China’s ramping up of its nuclear weapons numbers and Russia’s intensified nuclear threats against NATO and Japan are forcing the United States and its allies to reevaluate how much Western security should rely on nuclear first use and retaliatory strikes.
This helps explain why leaders in Poland, Germany, Turkey, and South Korea have recently floated the idea of getting nuclear weapons of their own. Meanwhile, nuclear officials in Great Britain and the United States are weighing the merits of increasing the number of their deployed nuclear weapons to “strengthen deterrence.” All of this has commentators asking if we are returning to a world of “assured destruction.”
How heavily the United States and its allies should rely on nuclear threats or invest in new missile and air defenses to assure our security is matter worthy of debate. What shouldn’t be, however, is whether assured destruction, which entails the nuclear targeting of cities would ever makes sense.
Some argue that we should only target population centers so we can reduce the number of nuclear weapons in our arsenal. Others, who reject this, nonetheless allow that if we are serious about deterring and winning nuclear wars, killing large numbers of innocents has to be contemplated.
Perhaps, but a half-century ago, Nathan Leites, one of the hardest headed and smartest analysts consulting for the RAND Corporation, argued such bloody mindedness was a mistake. In the attached analysis, “Once More on What We Should Not Do Even in the Worst Case: The Assured Destruction Attack,” Mr. Leites argues on military and moral grounds that planning to attack cities first or second is not a complete thought.
Mr. Leites wrote this essay for The California Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy, an organization that Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter, who helped found NPEC, helped create. This essay has been unavailable on the internet…until today. It is a disturbing read.
As always, I’m curious to get your take of the attached.
As Ever,
Henry S.
June 1974
By: Nathan Leites
Once More About What We Should Not Do Even in the Worst Case: The Assured Destruction Attack
Below I shall not deal with the worth of what has come to be known as the Assured Destruction Capability. I shall assume that we will want to continue having such a capability (while adding other endowments) and merely consider ways of exercising it.
While SIOP may dominate less than a few years ago, it is still with us. As a very specialized reader of an earlier draft of these pages recalls about a conference held in the summer of 1972, to almost all the participants anyone was suspect who would propose weapon systems compatible with anything other than what this paper is against.
The reader will not find below a history of the ideas about which I feel dubious, nor of those to which I am inclined.
I am not trying to answer the question: how is it that so many eminent men of affairs, often counselled by analysts of excellence, have over so many years adopted, less or more, a position which appears to me — after many others — as devoid of foundation both in morals and interest? However, I believe I have contributed to setting the stage for such an inquiry.
I shall not imply that all those quoted as expressing the stance which is my subject believed in it fully, or at all, always. Obviously, there is a powerful reason here for public words to exceed actual intents.
But I do surmise that to a notable degree more was involved than a threat merely intended to discourage, accompanied by a resolve not to execute.
More than that, I do conjecture that only few policymakers and planners fully renounced SIOP as an option perhaps to be executed.
Even more, I do believe that many who have in recent years argued for our acquiring and, in case of war, using a capacity for limited strategic operations, have proposed it as supplementary, in fact often subordinate, to the ultima ratio of SIOP. They surely were often moved, when so doing, by prudence in the face of a powerful creed: a motive which, even when valid, may help one conserve residues of a belief from which one has moved away.
In contrast, following upon many, I shall reassemble — more fully and concisely than I have seen done — the reasons for denying any morality and reason to “general” nuclear war.
All emphases in quotations, unless the contrary is indicated, are mine.
Donald G. Brennan has provided a number of important corrections of an earlier draft as well as additions to it. I am indebted to exchanges with Frank Hoeber, Fred Iklé, Albert Wohlstetter, and Charles Wolf.
To read the full piece, click here.