Deterrence: The Problem—Not the Solution

DETERRENCE: THE PROBLEMNOT THE SOLUTION Michael MccGwire he thesis of this essay is that many of the problems that now assail the West stem from the adoption in the early 1950s of "nuclear deterrence" as the basis of defense and foreign policy. The complaint is not against generic deterrence, a simple concept that applies at most levels of human interaction, but against the body of theory that grew up around nuclear weapons in the 1950s. There was, of course, no one theory, doctrine, or policy of nuclear deterrence, but a whole series of them that differed between countries and between government departments within countries. There was also a wealth of difference between the sophisticated approach of the more thoughtful deterrence theorists and the bowdlerized and homogenized version of their theories that was passed down to the rest of us. Nevertheless, there was a central dogma concerning the requirements of deterrence and, more important, there was a mindset that went with the dogma. It is the mindset that is at the root of the problem. This body of attitudes and ideas that I am labeling "deterrence dogma" was being taught at service colleges and universities throughout the 1950s and 1960s under the rubric of "nuclear deterrence theory." The dogma was the basis of innumerable and repetitive articles in service journals, and underlay most discussion of defense and foreign policy Michael MccGwire is a senior fellow in the foreign policy studies program at the Brookings Institution and a former British naval officer. Dr. MccGwire is grateful to Catherine Kelleher, Ray Garthoff, and Richard Betts for their helpful comments on this piece. Copyright © 1985, Michael MccGwire. 105 106 SAIS REVIEW matters in the daily press and in the weekly and monthly magazines. And it appeared continually in nato policy statements and national defense white papers. This deterrence dogma came to crowd out other longestablished ideas, becoming at times a virtual substitute for both foreign and defense policy.1 The usual rebuttal to this type of criticism is that "nuclear deterrence has kept the peace for thirty-five years," peace being defined as the avoidance of East-West conflict, particularly in Europe. A more thoughtful rebuttal acknowledges that although we cannot be sure that it was deterrence that preserved the peace, "it is better to be safe than sorry." An implication of that caveat is that while nuclear deterrence may not have been responsible for keeping the peace, neither did we suffer any harm through adopting such a policy. It is this comforting and widely held assumption—that deterrence has caused no harm—that is the focus of the argument. Only when the costs of nuclear deterrence are clearly established can one refute with clarity the more extravagant claims that this same deterrence has kept the peace for thirty-five years. In the wake of World War I, war was seen as too important to leave to generals, and it was taken over by the politicians. They, having done little better in World War II, left the field to the academics, who moved in to address the new conundrums that came with the atomic bomb. There was a peculiar quality to this subdiscipline of "strategic studies" as it emerged in the 1950s: It focused almost entirely on the problems of nuclear weapons, deterrence doctrine, and, in due course, theories of limited nuclear war. With a few notable exceptions such as Bernard Brodie, the field became dominated by academics from axiomatic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, and economics, who took over from the military and diplomatic historians that had traditionally presided over the study of international politics. To all these theorists, the Soviet "threat" was a given. The Soviet Union was assumed to have a relentless drive for territorial conquest, and the reality of a monolithic communist bloc went unquestioned. The governing concept of deterrence assumed a Soviet urge above all to seize Europe, and it was this assumption that provided the basis for most strategic theorizing. The field developed a new breed of self-styled "tough-minded" strategic analysts, who like to think through problems abstractly and in a political vacuum. To this new breed, the opponent was not "Soviet man"—not even "political...