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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA When the nukes start dropping
... By Julian
Delasantellis
Iran would suffer many times
what it wrought from the inevitable US nuclear
retaliation.
Herman Kahn, the physicist
turned Cold War nuclear strategist, had a name for
these musings of mass murder, these cerebrations
of ultimate catastrophe; he called it "thinking
the unthinkable".
I was once invited to
give an economics guest lecture to a class
studying this discipline, the possible scenarios
and wargames that were popular intellectual parlor
games during the Cold War. Of the 35 students in
class, none but one was a young woman. Yes,
studying this was OK for men; it wasn't something horrible
like kissing another man.
As I left the class, the professor gave out the
week's homework, to investigate who would be the
"winner" of a US/USSR nuclear "exchange" where one
country suffered 20 million dead, but whose
industrial infrastructure was degraded by a mere
20%, the other lost "only" 7 million dead, but 50%
of its industry.
Good
question The extent of these
investigations, both the Cordesman study and the
reams of similar studies that came out during the
Cold War, may be a lot more detailed than
necessary or seemly, but they do serve an
important purpose. The fear can be controlled,
made to serve an important purpose.
In an
October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, President
George W Bush, whipping an America shellshocked by
September 11, 2001 into a frenzy against his
Oedipal nemesis, Saddam Hussein, warned, "America
must not ignore the threat gathering against us.
Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for
the final proof - the smoking gun - that could
come in the form of a mushroom cloud." In this, he
turned away from the strategy that won the Cold
War, the strategy that allowed the people of the
US and USSR a half century of albeit uneasy peace.
Early on in the nuclear age, it was seen,
first by America, eventually by the Soviets, that
there was no real defense against the new weapons.
If you shot down 95% of the conventional bombers
of World War II, you were doing very well, yet
letting 5% of bombers carrying nuclear weapons
past your defenses would devastate your society,
and that was before the advent of the infinitively
harder to shoot down nuclear-tipped ballistic
missiles.
If you could not defend against
the threat, was all hope lost? No, even if you
couldn't defend against the threat, you could
deter it. If your nuclear force could be deployed
in such a way that it would be assured of
surviving an opponent's first strike, by being in
hardened silos or on hidden submarines, any
possible aggressor would know that any potential
attack would be pointless, since the surviving
retaliatory volley, which also could not be
defended against, would then devastate the
attacker's society.
Called "mutual assured
destruction", and then given the pejorative
acronym MAD, the strategy worked; its horrific
implications made sure that, when the US and the
Soviets came closest to the nuclear brink during
the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, president
John F Kennedy and premier Nikita Khrushchev found
a compromise that very quickly pulled their
countries away from the precipice.
But the
strategy did not guarantee total security, for its
operation depended on the existence of those tens
of thousands of nuclear weapons. The United States
maintained its deployment of Nike anti-aircraft
missiles along the nation's periphery into the
late 1960s; during that time, it also started to
deploy, but then bargained away, a limited,
rudimentary anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system.
In 1983, president Ronald Reagan proposed
the development of the futuristic, space-based
"Star Wars" satellite missile defense system.
Popular with the public, and effective as a
campaign issue, the concept was unpopular with
most US military officers, who thought it
unnecessary, expensive and ultimately impossible.
Quietly, president George H W Bush slashed funding
for "Star Wars" during his term following
Reagan's.
But after a decade of enjoying
the "peace dividend" in the 1990s, America
returned its gaze to the world it had been
ignoring after 9/11. There it saw a frightening
place, filled with mad, irrational terrifying
enemies. Like a child wanting the security of a
warm blanket during a dark night's thunderstorm,
America yearned once again for the its
traditional, comfortable security of
inviolability.
Even before 9/11, George W
Bush saw the political power of this desire - the
attacks of that day forced then-national security
advisor Condoleezza Rice to cancel an address she
was planning to give that very day in advocacy of
missile defense. After 9/11, Bush proposed
billions of dollars in new ABM funding, even
withdrawing from the 1972 US/USSR ABM treaty to
build a small ABM missile station at Fort Greely,
Alaska.
Then came the problem with
Iraq As Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton
has learned to her regret, after 9/11, no American
politician could deny, or even attempt to
rationalize away, the seemingly obvious, boiling,
eviscerating hatred the Arab and Muslim worlds
(few Americans know the difference) held for
America. "Why do they hate us?" Americans, whose
maximal extent of contact with Arab culture was
often just a box of microwaveable couscous mix,
asked in fear and trepidation.
Deterrence
was never all that popular when applied to the
Russians; the American public was told that it was
obvious that there was no way it would work
against the mad Saddam Hussein and the crazy
Arabs. Not willing to entertain the mere
possibility that the secular Saddam and the
fundamentalist Osama bin Laden were anything but
identical hatebots rolling off the same terrible
anti-American assembly line, the country was
fertile ground for Bush's fearmongering. Saddam
was just too mad, insane, suicidal, psychopathic,
irrational and megalomaniac to deter - exactly how
current Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad is
described now.
Many observers have noted
the similarities between the anti-Saddam public
relations campaign of 2002-03 and the
anti-Ahmadinejad campaign of the present; it too
is said to be sowing the seeds for another attack,
this one against Iran.
Can Ahmadinejad be
deterred? I have no idea; I'm not an expert on the
man, as, of course, are not all those who warn of
his status as an implacable and eternal foe of the
West. I do know that deterrence did work against
Joseph Stalin in the 1950s, who was irrational
enough to sacrifice about 50 million of his fellow
citizens in the Soviet Union's agricultural
collectivizations and political purges of the
1930s.
It worked against Mao Zedong,
responsible for about 100 million of his fellow
citizens' deaths in the Great Leap Forward of the
1950s and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
Neither of these leaders, who possessed both the
ideology and capacity to launch a nuclear strike
against America, did so. Evidently, they were
deterred by America's massive nuclear retaliatory
power. Are we really saying that Ahmadinejad is
more bloodthirsty and irrational than Stalin or
Mao?
The success of deterrence is
intimately related to the nature of politics and
politicians. From their days in short pants, the
world's leaders have dreamt of possessing power
and dominion over millions of their fellow
citizens; whether they do so through democratic or
other means is only a question related to the
random chance of what nation they were born in.
After they assume ultimate national power,
after a lifetime of political striving and
ambition, those who say that deterrence does not
work are, in essence, saying that these leaders
will put some abstract hatred or ideology above
the lives and interests of their fellow citizens
who put them into power. The countering argument
to this is that you can't rule a country if
there's no country to rule.
This is the
value of studies such as Cordesman's and their
ultra-meticulous details of death. At the end of
the study, Cordesman repeats the philosophy
expounded by "Joshua", the inquisitive nuclear
war-fighting computer of the 1983 movie War
Games; "The only way to win is not to play."
(The actual line from the movie is. "A strange
game - the only way to win is not to play.")
By actually showing how devastating a
retaliatory strike against Iran or Syria would be,
by showing how the US and/or Israel does not need
to launch a pre-emptive attack to be secure,
perhaps Cordesman's opus will help the world turn
away from the frightful momentum now building for
an Iran strike.
There will be 77 days from
the November 4 presidential election to the
inauguration of a new American president on
January 20, 2009. In my mind, that's when Bush has
penciled in his final, glorious
Gotterdammerung.
Besides not
wanting to risk the slaughter of those who put the
leader in power, perhaps deterrence works for
another reason. In 1985, Sting, in his song,
"Russians", sang of an additional factor keeping
world leaders fingers off the nuclear button.
There's no such thing as a winnable
war It's a lie we don't believe
anymore Mr Reagan says we will protect
you I don't subscribe to this point of
view Believe me when I say to you I hope
the Russians love their children too We share
the same biology Regardless of
ideology What might save us me and you Is
if the Russians love their children
too.
Note 1. To view
the report "Iran, Israel and Nuclear War", click
here.
Julian
Delasantellis is a management consultant,
private investor and educator in international
business in the US state of Washington. He can be
reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
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