Fool Me Once Shame On You, Fool Me Twice Shame On Me

  
Dick Cheney tries to fool the public again
 
Early signs indicate Dick Cheney is leaning against the Iran nuclear deal.

“It is madness,” the former vice president announced Tuesday.

The results may be catastrophic,” he inveighed.

“This deal gives Tehran the means to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S. homeland.”

“The Obama-Iran deal aids the efforts of America’s enemies.”
The deal “strengthens our adversaries, threatens our allies and puts our own security at risk.”

Cheney hyperbolized, hyperventilated and gave rein to hyperactive imagination — “desperation . . . cave . . . neutered” — and the audience at the normally sedate American Enterprise Institute was riled. When Michaela Anang, a student from Boston with the liberal group Code Pink attempted to heckle the “war criminal” Cheney, Marc Thiessen, the moderator (and online columnist for The Post), leaped up to block her, audience members shouted “get out of here!” at her, and one man, in jacket and tie, engaged her in a violent tug of war to confiscate her banner.

“Thank you very much,” Cheney said with a wry grin.

Supporters of the Iran deal are probably saying the same to Cheney. They are probably more grateful still that applauding Cheney from the front row were Paul D. Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq war, and Sen. Tom Cotton, (Ark.), author of the Senate Republicans’ letter to the ayatollahs attempting to kill the deal during negotiations. In the second row were former congresswoman Michele Bachmann and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Cheney aide whose tenure led to a prison sentence.

Surely, those who would like to see Congress undo the nuclear agreement can’t expect that rolling out Cheney is going to save the cause. When it comes to dire predictions based on scary intelligence, the former vice president wouldn’t seem to have the best track record.

Moments after Cheney’s speech came reports that the number of Senate Democrats supporting the Iran deal had climbed to 41 — more than enough to sustain a presidential veto of any congressional disapproval of the deal, and possibly enough to block such a disapproval resolution from clearing Congress. This came despite an all-out campaign by the once-feared American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its affiliates, which spent tens of millions of dollars to rally opposition; The Post called it the largest defeat for AIPAC in more than two decades. The deal’s survival also suggests Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extraordinary meddling in American politics backfired.
And now, as if to hammer nail into coffin, comes Cheney — angrily questioning “the veracity of the president’s claims” about the deal and labeling several Obama assertions “simply false.”

A lecture on veracity and falsehood from the man who asserted before the Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted nuclear weapons ? The man who said hitting Iraq would strike “a major blow right” at the base of the 9/11 terrorists? The man who claimed that Iraq had “long-established ties with al Qaeda” and that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 mastermind Mohamed Atta met with senior Iraqi intelligence officials?

Most everybody — including former president George W. Bush’s brother, presidential candidate Jeb Bush — has come to acknowledge that, given the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the United States should not have gone to war in 2003. But not Cheney. When Thiessen relayed a question to him about whether containment of Saddam would have been better than military action, Cheney said “I disagree.”

He unabashedly made allegations against Iran Tuesday that he once made against Iraq, citing evidence of “an agreement between the Iranian government and al Qaeda.” Echoing the old warnings about Iraq’s “mushroom cloud,” he noted that a nuclear Iran could kill 6 million Jews in a day. He acknowledged that intelligence failed to predict the North Korea nuclear test when he was in office — but only to argue that there should be “serious concern” about Obama’s claim that it would take Iran a year to produce nuclear weapons.

There should be concern about Obama’s claims — but there should be even more about Cheney’s. He said, for example, that the deal “threatens the security of Europe” without acknowledging that European powers negotiated it. Dropping his longstanding quest to expand executive power, he said Congress should have seized the authority to ratify the deal.

Cheney said it’s a “false choice” to claim the alternative to the deal is war. But he went on to say that unless Iran makes much deeper concessions, “they must understand that the United States stands ready to take military action . . . Iran will not be convinced to abandon its program peacefully unless it knows it will face military action if it refuses to do so.”

And this isn’t war? In the immortal words of George W. Bush: “You can’t get fooled again.”
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Nuclear Deterrence Is The Ultimate Fool’s Game (Romans 1)

Op-Ed: Nuclear Deterrence is a Deadly Game

Published: Sunday, February 22, 2015 9:43 AM

Prof. Louis René Beres

The writer (Ph.D, Princeton, 1971) is is professor of Political Science

Traditionally, successful national strategies of deterrence require enemy rationality. In the absence of such rationality – that is, in those more-or-less residual circumstances where an enemy state would rank order certain values or preferences more highly than “staying alive” as a nation – deterrence is expected to fail. For those potentially more serious situations involving nuclear deterrence, the palpable consequences of any such failure could be starkly catastrophic, or even unprecedented.
Benjamin Netanyahu, clearly understands that Iran’s extant leadership, and possibly even another successor government in Tehran, could, at some point, value Israel’s physical destruction more highly than its own national survival.


It goes without saying that dealing with sub-state or terrorist adversaries presents a wholly different and potentially more hazardous set of nuclear deterrence problems. By definition, these kinds of adversaries don’t have any national territories to protect and secure. Moreover, their ultimate objectives are increasingly apt to include “martyrdom,” a faith-driven preference that does not bode well for subjecting these proliferating foes to orthodox threats of retaliation. Today, of course, we are already dealing with ISIS and other apocalyptic death cults that will never conform to ordinary notions of decisional rationality in world politics.

Nuclear deterrence should be properly examined vis-à-vis national or state adversaries, not Jihadist terrorists. Irrationality is not the same as “crazy,” or “mad,” and must be carefully differentiated from these more common terms. Significantly, an irrational enemy leadership could still maintain a distinct and identifiable hierarchy of preferences, albeit one in which national survival does not usually rank at the top. In narrowly technical terms, professional military analysts would emphasize that these irrational state actors still maintain an order of preferences that is “consistent,” “instrumental,” and “transitive.”

In principle, as we shall soon see, even these “irrational” states can be made subject to certain alternative forms of deterrent threat. For any state that relies more-or-less on deterrence, recognizing such forms is absolutely indispensable to national security or survival.

A “crazy” or “mad” leadership, on the other hand, would have no discernible order of preferences; its actions, for the most part, would be random and unpredictable. Facing a genuinely “mad” adversary in world politics, therefore, is substantially “worse” than facing an irrational adversary. In essence, although it might still be possible and purposeful to attempt to deter an irrational enemy, there would be little or no point to seeking deterrence against an expectedly “mad” one.

“Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman,” asks Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV.  “Madmen, lucky folk, construct without logic, or rather with a logic that flies like a feather.”

What is true for individuals is sometimes also true for states. In the often-unpredictable theatre of modern world politics, a drama that routinely bristles with myriad debilitating absurdities, decisions that rest upon normal logic can quickly crumble before madness. Naturally, dangers may reach the most singularly portentous or even existential level when madness and a nuclear weapons capability come together.

These issues are not purely theoretical. Rather, they are profoundly real and current, especially in the deeply adversarial matter of Israel and Iran.[1]  Because not a single member of the “international community” chose to demonstrate a willingness to undertake suitably preemptive action (“anticipatory self-defense,” in the formal language of law), Jerusalem may soon have to face an expressly genocidal Iranian nuclear adversary. A potentially “suicidal” enemy state in Iran, one animated by certain graphically precise visions of a Shiite apocalypse, cannot casually be wished away, or simply dismissed out of hand.

As Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, clearly understands, Iran’s extant leadership, and possibly even another successor government in Tehran, could, at some point, value Israel’s physical destruction more highly than its own national survival. Should this happen, the “play” would almost certainly end very badly for all “actors.”

Nonetheless, for the foreseeable future, Israel’s ultimate source of national security will have to lie in sustained nuclear deterrence. Although still implicit or ambiguous, and not yet open, or disclosed, this Israeli “bomb in the basement” could sometime “crumble before madness.” Here, in certain easily-imaginable instances involving enemy “madness,” the results of any failed Israeli retaliatory threats could conceivably include collective annihilation.

Though the logic of deterrence has always required an assumption of rationality, history reveals the persistent fragility of any such understanding. Indeed, we already know only too well that nations can sometimes behave in ways that are consciously, or even conspicuously, self-destructive.

History may trump logic, and thus deserve pride of place. Mirroring the decisively unpredictable behavior of individual human beings, national leaders will sometimes choose to assign the very highest value to preferences other than collective self-preservation, a sort of Gotterdammerung  or “Twilight of the Gods” scenario. Fortunately, until now, we haven’t witnessed such a scenario involving nuclear weapons or doctrine.

Perhaps we ought to be reassured. For the moment, no single Iranian or Islamic national adversary of Israel would appear to be irrational or mad.  Harsh enemy rhetoric notwithstanding, no such adversary appears ready to launch a major first-strike against Israel using weapons of mass destruction. For now, at least, the plausible expectation that any such aggression would elicit a devastating reprisal is enough to prevent an attack.  To be sure, miscalculations or errors in information could still lead a perfectly rational enemy state to strike first, but this decision would not be the outcome of irrationality or madness. Always, in pertinent strategic thinking, judgments of rationality and irrationality must be rooted in prior intent.

In world politics, as everywhere else, all things move in the midst of death and in corollary hopes for immortality. Certain enemy states, most likely Iran, could one day decide that excising the “Jewish cancer” or, more generally, the “enemies of Allah,” would be worth even the most staggering costs. From a purely military standpoint, this unambiguously genocidal prospect could still be reduced or avoided should Israel be willing to undertake eleventh-hour “hard target” preemptions. All things considered, however, any such once-reasonable expressions of anticipatory self-defense are now very difficult or even impossible to imagine.[2]

Operationally, a meaningfully successful preemption is now almost assuredly beyond Israel’s cumulative capabilities.

Virtually all critical Iranian nuclear assets have already been deeply hardened, widely dispersed, and substantially multiplied. For Israel, there would also be considerable political costs to any preemption. A preemptive attack, even one that would become an operational failure, would still elicit utterly overwhelming howls of public and diplomatic condemnation. Such deafening howls of execration would, in fact, be inevitable.

It is plausible that certain alternative forms of preemption, including assassination of nuclear scientists, and/or cyber defense/cyber-warfare, could still be useful and necessary, but it is also unlikely that any such options could permanently obviate more traditionally expedient resorts to massive military force.

A “bolt-from-the-blue” CBN (chemical, biological or even nuclear) attack upon Israel that is launched with the expectation of city-busting reprisals might not exhibit irrationality or madness. Within such an attacking state’s particular ordering of preferences, any presumed religious obligation to annihilate the “Zionist Entity” could represent the overriding value.  From the standpoint of the prospective attacker’s decisional calculus, the expected benefits of producing such a blessedly apocalyptic annihilation would exceed the expected costs of any expected Israeli reprisal.
Judged from this critical analytic standpoint the standpoint of the would-be attacker – a seemingly “mad” attack decision could actually “make sense.”

An enemy state with such explicitly-exterminatory orientations could effectively represent the individual suicide bomber in macrocosm.  Whether we like it or not, it is a realistic and powerful image. Just as individual Jihadists (Shiite and Sunni) are now plainly willing to achieve personal “martyrdom,” so might certain Jihadist states become willing to “sacrifice themselves” collectively.
Any Iranian or Arab leaders making the fateful decision to strike massively at Israel could be willing to make “martyrs” of their own people, but not of themselves.  In this very “asymmetrical” scenario, it would be judged “acceptable” by these particular leaders to sacrifice more-or-less huge portions of their respective populations, but only while they, and presumably their own families, were able to flee expeditiously to a predetermined, albeit still earth-bound, safe haven. Again, these leaders would find justification and comfort in the “knowledge” that the Islamic victims were now destined for a far better place.

In all world politics, there is no greater form of power than power over death.

In the Middle East, the promise of immortality remains overarching and incomparable.

What is Israel to do?  It can no longer rely on even the most creative forms of preemption/anticipatory self-defense. It also can’t very well choose to live, indefinitely, with determined theological enemies who might not always be reliably deterred by the more usual threats of retaliation, and who would themselves already be armed with assorted weapons of mass destruction. Understandably, living under a nuclear sword of Damocles could be more than most Israelis would be willing to endure.

Moshe Dayan once declared: “Israel must be seen as a mad dog; too dangerous to bother.” If Israel’s enemies could all still be presumed to be rational, in the ordinary sense of valuing their physical survival more highly than any other preference, or combination of preferences, Jerusalem could soon begin, among other things, to exploit the strategic benefits of pretended irrationality. Recognizing that in certain strategic situations, it can be rational to feign irrationality, Israel could then work systematically to create appropriately more cautionary behavior among its relevant adversaries. In such cases, the threat of an Israeli resort to a “Samson Option” might be enough to dissuade an enemy first-strike

Recalling Sun-Tzu, more explicit Israeli hints of “Samson” could indicate an impressively useful grasp of the ancient Chinese strategist’s advice to diminish reliance on defense, and, instead, to “seize the unorthodox.” In this connection, it should not be forgotten that even Israel’s highly-refined and interpenetrating systems of active defense could never achieve a 100% reliability of ballistic missile interception. Although not generally understood, the Arrow and related BMD systems are needed primarily to enhance Israeli nuclear deterrence (hard-point defense), and not for any large-scale soft-point defense of civilian populations.

What about Dayan’s earlier advice? If Israel’s relevant national adversaries, probably Iran, were presumptively irrational in the ordinary sense, there would likely be no real benefit to any assumed postures of pretended irrationality. This is the case because the more probable threat of any massive Israeli nuclear counterstrike linked in enemy calculations with irrationality would be no more compelling to Iran, or to any other enemy state, than if it were confronted by an expectedly rational State of Israel.

In other words, pretended irrationality can “work” only vis-à-vis fully rational adversaries. Israel could benefit from a greater understanding of the “rationality of pretended irrationality,” but only in particular reference to expectedly rational enemy states.  In those circumstances where such enemy states were presumed to be irrational, something else would be needed, something other than nuclear deterrence, preemption, and/or ballistic missile defense. Although many commentators and scholars still believe the answer to this quandary lies in certain diplomatic or political settlements, this time-dishonored belief is born largely of frustration.

Unquestionably, President Barack Obama’s plan for keeping Iran non-nuclear was naive at best. It has already failed.

No meaningful political settlements can ever be worked out with enemies who openly seek Israel’s “liquidation,”[3]  a word that is still used commonly in many Arab and Iranian newspapers, web sites, and texts. Israel’s enemies are not concerned about land – not at all. Their incessant and lascivious “war” with Israel is still about only one thing. It is about God. It is about immortality.

Going forward, Israel must understand that irrationality need not mean madness. Even an irrational state leadership may have an instrumental, consistent, and transitive hierarchy of wants. The first deterrent task for Israel must be to identify this hierarchy among its several state enemies. Although these states might not be deterred from aggression by even the plausibly persuasive threat of massive Israeli retaliations, they might still be dissuaded by certain threats aimed at what they do hold to be most important.

What might be most important to Israel’s prospectively irrational state enemies, potentially even more important than their own physical survival as a state?  One possible answer is the avoidance of certain forms of presumed apostasy, shame, and humiliation. This would include avoiding the potentially unendurable charge that they had somehow defiled their most sacred religious obligations. Another would be leaders’ strongly-preferred avoidance of their own violent deaths at the hand of Israel, deaths that could be attributable to Israeli strategies of “targeted killing,” and/or “regime-targeting.” In these cases, the particular Islamic leaders would not themselves have been persuaded by the usually compelling benefits of “martyrdom.”

This last suggestion could be problematic to the extent that, theologically, being killed by Jews for the sake of Allah ought doctrinally to be regarded as a distinct positive. Dying for the sake of Allah, we may recall, could be regarded in these leadership contexts as a clerically-blessed passport to immortality.

In the future, Israel will need to deal with both rational and irrational adversaries. These enemies, in turn, will be both state and sub-state actors. On occasion, Israel’s leaders will also have to deal with various complex and subtle combinations of rational and irrational enemies, sometimes even simultaneously.

Ultimately, Israel must also prepare to deal with “nuclear madmen,” both as terrorists, and as national leaders. But, first, it must fashion a suitable plan for dealing with nuclear adversaries who are neither mad, nor irrational. With such an imperative, Israel should now do everything possible to enhance its deterrence, preemption, defense, and war-fighting capabilities. This means, inter alia, enhanced and explicit preparations for certain “last resort,” or “Samson” operations.

Concerning any prospective contributions to Israeli nuclear deterrence, recognizable preparations for a Samson Option could serve to convince certain would-be attackers that their anticipated aggression would not be gainful. This is especially true if such Israeli preparations were combined with certain levels of disclosure, that is, if Israel’s  “Samson” weapons were made to appear sufficiently invulnerable to enemy first-strikes, and if these weapons were identifiably “countervalue” (counter-city) in mission function.

