life on earth? Indeed, in spite of his many statements that any nuclear exchange would lead to mutual annihilation, he also says that should deterrence fail, “it would seem to be the most ordinary prudence and elementary common sense to make sure that we…do whatever we must to limit the damage to ourselves and our allies, and to induce the other side to terminate the conflict as quickly as possible in its own interest.”⁷

Draper does not tell us how to make doing whatever we must “sure” (or even a bit more likely) since he also says that the losing side is “bound” to escalate. Nor why we should try if, as he sometimes says, any nuclear exchange will inevitably lead to mutual suicide. He suggests that we can do nothing to limit harm should deterrence fail, because “no one can be sure what such a war would be like.” But the large uncertainties do not mean we can do no better than to prepare a capability simply to assure mutual annihilation. We can improve the odds, reduce the uncertainties about what we should do to limit damage. Draper not only implies that improvements in our capacity to maintain control and discrimination in various contingencies are infeasible, but, even worse, that they would weaken deterrence because they would reduce “uncertainty.”

My June and December pieces dealt with the stereotype that the more uncertain the better for deterring.⁸ The effectiveness of a deterrent depends not merely on the horror of the sanction promised but on the likelihood that it would be applied. The fact that the West had made no preparation to respond by limiting the catastrophe in case deterrence fails would make it less believable that we’d try. By decreasing the certainty of our response, we would then make it more tempting for the Soviets to believe us when we say that we may threaten suicidal use of nuclear weapons but never actually use them. Verbal nuclear threats hedged by statements that nuclear weapons have no use except as threats erode deterrence. But behavior revealing that we deliberately avoid capabilities or plans to respond in a nonsuicidal way erode it even further.

US political leaders never came anywhere near approving plans for attacking the Soviets when the US had a nuclear monopoly; nor for many years after, when Soviet nuclear forces were highly vulnerable. Yet many proponents of MAD threats believe that Western leaders would be tempted to use nuclear weapons simply because the West might emerge only “severely damaged” by a nuclear catastrophe.⁹ They assume that only a small risk of nuclear harm would deter the Soviet Union, but that the US would be tempted to nuclear preventive war by any outcome that was less than totally devastating.¹⁰ Draper’s “Nuclear Temptations” [NYR, January 19] does not deal with how the Soviets might be tempted to use nuclear weapons to overcome grave difficulties in the course of a conventional war on a critical flank of NATO¹¹—especially if they thought that the West would not respond because its leaders deemed a nuclear “exchange” suicidal. The “nuclear temptations” Draper treats are solely those affecting the West.

With such muddy views, Draper needs to rewrite history as well as the views of his critics to make his own way of trying to deter seem inevitable and “classic.” No mean feat. He suggests (1) that current critics of MAD call for an increased reliance on nuclear weapons, and (2) that they think nuclear wars can be made quite riskless, and hence (3) preferable to deterrence: He draws the “real dividing line…between those who wish to give nuclear weapons a war-deterring and those who wish to give them a war-fighting role”! This involves him in gross falsification.

One key example of the first misrepresentation:

He [Wohlstetter] contrasts favorably small nuclear weapons with conventional weapons, on the grounds that the former would do less direct damage and would be better able “to keep the chain of violence under political control.” [Emphasis mine.]

But the passage from which Draper lifts a phrase says the exact opposite! It contrasts small nuclear weapons unfavorably with advanced conventional munitions in both direct harm and controllability. I said: