I’ve had the book on my to-read list for ages, but it’s got so much company (including ‘The Strategy of conflict’, after reading this) that its odds aren’t looking good!
I found your first criticism especially interesting:
At times, Kaplan seems to sort-of dismiss the whole idea that nuclear weapons could have any value (from a country’s perspective) via helping to deter an adversary from taking a disliked action
I listened to a future of life institute podcast with Beatrice Fihn (director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) recently, where she seemed to be making the similar point that individual countries might not be made any safer by maintaining a nuclear arsenal because it unwittingly turns them into a target for other countries.
It’s a theory that seems fairly unintuitive to me—would North Korea’s leadership really have had such stability without being able to leverage a nuclear threat?
I’d love to know what motivated Kaplan’s argument (assuming you were understanding him correctly). It would be lovely to find out that disarmament wasn’t actually as much of a coordination problem as we though it was!
Yeah, Kaplan definitely isn’t the only person who seems to totally dismiss the possibility that nuclear weapons have some value, from a country’s own perspective, via aiding in deterrence. It seems to me that it’s often hard to pin down precisely what people are claiming and what their reasoning is.
when pressed, the people focus on quite defensible arguments like “The US doesn’t need the number of weapons it has, and having them increases overall risk to the US”
but at other times, they seem to be saying/implying things more like “The US doesn’t need any nuclear weapons, and having them has no benefits at all”
And I think this is problematic, because those two different sets/types of claims have different implications for which policies should be pursued.
she seemed to be making the similar point that individual countries might not be made any safer by maintaining a nuclear arsenal because it unwittingly turns them into a target for other countries.
I should note that, while I’m not sure if I agree with that claim overall, I think that that claim is much more reasonable than the claim that there is no deterrence value in having nuclear weapons. (Something can be net negative even if it has some positive effect.)
I’d love to know what motivated Kaplan’s argument (assuming you were understanding him correctly)
My guess is that it’s a sort of ideological thing, and/or a desire to make things sound as dramatic and simple as possible in order to build public/elite support for a particular set of policies. This connects to my guess that there’s a motte-and-bailey fallacy going on; I’d guess Kaplan doesn’t explicitly, fully believe strong versions of the things it sometimes sounds like he’s saying. (But this is just a guess, and one should be quite careful when arguing that other people believe something just due to bias. I don’t want to be perceived as highly confident or highly dismissive of Kaplan.)
they seem to be saying/implying things more like “The US doesn’t need any nuclear weapons, and having them has no benefits at all”
Does Kaplan speak at all about how the US would otherwise deter a USSR invasion of our European allies? Things like alternative proposals for deterrence, or arguments that NATO was superior in an immediate conventional conflict, or similar?
My understanding of the beginning of nuclear deterrence policy is that it was the cheaper option compared to maintaining a sufficiently huge air and transport capacity to respond rapidly to a Soviet land invasion in Europe. It feels to me like his understanding of—or position on—these details would be a factor in interpreting his position on nuclear weapons.
Kaplan does discuss how the US was worried about a Soviet invasion of the US’s European allies, and how this was a part of the motivation for having a large nuclear arsenal and also for specific aspects of the arsenal (e.g. stationing nuclear weapons in Europe itself so that the US could threaten to launch from Europe, which was assumed to be more credible than threatening to launch from the US since it seemed somewhat less likely to trigger a strike against the mainland US in response).
He also discusses how this consideration was sometimes raised as an argument against various arms reductions proposals. E.g., he says what I paraphrased in my cards as:
In the 1986 memo to Reagan entitled “Why We Can’t Commit to Eliminating All Nuclear Weapons Within 10 Years”, what 3 key arguments does Poindexter give?
Such an agreement couldn’t be verified
Other nuclear armed states might not also eliminate their weapons, and thus they might gain superiority
This would create a major risk to Western Europe, given the Soviets’ advantage in conventional forces [emphasis added]
I can’t remember whether, in the later chapters about more recent events, he directly confronts the question of whether the US would currently be able to deter Russian aggression effectively if it massively reduced or eliminated its nuclear arsenal. Though to be fair to him, the book isn’t explicitly about what we should do, but rather things like the decision-making that has occurred in relation to US nuclear weapons, so he doesn’t exactly have an obligation to cover that. (Though it seems to me that he does at times very much imply certain recommendations, or that certain actions have been reckless or crazy or must not be repeated.)