The Samson Option, by definition, would be executed with countervalue-targeted nuclear weapons. It is likely that any such last-resort operations would come into play only after all Israeli counterforce options had already been exhausted.

Concerning the previously mentioned “rationality of pretended irrationality,” Samson could enhance Israeli nuclear deterrence by demonstrating a national willingness to take existential risks, but this would hold true only if Israeli last-resort options were directed toward rational adversaries.
Concerning prospective contributions to preemption options, preparations for a Samson Option could convince Israeli leaders that their own defensive first-strikes would be undertaken with diminished expectations of unacceptably destructive enemy retaliations. This sort of convincing would depend, at least in part, upon antecedent Israeli government decisions on disclosure (that is, an end to “nuclear ambiguity”); on Israeli perceptions of the effects of disclosure on enemy retaliatory prospects; on Israeli judgments about enemy perceptions of Samson weapons’ vulnerability; and on an enemy awareness of Samson’s countervalue force posture. In any event, the optimal time to end Israel’s bomb in the basement policy, and thereby replace “deliberate ambiguity” with appropriate forms of disclosure, will soon be at hand.

Similar to Samson’s plausible impact upon Israeli nuclear deterrence, recognizable last-resort preparations could enhance Israeli preemption options by displaying a clear and verifiable willingness to accept certain existential risks. In this scenario, however, Israeli leaders must always bear in mind that pretended irrationality could become a double-edged sword. Brandished too flagrantly, and without sufficient nuance, any Israeli preparations for a Samson Option could impair rather than reinforce Israel’s nuclear war-fighting options.

Concerning prospective contributions to Israel’s nuclear war fighting options, preparations for a Samson Option could convince enemy states that any clear victory over Israel would be impossible. With such reasoning, it would be important for Israel to communicate to potential aggressors the following very precise understanding: Israel’s counter value-targeted Samson weapons are additional to its counterforce-targeted war fighting weapons. Without such a communication, any preparations for a Samson Option could impair rather than reinforce Israel’s nuclear warfighting options.
Undoubtedly, as was concluded earlier by Project Daniel, [4]  nuclear war fighting, wherever possible, should be scrupulously avoided by Israel.

The purpose of Israel’s nuclear forces and doctrine must always be deterrence ex ante, not revenge ex post.

But there still remain some readily identifiable circumstances in which nuclear exchanges could be unavoidable, whatever Israel might have done to prevent them. Here, some forms of nuclear warfighting could ensue, so long as: (a) enemy state first-strikes launched against Israel would not destroy Israel’s second-strike nuclear capability; (b) enemy state retaliations for an Israeli conventional preemption would not destroy Israel’s nuclear counter-retaliatory capability; (c) conventional Israeli preemptive strikes would not destroy enemy state second-strike nuclear capability; and (d) Israeli retaliations for enemy state conventional first strikes would not destroy enemy state nuclear counter-retaliatory capability.

From the standpoint of protecting its overall existential security, this means that Israel must take appropriate steps to ensure the plausibility of (a) and (b), above, and the implausibility of (c) and (d).
“Do you know what it means to find yourself face to face with a madman?” Repeating this pertinent question from Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV does have immediate relevance to Israel’s existential dilemma. At the same time, the mounting strategic challenge to Israel will come primarily from enemy decision-makers who are not-at-all mad, and who are still more-or-less rational.

Promptly, Israel will need to fashion a comprehensive and suitably-calibrated strategic doctrine, one from which various specific policies and operations could readily be extrapolated. This focused framework would identify and correlate all available strategic options (deterrence, preemption, active defense, strategic targeting, nuclear war fighting) with core survival goals. It would also take close account of the possible interactions between these strategic options, and of  determinable “synergies” between all conceivable enemy actions directed against Israel. Actually calculating these particular interactions and synergies will present a computational task on the very highest order of intellectual difficulty.

Nuclear deterrence is a “game” that certain sane national leaders must play, but to compete effectively, a would-be winner must always first assess (1) the expected rationality of each critical opponent; and (2) the probable costs and benefits of pretending irrationality oneself. These are undoubtedly complex, interactive, and glaringly imprecise forms of assessment, but, just as doubtlessly, they constitute an indispensable foundation for Israel’s long-term security. Doctrinally, it is already time for them to become part of Jerusalem’s codified and revitalized Order of Battle.[5]

Ignorance Is Not Bliss (Proverbs 1:22)

Not to worry about Iranian nukes because Obama says Iran told him so

by Bob Taylor – Feb 12, 2015

Is President Obama naive when it comes to Nuclear Weapons and Iran?

