David Ignatius Runs With Nuclear Scissors

Note to David Ignatius' journalistic colleagues - don't let David have any scissors, because he will surely run with them.

You see, David is a fan of what is being called "expanded deterrence". Basically, it goes like this:

The biggest danger posed by North Korea isn't that it would launch a nuclear missile, but that this desperately poor country would sell a bomb to al-Qaeda or another terrorist group. Accountability ... means that if a bomb explodes in Manhattan that contains North Korean fissile material, the United States would act as if the strike came from North Korea itself -- and retaliate accordingly, with devastating force. To make this accountability principle work, the United States needs a crash program to create the "nuclear forensics'' that can identify the signature of fissile material of every potential nuclear state.

It's exactly the kind of political red meat that the hawks of the uber-right love, of course, which is why Bush has been making the same kind of noises. As Ignatius notes:

President Bush seemed to be drawing this red line of accountability when he warned Monday: "The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences of such action.''

It sounds 'Malboro Man' tough and manly, just like "either for us or against us" or "we will make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that shelter them" - and just like those other neocon policies it simply won't work.

The reason it won't work begins with its use of an outdated idea of what "deterrence" back in the old days of Mutually Assured Destruction actually comprised - one that said the bad guys didn't attack out of fear of the consequences. It wasn't until the cold war thawed and access was gained to the thinking of Soviet military planners that everyone (well, almost everyone) realized the truth - MAD had worked because both sides thought of themselves as defending against the other's aggression and neither side ever wanted to attack the other first. It is a simple truth of humans - we never see ourselves as the bad guys. America and the West saw the Soviets as planning a first strike and so pumped untold billions into survivability, into counterstrike capabilities, into massive retaliation. The Soviets saw the West's responses as attempting to create a first-strike knockout capability and so reacted with even more massive buildups, deep bunkers, etc. The cycle of "fear of the bad guys" fed on itself to no end - both sides saw themselves as the good guys on the defensive and had no intention of attacking. Thus, MAD worked almost in spite of itself and accidentally, purely because of a quirk of human nature.

But MAD won't work for people who are willing to sacrifice themselves as martyrs in what they see as the highly unequal struggle against "the bad guys" and who regard consequent deaths of their not-so-fanatic co-religionists as simply assuring those innocents of a place in Paradise. People who will happily die to fly a plane into a building will happily set of a nuke, regardless of what the consequences to their fellows or to those who made the weapon will be. So for "expanded deterrence" to work it has to deter the people who make or sell the nuke - and it has to deter them through fear of the consequences. That means fear of "the bad guy" carrying through on his threats (remember, the other guy is always the bad guy). The result will be an arms race again, and unlike the Cold War this time the world's view of America (the one doing the threatening, after all) will likely not be positive. That will open a huge can of worms which will create more foreign policy propbelms than it solves - and probably lead to far more deaths through conventional terrorism than could be brought about by a single terrorist nuke.

Be that as it may, the policy of "expanded deterrence" is dumb for another reason. It cannot be a universal policy which every nation could happily sign up to and it will never be a universal policy of an American administration. To see why, you have to see past the neocon propoganda that says the most likely places for a terrorist nuke to come from are the "axis of evil" nations - enemies rather than allies of the U.S. The simple truth is that the most likely places for a complete weapon or the material to make one to originate are the vast and uncontrolled stockpiles of the former Soviet Union - much of which is now in the hands of dictatorships Islamic nations formerly Soviet states or in the hands of black market mobsters from the underground arms trade - or from the great proliferator of the Islamic world, Pakistan. Pakistan and most of these former Soviet states are, of course, U.S. allies.

So suppose the LeK set off a nuke in Mumbai which is found to contain Pakistani uranium. The Indian government already maintains that Pakistan's intelligence agency aids islamic terror groups in any case. Pakistan might calim a "rogue element" or deny all knowledge just as it did with the Khan network. If India claimed it's right to "expanded deterrence" even so and nuked Pakistan's four biggest cities do you think the Bush administration or any conceivable Republican successor would stand by and say "Fair enough by us, we did warn everyone"? Of course not. That's just one possible counterexample to prove that the principle of expanded deterrence as put forward by rightwing hawks would not be universal, but instead be claimed as the sole right of the U.S. Its pretty easy to construct more. If expanded deterrence is the sole preserve of America...well, that's the huge can of foreign policy worms opened again. Back to PNAC's American Hegemony with several vengeances.

Now, suppose an Islamic terror group gets a hold of fissile material for a bomb, or even a complete weapon, from some Russian Mafia blackmarket dealer in Uzbeckistan. They then set it off in Manhattan and a forensic examination determines that the bomb came from...the former Soviet Union. Probably produced in Minsk, Kiev or somesuch. Is the U.S. going to launch a retaliatory strike "with devastating force" on Russia or the Ukraine? Somehow I don't think so and again its simple to think up other counterexamples. So just like "for us or against us" and "no distinction between terrorists and the nations that shelter them", (think Pakistan again), it cannot be a sensible universal policy for even America.

And if you stop to think for a moment, the actual idea behind this plan is idiotic. It is tantamount to saying that if you manufacture a gun that eventually ends up in the hands of a murderer, no matter how that happens, we will come round to your house and machinegun your whole family. Try getting that "expanded deterrence" past the NRA!

Which makes it one of two things - either it is simply political red meat which isn't applicable to the real world in a way that solves problems rather than creating them, or it is simply running around with scissors.