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Page 64
APPENDIX A Revising the Practice of
Deterrence
John D. Steinbruner, Brookings
Institution
The concept of deterrence is a product of the Cold War. Though
the underlying principles can be detected in the military writings
of all historical periods, the word itself and the elaborate
conceptualization that accompanies it have been developed over the
past 50 years in the course of establishing a rationale for the
deployment of nuclear weapons.1
The familiar central doctrine holds that nuclear weapons are
maintained to prevent their use and, by extension, any large-scale
form of warfare by threatening retaliation destructive enough to
override any rational motive for aggression.
This concept rests on a theory of human behavior. Assuming that
the primary danger is that of a war arising from deliberate
calculation, the theory posits that a countervailing threat
displayed with sufficient probability and sufficient destructive
potential can dominate any aggressive calculation that might be
made, no matter how perverse or myopic it might be. It is apparent
from the historical record that this theory did not inspire the
creation of nuclear weapons in the first place, nor did it very
directly determine the size or composition of the deployments that
occurred. Nonetheless it is arguably as consequential as any theory
of human behavior has ever been. The single word "deterrence" has
been widely accepted as a summary statement of the most fundamental
national security objective and indeed as the central pillar of
foreign policy. Within the United States, it is perhaps the most
solidly established element of political consensus—the least
disputed function that the increasingly beleaguered national
government performs. Moreover, within the military establishments
that deploy nuclear weapons, the conceptual elaboration of
deterrence provides the main guidelines for practical decisions on
the size and composition of forces and for the daily management of
their operations.
The entrenched practice of deterrence has survived the declared
ending of the Cold War essentially unaltered—a fact that is
hardly surprising given the critical organizing functions that the
concept has come to perform. The rhetoric of confrontation that
originally accompanied the doctrine has been replaced with more
polite forms of political discourse, and overall nuclear weapons
deployments are being reduced to less than one-quarter of their
peak levels. Nevertheless the main forces still continuously
preserve the ability to initiate deterrent retaliation within 30
minutes—the nominal intercontinental flight time of a
ballistic missile. And even with their scheduled reductions
fully
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OCR for page 64
Page 64
APPENDIX A Revising the Practice of
Deterrence
John D. Steinbruner, Brookings
Institution
The concept of deterrence is a product of the Cold War. Though
the underlying principles can be detected in the military writings
of all historical periods, the word itself and the elaborate
conceptualization that accompanies it have been developed over the
past 50 years in the course of establishing a rationale for the
deployment of nuclear weapons.1
The familiar central doctrine holds that nuclear weapons are
maintained to prevent their use and, by extension, any large-scale
form of warfare by threatening retaliation destructive enough to
override any rational motive for aggression.
This concept rests on a theory of human behavior. Assuming that
the primary danger is that of a war arising from deliberate
calculation, the theory posits that a countervailing threat
displayed with sufficient probability and sufficient destructive
potential can dominate any aggressive calculation that might be
made, no matter how perverse or myopic it might be. It is apparent
from the historical record that this theory did not inspire the
creation of nuclear weapons in the first place, nor did it very
directly determine the size or composition of the deployments that
occurred. Nonetheless it is arguably as consequential as any theory
of human behavior has ever been. The single word "deterrence" has
been widely accepted as a summary statement of the most fundamental
national security objective and indeed as the central pillar of
foreign policy. Within the United States, it is perhaps the most
solidly established element of political consensus—the least
disputed function that the increasingly beleaguered national
government performs. Moreover, within the military establishments
that deploy nuclear weapons, the conceptual elaboration of
deterrence provides the main guidelines for practical decisions on
the size and composition of forces and for the daily management of
their operations.
The entrenched practice of deterrence has survived the declared
ending of the Cold War essentially unaltered—a fact that is
hardly surprising given the critical organizing functions that the
concept has come to perform. The rhetoric of confrontation that
originally accompanied the doctrine has been replaced with more
polite forms of political discourse, and overall nuclear weapons
deployments are being reduced to less than one-quarter of their
peak levels. Nevertheless the main forces still continuously
preserve the ability to initiate deterrent retaliation within 30
minutes—the nominal intercontinental flight time of a
ballistic missile. And even with their scheduled reductions
fully
1 The history of the
concept is briefly reviewed in Alexander L. George and Richard
Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice,
Columbia University Press, New York, 1974.
OCR for page 65
Page 65
accomplished, the residual capabilities of the United States and
Russia will be virtually as lethal to each other as they were at
the height of mutual antagonism. In terms of political consensus
and institutionalized procedure, neither establishment knows how to
do it in any other way.
Understandable as this situation may be, it cannot be continued
indefinitely. The entire context of international security is being
radically altered, and the emerging problems require different
organizing principles. Moreover, all along there have been
underlying dangers whose importance was obscured by the ideology of
the Cold War. It is not responsible to tolerate those dangers in
the new context. The prevailing practice of deterrence will have to
be substantially revised. The sooner this is appreciated and the
more systematically it is accomplished, the better off we all will
be.
CHANGING CONTEXT
There is as yet no agreed formulation or summarizing imagery to
characterize the period of history that is to follow the Cold War,
but already it should be evident that it will involve a major
transformation of international relationships.2 A globally extended economy is
forming, driven by a revolution in information technology. The
scale of this extended economy will have to undergo an
unprecedented expansion as the world population surges over the
next five decades. The effects associated with these two phenomena
can be expected to generate extensive changes within most societies
and will certainly alter their interactions.
The revolution in information technology is already a familiar
event in terms of its effects on consumer products and thereby on
daily life. Over the past two decades the inherent costs of
performing the basic functions of storing, processing, and
long-range transmission of information have undergone precipitous
declines. Though agreed measures of these cost declines have not
been fully established, they clearly amount to several orders of
magnitude—factors of a thousand to a million or more. That
appears to be the largest efficiency gain of any commodity in
economic history. Highly facilitated information flows are enabling
the production of goods and services to be conducted on a global
scale and the market forces derived from that fact are
spontaneously inducing an integrated international economy. This
process is also diffusing technology and basic cultural information
so extensively that the entire pattern of social organization seems
likely to be affected.
At the same time we are encountering an unprecedented surge of
the world population—the rapid rise associated with an
exponential growth sequence before it reaches some natural or
induced limit. Barring a cataclysm, the world population will
increase by roughly 1 billion people per decade over the next three
decades and will exceed 8 billion by 2025. The trend thereafter is
not yet
2 Steinbruner, John.
1994. "The Problems of Strategic Realignment," paper prepared for
the 1994 meeting of the Atlantic Conference of the Chicago Council
on Foreign Relations.
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Page 66
determined, but a trajectory that reaches 10 billion by 2050 is
a plausible possibility. More than 95 percent of whatever increase
occurs will come in the poorest communities. The absolute magnitude
and the distribution of this surge is a combination without
precedent in human history and will clearly give tremendous impulse
to the internationalizing economy.
As an obvious consequence of this impulse, economic performance
is likely to become the principal determinant of national viability
and therefore the central objective of policy for all governments.
Moreover, performance will necessarily be defined not only in terms
of overall growth but also in terms of distribution. Unless the
globalizing economy successfully extends its reach to those people
in the lower economic strata, where the population surge is
occurring, the coherence of many if not all political systems is
likely to be in question and some would almost certainly be torn
apart. It is difficult to imagine a successfully operating
international economy of 10 billion people, 6 billion of whom live
under conditions of endemic austerity and another 2 billion who
experience continuously declining standards of living. The amount
of violence generated in an integrated economy of that sort would
presumably be massive, more than the prosperous 2 billion could
reasonably expect to contain by coercive means.
The expansion of economic participation required to assure a
favorable trend in economic equity—that is, an absolute and
relative improvement in the standards of living of the poorest
population segments—implies that the global economic product
will have to increase by a factor of five or more, including a
probable tripling of energy and agricultural production. Were that
to be attempted on the basis of current technologies even taking
their natural evolution into account, the environmental
consequences would probably be severe enough to preclude the
economic growth objectives, at least in some of the more burdened
regions of the world. That implies that massive investment programs
will have to be undertaken to alter the core production and
consumption patterns on a schedule commensurate with the population
surge, a process that would entail large structural and technical
shifts within virtually all national economies. It also implies an
increasing sensitivity to the balances of material flows and to
their environmental effects, a development likely to be of decisive
importance in the more burdened regions and potentially so on a
global scale as well.
As these implications emerge, there will also undoubtedly be a
diffusion of political power. National governments struggling to
assure economic performance will not have autonomous means to do
so. Information technology is enabling, probably in fact
compelling, the decentralization of many decision processes,
thereby eroding the degree of control that national governments are
able to exercise within their societies. It is simultaneously
driving the global extension of basic economic activities, thereby
dispersing control into the international economy as a whole. The
predictable longer-term effect of this pattern is to drive national
governments into more consequential collaboration.
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That in general will be the only realistic means of extending
their effective authority.
STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS
It is possible to project conceptions of political intention
that appear to justify the continuation of Cold War deterrent
practices in this emerging situation. The conceivable reversion to
authoritarian government and to expansionist policies in Russia is
being advanced in official documents as a major reason for the
preservation of U.S. deterrent forces.3 Informally there are more venturesome
variants. One can observe, for example, that China and India
together encompass one-half of the world population and that both
are poised for rapid economic growth, as is Indonesia. If one
assumes that national identity can somehow override the globalizing
trend and that these powers will join Japan on the frontiers of
technology, then one can posit the emergence of an Asian power
center or alternatively a major confrontation centered in Asia.
It is worth noticing, however, that none of the countries in
question is yet making the extensive investments required to
develop classic military power projection capabilities on a global
or even a regional scale. In fact the United States is currently
the only country sustaining investments of that magnitude, and
there are strong reasons why others would not attempt to match what
we have done. Those reasons have to do with the deeper implications
of the transformation that is in progress.
Perhaps the central fact is that deliberately calculated,
large-scale aggression—the central focus of deterrent
policy—is simply not a major temptation for a major
government. The classic exercise of seizing territory by force is
not worth the risk and expense involved, save for a few marginal
situations. With the advanced capabilities of the United States and
its major allies, those exercises can in principle be detected and
preemptively defeated, and even an initial success could not be
sustained. Basically the assertion of political jurisdiction by
illegitimate force is ruinously inefficient in the globalizing
economy. The variant of attempting political intimidation by
threatening long-range destruction is such a blunt instrument and
is so exposed to countervailing threat that it is not a credible
policy for a major government. As long as the source of aggressive
intent can be located and identified, the basic deterrent effect is
not worth contesting and is therefore relatively easy to
achieve.
The more serious security danger, moreover, is that emerging
from spontaneous social violence and from small-scale but highly
destructive threats whose originating source cannot be readily
located or identified. The globalizing economy is making access to
destructive technology inherently available, as dramatized but only
indirectly illustrated by terrorist episodes in
3 Department of Defense,
Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review
briefing, Washington, D.C., September 22, 1994.
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Tokyo and in Oklahoma City. Small states and substate
organizations can acquire weapons of mass destruction and
sophisticated means of delivery. The proliferation of highly
destructive clandestine threats of this sort could reach
unmanageable proportions. So also could the instances of radical
internal disintegration such as have occurred in Bosnia, Somalia,
Rwanda, Tajikistan, and many other places as well. At the moment,
the leading military establishments are poorly prepared to handle
this array of problems, and traditional deterrent practices
interfere with the intricate collaboration among them that would be
required to develop relevant capabilities.
RUSSIAN CASE
The problem of adjusting traditional security commitments to fit
the new circumstances clearly weighs most heavily on the Russian
military establishment.4Russia, it is important to note, has
been the principal victim of the Cold War. For 50 years as the core
element of the Soviet Union, it sustained an effort to develop a
competitive military establishment in confrontation against all of
the major industrial economies. The cost in terms of economic
opportunity was tremendous. In the aftermath of that period, Russia
has inherited an oversized and unbalanced remnant of the Soviet
military establishment poorly suited for its new political and
territorial configuration. It faces the problem of relocating and
redesigning this inherited establishment while simultaneously
undergoing a massive regeneration of its economy, its political
system, and indeed its entire society.
In responding to the problem, the Russian military planning
system is attempting to preserve a military establishment of more
than 1.5 million people. This is the minimum deemed necessary to
preserve core nuclear deterrence, to protect against an imaginable
conventional ground attack in the Far East and tactical air
assaults from the West, and also to cope with flaring episodes of
civil violence along their southern border. Though these images of
potential threat may appear unlikely to the rest of the world, in
the traditional logic of military planning they are at least as
plausible as the ones the United States currently uses to set
standards for its military deployments. So are the force structure
conclusions derived from them.
Those conclusions, however, are wildly unrealistic in economic
terms. Russia would have to spend nearly $100 billion per year to
sustain a 1.5million-person establishment even if it could produce
comparable equipment at half the cost the United States
experiences. As prices in the Russian economy adjust to world
standards, the full financial requirements of the planned military
establishment would exceed $200 billion. The officially enacted
defense budget of 40 trillion rubles, nominally comparable to $20
billion at the time it was approved, undoubtedly understates the
resources that the Russian defense effort
4 Steinbruner, John.
1995. "Reluctant Strategic Realignment: The Need for a New View of
National Security," The Brookings Review (Winter 1995).
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actually extracts from the economy. But whatever the true amount
is, it almost certainly falls well below the minimum sustaining
requirement.
There is very little practical prospect that the defense budget
will be expanded to meet this requirement. The attempt to do so
would threaten the more vital process of economic regeneration and
would require a degree of coercive political recentralization that
probably has become infeasible but at any rate would be
self-defeating. The international reaction to that development
would drive the burdens of military preparation to yet more
unrealistic levels.
If indefinitely continued, underfinancing of the Russian
military establishment will assuredly cause its internal
deterioration, and a series of very grave consequences could
readily result—the loss of control over large weapons
inventories and a destructive interaction with the process of
political reform foremost among them. The disintegration of
Yugoslavia has provided a chilling hint of what could happen. If
that large set of risks is to be avoided, the Russian establishment
will probably have to be cut to a level substantially below the
current planning aspiration in order to preserve its internal
coherence. That in turn requires some very systematic international
arrangements to provide reassurance. A coherently planned reduction
will not be undertaken if those who are doing it believe the
consequence is indefinite exposure to unmanageable external
threat.
THE SUBORDINATION AND REVISION OF
DETERRENCE
In fact it seems likely that reassurance will eventually emerge
as the central security objective of the new era. It is the natural
guideline for international security relationships not only between
the United States and Russia but also more generally. If no major
government is straining to commit aggression or to practice
intimidation, then all share a common interest in protecting
against these traditional threats as efficiently as possible. To
the extent that they can reassure each other in that regard, force
deployments, alert levels, and defense budgets can be reduced. Much
of the expense and the inherent danger of Cold War forces has been
driven by the perceived need to prepare for war on short notice.
Beyond that the exercise of reassurance would establish the
foundation for close cooperation in responding to instances of
spontaneous violence and the potential proliferation of clandestine
threats.
At the outset, at any rate, an international security
arrangement based on systematic reassurance would necessarily
subordinate but presumably not eliminate the practice of
deterrence. The legitimacy of preserving a residual deterrent
capability would be accepted, but the primary commitment would be
to reassuring measures designed to provide convincing indication
that nuclear force operations were being restricted to that single
legitimate purpose. Abstract as that principle may seem at first
glance, its full implementation would involve extensive, indeed
revolutionary, changes in prevailing operational practice.
Specifically, it would terminate continuous alert operations; it
would impose
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international standards of accounting and physical security on
weapons and fissionable materials inventories; and it would
formulate agreed restrictions on operational doctrine. The main
purpose of all three measures is to set higher standards of
operational safety designed to be reassuring both to those being
deterred and to those being protected.
Alert Practices
The termination of alert operations would be the most
consequential of these measures. As noted, the preparations for
rapid retaliation that were developed during the Cold War continue
in the aftermath. The number of nuclear weapons currently being
maintained on alert status is sufficient to execute a coordinated
plan designed to do decisive damage to opposing military forces and
their supporting industrial structure. With any serious indication
of increased tension, current strategic forces are in the habit of
adding additional weapons to their alert forces so as to increase
the scale of attack they are immediately prepared to undertake.
This operational pattern was developed in order to be sure beyond
any practical doubt that a deviously calculated, skillfully
concealed attack would not meaningfully degrade the capacity for
retaliation. Implicit in the practice is the commitment to respond
so quickly that retaliation would be effectively initiated before
the initial attack had been completed.5
These alert practices have been accompanied by elaborate
physical and procedural measures designed to prevent accidents and
unauthorized actions, and they have been fundamentally successful
in that regard.6 There has been no
hostile or unintended explosion of a nuclear weapon since 1945. The
record is replete with incidents that warn of the inherent danger,
however, and there are particularly strong reasons for worrying
about crisis conditions. The ostensibly good safety record applies
primarily to routine peacetime circumstances. The few occasions
when nuclear weapons were maneuvered in response to crisis
circumstances have produced some unsettling episodes.7 The infrequency of crisis experience
is merciful, but it means that there has been little opportunity
for the discovery and correction of managerial errors under the
conditions when they are most likely to occur. It also means that
the empirical base provided by historical experience is not
adequate to derive a comprehensive measure of safety. In particular
there is reason to believe that the Cold War procedures
5Blair, Bruce
G. 1993. The Logic of Inadvertent Nuclear War, Brookings
Institution, Washington, D.C.