President Obama, President Rhoutani, and Imam Khamenei

CHARLOTTE, NC, February 11, 2015 – Barack Obama told us point blank in one of the presidential debates with John McCain that he would attempt to negotiate with Islamists.
It was a naïve statement then, and it is still naïve today, even though Obama has been president for more than six years.

In a press conference with Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, Obama said on Monday that he a believes a deal can be struck with Iran regarding their nuclear weapons program because it would be “contrary to their (Iran’s) faith to obtain a nuclear weapon” according to Supreme Leader Khamenei.

The Islamic faith in its purest sense follows a blueprint laid out by the Prophet Muhammad in the Koran. As a point of reference for Mr. Obama, difficult as it may be to believe, there is no mention whatsoever of nuclear weapons in the Koran.

The Arabic word for non-believers is kuffar, of whom the primary goal of is Islam is to eradicate them from the face of the earth. Yet in Obama-world the president believes he is able to negotiate with Iran in “good faith.”

What Mr. Obama does not understand, or more accurately refuses to accept, is that “good faith” for Islamic extremists is “bad faith” for the rest of the world.

As Winston Churchill once so brilliantly observed, “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

Sadly there are no Winston Churchill’s alive today. At least none who are capable of dealing with the cancer of global terrorism.

In an interview with VOX.com that was done in January but not released until earlier this week, Obama downplayed the threats of global terrorism and said that we needed to tackle more urgent problems such as climate change.

As Obama, and others following his lead, suggest, Islamic extremism is not a problem because the United States is not under an immediate threat. In other words, the rest of the world can go to hell as long as the U.S. is not in danger.

That is no different than the personal approach Obama takes to everything. Healthcare is not something he personally has to worry about so the rest of the country be damned. You can transpose that philosophy to everything else he does, including the way he runs the country.

In his bestselling novel Inferno, author Dan Brown cites the writings of Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Since President Obama is intent on making references to the Middle Ages with his recent remarks about the Crusades, perhaps a quote from Dante is also appropriate in which he writes, “The path to paradise passes directly through hell.”

That seems to be Obama’s approach to foreign policy. Make the world tread through hell in order to be rewarded in the afterlife. That, too, by the way, is what Islamists believe.

As one character in the novel poignantly observes, “Someone needs to fight this war or this is our future. (referring to grisly images writhing in the agony of hell) Mathematics guarantees it. Mankind is hovering in a purgatory of procrastination and indecision and greed (emphasis added)…but the rings of hell await, just beneath our feet, waiting to consume us all.”

Those “rings of hell” are rippling throughout the Middle East just like a stone that is thrown into a placid lake. And the rings are multiplying. Whether they directly affect our country now or somewhere in the distant future, the time has come to halt the menace of global terror and the spread of Islamic jihad before it is too late.

Barack Obama’s calculus is to hold on to the ledge of the cliff by his fingertips until someone else takes his place. The president has no stomach for dealing with international conflicts, especially those involving Islam.

We speak mostly of ISIS these days with less focus on a group called Boko Haram. Roughly translated Boko Haram means that “Western education is a sin.”

The word haram in Arabic means “a sin or something that is forbidden by Allah.”

Therefore, though it is impossible for nuclear weapons to be mentioned in the Koran, if Iran does indeed determine that such weapons are necessary to destroy the kuffar, then they cannot be haram in the eyes of Allah.

And therein lies further evidence of Barack Obama’s naivete.

