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An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
If it's called Daily Blah, how come you don't ... hey, wait, you're writing every day!
See? Told you I'd try harder.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
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Daily Blah for... Wednesday, March 13, 2002
Hysterics and History
So Mac has once again taken issue with a political posting of mine. This time, it's what he calls my "hysterical" reaction to the Pentagon's nuclear review. He prefers not to post his response, so I'll offer a link to this Slate article by Scott Shuger, one of my favorite Slate writers, which Mac says explains it better than he can. Shuger's argument boils down to this: nuclear deterrence works; the last 57 years have proved that. Best to have our deterrence in place in case these guys are developing or acquiring nukes. "If the world is now populated by more powerfully armed enemies of the United States," writes Shuger, "and if they now operate from more facilities that confound our Cold War nuclear structure, then trying to improve on that structure could be stabilizing." In other words, since saber-rattling worked with the Soviets, let's really make it work with the Libyans, the Syrians, the Iranians ...
All of which amounts to an oft-repeated mistake in military strategy: let's fight the next war on the lessons of the last one. In 1914 generals on both sides remembered that cavalry charges and bold troop movements had worked in the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1871, and so they tried them again. That led to the deaths of ten million people. In 1938, French and British politicians remembered that they should have left more time for diplomacy in 1914, and so they tried to appease Hitler at Munich. That led to the deaths of fifty million people. In 1962, American generals were mindful of the lessons of Munich when they saw Kruschev putting missiles into Cuba, and counseled Kennedy to invade the island immediately. We now know the Cuban missiles were already armed, so that action would have led to the deaths of four billion people. Thankfully Kennedy was reading Barbara Tuchman's classic The Guns of August, and wisely saw that the missile crisis bore more resemblence to 1914 than it did to 1938. He stopped short of invasion. You and I exist.
Now the Pentagon is asking us to believe we're in another Cold War situation. If we yell really hard about pointing missiles at Tripoli, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran and Pyongyang then deterrence will be in effect. Trouble is, it's kind of hard to have nuclear deterrence with countries that don't yet have a proven nuclear capability. And threatening them makes it more likely that they will. We've just given these nuts the green light to accelerate their bomb programs. We've given the Iranian hardliners, for example, a great argument with which to shout down their moderate rivals. They now have a legitimate excuse to arm themselves: self-defense. It's human nature; if someone threatens you with a sword, you're going to start carrying a sword too. And then we end up with seven potential nuclear enemies instead of two. Five more fingers hovering over the button. How can anyone blithely assume Cold War-style deterrence works in those circumstances?
I remember playing a computer game in the mid-80's called Armageddon Man. It was set in 2032, and the premise was that there were now thirty nations with nuclear weapons. You played a U.N. diplomat who had to watch international political rhetoric, looking for clues that could help you prevent a first strike. It was impossible. The missiles were always flying inside a couple of years, and it usually started with one nation specifically targeting a couple of others. The threatened nations then built up their stockpiles, which caused neighboring countries to build up their stockpiles, and soon the whole nuclear world had itchy button fingers. Now, in 2002, we have seven declared nuclear powers. Two more (Israel and South Africa) are undeclared; Japan almost certainly has capability. That's ten. Imagine if Syria said it was developing the bomb to defend itself from the US; that would likely lead Israel to go public with its own nuclear capability, and God only knows what that would do to the Middle East. Egypt would probably have to go nuclear. So would the Saudis. That's 13. Throw in Libya, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and you've got 17. The world of Armageddon Man is not that far away.
In the messy and mutually suspicious climate of global politics, we have to assume that nuclear proliferation leads to war. Proliferation starts when a nation feels threatened. The Pentagon is proposing to make some of the world's least stable nations feel very threatened indeed. It thinks this is a sane move because it remembers facing down one superpower with mutual assured destruction. That is as dangerous as the generals of 1914 thinking it's 1871 all over again. Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it; but those who only remember recent history -- instead of the totality of human experience on Earth -- are just plain doomed.
By the way, the nuclear countdown clock now stands at seven minutes to midnight; that's the closest we've come to destruction since the end of the Cold War. (Last time I checked, it was at nine minutes to.)
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