As Joe mentioned, we were all having dinner when I got a call telling me that the Norks had set off a bomb.
I bumped an Examiner piece I’d done called “What’s a Hawk To Do?” (which I’ll extend and put up here soon), and did a quick piece on my response instead. It’s up at the Examiner site right now, go check it out and let me know what you think here.Let me take a moment and expand on my comments, which are really twofold. One is aimed at the political crowd:
I’m tired of hearing whose fault it is, was, or will be.
I’m tired of reading everything written by people close to the seats of power and seeing nothing but spin generated in a quest for partisan advantage.
I want to see some serious effort to address the very real and deadly issues we’re facing, and I don’t care where it comes from. I threw over my party loyalty of thirty-plus years because I felt that one candidate had more to say than the other, and I’ll gladly continue to be fickle in my search for someone who has some serious thoughts about what to do about the situation we’re in.
So step to the plate folks, and let’s see what you’ve got.
The other comment is aimed at the core foreign policy question – which is why does it matter? So what if the Norks have nukes?
Well, go back to one of my first blog posts, back in 2002:
One nice afternoon, I’m sitting here in my home office near the Palos Verdes peninsula when I notice a brilliant flash of light and some of my windows break.
The power goes out, the telephones, cell phones, and computers don’t work. My backup AM/SW/SSB radio in the garage doesn’t work, and I step onto my driveway and look toward San Pedro and see a dark mushroom cloud.
We’ll skip over the fact that all the electronics in the area are kaput because of EMP, and hypothesize a working TV or radio, which informs me that it appears that a small…5KT…nuke has just exploded on a container ship in San Pedro harbor, along with another one in Red Hook, just across from Manhattan, and another one at the container yard in Seattle.
The problem is that it is very likely that there won’t be a clear return address on those nukes. A Russian or Chinese ICBM is a clear statement – their government is culpable. But a mystery nuke? One where we don’t have assays of the fissile materials that would let us point to a source?
How do we respond in a world where courtroom standards are the only acceptable ones?
First, you tell everyone, loudly and clearly, that there will be no courtroom standards if an untraceable nuke explodes in the US. There will be immediate and extremely disproportionate nuclear retaliation: against the Norks and, if the Iranians have managed to get their hands on a nuke by then, against them, too. By acquiring nuclear weapons, they have decided to become guarantors of the safety of US cities from nuclear attack.
If another nuclear power wants to step into the line of fire by threatening a response to our response, well, after doing NK and Iran, we’ll have plenty left over for them. The first nuke that explodes in the US without drawing a devastating response from us is an open invitation for a second, and a third, etc.
There is absolutely no room to go wobbly on this issue. And it really doesn’t matter very much if our retaliation is directed at the nation who actually attacked us, because WE are dictating a standard of proof that WE will apply if WE are attacked. The rogue new members to the nuke club are responsible for making sure that no attacks occur — if one does occur, they’re guilty. If they don’t like it, they can give up their nukes now and open up for inspections. That’s the choice.
First of all, we’ve basically been living with the assumption that NK already had a small nuclear arsenal for the last few years. So this test (successful or not) hasnt radically changed our situation.
The given should be that a conventional military option is off the table- several hundred thousand dead South Koreans in Seoul could be the kind of debacle that shuts the US out of every allied nation on Earth. If you think we are diplomatically shunned now… That would be the ultimate Pyrrhic victory.
A lot of people are pushing for an embargo. Problem is embargos tend to turn into shooting wars pretty quick. NK loves to play the escalation game- if we impose an embargo they
_will_ try to shoot down some planes or sink a ship. How do we respond to if they try? If they succeed?
I think our best hope may be a sort of nuclear Monroe Doctrine. It should be announced United States policy that if a nuclear weapon is used against the US or an ally and the perpetrator is not instantly clear, we will hold all rogue nuclear regimes not in UN compliance equally and immediately responsible (we will exclude Israel obviously- hypocracy? Maybe, but too bad). In other words, any nation that wants into the nuclear game is going to have to ante up on the MAD stage. If NK wants in the club, their fate will be instantly tied to every lunatic jihadi that might be able to get ahold of a nuke from Pakistan etc. Same goes for Iran.
This creates a big deterrant against ducking out of the nonproliferation treaty- and an even bigger deterrant not to sell nuclear technology to Iran or anyone crazy enough to use it or let it get out to someone who will. If some US city goes up, North Korea is _done_ no matter where the nuke came from and who did it.
I like FormerDem’s idea.
“Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoset”
Let it be known that if a nuke blows up in the US, and we cannot id the source of the material(which does narrow it down by a bit, truth be told), then a whole lot of people who may or may not be responsible, but might be, are going to buy the farm.
It has to be announced though. If they think you’ll follow through with it, you probably won’t ever have to. But the apparent will has to be there (which is why such a policy would never be announced of course. No will.).
Former Dem beat me to the punch.
It matters because NK’s an arms merchant, more than they might use a nuke themselves. A Terrorist group probably couldn’t afford to buy a bomb retail, but even a poor country probably could. If they figure out how to mass produce nuclear missiles, that’d be a great export trade for them, and what do they care what happens then?
As for what we should do about it… what’s the options? Seem any choice risks a war, because any pressure strong enough to intimidate them would be strong enough to put them in a choice between destruction by internal collapse or destruction by external war. If you try to starve them in submission by blockading their ports, they might well consider it better to fight than either submit or collapse. If we’re not willing to push them that far, then it’s not worth it even to start something we’re not ready to finish, because if we do and back down, we’ll be in the same place as if we did nothing but worse for paying the cost in the interim uslessly.
The blockade option’s complicated in any event because it’s not even us that gets to make that call.. it’s China and South Korea. All we can really do there is back them up if they want to cut off aid.
What else? Invade, or give in to their extortion and pay them off. Both those are worse than betting China & SK neither want a Nukemart opening up for business on their border any more than we do. That means 6 party talks, and talks, and talks, and hope after all that it’s not just talk.
I think a lot of people are thinking along the same lines.
Marc’s suggestion that we threaten the new owners of nukes with regime decapitation in the event of an untraced nuclear explosion doesn’t go nearly far enough. Nuclear deterrence between the West and the Communist bloc was always Mutually Assured Destruction, not mutually assured regime decapitaion. Supposing that the Iranians or the Norks could be deterred with a lesser threat seems like wishful thinking. It would indeed be horrible to have to condemn millions of people, but anything less leaves the possibility that the mullahs or the Norks could make a rational decision to call us on our threat, if not directly, then through a proxy, to make the act deniable. Since it appears we must rely on deterrence, we must make sure that the threat is enough not only to cause all but the wholly irrational to refrain from perpetrating a nuclear attack, but also emphasize that it is not related to any finding of guilt. The new rogue members of the nuclear club have acquired their weapons in violation of previous agreements, so we need to give them a reason to be interested in nonproliferation. This has to be MAD, but without the M — because it would not be mutual, but very one sided.
FormerDem: whether that’s the best strategic method for ensuring our safety or not, it strikes me as being very similar to North Korea’s policy of ensuring its safety by holding Seoul hostage.
I suppose the difference is that regimes would be voluntarily submitting to having their people held hostage under this scheme, but that’s cold comfort for the people living in dictatorships.
Note, Mark and FormerDem: We can yell all we like, but if NK doesn’t believe we’ll be that indescriminate in our response, it won’t deter them. The debate about how Iraq was such a mistake for not being involved in 9/11 undermines any such deterrance. Also, this isn’t really just about US cities going up; It’s about tinpot dictators in Africa and whatnot being able to buy a Nuke off the shelf for a fraction of the cost of making one themselves.
First, I would like to continue to advance my theory that MonkeyBoy is responsible for most of the problems in the world today. As a solution, I suggest we stop naming any of our children monkey names – that’s monkey see, monkey do, monkey hear, and monkey post.
On a more serious note, what I’m hearing so far has that back-of-the-tailgate, beer-in-hand, “heck yeah!” feel to it. Heck Yeah! Let’s just tell them we’ll nuke as many of those b*strds as we see fit.
I find this somewhat lacking. Would it be acceptable for the Russians to have a similar policy? The Indians? Is this some sort of mutually assured, mutual destruction? One nut makes a move and the whole room goes down? And why does that make sense again in a world with Islamic crazy people? And we really think that we can have a public policy of nuking millions of random people because of a anonymous explosion when we can’t even make completely nutso dangerous people think they are drowning for a couple minutes to get vital targeting information from them? It’s just implausible.
On a constructive note, right now we got the North Koreans and the Iranians as the major problems. We may not have to solve the general problem of multi-party nuclear detente just yet. Perhaps there is some fix for the two rogue states we have now and the can keeps getting kicked down the road.
For the current crisis, i would suggest that South Korea start holding practice evacuation drills for Seoul.
Maybe it’s time to send Bubba and his experts along with a bevy of babes and truckload of scotch to NoKo and tell them not to come home until they disarm l’il Kim and undo the ’94 Agreed Framework.
The reason the “Don Corleone” policy suggested here worked for him was that he was, well, a crime boss. He could order murders with few repercussions to his business, because his customers–johns, gamblers, drug users–didn’t care.
Also, of course, the targets of his threats, other crime bosses, were relatively rational, and in good control of their minions, and not what you would call “innocent victims” even on a good day.
1) The US can’t murder millions of obviously innocent people without repercussions which would be utterly disasterous.
2) It isn’t clear how great the level of control over the minions is in places like Iran, Pakistan, etc. Suppose it’s a Paki nuke stolen by rogue ISI agents? I presume that regime decapitation isn’t in the works for them.
This is an interesting question:
Well, if a nuke goes off in Moscow, are we OK with the Russians nuking Iran in response? Why or why not? What if the nuke went off in Paris or London instead? Should the US, as an avowed ally of the target country, join in on the attack? (I’m not actually trying to make a point here, just curious to know what everything thinks the rules of nuclear war should be.)
And possibly even more important is AL’s question given the political climate in which he is asking it:
Given the very public failure of the CIA intelligence in Iraq (and Libya for that matter), plus the concerted effort much of the left has undertaken to discredit Bush and call him a liar, plus the incredible explosin of 9/11 conspiracy theories… if the President did say we knew who was behind the attack, how many people would believe him? How would you make that case in the UN to the satisfaction of that country’s allies?
Rob –
I’ll agree that more debate and less “f**k yeah!” would be welcome. But I’m willing to bet that we have all kinds of samplies of Pakistani fissile material, and could tenn in an hour of a weapon was of Pakistani (or Indian or Israeli) origin. The issue is a weapon of unknown providence.
And the reason I’m arguing for decapitation and attacking nuclear facilities is exactly that I can’t see justifying MAD against all the citizens of North Korea or Iran.
A.L.
A policy of wait until we are attacked, then “nuke ’em all and let God sort ’em out” is another variety of MAD, and is insane in the context of nutball enemies. It maximises the casualties for everyone.
This issue was discussed in the strategic weapons community during the Clinton administration. The only coherent policy voiced about it was given the euphimistic title of “deterrence by denial”, but it really mounted to pre-emptive attack, if necessary by a surprise massive strategic nuclear strike against foes with WMD.
Tom, you’ve been preaching this for some time, and the objections remain the same as always: Even in a world of perfect information, the political fallout internationally would be devastating to the US and the parties that joined us in the preemptive attacks. Without some ability to impose our will on the ground afterward, we’d be facing a nation-by-nation “bomb them into the stone age”, which would end badly for us in most of the scenarios that I can imagine.
Let’s not even talk about what it means in terms of domestic politics. Think tanks ringing the White House to keep the rioters away.
So given that, what’s your Plan B?
A.L.
” Would it be acceptable for the Russians to have a similar policy?”
I would say the strength of the Russian position (and remember they have terrorist problems themselves) is precisely that its readilly apparent they _would_ carry out this policy. Anybody think the Chechans would detonate a nuke in Moscow? Maybe, maybe not, but they would certainly know for a fact what the response would be.
“One nut makes a move and the whole room goes down? And why does that make sense again in a world with Islamic crazy people?”