Bob Taylor has been traveling the world for more than 30 years as a writer and award winning television producer focusing on international events, people and cultures around the globe.
Taylor is founder of The Magellan Travel Club (www.MagellanTravelClub.com)
Read more of What in the World and Bob Taylor at Communities Digital News
Follow Bob on Twitter @MrPeabod

Read more at http://www.commdiginews.com/featured/not-to-worry-about-iranian-nukes-because-obama-says-iran-told-him-so-35342/#zcC7BcIbI4jKJ372.99

Nuclear Deterrence Is A Fool’s Game (Revelation 16)

Reconsidering Deterrence Stability

By krepon | 14 January 2015

What benefits are conferred by nuclear weapons? Do they provide status? Not like in the past. North Korea and Pakistan haven’t gained status by having the Bomb. Instead, they have become more worrisome countries. Do they alleviate security concerns? Possessing nuclear weapons against a similarly-armed foe or against an adversary with stronger conventional capabilities provides a sense of deterrence, dissuasion, and national assurance. To give the Bomb its due, during the Cold War, nuclear weapons helped keep border skirmishes limited between major powers, fostered cautionary behavior in severe crises, and reinforced a natural disinclination to engage in large-scale conventional wars. These were – and remain — significant accomplishments.

But the Bomb always promises more than it delivers. Possessing the Bomb, even in significant numbers, has not deterred limited border clashes between nuclear-armed states, conventional wars with non-nuclear-weapon states, punishing proxy wars and severe crises. The Bomb isn’t stabilizing; it exacerbates security dilemmas and can engender risk taking as well as caution. The Bomb promises advances in security that are quickly undercut by countermeasures taken by wary adversaries.
States that acquire nuclear weapons don’t feel safe without them. They also do not feel safe with them – if they have something to fight about with another nuclear-armed state. Having assured retaliatory capabilities helps, but assurance erodes in an interactive nuclear arms competition. A key threshold for erosion occurs when the contestants move from counter value to counterforce targeting. Increments in counterforce capabilities lead to and decrements in deterrence stability – even under conditions of absurd nuclear overkill.

Strategic and deterrence stability are about political relations, not technical advances. The United States and the Soviet Union never achieved deterrence stability until the Soviet Union was heading toward collapse. Brief periods of détente were interrupted by clashes of interest in far away as well as sensitive places. Constraints on nuclear testing and arms limitation treaties negotiated with great effort were accompanied by modernization programs that lessened mutual security. Deterrence stability between the superpowers was accomplished only when two unorthodox leaders – one whose economy was cratering – threw nuclear orthodoxy out the window and sought to normalize ties.
India and Pakistan will find deterrence stability as elusive as the nuclear superpowers, even though their nuclear competition pales in comparison and they have not yet embraced counterforce targeting for longer-range delivery vehicles. Deterrence stability on the subcontinent, as elsewhere, rests on the prospect of resolving or mutually agreeing to defer issues in dispute and, in Pakistan’s case, regaining a monopoly on the use of violence within and across its borders. In the near term, these prospects are iffy, at best. Deterrence instability is inherent when an interactive nuclear arms competition gets mixed up with religion, inheritance, and regional security issues, not to mention a history of conventional and sub-conventional warfare.

There’s more hope for India and China to work out arrangements of deterrence stability — if their border dispute remains shelved or resolved, and if they manage to avoid venturing into counterforce capabilities. The combination of a quiet, albeit contested border, plus growing trade and investment ties alongside mutual strategic restraint would make for a stabilizing mix. But this won’t be easy.
For more on the contested valuation of nuclear weapons, aspiring wonks can check out a volume of essays, Nuclear Diplomacy and Crisis Management, co-edited by Sean Lynn-Jones, Steve Miller, and Steve Van Evera (MIT Press, 1990). Robert Jervis’s essay argues that nuclear weapons have only limited utility is preventing war:

“It is rational to start a war one does not expect to win… if it is believed that the likely consequences of fighting are even worse. War could also come through inadvertence, loss of control, or irrationality… At best, then, nuclear weapons will keep the nuclear peace; they will not prevent – and indeed, may facilitate – the use of lower levels of violence.”

John Mueller’s essay in this volume – and his provocative book, Atomic Obsession (2010) – argues otherwise, “that nuclear weapons neither crucially define a fundamental stability nor threaten severely to disturb it.” Here’s more from Mueller:

“Escalation is key: what deters is the belief that escalation to something intolerable will occur, not so much what the details of the ultimate unbearable punishment are believed to be.”

“It almost seems … that the two major powers have forgotten how to get into a war… There hasn’t been a true, bone-crunching confrontational crisis for over a quarter-century.”

“Since preparations for major war are essentially irrelevant, they are profoundly foolish.”
This week’s pop quiz: Do Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Vladimir Putin’s actions into eastern Ukraine support Jervis, Mueller, or both?