Deterring The Undeterrable
Washington Post:
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 18, 2008; A27
The era of nonproliferation is over. During the first half-century of the nuclear age, safety lay in restricting the weaponry to major powers and keeping it out of the hands of rogue states. This strategy was inevitably going to break down. The inevitable has arrived.
The six-party talks on North Korea have failed miserably. They did not prevent Pyongyang from testing a nuclear weapon and entering the club. Now North Korea has broken yet again its agreement to reveal all its nuclear facilities.
The other test case was Iran. The EU-3 negotiations (Britain, France and Germany) went nowhere. Each U.N. Security Council resolution enacting what passed for sanctions was more useless than the last. Uranium enrichment continues.
When Iran’s latest announcement that it was tripling its number of centrifuges to 9,000 elicited no discernible response from the Bush administration, the game was over. Everyone says Iran must be prevented from going nuclear. No one will bell the cat.
The “international community” is prepared to do nothing of consequence to halt nuclear proliferation. No one wants to admit that. Nor does anyone want to contemplate the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of one, two, many rogue states.
We must. The day is coming, and quickly. We must face reality and begin thinking how we live with the unthinkable.
There are four ways to deal with rogue states going nuclear: preemption, deterrence, missile defense and regime change.
Preemption works but, as a remedy, it is spent. Iraq was defanged by the 1981 Israeli airstrike, by the 1991 Persian Gulf War (which uncovered Saddam Hussein’s clandestine nuclear programs) and finally by the 2003 invasion, which ended the Hussein dynasty, père et deux fils.
A collateral effect of the Iraq war was Libya’s nuclear disarmament. Seeing Hussein’s fate, Moammar Gaddafi declared and dismantled his nuclear program. And if November’s National Intelligence Estimate is to be believed, the Iraq invasion even induced Iran to temporarily suspend weaponization and enrichment.
But the cost of preemption is simply too high. No one is going to renew the Korean War with an attack on Pyongyang. And the prospects of an attack on Iran’s facilities are now vanishingly small. What to do?
Deterrence. It worked in the two-player Cold War. Will it work against multiple rogues? It seems quite suitable for North Korea, whose regime, far from being suicidal, is obsessed with survival.
Iran is a different proposition. With its current millenarian leadership, deterrence is indeed a feeble gamble, as I wrote in 2006 in making the case for considering preemption. But if preemption is off the table, deterrence is all you’ve got. Our task is to make deterrence in this context less feeble.
Two ways: Begin by making the retaliatory threat in response to Iranian nuclear aggression so unmistakable and so overwhelming that the non-millenarians in leadership would stay the hand or even remove those taking their country to the point of extinction.
But there is an adjunct to deterrence: missile defense. Against a huge Soviet arsenal, this was useless. Against small powers with small arsenals, i.e., North Korea and Iran, it becomes extremely effective in conjunction with deterrence.
For the sake of argument, imagine a two-layered anti-missile system in which each layer is imperfect, with, say, a 90 percent shoot-down accuracy. That means one in 100 missiles gets through both layers. That infinitely strengthens deterrence by radically degrading the possibility of a successful first strike. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might refrain from launching an arsenal of, say, 20 nukes if his scientific advisers showed him that there was only an 18.2 percent chance of any getting through– and a 100 percent chance that a retaliatory counterattack of hundreds of Israeli (and/or American) nukes would reduce the world’s first Islamic republic to a cinder.
Of course, one can get around missile defense by using terrorists. But anything short of a hermetically secret, perfectly executed, multiple-site attack would cause terrible, but not existential, destruction. The retaliatory destruction, on the other hand, would be existential.
We are, of course, dealing here with probabilities. Total safety comes only from regime change. During the Cold War, we worried about Soviet nukes, but never French or British nukes. Weapons don’t kill people; people kill people. Regime change will surely come to both North Korea and Iran. That is the ultimate salvation.
But between now and then lies danger. How to safely navigate the interval? Deterrence plus missile defense renders a first strike so unlikely to succeed and yet so certain to bring on self-destruction that it might — just might — get us through from the day the rogues go nuclear to the day they are deposed.
