It’s a MAD world. But nukes didn’t stop war, humans did

Which brings up an 80-year-old question: Did the development of atomic weapons keep the peace during the Cold War? And if so, what accounts for this paradoxical result? The simple answer is the unsatisfying one: It’s complicated.

Harry Truman, the US president responsible for Hiroshima, insisted that the bomb would “become a powerful and forceful influence toward the maintenance of world peace.” Recent polling by Pew suggests that view is out of fashion: 69% of US respondents said the development of nukes “has made the world less safe.”

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But maybe that’s the wrong question. After all, a weapon isn’t a sentient thing; the real question is whether the people in charge are wielding it wisely. (In this case, not using it at all.) And by ‘wisdom,’ I don’t mean just believing that a nuclear war, while not unthinkable, is untenable. Rather, real wisdom is recognizing that avoiding a nuclear winter required a remarkably astute series of strategic shifts by American leaders over the 45 years we lived on the brink.

We often view Cold War strategy through the catchy phraseology of the early theorists of atomic conflict, many of them working at the RAND Corporation. They included the economist Thomas Schelling, a specialist in game theory, and the physicist Herman Kahn, who popularized the idea of ‘mutually assured destruction’—the idea that the horrific consequences of a nuclear exchange would restrain both adversaries.

Maybe. Game play may be a good way of considering economic decision-making, but it’s risky for geostrategy: It is traditionally based on the idea that neither side has an incentive to change strategy unilaterally and can assume the nations are ‘playing’ a zero-sum nuclear game. That’s not how policy and statecraft are played.

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Mutually assured destruction has a stronger grip on reality but, in addition to its poor branding, it was widely looked at in static terms: the perpetual presence of civilization-ending weapons poised on a hair-trigger. That model doesn’t hold up, for example, if even one side thinks the escalatory ladder can end with the use of low-yield tactical ‘battlefield’ weapons.

Abstract theories are all well and good, but let’s face it: politics, diplomacy, military strategy, soft power, even luck—these are the product of actions by fallible, flesh-and-blood humans who change their minds and adjust to new realities, as do their successors with the status quo they inherit. So, if we want to say that a mass of nuclear weapons kept the peace for decades, we need to focus on the men (alas, they are all men of course) in charge, and not the missiles.

The US approach to deterrence had almost as many monikers as presidents over those 45 years: massive retaliation, New Look, Flexible Response, strategic stability, Madman Theory, ‘limited’ nuclear war and so forth. Some overlapped and all contributed to the nuclear balance, but none defined it. Rather, taken together they show that if nukes kept the peace, it was only through constant adaptation based on shifting geopolitics, advances in conventional military technology, generational change, domestic politics and policy conflicts (i.e., bureaucratic backstabbing). 

Bookshelves and hard drives groan with the mass of debates over that history. It defies easy encapsulation. 

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Then there is the strange case of Ronald Reagan. As much as his opponents painted him as a warmonger US leader, he had been in favour of a ban on atomic weapons as far back as 1945, when Warner Brothers blocked him from helping to lead a Hollywood antinuclear rally. He came into office with the mindset that the concept of mutually assured destruction was abhorrent.

Reagan’s strategy was stick and carrot. The most discussed and perhaps misunderstood initiative of the Reagan years was the Strategic Defense Initiative, or ‘Star Wars’ as its detractors called it. 

The space-based system was intended as a shield to defend the US from Soviet missiles, insulating it from the biggest nuclear threat. In the minds of Reagan and his advisers, it was the ultimate peacemaker: If the Soviets were unable to hit the US with massive nuclear blasts, there would be no cause to hit back. Opponents derided its technological infeasibility (a good point) and said it would upend the balance of power in the nuclear age—a less evident conclusion, and an odd one from a crowd that decried the status quo of equilibrium under mutual assured destruction.

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As we know, SDI never happened. And with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, we entered what we hoped would be a sort of post-nuclear global order. Until now.

With Russian President Vladimir Putin threatening to use battlefield weapons in the Ukraine conflict, North Korea refining its ballistic missiles and China building a world-class arsenal in record time, we have reached what my colleague Hal Brands calls the New Nuclear Age.

So, in this new cold war, how does the US re-deploy the lessons of the old one, and adapt to changing conditions in a way that deters rivals without inflaming tensions?

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Here are a handful of suggestions to start with:

Encourage allies including South Korea, Poland and Japan to begin R&D of their own nuclear weapon programme—but not necessarily to build a bomb until we are clear on the China-Russia reaction.

Make tactical weapons on nuclear-powered submarines the centerpiece of deterrence. Unfortunately, China’s rise makes it necessary to upgrade America’s intercontinental missiles (part of a $1.2 trillion programme begun in the Obama administration), but with air forces increasingly vulnerable to drones and other technologies, the new B-21 long-range bomber programme should be capped at the 100 under contract.

Try to bring China into a global arms control regime—an effort almost certainly doomed to failure but that burnishes America’s good-guy credentials. Also, try to save the START treaty with Russia before it expires next year—also unlikely to happen, but worth trying. 

Conclude a formal defence treaty with Saudi Arabia (and the UAE) in exchange for recognition of Israel. This would keep Arab states from pursuing their own nuclear programmes while keeping Iran’s in check. But that’s on hold until the war in Gaza is resolved.

Forget US President Donald Trump’s vaunted ‘Golden Dome’ nationwide missile defense, which is no more technologically viable than its SDI predecessor. Instead, invest more into the West Coast Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system designed to shoot down a North Korean rogue attack. 

Most importantly, the US needs to survive Trump’s efforts to undermine the US-led world order—and decades of deterrence strategy—and to keep adapting its nuclear policy to the changes on the global chessboard. 

Human agency remains the antidote to technological determinism. If a future state of play engineered by smart policymaking entails killing off any one of these five prescriptions, nobody will be happier than me. ©Bloomberg

The author is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs.