The nuclear deterrent

Corridor from Titan control room to missile silo, originally uploaded by Telstar Logistics.

Via Rob at lgm, a truly remarkable radio documentary about the human beings who are actually in charge of the United Kingdom's nuclear weapons on a day-to-day basis. It's called The Human Button

Historian Peter Hennessy speaks to men all along the firing chain from top civilian and military officials to a weapons officer in a submarine in the North Atlantic who would personally pull the trigger on the modified pistol that launches a missile.

Nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrents.

If deterrence fails, and one side launches a nuclear attack, reprisal is pointless because the victim's country is already destroyed. The central question of The Human Button is  whether those in charge would opt to slaughter 20 million people on the other side for no conceivable benefit.

The nuclear threat is supposed to deter an initial strike, but deterrence only works if the enemy believes that the target would follow through on revenge.

The documentary explains that there are two sides of the nuclear system: policy and operations. Deterrence only works if your opponent thinks you'll go through with it. So, the operations/military side is all about being (and seeming) as ready as they can be to give the order from deep within a limestone bunker to direct a sub in the North Sea to launch its missiles. The policy side is all about making sure the prime minister never has to give the order.

Update: I want to elaborate on some of the ideas in the documentary. Daedalus suggested in comments, below, that the documentary humanizes an insane system. I think the implicit argument is obliquely but profoundly, but subtly anti-nuclear.

As the narrator points out, nuclear weapons are only valuable as a deterrent. For the deterrent to work, each side must know that if they fire the first salvo, they too will be destroyed.

Mutually assured destruction is supposed to ensure that no one will start a nuclear war. The assumption is that the country that gets hit first will still have the capacity to vaporize much of the aggressor's country.

Of course, the system only works if our adversaries believe that everyone along the chain could bring themselves to vaporize 20 million Russians after the United Kingdom had already been destroyed.

This documentary casts doubts on whether everyone who had to cooperate would actually do so.

One former prime minister went on the record to say that he wouldn't have launched the retaliatory strike. In this program, a former defense secretary admits that he wouldn't have ordered such an attack either.

The catchphrase on everyone's lips is that if the first strike hit the UK, "the deterrent had failed." Everyone knows that a second strike would serve no purpose, except revenge.

Yet in order for the deterrent to work today, everyone has to believe they would do it, or at least pretend they would if worse came to worst.  The documentary reveals that actual humans involved are a lot more ambivalent than you might think.

If we know about the human ambivalence in the nuclear chain of command, then surely our adversaries know it, too. Which means that our vast nuclear arsenal isn't as good a deterrent against a first strike as we thought it was.

The Human Button doesn't explicitly take a position on nuclear disarmament, but it invites some important inferences: There's real reason to doubt that humans will actually follow through on a retaliatory strike. Therefore deterrence doesn't work. Therefore we'd better get rid of these nukes before someone realizes they can get off a "cost-free" first strike against us.

[Photo: Not a nuclear sub but a corridor in a decommissioned ICBM silo near Tucson, AZ, by Telstar Logistics.]

Comments

[Eric Jaffa]

Reagan's treaties with the Soviet Union had a good idea: let the nuclear weapons in both the US and Soviet Union grow old and degrade until the threat of blowing up the world is lessened.

But now that our nuclear weapons are growing old and degrading, the Bush Administration is acting like it's a crisis which demands building more nuclear weapons.

[Daedalus]

The BBC attempts to impart humanization to a fundamentally inhumane system.

I guess I'm pleased to hear that some higher level ministers in the British Government would have chosen to hold their fire in the event that the Cuban Missile had gone completely wrong and London, Manchester, Liverpool, et. al., were reduced to glowing piles of rubble.

But is the point relevant? Would not NATO, a.k.a. the US, finish the job for them?

I think I can safely speculate that, if Soviet missiles were inbound or had already detonated, there would be no such pangs of conscience anywhere along the US chain of command about "deploying the deterrent."

I am so f-in' happy that the cold war is over.

I just hope that India, Pakistan, the US, China, Russia, and all the nuclear powers of the world can continue to live in peace.

This will take some work.

[Alon Levy]

If deterrence fails, and one side launches a nuclear attack, reprisal is pointless because the victim's country is already destroyed.

This is only true in case both sides have massive numbers of nuclear weapons. The US and Russia can destroy each other several times over; India and Pakistan can't destroy each other even once. India has the capability to destroy Karachi and Lahore, and Pakistan has the capability to destroy Mumbai, Delhi, and perhaps a few more cities, but in each case, the victim country will still keep going.

[Windypundit]

There's real reason to doubt that humans will actually follow through on a retaliatory strike. Therefore deterrence doesn't work. Therefore we'd better get rid of these nukes before someone realizes they can get off a "cost-free" first strike against us.

First, I don't see any real reason to believe that humans will actually follow through on nuclear disarmament. Everyone will want to keep a few, just in case. In some ways, that seems more unstable.

Second, your argument works the other way as well. If, say, 80% of missile commanders wouldn't launch in retaliation, that's a reason to make the deterrent force five times larger. That we had 30,000 warheads at the height of the cold war suggests that U.S. military planners were well aware of the problem.

Third, the goal of the retaliatory strike has never been to destroy the enemy completely, just to hurt them so badly they wouldn't want to chance it. In the U.S. at least, command during a nuclear war would devolve down to dispersed units---missle wings, bomber squadrons, and individual missile subs---and even if only a handful launch their full load of multiple-warhead missiles, that could be enough for a deterrent.