6Carter,
Ashton B., John D. Steinbruner, and Charles A. Zraket, eds. 1987.
Managing Nuclear Operations, Brookings Institution, Washington
D.C.
7 Sagan, Scott. 1993. The
Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons,
Princeton University Press, Princeton N.J.
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involve a meaningful risk of an inadvertent war arising out of
the interaction of opposing alert procedures.8
In the new strategic situation, there is no reason to accept
this risk. In principle, the legitimate deterrent effect can be
preserved, essentially undiminished, with much higher standards of
safety if physical and procedural measures are introduced to assure
that no weapon is immediately available for use and that the
process of preparing a weapon for use would reliably provide
international warning that it is occurring. The most direct way of
accomplishing that is to separate warheads from delivery vehicles
or to otherwise configure the operating systems short of full
readiness with international monitoring procedures to verify that
condition. To do this in a manner that did not open up any good
possibility for an effectively concealed initial attack would
involve some substantial problems of technical design and would
require systematic collaboration among all of the countries
deploying nuclear weapons. At least in technical terms, however,
there is no reason to believe that standard would be more difficult
to achieve than the current rapid reaction posture. Deactivating
nuclear weapons is a major part of the agenda for reassurance.
The Accounting for and Physical
Security of Fissionable Materials
A supplementary part of the agenda concerns the accounting for
and physical security of fissionable materials.9 In aggregate, the five states that
explicitly developed nuclear weapons during the course of the Cold
War produced hundreds of metric tons of plutonium and highly
enriched uranium and fabricated nearly 100,000 nuclear weapons out
of this material. Very exacting standards of accounting and
physical protection were developed for the weapons themselves, but
the same standards were not extended to the byproducts of the
effort. Moreover, no provisions were made for disposition of the
fissionable material other than incorporating it in weapons or
holding it in reserve for that purpose. The critical isotopes will
be suitable for weapons application for spans of time ranging from
tens of thousands of years to hundreds of millions of years, and
their radioactive decay products will be a severe health hazard for
those durations. Ultimately some acceptable method of disposition
will have to be devised. This material cannot be deployed as
weapons or stored in its current sites for as long as it will
remain dangerous.
The issue of ultimate disposition is being immediately posed by
the release of weapons-grade material from active inventories in
the course of implementing the arms control agreements that have
recently been concluded by
8 Blair, Bruce G. 1995.
"Global Zero Alert," Brookings Occasional Papers, Brookings
Institution, Washington, D.C., May.
9 Carnegie Commission on
Preventing Deadly Conflict. 1995. "Comprehensive Disclosure of
Fissionable Materials: A Suggested Initiative," Discussion Paper,
Carnegie Corporation of New York, April. Also, Committee on
International Security and Arms Control of the National Academy of
Sciences. 1994. Management and Disposition of Excess Weapons
Plutonium, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
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the United States and Russia. The two countries will release
approximately 100 metric tons of plutonium along with more than 600
metric tons of highly enriched uranium as they carry out the
provisions of the START I and START II agreements. The uranium can
be readily diluted to lower enrichment levels and stored
indefinitely without radiological hazard. If it is eventually
burned in commercial reactors, it will nonetheless contribute to
the further accumulation of plutonium. For plutonium itself, at
least in the United States, there is no agreed method of
disposition other than holding it in guarded storage. It currently
appears likely that the effort to begin the process of disposition
will consume a decade or more, and completion of the process is
likely to require several decades after it has been initiated.
In the course of attempting to solve that immediate problem, it
can be expected that a broader issue will be recognized. More than
1,000 metric tons of plutonium have been produced throughout the
world as a by-product of nuclear power generation, with
approximately 100 tons of it held in separated form in several
different locations. Though this material is of different isotopic
composition than the plutonium produced for weapons application, it
can be fabricated into nuclear explosives and is virtually as
dangerous from that point of view. Under the provisions of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, most of this material is subject to
International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards, which are in effect
a set of international auditing arrangements overlaid on national
accounting systems. Even under the most generous estimate of their
effectiveness, it is apparent that plutonium generated in
commercial reactors is not subjected to the same managerial
standards as weapons-grade material, particularly not the same
standards of physical security.
