Choosing Targets for Nuclear Weapons

Book Review Desmond Ball and JeffreyRichelson, eds. Strategic Nuclear Targeting. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Strategic nuclear targeting entails more than just sliding cross hairs across maps; it is a confrontation with conflicting visions of Armaggedon. Drawing up a target list presupposes judgments about whether a nuclear war will be long or short, controlled or chaotic, discriminate or savage. Moreover, it presupposes eminently political decisions about whether the nation is prepared to purchase the weapons, support the diplomacy, bear the moral burdens, and run the grave risks implied by its targeting choices. Such choices ought to reflect the will of the governed, and the editors of Strategic Nuclear Targeting present this collection of essays as a provocation and foundation for an informed public debate on such matters. These are excellent essays on the whole, most of them culled from other publications where they first appeared during the past half dozen years. The principal questions raised for debate here are two: can the destructiveness of nuclear weapons be applied with precision and discrimination, and if so, what should be targeted? Although I doubt that the authors intended it, a reader may come away from these essays with a third question: is an informed public debate on these matters truly possible? Chapters by David Alan Rosenberg, Desmond Ball, William Lee, Lawrence Freedman, and David Yost make up the first half of the book, surveying the tenets and evolution of U.S., Soviet, British, and French targeting policies. The function of these essays is to set the historical background, but right from the outset they expose formidable obstacles to any public debate on nuclear targeting. For instance, the work of Ball and Rosenberg had a stunning effect when first published a few years ago, because it revealed, from previously classified documents, the enormous gap between what the miliDonald L. Hafner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston College [ntrrfintional Security, Spring 1987 (Vol. 11, No. 4) 01987by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 135 International Security 1 136 tary targeters were planning and what the public was debating.’ Encouraged by official pronouncements and catchy phrases such as “massive retaliation” or “mutual assured destruction,” the public supposed the backbone of U.S. doctrine was urbanhndustrial targeting. In fact, the direction of strategic planning and the pace of nuclear weapons procurement had for decades been keyed to attacking Soviet nuclear forces, even attacking them preemptively . In effect, the public discussion in these years-even among the informed public of academic strategists-was largely irrelevant and ignored by the targeters. So now the documents from past decades are available, and we know what the public debate should have been about. The trouble is that the work of today’s targeters must remain secret, and no political mechanism exists to ensure that today’s public debate is not equally irrelevant and ignored. An additional obstacle to debate, starkly evident in these opening essays, is the gap between a widespread public perception that we live in a world of nuclear plenty, and the military targeter’s sense that we live in perpetual nuclear scarcity. The target list is always too long, the warhead supply too short. The reasons for the targeter’s sense of poverty are clear. The bulk of the National Strategic Target Data Base (NSTDB) consists of Other Military Targets (0MTs)-a wide variety of targets, perhaps 25,000 in all, that includes conventional forces, military bases and airfields, civilian airfields that could be used by military forces in wartime, space launch facilities, etc. This list has grown relentlessly, from an NSTDB of 4,100 targets in 1960 to some 50,000 today, as each side has expanded its military facilities to offset the other side’s expansion. Moreover, to ensure the efficient use of the last available warhead, the targeter constantly lengthens the list to see what the next set of targets would be if more warheads were at hand-thereby producing a “wish list” of additional targets to be covered. Finally, nuclear war is an uncertain business, so the targeter tries to stack the odds in favor of near-certain target...