Chinese usually note that until US joins China in promising not to use nuclear weapons first, there isn’t
much to say.
By Jeffrey Lewis
Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta has been in Beijing this week for a round of meetings with senior Chinese officials, including presumptive paramount leader Xi Jinping. One topic that will most likely not be on the Panetta-Xi agenda is nuclear weapons. Which is weird.
Oh sure, every now and again the topic makes it onto the agenda, such as in 2006, when Presidents George Bush and Hu Jintao agreed on the importance of nuclear dialogue, or 2007, when the topic was placed on the agenda for the annual Defence Consultative Talks. But these instances are, by and large, the exception.
Anyone who has attended a nongovernmental US-China dialogue on nuclear issues will recognise a familiar pattern. The Chinese usually note that until the United States joins China in promising not to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons first, there isn’t much to say. The US response is usually that such promises are worthless and, in any event, the Chinese are not transparent enough for us to believe their pledge. The Chinese response is to ask what sort of rocket scientist would be transparent when being threatened with nuclear weapons. Everyone breaks for tea, then has at it again. There is little reason for Panetta and Xi to waste everyone’s time reenacting this particular scene.
Whether you like the phrase “no first use” or not, the Chinese have a point about starting this discussion without nuclear threats.
If you know one thing about nuclear weapons, it is probably the eminently sensible moral from the movie War Games: Regarding thermonuclear war, “the only winning move is not to play.” Well, that’s Hollywood. As recently declassified documents on the Carter administration’s nuclear strategy make clear, the illusion of the winning move has been a reliable part of US thinking about nuclear weapons. As long as the United States holds out the prospect of fighting and winning a nuclear war against China, the dialogue is going nowhere.
There are some voices suggesting that the administration should find a way to make clear to Beijing that China’s small stockpile of a few hundred nuclear weapons is plenty and that we aren’t likely to start any nuclear wars, at least not unless we really have to. Last month, the Secretary of State’s International Security Advisory Board began circulating draft copies of a report on Maintaining US-China Strategic Stability that recommended “mutual nuclear vulnerability should be considered as a fact of life for both sides.”
If you do not closely follow the arcana of US nuclear weapons policy, this statement might seem blindingly obvious. After all, China holds some $1.2trn in US Treasury securities. Looking at the ways in which the United States and China are economically interdependent, it might be easier to count the ways in which we are not mutually vulnerable. But just four years ago, a very different ISAB report was leaked to the Washington Times. That report, drafted under Paul Wolfowitz’s name, advised that “Washington should also make it clear that it will not accept a mutual vulnerability relationship with China” — before making a series of bizarre assertions about Chinese foreign policy right out of the Manchurian Candidate.
There remains a school of thought, popular among those that might populate a Romney administration, that the United States should maintain at least the threat of nuclear annihilation to keep the Chinese in line. American policymakers remain divided over a question that can be put this way: Is China a little Russia to be deterred or a big North Korea to be defended against?
Now, being churlish, I often insist that China is an inscrutable France. People seldom laugh. Perhaps the joke isn’t funny. (True story: The only place that line got a laugh was actually in France.) Or perhaps I underestimate the seriousness of this business of stuffing China into the intellectual boxes we’ve created for Russia and North Korea — as though those policies have turned out so well.
This debate was not settled in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, despite its sensible observation that “maintaining strategic stability in the US-China relationship is as important to this Administration as maintaining strategic stability with other major powers.” Although that would seem to cement China’s status as a “little Russia,” a close reading — the sort of close reading that gets done in Zhongnanhai — reveals reasons for caution. The Nuclear Posture Review actually quotes a previous document: the 2010 Ballistic Missile Defence Review. The Obama administration could not agree to language on China, defaulting to a vague reference to “strategic stability” that raises more questions than it answers. More expansive language on the subject of the US-China nuclear relationship was left on the cutting room floor, victim to a persistent divide within the US government.
Although the “little Russia” quip implies the United States accepted mutual vulnerability with Russia, the reality throughout the Cold War to the present day is more complex and contested. In the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we find an argument that there would be no winner in a nuclear war. With the advent of even more powerful thermonuclear weapons, it became common to imagine that following a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the living would envy the dead.
But there was another side to the debate, led forcefully by Herman Kahn and his cronies at the Hudson Institute, based on the notion of “victory” in a nuclear war. The basic idea enjoyed the full cinematic treatment in my favourite scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove — the one where General Buck Turgidson presses the president to follow unauthorised attack with a much larger effort to catch the Russians “with their pants down.”
Turgidson: “Mr President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, the truth is not always a pleasant thing, but it is necessary now make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.”
President: “You’re talking about mass murder, General, not war.”
Turgidson: “Mr President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say . . . no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh . . . depending on the breaks.”
The amazing thing about this comedic dialogue, as well as much of the film, is that it comprises actual quotes attributable to Kahn and other Cold War strategists. The phrase “two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments” for example, is lifted almost verbatim from a chart on page 20 of Kahn’s tome “On Thermonuclear War.” And Turgidson’s reference to casualties takes surprisingly few liberties with Kahn’s argument that “If, on the contrary, by spending a few billion dollars, or by being more competent or lucky, we can cut the number of dead from 40 to 20m, we have done something vastly worth doing!”
Some policymakers sought to impose some sort of limitations on the nuclear arms race, which seemed to be spiralling out of control by the early 1960s. In 1963, then-Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara championed a thought experiment to size US nuclear forces. Imagine the United States has a force of 1 megaton nuclear bombs that we begin dropping on the Soviet Union, starting with Moscow. (Of course the United States did not have a force of uniform 1 megaton bombs, nor do we target cities. This was a thought experiment.) McNamara’s Whiz Kids observed that the damage to the Soviet Union started to level off around the 400th bomb. McNamara didn’t know if 400 one-megaton bombs would deter another Josef Stalin, but it was damn clear that if 400 didn’t do the trick, flattening Perm with number 401 was a fool’s errand.
The resulting policy was called “assured destruction” — the idea that once the United States had a survivable force capable of about 400 equivalent megatons that could kill much of the Soviet Union’s population and destroy its industry, there wasn’t much point in making the rubble bounce. Say what you will about the tenets of assured destruction, at least it was a ceiling.
Kahn and others did not like “assured destruction” because it did not hold out the possibility of prevailing in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, something they believed was possible with bomb shelters, missile defences, and hard hearts. (Decades later one proponent of victory of summarised the argument by saying “If there are enough shovels to go around, everyone will make it.”) They went after assured destruction.
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