Fourth, while commanders might be unwilling order the deaths of millions in retaliation, they would probably be willing to make a counterforce strike against enemy missile silos and other military targets to prevent further attacks. The collateral damage from that alone could kill millions and serve as a deterrent.

[J Hertzberg]

Excellent documentary, thanks for the link.

In a similar vein, Frederick Wiseman made a documentary in the late 1980s about the USAF personnel responsible for launching ICBMS.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093548/.
Unfortunately it's pretty hard to get hold of and I've never seen it.

Also noteworthy is an article that ran a year ago in the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/22/AR2007112201294.html

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I should have mentioned that the Human Button is specifically focused about how the chain would work in a doomsday scenario with the UK facing off against Russia. It doesn't address tactical nukes.

One of the most interesting facts in the documentary is the existence of letters of last resort that are placed in double-locked safes in nuclear submarines. These are handwritten letters the the PM drafts when he or she takes office. They're only to be read in the event that the PM has been killed in a devastating nuclear attack. They tell the submarine commander what to do.

At any given time a British PM may have written an order to the commander not to make a retaliatory strike. At least one PM has gone on the record saying that he wouldn't have ordered a retaliatory strike after a decapitating attack--which is presumably what he wrote in the letters. (These letters are destroyed unread when the PM leaves office.)

If the ambivalence goes all the way to the top, having more nukes teams won't address the problem.

[Cass]

I'm not sure that doubts about the other side's willingness to retaliate would be all that significant a factor, but who knows; the psychology and thought processes of people who get into power are often enough full of unpleasant surprises. I do know that Curtis LeMay and others who wanted to annihilate the Soviet Union in early sixties weren't counting on the Russian conscience, just their ability to effectively strike back.

[Scott PM]

But doesn't the same logic apply to the country ordering a first strike? I can easily imagine the victims of a first strike working up the will to retaliate, but the same moral qualms that might break the chain of command during retailation seem to apply doubly to those ordered to carry out a first strike.

[DonBoy]

This reminds me of Newcomb's Paradox. I'm inclined to describe the nuclear situation like this: It does not make sense to retaliate (in a MAD sense), but it makes sense, in advance, to be a person who would retaliate.

Also, that thing with the letters keeps reminding me of a famous joke.

[Cass]

An "effective response"? Let me clarify: the working definition of this at one time was > 5 million Americans dead. Depending on the breaks.

Anyway, that was a fascinating documentary, and very moving. Thank you for sharing it.

[Autumnal Harvest]

President Merkin Muffley: How is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger?

Dr. Strangelove: Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy... the FEAR to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the Doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand... and completely credible and convincing.

...

Dr. Strangelove: Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?

Ambassador de Sadesky: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.

[Alon Levy]

Fourth, while commanders might be unwilling order the deaths of millions in retaliation, they would probably be willing to make a counterforce strike against enemy missile silos and other military targets to prevent further attacks. The collateral damage from that alone could kill millions and serve as a deterrent.

Historically, the liberals in the Cold War, led by Kennedy, focused on nuclear weapons that would destroy civilian targets, not military ones. Military targets are only useful if you're making a first strike; otherwise, the silos will be empty, the planes already in the air, and the subs at sea. By targeting civilian areas instead, the Cold War liberals reasoned, the US would have ample second-strike capability, but would not be able to attack the Russians first.

[jonj]

The reluctance to follow though with a retaliatory nuclear strike suggests that there may be significant advantages to ordering a preemptive first strike, and gambling that your opponent won't have the stomach to order the destruction of your own cities and industrial base. In that situation the first actor 'wins'.

Also needing to be factored is that the UK has always been the junior partner in this calculus. It is highly unlikely that Britain would suffer a nuclear attack when the US has also not been targeted and likely already launched its own missiles. Full UK nuclear response may not add all that much to the destruction of Soviet, Russian, or other nation's facilities.

'Winning' a nuclear war, even if your own country manages to avoid any losses, is not likely to look much like what victory is conventionally thought of, at least for long. Fallout from anyone's explosions will rapidly circle the globe and cause substantial amounts of radiation sickness and cancers in the Northern Hemisphere within weeks.

This is why sane political leaders, once in possession of their nuclear arsenal, have rapidly become appalled by the power and responsibility it entails. Most have come to realize that there are very few scenarios in which it makes any sense at all to launch nuclear weapons.

At best, nuclear weapons now serve as an insurance policy to deter conventional aggression by other states, and that they do add to the political and foreign policy stature of your own country. Bush invaded Iraq, but negotiated with North Korea. This point will not be lost on other nations with nuclear capabilities or ambitions.

[cfrost]

Bush invaded Iraq, but negotiated with North Korea. This point will not be lost on other nations

And since N. Korea, compared to any of the major nuclear powers, has no real credible first strike or retaliatory capabilities, Kim Jong-il plays the “you’re dealing with a seriously crazy motherfucker” card to excellent effect; which point will also not be lost on any nation or organization that obtains a few nuclear weapons. As will the point that anyone in the North Korean chain of command who shows any trace of doubt is probably summarily shot.
God help us.

[Dunc]

Who, exactly, are we (the UK) supposed to be deterring these days anyway? The Russians aren't going to nuke us - why would they bother? What would anybody possibly stand to gain from nuking us?

[Acm]

Actually, Windypundit, Wiseman's MISSILE doc is not that hard to get ahold of after all. You can buy it online, directly from his company:

http://www.zipporah.com/films/13

[Brock]

David Lewis wrote a great paper on nuclear deterrence theory entitled "Buy like a MADman, use like a NUT". (MAD = mutually assured destruction, NUT = nuclear use theory.)