Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo

4 Likely American Popular Reactions

C H A P T E R F O U R Likely American Popular Reactions The probable responses of the American public to a use of nuclear weapons fall into the same seven categories of scenarios. There are possibilities of ambiguity at various levels of analysis. While an escalation might come in a form that was a “pleasant surprise,” most of us would expect a great horror and shock, generating a variety of responses. Ambiguity about Whether the Line Was Crossed (Category A) All that was said earlier about global confusion as to whether we had a real case of nuclear escalation (based on difficulties of definition, or difficulties of establishing the evidence) will apply for Americans. The United States government is surely equipped with the best intelligence-gathering devices to help determine the truth or falsity of an allegation that nuclear weapons had been used (e.g., if Britain had used a nuclear depth-charge to destroy an Argentine submarine, it might have been mostly American sensor operators whose hearing was damaged by the underwater signal of the detonation). Yet, given the vastness of the globe and the possible ingenuity of nuclear weapons designers producing future “mini-nukes,” there may still be cases that are hard to resolve. And, for good reasons, the United States government cannot share all the information it has with foreign governments, or with the American public. The United States similarly leads the world in the extent to which its strategic analysts, inside and outside the government, have thought through the logic of the distinction between conventional and nuclear warfare. Yet the possible definitional ambiguities noted at the outset remain. Perhaps the U.S. government will know more than the American public about what has happened, but the possibility that ordinary Americans would feel unsure about whether a nuclear escalation had occurred is hardly unimportant for U.S. foreign policy. An important part of the nuclear taboo, of the general global abstention from the use of such weapons, is based on what the world’s publics, including the American public, think about the question, since perceptions can be so self-confirming and self-renewing. In a case of popular ambiguity, the public might try to round the uncertainties down to zero by concluding that “nothing really happened.” The policy questions would then pertain to whether this was bad or good for American national interests and how long this impression could be maintained. We mentioned earlier the uncertainty, often rounded down to zero, about whether there was a nuclear test over the South Atlantic in 1979, conducted by Israel or South Africa. A much broader ambiguity about the violation of a taboo has pertained for all these years about whether Israel, with or without an actual test detonation, actually possesses nuclear weapons. The United States and Israel, and the rest of the world, seem to have settled into an acceptance of ambiguity on that question, preferring ambiguity to some kind of clarification.1 Might the same choice be the appropriate policy response to some future ambiguity about whether one state or another had used a nuclear weapon? Cases with Surprisingly Low Collateral Damage (Category B) In another scenario, Americans will not be terribly shocked by the next use of nuclear weapons, will not remember exactly where they were standing when they heard the news. Much of this would depend on the physical proximity of the nuclear attack. If it were far removed from North America, with no CNN television cameras around, and/or if the nuclear attack were purely or mostly on military targets (for example, an earth-penetrator warhead to destroy a military or terrorist underground command post), the American reaction might indeed be that “nuclear weapons were just another weapon.” If the target were closer and the damage more visible, with a city being hit and tens of thousands killed and wounded, the reaction would instead be very great shock. The pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were graphic enough to condition decades of Americans and others to regard nuclear war as uniquely horrible ; a new round of such pictures of dead and wounded would almost surely reinforce this impression. Likely American Popular Reactions 75 The American public would of course be considerably less offended if the initiator of nuclear warfare was an ally or friend of the United States and if the occasion for such nuclear escalation had...