There are, roughly speaking, three schools of doctrine on nuclear defense. The first and dominant is the line of thought emanating from John von Neumann, father of the computer: “Mutual assured destruction” (MAD), the certainty of catastrophic nuclear reprisal, will deter wars between nuclear-armed powers. This has in practice been the actual frame for nuclear weapons policy since the early days of the Cold War. The second line, from the physicist Herman Kahn, posits a winnable nuclear war; in the era of the nuclear submarine, a true decapitation strike seems less viable than it did in 1960.
The third accepts the premise of MAD, but inverts the conclusion: The threat of nuclear reprisal discourages nuclear war, but does not preclude the possibility of purely conventional conflict between nuclear-armed powers. An early and prominent exponent of this heterodoxy was the British Member of Parliament Enoch Powell, who believed that the drawdown of conventional military forces was based on a misguided trust in the security afforded by the bomb. Already in 1949, he wrote, “When atom bombs are a stock line in the principal arsenals of the world, the absolute certainty of reprisals reduces the likelihood of their being used, though it cannot, of course, eliminate the possibility. Nevertheless, the atom bomb in World War III may be like poison gas in World War II – a constant potential menace, but never an actual one.”
More pointedly, during a 1970 parliamentary debate, he said, “I have always regarded the possession of the nuclear capability as a protection against nuclear blackmail. It is a protection against being threatened with nuclear weapons. What it is not a protection against is war.” Powell’s view was not taken terribly seriously at the time, or after; indeed, the Thatcher government was preparing to draw down its Atlantic fleet when the Falklands War broke out, an infelicitous bit of timing on the Argentine part.
As so often happens, it seems that he has been vindicated at a lag. The Russia–Ukraine war has been an interesting if hair-raising study in the potential of proxy wars between nuclear powers; for all intents and purposes, Ukraine is waging a war on behalf of NATO with NATO armaments, NATO intelligence, and NATO advisors, some of whom are directly operating weapons systems against Russian forces. (This all is conceded by the more honest sort of Ukraine hawk, who will say that we’re using cheap mercenaries to degrade a historical near-peer rival and, of course, to Teach China a Lesson.) Russia rattled its nuclear saber a bit in response to strikes on its core territory, but the bomb has pretty much been kept on the top shelf throughout the war. (Another vindicated Powellism: the observation that the “tactical” use of nuclear weapons is an absurdity.)
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Even more to the point was the most frightening thing to happen this century, which, of course, promptly dropped out of the headlines of Western newspapers within 24 hours of its conclusion: the brief war between India and Pakistan that broke out on May 7. No proxy kabuki here; India lobbed ballistic missiles directly into Pakistan, including in the environs of Pakistan’s nuclear command headquarters, and Pakistan’s air force directly engaged Indian jets in Indian airspace. Swift diplomatic action kept the conflict short, but the cat is still out of the bag: Nuclear-armed powers can have conventional battles without an inevitable spiral into nuclear war.
What does it all mean, Mr. Natural? First, that nuclear proliferation—as occasionally suggested as a solution for containing China and its proxies in the Pacific—is not in fact a guarantee of peace or a deterrent to wars of expansion. Second, that, as policymakers observe these empirical limits on nuclear deterrence, we can expect to see more such conventional wars. (A handful of political scientists in the past 60 years predicted this, dubbing the dynamic the “stability–instability paradox.”) Third, that the cultivation of conventional armaments, particularly drones and the allied technologies in computing and E/M emission, will decide the national power rankings of the near future. The apparently dominant assumption in the American military–industrial complex that conventional weapons are an expensive sideshow to our well-established nuclear program—that, so long as the Tritons are out there reliably prowling the seven seas, it doesn’t matter too much that our F-35s have a combat readiness of about 60 percent or that the 400-ship navy is an impossible dream—is dangerous if a robust defense establishment is in fact an American national interest.
Some analysts, particularly our own Sumantra Maitra, have argued that the Cold War world system is giving way to an older style of international relations, the concert of powers. As the horror show of nuclear war has lost its power as a threat, slowly at first and then quickly two weeks ago, those analysts are looking more right than ever. Defense policy must follow, or the laggard powers will find themselves left totally behind.