We have entered the post-nonproliferation age. It’s time to take our heads out of the sand and deal with it.
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In 1983 I was have a discussion with a Lib idiot about nuclear weapons. He was literally terrified of a Nuclear exchange between us and the Soviets.
I told him I wasn’t worried because no one knew more about what the aftermath would be like than the U.S. Military.
And that the U.S. Military would never allow a Civilian leader (including POTUS) or anyone else to launch a first strike.
I told him that Russian nuclear forces are as professional as ours and they too would never allow a first strike to be launched…no matter what you see in movies or TV.
Around Christmas ‘84 I ran into him again and he said he’d voted for Reagan.
for the Gipper
Simpler times, eh?
April 18th, 2008 at 7:39 pmSimpler times, eh?
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Got that right … Atleast the Soviets valued life (in their own way) …
The devils we face today don’t. When someone uses suicide as a weapons delivery system, you just can’t talk/reason with them about NOT killing you …
SOME people just don’t understand that.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:51 pmThe difference between NK and Iran is that NK can do nothing w/o a wink and a nod from China. In the case of Iran there is no such oversight.
NK wants to survive. Iran wants to cause such chaos to the world that the Mahdi appears.
Both countries are equally screwy. But only one is crazy enough to launch a nuke against a Western target..regardless of M.A.D.
No amount of sanctions will stop Iran. The only people affected by those sanctions are the average Iranian; not their military-industrial-complex; which continues to aid and abet terrorism around the world. Such terrorism is likely funded by both Muslim Charities and Iranian oil sales.
With so many countries and pricks like GE helping out the Iranians, further sanctions will do nothing.
The only alternative to a nuclear Iran is a massive strike on their military-industrial complexes. Call it “Shock And Awe times 100″.
Otherwise, once the Iraniacs launch their strikes against Israel and the US, it will be too late for the average Iranian, many Israelis, US and Coalition soldiers and many, many innocent civilians.
Do the smart thing. Strike now. Strike hard. Destroy every Iraniac installation in Iran, Lebanon. Do it now or we will most assuredly have to do it next year, or the year after..only then we’ll be talking about a nuclear counterstrike that will make Nagasaki and Hiroshima look like a minor accident in comparison.
April 18th, 2008 at 7:51 pmBecause of the way of the world, and of the PC bullshit politics that all governments play, The U.S. could not make the following info public: But the U.S. should tell Saudia Arabia, Syria, Iran, and I’m sure many other Islamic nations who would fit the profile, that if the U.S. is attacked with a nuclear bomb,small, medium, dirty-bomb, what-ever; make it be known that we will destory them in a heartbeat. Sit them down at the State Department or in the Oval Office and be clear, this is what will happen to you. Because of your support of the Islamic terrorists, we will flatten you. Then perhaps these yahoos might do something to help in the prevention of terrorists getting and setting off a bomb in the U.S.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:27 pmAmen, lets give our children (fuck theirs) a chance
April 20th, 2008 at 12:35 amThere is no way out of this problem! We and the Israelis have waited far too long to solve it. Clinton let NK get away with their program, because he was too busy chasing skirts. W has let Iran off the hook because of his focus on Saddam and Iraq. Saddam and sons, while madmen, were not a serious threat to our security. W should have let that go. The one real benefit that came from Iraq is that we are the new next door neighbors to Iran, even though that doesn’t seem to matter openly to Ahmadinejad. And our Persian Gulf “friends” are too busy sucking up our dollars to build ski resorts in the desert, construct palatial homes, stock their garages with more cars than they can drive in 5 lifetimes, play with non arab girls and boys, swill booze and gamble millions to feel any heat. They know that we need their oil and will come to their defense [remember Desert Storm?] at a cost of our blood and treasure. They do nothing to help and therefor compound the problem. On the other hand sitting around whining and complaining will not solve the problem either. Action in some form is necessary now. Maybe start rattling our swords is one answer.
April 20th, 2008 at 2:52 amonce a nuke happens on our soil i doubt the liberal piglets could stop retaliatory pwnage
April 20th, 2008 at 9:32 am