It _especially_ makes sense in a world with Islamic crazy people. The point is, right now the world view Islamic terrorism as a strictly US problem. We to very visably be seen to be stacking the dynamite so it is abundantly clear to China, Russia, Europe, Iran, and NK that we are _making it_ their problem. We have made it far to simple for everybody else on the planet to piss in the lemonade with no repercussions- just to stick a thumb in our eye. That needs to end before its too late. What are our options?
“And we really think that we can have a public policy of nuking millions of random people because of a anonymous explosion when we can’t even make completely nutso dangerous people think they are drowning for a couple minutes to get vital targeting information from them? It’s just implausible.”
It has been plausible for 50 years, what do you think the Cold War was? If a nuke went off in Moscow or DC, the response was pretty much automatic. There is no room for error, its nothing new. Is it more dangerous now? Heck yeh, but fortunately mostly for our enemies. We still hold the trump hand that we can wipe them out but not vice-versa. Im trying to _save_ those people- save them by making their government take account for how wreckless and potential devastating their actions are. Maybe some clever NK general will figure all this out and put a bomb in his briefcase.
I think you guys are suddenly taking a new look at MAD, its always been about making a whole lot of innocent people pay for their leaders decisions. Nothing is new here. The simple way out is for NK to renounce their nukes- its their option. If dont even have the nuts to publicly say we will retaliate to a nuclear attack in kind, we are in serious, serious trouble. Decapitation? How well did that work against Hussein? _That_ is a dangerous idea.
A.L.,
That analysis pre-dated 9/11 – it assumed the will to use lesser means was not available. After 9/11 we have the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy. Pre-emption is one of its tools, but hardly the only one. 9/11 gave us the will to do more than nuclear pre-emption. More 9/11’s will increase that will.
9/11 changed things. You’re a Democrat. You don’t understand such things.
As Trent put it, our strategy is now “salvage and destroy” – we’ll salvage what we can and destroy what we must.
Do you really think Pakistan’s ultimate fate in the war on terror will be less than nuclear devastation?
And Tom, you continue to convince me that you’re a fool. The politics of this country are pushing away form the place you’re standing, and only tragedy will bring it back toward you. I’m trying to figure out how to avoid the tragedy, and I keep getting the impression that you’re looking forward to it.
Bombing countries is easy; it’s kind of like playing Risk. Winning wars without bombing is harder; care to try it?
A.L.
A.L.,
Remind us of that after the next 9/11.
I was dead on about October, six months in advance. Three years I predicted the Sunni Arab exodus from Iraq which is peaking right now.
Fools are those who won’t admit the bloody obvious.
Tom- everyone on the planet knows NK is quite advanced in building their nukes. Dont break your arm patting yourself on the back for predicting what intel agencies have assured us was eminent for years.
The radical (and interesting) part of you and Trent’s argument is that NK and Iran are working in tandem on their nuke programs.
Trent went so far as to “claim”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/009019.php
_”Iran will have an arsenal of tested nuclear missile warheads for its ballistic missile arsenal of Chinese design and North Korean construction in 30-90 days after that test.”_
Like I said, we already were working under the assumption the NK had a working arsenal. What we havent seen any further evidence of is an Iranian connection, which is the only thing really worth wondering about in that context.
Ok boys and girls, let run the numbers with our “one move and the whole room gets it” scenario.
Don’t like the Pakistanis? Perhaps you’re a Taliban and want most of those pestering folks down at the capital elimintated. Simple. Slip a nuke into India and watch the whole country go. Heck. Even better put it in the US. Doesn’t really matter when everybody is shooting everybody. As long as you’re somewhere on the “don’t shoot” list, you’re safe.
Not crazy about the Malaysians? Well who is, anyway. Just lob a nuke anywhere in a 500-mile radius, and their neighbors will do the job for you.
MAD, Mark, was about 2-party mutually assured destruction. I believe what you are now espousing was called, “You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”
[apologies for the profanity, but it is a quote from an external source]
It was generally acknowledged after the cold war that MAD was not going to work in a multi-party scenario. There’s something about a national policy of, say, nuking the Chinese when the Iranians attack that just ticks people off. Go figure. Some people are so finicky.
Mark B: A phrase for you: “Some damn thing in the Balkans”. We’ve already had a megadeath demonstration that an all-or-nothing response coupled with marginal, unstable players leads to tragedy. I’d really like to live out my life without witnessing a nuclear exchange. Please keep trying.
Marc D: I suggest you’ve got one part of your framing wrong, and it makes a big difference. That part is “…a world where courtroom standards are the only acceptable ones.” I suspect we both would agree that the only likely response to your Long Beach attack will be a full boat Jacksonian outbreak, no matter the party in power. Legality at either the World Court or Constitutional levels will not be an issue, and its collapse will simply be part of the collateral damage of the tragedy.
May I suggest an alternative framing that may find some common ground? In the commentary here and on Joe’s post there’s at minimum a volks-wisdom that we can grudgingly trust some newer nuke powers to act responsibly – India, Israel, China (let’s hope), but others we cannot: NK, Pakistan, Iran.
Is question is how to convert that intuition into a framing that is understandable by all, not seen to be simply arbitrary, and is utterly convincing to transgressors in regards of their fate. It should also be able to survive the probably inevitable further proliferation of nuclear power reactors. In short, a de facto effective ‘Nuclear Proliferation Treaty’, with nasty, sharp, pointy teeth.
A strawman:
* All participating nuclear powers provide samples of output of their reactors to all other powers. If any power is ever caught not doing so, through the national intelligence means of any other power, they are out of the agreement.
* All non-participating powers are in one equivalence class. They may come into compliance only by agreeing and conforming to the above, to the satisfaction of all the currently complying powers.
* Any conventionally or unconventionally delivered nuke having the signature of one of the participating powers makes that party culpable. (A powerful incentive to report any fissile materials losses and enlist everyone in cleaning them up.)
* Any conventionally or unconventionally delivered nuke having no known signature, or one known to originate from a noncompliant power by national intelligence means, means that all noncompliant powers are jointly culpable.
* The target of an attack may deal with the culpable party or parties by any means it feels necessary. Other compliant powers may assist in this, but none will oppose.
