SDB writes that pipsqueek nations with nukes could deter the US from attacking them by threatening to sneak a nuke into one of our cities. But wouldn't the very act of making such a threat trigger an all-out nuclear attack by America against them? That's the guiding principle behind the policies of Mutually Assured Destruction and nuclear deterrence.
If a nuclear-armed pipsqueak nation saw indications that we were seriously contemplating such an attack, or saw us actually begin such a buildup, they'd either privately or publicly threaten us with massive consequences unless we backed down. They wouldn't threaten our troops; they'd threaten our cities.Our only options would be to back down, or to go nuclear immediately. If we're still following MAD, we'd choose the second option. The point of MAD is to prevent any nation from blackmailing us with the threat of nuclear attack, and forces them to either just do it or keep their mouth shut.
It would likely be more like we have a lead shielded nuke in an indeterminate number of your cities right now. Attack us and they light off.
And the counter for this is...
What?
The determinant of our actions would not be whether we could annihilate them. It would be:
1) Whether their threat was credible,
2) Whether we were willing to absorb casualties on that scale to get whatever it was we were after.
In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was approximately impossible for the Soviet Union to hurt the United States except with the IRBMs in Cuba. Given what we've learned about the terrible quality of Soviet arms, the worst plausible damage from an all-out war with the Soviets would have been the loss of a single US city and about three million lives. The estimates presented to President Kennedy were of that magnitude, and he had satellite evidence to confirm their soundness.
Now, I'm not sneering at three million deaths. But even then, we could have incinerated the Soviet Union, from north to south and east to west. Those three million deaths would have bought us the end of the problem of Communism, thirty years early and for all time to come. We didn't, even though the provocation of installing nuclear weapons and delivery systems in Cuba was the worst we could have imagined.
We put a high value on human life -- far higher than nearly anyone else in the world.
Recently, we've begun to value the lives of the enemy on a rough par with our own. This is a transformation of warfare that no one, looking at Mankind's bloody history, could ever have predicted. But we're special; we know what life can be, and we tend to value each one as if it were at its full potential instead of its nadir.
"Weakness? It could be the unique strength that wins us a galaxy." -- Robert A. Heinlein.
The point of MAD was to prevent exactly the type of threat you're describing. By counting the threat as equal to the action itself, it was hoped that no one would be nuts enough to make such a threat.
Once such a threat is made, it is equivalent to setting off the nuke that you are threatening to set off. So, the proper response would be to glass whoever was doing the threatening ASAP, hope for the best, but be willing to accept Mutually Assured Destruction in the worst case.
The only alternative is to allow yourself to be blackmailed by threats of nuclear attack. The point isn't to counter a threat once it's made, but to prevent the threat from being made by counting such a threat as equal to an attack.
You're half right, Michael. The point is indeed to prevent the threat being made in the first place. But deterrence fails when your opponent is willing to be severely damaged or destroyed if he can first inflict even a far smaller amount of damage on you. At that point, what matters is your own tolerance for death and destruction.
I mulled this over at some length a few months ago, going all the way back to the classics of strategic thinking and conflict resolution -- Thomas Schelling; Herman Kahn; Albert and Rebecca Wohlstetter; Bernard Brodie; Donald Brennan; even John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. To a man, they shared an invisible assumption that limited their theory, the theory undergirding MAD and every other warfighting doctrine of the Industrial Age: they assumed that there was a maximum price the opponent was willing to pay for victory.
With some sorts of people, countries and "civilizations," this assumption does not hold. We have seen this demonstrated by repeated suicide bombings in Israel and by Black Tuesday here in the United States.
Because we have strong, highly constraining views of the value of human life plus a desire to keep on living it -- in other words, because there is a maximum price we'd be willing to pay to impose our will on another country -- we cannot abide the possibility that a group of madmen willing to die for their cause (and take a whole country with them) might get hold of a weapon of mass destruction and the means to deliver it to our soil. In our hands, it would be just another card to play against an enemy. In the hands of a Saddam Hussein or a Kim Jong Il, it would be the Ace of Trumps, not because we couldn't match it manyfold, but because of our far greater sensitivity to death and destruction, at every level.
We're in an ethical corner of our own devising. Because Nature is an open book, all of whose secrets can be known with time and diligent study, we have to un-corner ourselves really bleeping fast. Nukes, war gasses, weaponized plagues and the like cannot long be kept solely the possessions of responsible, moral men.
All the more reason why as soon as such a threat is made, we nuke them. We may still lose a city, but the alternative is to give in to nuclear blackmail... which is worse. So they force us into losing a city.
That doesn't defeat us, even though it would be horribly bad. Setting off a small nuke at ground level in Los Angeles or New York or Washington, DC, would kill 100k people at most. And cause fallout and radiation damage, etc. It would be bad, but it wouldn't defeat us or even really cripple us economically.
On the other hand, the slow erosion of power that nuclear blackmail would bring about could have far more drastic consequences in the long term.
MAD fails as a deterent because an opponent may not believe or care that the US will respond to a nuclear attack. The Japanese realized they couldn't beat the US at Pearl Harbor, this didn't stop them from attacking Pearl Harbor. Saddam certainly didn't believe the US would attack in either of the two wars with the US. The only way to deal with a nation with a limited nuclear capability is to build missile defenses and wrk from there.
Missile defense is worthless against a country that has no ICBMs, but can sneak bombs into your cities (as SDB pointed out).
The reason Saddam and the terrorists weren't deterred is because America didn't respond strongly to their previous attacks.
But that's the point of MAD. If it doesn't work as a deterrent, then yes, we lose a city to a sneak nuclear attack, and then we vaporize our enemies. We have to be willing to engage in total escalation, otherwise we'll hav to succumb to blackmail.
There are no other alternatives. We're playing for all the marbles.