Challenges the assumption that a reduction of arms can affect the threat of nuclear war

The Nuclear Seduction: Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter--And What Does

By William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber, et al

University of California Press

Copyright © 1989 William A. Schwartz and Charles Derber, et al
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520061349
Chapter One
Why the Arms Race Doesn't Matter

A tired old Bear bomber, and a maneuvering hypersonic re-entry vehicle … [either one] can destroy New York just as well.
—Admiral Noel Gayler, former commander in chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific

The Fallacy of Weaponitis

The existence of nuclear weapons is a fundamental feature of the modern world. Their possession—by the human race generally or by any particular nation—definitively matters. They have completely changed the consequences of full-scale war between the dominant world powers, posing a threat to the very survival of civilization and the natural order. Correspondingly, international nuclear disarmament, or even unilateral denuclearization of individual states, would be singular historical events.

The fallacy of weaponitis lies in attributing great significance to the size and technical characteristics of the superpowers' nuclear stockpiles, and especially to the margins of each arsenal—incremental additions to or subtractions from the immense current force, such as building MX missiles or removing Pershing II and cruise missiles from Europe.1

With conventional military technology, such concerns about weapons make sense. From the ancient discovery of the club, reenacted in 2001: A Space Odyssey, to the horrors of modern saturation bombing, the types and quantities of conventional weaponry have undeniably affected military and political power. Conventional arms races matter because conventional wars are processes of attrition. The guns, tanks, and planes of one side oppose and try to neutralize the weapons and fighters of the other. One side's forces must deplete those of the enemy before a threat of destruction can be posed to the enemy's inner society.

Because no single weapon or small arsenal of weapons determines the result, the quality and size of the overall fighting forces matter.

The side with more or better weapons does not always win, of course, because technical factors must share the military stage with psychological, social, economic, and political ones. In modern guerrilla warfare, for example, primitively armed local organizations sometimes defeat huge, highly advanced military powers. But the military balance has determined much of human history. Firearms helped European settlers conquer Native Americans. Germany's buildup of naval power prior to World War I increased the military threat to Britain. Large, technically advanced interventionary forces supported American power in Korea and other Third World conflicts after World War II.

At the beginning of the nuclear age, too, the weapons paradigm made sense. The atomic bomb was a new weapon, and it revolutionized war and politics. The reason was the immense power of an individual atomic weapon, especially the later hydrogen weapon—so powerful that a single warhead could destroy a city. As Bernard Brodie wrote in 1959: "People often speak of atomic explosives as the most portentous military invention 'since gunpowder.' But such a comparison inflates the importance of even so epoch-making an event as the introduction of gunpowder."2

Consider what a single large warhead could do to Chicago:

One twenty-megaton nuclear bomb explodes just above ground level, at the corner of LaSalle and Adams. In less than one millionth of a second the temperature rises to 150,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit, four times the temperature of the center of the sun. A roar follows but no one is alive to hear it.

Chicago has disappeared. The crater is 600 feet deep, one-and-one-half miles in diameter. Within a five-mile radius, skyscrapers, apartment buildings, roads, bridges, trains, subways, planes, hospitals, ambulances, automobiles, gas mains, trees, earth, animals, people—all have vanished….

The fireball is hotter than five thousand suns. The firestorm roars out in all directions, absorbing all available oxygen, thereby suffocating or incinerating all the living in its path. Before it burns out it will devastate 1,400,000 acres and most of the people on them.

The firestorm is followed by the shockwave, the latter at close to the speed of sound. Then the mushroom cloud, reaching twenty miles in height, and the beginning of lethal radioactive fallout.3

All weapons are subject to diminishing returns, but with weapons this powerful the point of saturation—when increasing the number or quality of weapons adds little to military potential or risks—was reached very soon, perhaps as early as 1955 and no later than the early

1960s, although the date is unimportant now. Both sides had by then acquired so much destructive power that only secondary importance would attach to any further quantitative or qualitative improvements in the leading weapons of the day. The same was true for even large reductions in weapon stockpiles. The weapons paradigm was already obsolete.

For with nuclear weapons, a nation's armed forces no longer must be defeated, or even seriously confronted, before its inner society can be destroyed, because the penetration of so few warheads is needed to accomplish the task.4 General war would no longer be a drawn-out process of attrition but an orgy of mutual devastation. Additional weapons on one side could do little to inflict greater damage on the other.

Even modern air attack with huge conventional bombs does not dispense with the task of defeating the enemy's armed forces. For example, the Allied bombing of German cities during World War II killed hundreds of thousands of people but did not make a decisive difference in the war. In more recent memory, the heavy bombardment of cities such as Hanoi and Beirut caused unimaginable human horror, but even in combination with the extensive bombing and shelling of other cities and villages, it did not completely destroy Vietnamese or (at least so far) Lebanese society.

In contrast, as McGeorge Bundy writes, "a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one's own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable." Herbert York, another former high-level American official, concurs: "From one to ten are enough whenever the course of events is being rationally determined." Yet we urgently debate the composition of nuclear arsenals that now number not in the tens but in the tens of thousands. As the military historian Michael Howard notes, the amount of damage to be expected from a war that employs such weapons is so insensitive to the sizes of the nuclear arsenals held by the opposing powers that "the nuclear arsenals of the superpowers could be reduced by a factor of a hundred without affecting their capacity to destroy each other, and probably the rest of the world as well."5

The Existential Balance of Terror

Overkill in itself did not make the arms race irrelevant. The arms race would matter had it produced either (1) a way to defend society against

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