This might be stable if enough of the incumbent nuke powers agreed to it as a de facto doctrine. The disclosure part is close enough to the current, ineffective NPT compliance regime that that it might be workable, at least technically.
Tear it up…
“It was generally acknowledged after the cold war that MAD was not going to work in a multi-party scenario. There’s something about a national policy of, say, nuking the Chinese when the Iranians attack that just ticks people off. Go figure. Some people are so finicky.”
Thats absurd- MAD always involved a multi-party scenario. US existance has always been tied to England and France vis-a-vis nukes. The _reason_ the Nuke club remained exclusive is _exactly because there was a HUGE incentive to keep it so_. Why didnt the Russians give the Eastern Europeans or Cuba or anybody else the bomb of their own? Because Russia didnt want their existance tied to what Castro might decide to do (or what was done to him).
THATS THE POINT. We arent digging up new and inventive ways to kill off as many innocent people as possible, we are trying to provide _really_ effective incentives so these folks wont get in that position in the first place. Guys like the Taliban cant get nuclear weapons in the scenario you suggest without state sponsors, and they _wont_ get them if the state sponsors know for metaphysical certainty that they will pay for it with their existance if they do hand it off. That is exactly the point of MAD- we are trying to make it rationally impossible for what you are describing to happen- and the best way to do that is to keep the nuclear club as small as possible with everyone terrified of letting a wild card in and blowing everybody up. That is extremeley effective at ending the little games people like China and Russia play with us, not to mention NK.
There’s something people need to understand:
If and when a 40 KT warhead goes off in, say, Long Beach, two to three hundred thousand Americans will die. The rest of the country will go apesh*t and want revenge. The people will come rapidly to the conclusion that only Islamic Nutters could have done this, and they’ll want the problem taken care of ,PDQ.
I don’t care if the President is Hillary Clinton. If the Prez has to choose between the Eurotrash begging for restraint and tens of millions of Registered Voters screaming “Nuke the Ayatollahs”, you know, the same crowd that have been saying “Death to America” since 1979, guess who the politician listens to?
Politicians are public servants, not leaders. “Courtroom standards” my a$$. You haven’t seen people scream for blood until you see what will happen if this country gets nuked by Islamic terrorists.
“I’d really like to live out my life without witnessing a nuclear exchange. ”
I’d like to live in a world where the children can sing in peace and harmony. But this isnt that world. I’m really having trouble believing the amount of sentiment for not responding to a nuclear attack on an American city. It sounds absolutely suicidal. It sounds like exactly _what our enemies are counting on._
The point is: WE arent the ones that will have started the nuclear exchange, and we didnt put anyone in these positions. There is a word for backing down from exactly what Iran and NK are hoping we back down from- appeasement. We have no other ability to threaten NK at least, and you guys are happen to promise not to punish NK if their nukes ‘happen’ to fall into the wrong hands and demolish Baltimore. Do you not realize that is exactly what NK is counting on? Why there are doing all this in the first place? This is high stakes global thermal JOSHUA nuclear war scenarios here. We need to get back to that Cold War mentality. Why in gods name do we have nuclear weapons to begin with if we can no longer fathom using them on innocent populations? THATS WHAT THEY ARE FOR.
“THATS THE POINT. We arent digging up new and inventive ways to kill off as many innocent people as possible, we are trying to provide really effective incentives so these folks wont get in that position in the first place”
Primary actors in MAD: Warsaw Pact and NATO. Case closed.
MAD was based on the Soviet Union acting rational, or at least self-consistent. A large group of various nations, almost by definition, is not going to be self-consistent. In fact, it’s not too much to say that any large group of external entities will fail to act rationally all the time in your eyes. You can’t have the Cuban missile crises with NK on one hand and be checking reactors for signatures in Pakistan on the other. We were able to make our way through the Cuban crises because we weren’t in 8-way talks with 47 other countries. We were able to act alone, and watch the other side for signals. The word “incentive” requires a target — it doesn’t mean much without a context. Your theory falls quickly to the lowest common denominator: who wants to live today? And that’s it. It’s not like you can fine tune it any more. The problem is that the answer may be “well Mark, 1 percent thinks today would be a good day for the end of the world, are you ready to serve it up?”
section9 has a good point: somebody for sure is catching hell if a nuke goes off in Long Beach. Even if it unrational. My point, and I believe the question here is, what is the accepted standard and policy of this country? So far I’m not hearing anything practical or pragmatic from a internal or external political standpoint. I hate just to throw rocks, but there it is. Tim Oren’s got the best response so far in my book, but I remain unmoved.
Tim –
That’s a good elaboration of my sketchy scheme. Cut and paste into a post??
A.L.
Wretchard had another post on this topic a few days ago. Although what he sees happening is very similar to some of the proposals and comments here, it’s different in one very important sense. Conventional political calculations do not apply. The sitution is fundamentally different from MAD in that “There are no ledges on which the falling stone of destruction will catch.” We can attempt to imagine some, but the effort is rather futile. The golden hour is now. If we don’t, or can’t, take advantage of it we won’t really have a choice “then”.
How do we convince opponents of “our conviction?” I don’t think we have to. Explain the situation as best we can, and if the opponent is even remotely rational they’ll see that it’s far beyond a mere policy consideration. We would have no choice. It’s beyond our control. Or to put it a bit more clearly, we’d have no other “rational” choice. Therefore it’s almost the opposite of MAD, at least in the sense that MAD required that we convince the opponent that we were slightly irrational. Rationality under these conditions imposes a far more cruel and heartless fate than was the case during the Cold War.
And if our opponents can’t see that, then it’s worth almost any risk and expense to take such opponents out now, before the golden hour closes.
“MAD was based on the Soviet Union acting rational, or at least self-consistent. A large group of various nations, almost by definition, is not going to be self-consistent.”
Thats why we need to act promptly to keep the group as small as possible- and i fail to see how basically announcing what we arent going to do in the event of getting nuked advances that cause. Quite to the contrary I would say. I really seem to be missing your point. Did Libya not give up their nuclear program when it became clear the consequences were too high? Hasnt that held back the majority of other nations as well? All i am suggesting is highlighting exactly what those consequences are.