It is prudent to assume that this situation cannot be continued
indefinitely without eventually producing a serious breach of
control or an actual explosive catastrophe. It is a by-product of
the Cold War practice of deterrence that will surely have to be
refined under the imperatives of the new era. In order to establish
more robust protection against the unmanageable profusion of
clandestine threats, the nuclear weapons establishments will have
to set more exacting and more comprehensive standards for the
accounting and physical protection of fissionable materials. The
key to that is making the status of these materials continuously
transparent to the international community as a whole— a major
revision of traditional practice.
Restraints on Operational
Doctrine
The deactivation of deployed weapons and the control of
fissionable materials are measures that are directed, as it were,
to the hardware of deterrence policy. Under Cold War practice, arms
control measures designed to stabilize the interaction of deterrent
forces relied primarily on hardware constraints-the number of
weapons to be deployed, the number of warheads they could carry,
the number of tests allowed, the physical parameters of testing,
and such things. These were matters that admitted to exact
definition and
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independent verification. In the adversarial bargaining process
of the era, they emerged naturally as the focus of control.
If the practice of deterrence is subordinated to the broader
objective of reassurance, then additional measures having to do
with the ''software" of deterrence practice become both feasible
and desirable. Among the more important of these would be
restrictions on operational doctrine.
The Cold War practice of deterrence was bedeviled by some
serious tensions involving the doctrine of force operations. The
entire concept of deterrence required, in principle, a strict
policy of retaliation; but, as a practical matter, if a nuclear war
even appeared imminent, there were powerful incentives to initiate
it. Largely because it was so difficult to protect command systems
from a dedicated assault, a force able to initiate a coordinated
attack might fare substantially better than the one slavishly
adhering to the rule of retaliation. That realization drove the two
principal establishments into their rapid reaction postures and
created the possibility that one side in the heat of intense crisis
might misjudge the actual imminence of war and might initiate what
it considered to be a protective preemptive attack.
In terms of the underlying theory of calculated behavior, this
hair-trigger situation did not seem to be unacceptably dangerous.
Indeed it could be used to solve another doctrinal dilemma—the
fact that the massive threats used in advance of war to present an
overwhelmingly stark deterrent threat would be irrational if war
were actually to occur. Lest a truly cold-blooded aggressor count
on that anomaly to prevent retaliation, the hair-trigger
preparations introduced an element of chance that would preserve
the deterrent effect. If one considers the fact, however, that no
large organization can be absolutely controlled by central
calculation, particularly not one whose central authority is
inherently vulnerable to preemptive destruction, then the element
of chance becomes a danger rather than a comfort.
In order to remove the underlying risk of mistaken or
inadvertent preemption, it would be necessary to remove the
doctrinal commitment to rapid reaction, and that would be
desirable, perhaps also necessary, even if deactivation had been
achieved. It would clearly not be wise to set up a situation in
which the major forces were programmed to move from a normal state
of deactivation directly to one of rapid reaction. To prevent that,
some important doctrinal limitations would have to be set—most
notably, no targeting of command systems and no completed
authorization for retaliation in response to tactical warning.
Those measures of reassurance would segregate the deterrent effect
from its more dangerous by-products.
During the course of the Cold War, doctrinal limitations of this
sort were summarily rejected on grounds that they could not be
verified with absolute certainty by independent means. That
standard of verification with its presumption of an intent to cheat
promoted the confrontational atmosphere of the era and precluded a
number of prudent safety measures that would have been highly
desirable even if they could not be verified with absolute
confidence. If the possibility of cooperative verification is
admitted on behalf of
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the general objective of reassurance, then some very useful
mutual constraints on force operations can be introduced with
reasonable assurance. Tactical warning can and should be made a
collaborative venture. If there were a desire to do so,
arrangements could be devised to give controlled access to
targeting plans without revealing their full details. If the normal
pattern of force operations is made transparent, then nefarious
alternatives that might be secreted away are forced to carry the
considerable burden of detachment. If military forces are precluded
from training for an operation, there is reasonable assurance that
they will not attempt to do it.
CONCLUDING PERSPECTIVE
There are two simple conclusions that emerge from this
assessment. If the practice of deterrence is liberation from the
belligerent political attitudes that originally inspired it, then
it can be made a good deal safer than it has historically been. The
process of making this adjustment, moreover, is one of the things
that must be done in responding to the security imperatives of the
emerging era. The determining fact is that any identifiable actor
can be readily deterred. It is the impersonal processes and the
actors that cannot be identified that we most need to worry
about.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
fissionable materials
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