And lets not get carried away with end of the world talk. We’re talking about the end of NK and Iran at the moment, not WW3. In my opinion, it is entirely rational and right in line with traditional realpolics to make those nation understand that the consquences for being a rouge nuclear state is that you will be destroyed if we are attacked with a rouge nuclear weapon. That just doesnt seem so fantastic to me. You guys are getting really caught up in the ‘innocent victim’ emotional toil. Well that applies to every nuclear weapons scenario- just like I said before. If at some point in the day you arent willing to rattle you saber at several million innocents when their governments rattle at us, you might as well fill in those nuclear silos with concrete because they are useless to you.
Would the opposite of MAD be DAM? ‘Cause that’s what I’m thinking.
And could somebody explain to me, given the uncertainty of “explaining ourselves”, why we just shouldn’t attack everyone who might be a threat with nukes right now? After all, if your stated policy is to take out half the world, even countries who are not against you might see it in their interest to make sure you are no longer a threat to trade. Waiting is a losing game in this scenario.
Is it just me, or has this conversation gotten very surreal?
i think the scenarios have gotten surreal- which i find to be odd. When did holding Iran and NK responsible for any rouge weapon attack as an incentive for them not to propogate those weapons turn into nuking half the world? Once upon a time we could hold nations nuclear hostage for all sorts of worse reasons.
Mark — I have to go, but I will give it a quick shot. I’m really not trying to be emotional at all.
So we have a list of countries who are automatically nuked if we are attacked? Wouldn’t putting a country on this list be an act of war? Wouldn’t countries who say, trade with Iran for oil consider such a list to be a threat to their national interests? No matter how rational you think you are, the calculus plays differently in other countries. It sounds to me like you are saying something that, while it sounds cool, is totally inane. I seem to be missing your point, I’m afraid.
Did I say anything whatsoever about not responding in kind to a nuke attack on an American city? If anything, I made it clear that I thought that would happen, no matter the party in power or the nominal legality.
The residual question is how to minimize the chances of going down that road. We’re in agreement that surfacing the brutal reality of what will happen at that point is far preferable to polite fictions of ineffectual nonproliferation treaties.
Rather than simply saying that Iran and NK get it, though, it’s worth thinking about some clear dividing lines that deal with those cases as well as others that will arise. Those who are appear to deal responsible with the peril of their own nukes should have the chance to ante up to prove it. Those who are acting with malignant or ambiguous intent should have a powerful incentive to clean things up before they get uglier.
This isn’t fantasy. We have the examples of South Africa and Ukraine to show that nations can decide the risk of keeping nukes they already had was not worth any potential advantage. We’ve got Ghaddafi to show that a clear threat can be quite focusing on those who are going down the malignant proliferation path. It doesn’t take a formal treaty to implement, just clear statements from (say) us, Russian, China, the UK, and France, all of whom have good reason to believe they could be the victims of a rouge nuke.
Tim’s idea of dividing the Nuclear world into two groups determined by some standard of legitimacy might work to strengthen the logic of deterrence, compelling the “rouges” to make sacrifices to join the “legitimates” and gain a little security. That idea is worth exploring, to provide some ledges to slow or stop the stone’s fall if we cross the threshold.
Uhh… I meant “rogues”, sorry.
“So we have a list of countries who are automatically nuked if we are attacked? Wouldn’t putting a country on this list be an act of war? ”
Of course not- people do it all the time. NK threatens Japan everytime the US or SK sneezes. The list is completely logical, its only members are regimes universally recognized as being in complete violation of international law and treaty breakers.
“Wouldn’t countries who say, trade with Iran for oil consider such a list to be a threat to their national interests?”
Hopefully. It might spur them to help put an end to those nations nuclear ambitions, instead of seeing the conflict as an opportunity to screw with the US as they do now. Maybe we need the days when the big nations would lean on the little nations when nuclear war was in the offing.
“No matter how rational you think you are, the calculus plays differently in other countries. It sounds to me like you are saying something that, while it sounds cool, is totally inane. I seem to be missing your point, I’m afraid”
Inane? Its utterly simple. If my house burns down i blame all the kids playing with matches that i told repeatedly to stop. More importantly i let them know that before hand so maybe they will stop playing on their own. Demosophist has it right- this isnt even really a choice, its an eventuality we should let them know about for their own goods (as well as ours).
Kids we are through the looking glass here. The _only_ reason NK possibly has for not selling nukes is the sure and certain response from the US should those weapons be used. This isnt theoretical- this is real life, right now. Hand wringing is exactly what KJI is counting on and exactly why he thinks he can sell his weapons with no consequences. I meerly suggest it is in everyones best interests to disabuse him of that notion now with words instead of later with the real deal.
_We have to provide some consquence for wreckless rouge nations defying the world or they will become more wreckless still._ And we’ve run out of rope.
If we can’t blame the “better to fight them there than here” crowd for their latest diplomatic home run, can we at least blame a nuke that goes off in an American port on their lack of port security?
For the money we’re blowing in Iraq, we could be searching every single container that arrives in America, or even move our port facilities offshore.
And can we blame them in advance for their inevitable Katrina-like response that will kill as many people as the initial blast?
Bah!
appear s/b appearing
Russian s/b Russia
rouge s/b rogue (like the river)
PIMF. PIMF. PIMF.
A.L.,
You haven’t seen it because of your habit of closing your eyes upon seeing posts by Trent and I. Here is the opening of an article from last January which we have posted here umpteen times since.
Further down the article mentions:
Note the quantities of plutonium here are given in kilograms. Multiply by 2.2 for pounds.
Then, in today’s Washington Times, we have:
I.e., our all-knowing, wise and entirely competent intelligence (oxymoron) agencies claim that North Korea has (gasp!) EXACTLY the same amount of plutonium they said it had last year. As if North hadn’t produced anymore plutonium in the meantime.
Either they are lying, or North Korea has a lot more plutonium than they admit, or what North Korea has produced in the meantime has gone somewhere else.
Can you think of anywhere else it might have gone to? Or are they just lying?
[ Released from queue 45 min. after posting. As it stands, three or more URLs in a comment will get it held up. –Marshal Festus ]
I think you guys are still all mischaracterising the nature of the problem. It’s not something so obvious as Long Beach being vaporised. It’s the league of unaligned nations lining up to buy Nuclear arms from the North Koreas, they way they’ve already bought their convential missiles.
The question we need to avoid having to answer is what to do about all the Hugo Chaves’s of the world if they can buy an NK retail nuclear deterrent.
Monkeyboy,
A party more concerned with blame than addressing the issue is not an adult party.
Folks, I’ve given up on dialog with monkeyboy. His comments don’t fall to the leel that I’d consider banning him, but I’m done engaging him.
You may feel that’s an appropriate response as well, in which case he’ll be motivated either to engage in more serious debate or so scrawl digital graffiti elsewhere.
“It’s not my planet, monkeyboy…but it is my blog.”
A.L.
Seth, i think that is the least of our worries. Chavez with or without nukes isnt really a security issue for the US, although nobody prefers to see a nuclear armed Venezuela point Iranian missiles tipped with NK warheads at Miami. MAD still works in that situation- we have no reason to upset Venezuelas vital interests (which is also true now) and they have no way of doing so to ours short of national suicide in exchange for a US city or two (assuming we dont get our missile shield act together).
The horrific danger is that KJI and/or Iran convinces themselves that it is possible to pass a nuke to a 3rd party and not have it traced back to them. Or of course Iran going martyr and starting WW3 out of sheer bloody mindedness. But i think the first scenario is the more likely of the two. KJI isnt all there and its a lot easier for a dictator to convince his croneys to sell a nuke than it is to convince them to start a nuclear war for you.
Where i think Tom and Trent may be right would be a scenario where NK produces a nuke and smuggles it to Iran for some cash, assuming (right or wrong) it will only be used as a deterrant or impossible to trace back to NK because their research hasnt been inspected. Iran then basically just does a dummy drop to terrorist organization X and pretends it never happened. Boom. And who do we blame?
Thats what the doctrine idea addresses- we should make it clear to all parties involved that no matter how clever they think they are, there can be no profit in proliferating a nuke, and in fact being in their busiess is extremely dangerous. The upside is NK will have to worry about how crazy Iran might be and vice-versa, maybe just worried enough to back down via a face saving deal to get them off the rouge list.
Rogue even. The rouge list is something else entirely.
Seth raises a good point. One answer would be that a doctrine of ‘nuke the reactor owner’ creates a disincentive to hand nukes to those whose actions you can’t directly control. OTOH, if you’re just irresponsible anyway, maybe you don’t care about compounding the risk.
Question to the assembled collection of expertise: Are there cases in the past in which a nuclear power has outright sold or handed nuclear devices to another power? (As opposed to giving another country reactor technolog.y) Do I recall correctly that the UK and France independently developed their own capability? If there’s no precedent for such sale, maybe that’s itself a de facto bright line.
I see.
We’re spending over $600 billion a year on “defense,” yet none of that money actually goes to “defend” Americans.
If the threats that are used to justify this massive expenditure were real, dontcha think it would be wise to take at least some minimal steps to protect Americans from them?
Tim O:
Nuclear devices as in bombs? I think there’s no record of that. We and the Brits come closest, since we pretty much co-developed the A-bomb together.
However, Richard Ullman at Princeton about twenty years ago documented that we provided significant assistance to the French in the development of their independent deterrent. Bomb designs, etc., shaved a lot of time off their development process.
The Russians trained a fair number of Chinese physicists (but refrained from handing over design materials, b/c Mao was just too scary and irresponsible in the 1950s).
We apparently provided the USSR, and possibly China, with Permissive Action Link (PAL) technology, in the belief that the ability for a national command authority to retain control over its nukes was a good thing.
Insofar as we have much of an idea as to what AQ Khan had been up to, he may have come closest to providing an actual weapon. He was (from all accounts) acting independent of the Pakistani government, however, and it’s not clear that he actually handed over any weapons (as opposed to blueprints, calculations, etc.).
Tom H,
Please carefully note the following:
13 lbs — CIA/NSA/DIA estimate of Nork Plutonium used in bomb test.
13/2.2= 5.9 and a fraction kilograms.
Passage from the telegraph article:
bq. Plutonium is the element used to fuel the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945. Between *7kg and 9kg* are needed for a weapon. According to Siegfried Hecker, the eminent American nuclear scientist, officials in North Korea intend to restart a reactor that will produce 60kg a year.”
The three letter agencies just said that the Nork bomb is using plutonium *at rates below what was expected a year ago.*
That means a great deal. Starting with the fact the three letter agencies are spinning like hell and haven’t got their stories straight.
Why are you so willing to give up our freedom so these nutballs can have nukes?
That’s the big advantage of the “hit everyone” response – it’s roughly the ONLY way to disincentivize the development of nuclear weapons, and the disincentive is exponentially greater not to sell said weapons.
Hell, NK might even decide to be a regular member of the club. If they’re not worried about the lost revenue from sales, but they’re terrified of foreign attack, then they can keep the weapons program and accept the requisite inspectors, yadda yadda. They still have the security of having a few (pathetically small and weak, pose pose, American muscle flex) nukes around the house, and everyone else gets a big incentive to keep their regime afloat, or at least keep things from coming apart at the seams.
Mind you, it’s entirely likely that they’d accept such a deal and then immediately attempt to cheat on it, building their “regular” bombs for the stockpile and then some “off the books” bombs with a different signature for export. If you can’t trust NK to hold to a treaty (and they broke one getting to this point, so we have ample reason to doubt their word), then all you can do is point the gun at them and hope they comply.
Tim’s plan may have an advantage in that we have options short of “bombs away” in the event of a nuclear explosion, but don’t kid yourselves – if we did not bomb those countries, we would certainly deliver an ultimatum that they surrender totally, and at least one (the guilty party, heh) would refuse. Likely ALL of them would refuse. At that point, do we engage in conventional war to force them to submit, hoping that they don’t have a second warhead ready, or do we engage in wholesale slaughter?
In reality, the only advantage of a selective plan is that some of the targeted countries might capitulate and spare their populations (especially if you offer amnesty and a big carrot to the leading elite). The big disadvantage is that the nuke-user would have time to try again, and you can guarantee that the second nuclear weapon would prove convincing. (The US has some history with that, if you remember…)
I’d like to think that I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I had to order the deaths of millions of people, the vast majority of whom had done us no wrong. I don’t know, however, that I would fail to do so under the circumstances.
So we’re gonna nuke Israel, N. Korea, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, China and Russia if we’re attacked by a nuke?
Isn’t that plan more incentive for al Qaeda to get a nuke and use it against us?
For those who haven’t seen the link elsewhere, John McCain has a guest post re NKor at Captain’s Quarters.
A.L.,
What proof do you require that North Korea and Iran are cooperating in nuclear matters? A written confession by their governments? Or will you then say that they are lying, or that the confessions are fake like this test?
Or will you believe it only when they nuke us? What is your bottom line?
Why are we supposed to wait for proof by some impossible and constantly changing definition before believing the bloody obvious – THAT OUR ENEMIES COOPERATE AGAINST US?
The point I am making is that you are in terminal denial here. You are stuck on an old paradigm and won’t give it up until you die. Which means your statements on this subject have no value.
I’m fairly demoralized by the response I’m seeing to the threats posed by NK and Iran, and by the manner that MSM shamelessly rewrites the narrative every evening to suit its elitist preferences. The basic analysis of Qutb is that the Christianized West will tend to respond too little and too late to challenges from Islam, or simply won’t maintain the effort even when successful. This is the story of the Crusades, which Bernard Lewis also saw as “too little”.
But not only are our boldest not willing to countenance the genuine price of forestalling that awful future of the conjectures, but we also have far too many voices who simply see it all as a clown’s game, to be milked as a good opportunity to express grievance about civilization’s imperfections. (i.e. munkyboy * millions).
Perhaps if it appears that we’re simply not going to muster the required resolve we should just revisit the idea of martyrdom with which Christianity began? If you’re unwilling to kill the home invader perhaps your best bet is to throw yourself on his mercy? Or, by example, change his heart?
No, I’m not kidding. I have little faith in our resolve to fight. We’ve got civilizational ADD. Perhaps we can muster enough attention to tap that reservoir of strategic pacifism for the second time? Maybe we’re just not cut out for the fight?
I’m starting to agree with that. The fact that we have to hand wring and agonize about even _threatening_ a nuclear response to a nuclear attack is more than disheartening. It kinda shows how far down the path we’ve gone. The Reagan lesson obviously hasnt taken hold- that being resolute can win wars without firing a shot, but being conflicted emboldens those that seek dominion. We are playing big boy poker here, i think we’ve been playing peace time American politics too long. There are a couple of nations out there that are holding a nuclear shiv to our throats. The idea that simply telling them to _back the F off or this is what you get_ is seen as too intense, too agressive, is simply devastating. We care more about their populations than they do, and thats going to be the end of us. Sometimes i think that the Skynet-JOSHUA-Hal 9000 builders werent as nuts as you would think.
We worry about compassion so much- what about justice? On some level we have to act as though a nation is the sum of the will of its people, otherwise we would never be able to fight a fascist foe. Here are 2 nations that routinely defy every international treaty and understanding, not to mention flat out moral outrage we can think of- and yet we arent able to give them an ultimatum about developing and proliferating _nuclear weapons._ Something is horrifically wrong with that scenario. Kim Jung Il is as great a butcher as there is left in the world to day, as great a mad man, and we aren’t willing to tell him he’ll get what Japan 60 years ago got if he keeps going down this road that ends with an American city meeting nuclear fire? Is that seriously where we are today?
For once and all, compassion and hand-wringing have little to do with it, except for the wonderful rhetorical levers available in the subject matter. Please don’t get confused and try to stay on track.
Remember that you guys are basing our response on the _delivery_ of nukes, not the production of nukes. You are saying that since country X, Y, and Z make nukes (and we don’t trust them), once a nuke goes off over here, they get it. Let’s put aside the issue of whether any “non bad” countries might see an advantage in nuking us under those scenarios for a minute. Let’s just deal with the explosion (or threat thereof, and the policy)
Currently, national policy is based on identifying, mitigating, and deferring threats based on national interest. This is true for all countries. Countries such as Iran, NK, and Pakistan have a lot of economic ties. As I understand it, you are saying we should punish not only those countries in the event of an anonymous nuclear blast, but all of those economic interests from people and organzations in their trading group, which is pretty much the world any more.
If we were to have a policy that would punish economic interests of other nations because of action some other random group might take, it presents them with two options: either worry about finding every threat to OUR national interest and making it go away, or view us and/or our policy as the real threat. The devil I know is always better than the devil I do not know.
Such a policy would quickly make us more of an easily identifiable and mitigable threat to more countries than dozens of trans-national mostly-hidden NGO terrorist organizations. After all, they know where we live. So if I represented the resources of 20-40 nations and wanted the best economic and political outcome, my best bet would be to do something about the U.S., not try to chase hundreds or thousands of people all over the place. After all, U.S. policy can be changed, and the danger of loose nukes is really to the U.S. (and maybe GB and AU), not the rest of us.
So the deliberate, logical, cold calculus of self interest does not work for us in this case. The position of DAM (Deliberate Auto Mutual destruction?) is self-consistent and rational, but it incentivizes others to deal with us as a threat, not work with us. It just don’t work, dudes. Nothing emotional or wishy-washy about the criticism. Your position fails to acheive its desired goals.
As far as civilizations with ADD, yes, different types of governments are better or worse at defeating various kinds of threats. We’re going to have a very difficult time with subtle and multi-decade issues, even if they are huge in potential impact.
Daniel, you -sure- that it’s the US’s problem? You know, nobody would bomb, say, Spain to further the global cause of militant Islam when they could bomb the US or UK… except, of course, that they’ve done just that already. What about Japan, who Kim seems to enjoy buzzing with a long-range missile when he gets bored? Russia has also sustained a few mass-casualty terrorist attacks…
I also note the interesting absence of Israel from the list. You think a small country with a history of suicide bombing, that is -also- a big source of Arab tension, has nothing to worry about from a loose nuke? (Leaving aside the comments of the Iranian president, who’s essentially stated that they’d love to nuke Israel.)
Hell, it might not even be in a Western country. There are plenty of groups that could try to use a nuke threat in order to pull off a revolution in their own backyard. Algeria? Indonesia?
Also, while “we can’t afford to sever the economic ties of these countries!” is a neat argument, we’re not exactly talking about the biggest trading partners here. Pakistan, to put it bluntly, does not have much foreign trade, and a lot of it is with Iran. Iran, yes, you lose some oil production, and that’s bad. North Korea doesn’t have economic ties with anybody but China, and those ties only flow one way. Comparing that to the damage done by a nuclear weapon going off in an urban area? Please.
The weakness of the “if they all gang up on the US” argument is that the US tends to have much bigger economic ties with the major players than everybody else. Even if other countries weren’t happy with us, what are they going to do? There’s no economic damage that they could do to us that we can’t do right back and five times worse. If you tried to direct the policy of 20 nations against the US, what you’d see is most of your supporters cutting a deal with the US behind your back and your own nation getting screwed as everyone stops trading with it. (One of the advantages to being the biggest, strongest guy around is that you don’t get bullied!) Which country is going to favor preserving their economic links with a couple of third-world dictatorships over getting into a full-throated trade war with the US and everybody the US can haul behind them?
During the Cold War, most Liberals were appalled at the notion of a “winnable” nuclear war, or a “limited” nuclear exchange, and they supported the MAD strategy precisely because there was a consensus that it was the best way to deter ANY nuclear attack.
It’s odd to see some Liberals now refusing to apply MAD deterrence to rogue regimes when such refusal would logically increase the risk that we will be attacked and, therefore, would put the enemies for whom they have such humanitarian concern at greater risk of being on the receiving end of the devastating response that they are unwilling to contemplate as part of a deterrent strategy, but which would nevertheless likely be the result (the Long Beach scenario discussed above, for example). There was a time when such pretensions to an ability to control a US response to a nuclear attack would have been understood as a dangerous willingness to blur the critically important distinction between conventional (i.e., winnable) warfare and nuclear (i.e., suicidal, and therefore unwinnable) warfare.
Perhaps it’s an example of the influence of that strain of Liberalism which tends to elevate subjective intent over objective results. During much of the Cold War, such strain was suppressed by hard-headedness, at least where the prospect of nuclear attack was concerned. But lately? Could it be that the end of the Cold War has allowed soft-headedness to prevail, such that, if we declare our intention to kill millions in response to a nuclear attack, we are evil, but if we hold even the lives of our enemies too dear to contemplate such a thing, we are good? even if the logical effect of the latter strategy is to increase the chance that millions will die in a nuclear attack and a subsequent nuclear response (which of course no one opposing the MAD strategy could hope to actually restrain)?
_”For once and all, compassion and hand-wringing have little to do with it, except for the wonderful rhetorical levers available in the subject matter. Please don’t get confused and try to stay on track”_
But that argument _has_ been made in this thread. We all seem to agree that military action would be probable against ‘non-guilty’ rogue regimes in such a case, but nuclear attack you are saying is off the charts. Hence at the bottom it is just a matter of acceptable scale.
_”Remember that you guys are basing our response on the delivery of nukes, not the production of nukes. You are saying that since country X, Y, and Z make nukes (and we don’t trust them), once a nuke goes off over here, they get it.”_
I am basing our threat posture, which in the global nuclear game is far more important (and often different) than what our actual decision making at the critical moment would look like. For instance, it was US Cold War policy to respond to a single nuclear launch with complete overwhelming response. That was the policy. In reality, would that really have happened? Who knows- but the policy was important in and of itself because it made the actual event much more unlikely to happen. The policy created a huge disinsentive for the USSR to try gaming the system.
_”Let’s put aside the issue of whether any “non bad” countries might see an advantage in nuking us under those scenarios for a minute. Let’s just deal with the explosion (or threat thereof, and the policy)”_
Lets do that because the nuke would very likely be traced to its actual source and there would be hell to pay. The intolerable threat is the NK and Iran may not understand that and/or can convince themselves they can get away with passing along a nuke. Bad presumptions have started more wars than anything. Making our presumptions automatic and quite up front may just stop a war.
_”As I understand it, you are saying we should punish not only those countries in the event of an anonymous nuclear blast, but all of those economic interests from people and organzations in their trading group, which is pretty much the world any more.”_
Thats a ridiculous argument. You can make it for every war scenario imagineable. Did we punish France by going to war with Iraq?
_”either worry about finding every threat to OUR national interest and making it go away, or view us and/or our policy as the real threat.”_
You are missing the point- it doesnt become _our_ problem at all. Let those nations that have tied their financial interests to lunatic regimes in violation of international law decide what to do. I think its a marvelous incentive for China and Russia to start rethinking their current positions.
_”Such a policy would quickly make us more of an easily identifiable and mitigable threat to more countries than dozens of trans-national mostly-hidden NGO terrorist organizations.”_
Are you seriously suggesting the rest of the world is going to ‘gang up on us’ for threatening NK and Iran? Implausible in the extreme.
_”The position of DAM (Deliberate Auto Mutual destruction?) is self-consistent and rational, but it incentivizes others to deal with us as a threat, not work with us.”_
As i showed above- it forces them to deal with the problem which is not happenening now. China and Russia are not going to freak out because we threaten Iran and NK for producing nuclear weapons- _because it is exactly the kind of thing they would do_ (or any rational actor). You make it seem like this policy would be some unheard of new innovation in international relations. This kind of thing happens all the time. Nobody but the Western left would bat an eyelash. You honestly think China and Russia are going to flip the international apple cart by going to bat for _North Korea?_
Oh, and btw, do you think it has occurred to China in particular that a nuclear weapon going off in Los Angeles might just impact China’s bottom line _a lot?_ Somehow i doubt they are getting as much out of NK as they are from trade with the US. By a sight.