Mm, I can certainly see the temptation to lean towards ‘nuclear weapons likely don’t actually work as deterrents’ if one didn’t have a strong conviction in the other direction.
I was under the impression that Beatrice seemed to be tentatively arguing that maintaining any sort of nuclear weapons capability would make an individual nation less safe from attack, but looking at the transcript again I think there is some potential ambiguity that means I could be mistrepresentingher postition.
Would be very interested to hear a more fleshed-out argument though.
I’ve had the book on my to-read list for ages, but it’s got so much company (including ‘The Strategy of conflict’, after reading this) that its odds aren’t looking good!
I found your first criticism especially interesting:
I listened to a future of life institute podcast with Beatrice Fihn (director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) recently, where she seemed to be making the similar point that individual countries might not be made any safer by maintaining a nuclear arsenal because it unwittingly turns them into a target for other countries.
It’s a theory that seems fairly unintuitive to me—would North Korea’s leadership really have had such stability without being able to leverage a nuclear threat?
I’d love to know what motivated Kaplan’s argument (assuming you were understanding him correctly). It would be lovely to find out that disarmament wasn’t actually as much of a coordination problem as we though it was!
Yeah, Kaplan definitely isn’t the only person who seems to totally dismiss the possibility that nuclear weapons have some value, from a country’s own perspective, via aiding in deterrence. It seems to me that it’s often hard to pin down precisely what people are claiming and what their reasoning is.
I think sometimes it’s a sort of motte-and-bailey fallacy, where:
when pressed, the people focus on quite defensible arguments like “The US doesn’t need the number of weapons it has, and having them increases overall risk to the US”
but at other times, they seem to be saying/implying things more like “The US doesn’t need any nuclear weapons, and having them has no benefits at all”
And I think this is problematic, because those two different sets/types of claims have different implications for which policies should be pursued.
I should note that, while I’m not sure if I agree with that claim overall, I think that that claim is much more reasonable than the claim that there is no deterrence value in having nuclear weapons. (Something can be net negative even if it has some positive effect.)
My guess is that it’s a sort of ideological thing, and/or a desire to make things sound as dramatic and simple as possible in order to build public/elite support for a particular set of policies. This connects to my guess that there’s a motte-and-bailey fallacy going on; I’d guess Kaplan doesn’t explicitly, fully believe strong versions of the things it sometimes sounds like he’s saying. (But this is just a guess, and one should be quite careful when arguing that other people believe something just due to bias. I don’t want to be perceived as highly confident or highly dismissive of Kaplan.)
Does Kaplan speak at all about how the US would otherwise deter a USSR invasion of our European allies? Things like alternative proposals for deterrence, or arguments that NATO was superior in an immediate conventional conflict, or similar?
My understanding of the beginning of nuclear deterrence policy is that it was the cheaper option compared to maintaining a sufficiently huge air and transport capacity to respond rapidly to a Soviet land invasion in Europe. It feels to me like his understanding of—or position on—these details would be a factor in interpreting his position on nuclear weapons.
Kaplan does discuss how the US was worried about a Soviet invasion of the US’s European allies, and how this was a part of the motivation for having a large nuclear arsenal and also for specific aspects of the arsenal (e.g. stationing nuclear weapons in Europe itself so that the US could threaten to launch from Europe, which was assumed to be more credible than threatening to launch from the US since it seemed somewhat less likely to trigger a strike against the mainland US in response).
He also discusses how this consideration was sometimes raised as an argument against various arms reductions proposals. E.g., he says what I paraphrased in my cards as:
Such an agreement couldn’t be verified
Other nuclear armed states might not also eliminate their weapons, and thus they might gain superiority
This would create a major risk to Western Europe, given the Soviets’ advantage in conventional forces [emphasis added]
I can’t remember whether, in the later chapters about more recent events, he directly confronts the question of whether the US would currently be able to deter Russian aggression effectively if it massively reduced or eliminated its nuclear arsenal. Though to be fair to him, the book isn’t explicitly about what we should do, but rather things like the decision-making that has occurred in relation to US nuclear weapons, so he doesn’t exactly have an obligation to cover that. (Though it seems to me that he does at times very much imply certain recommendations, or that certain actions have been reckless or crazy or must not be repeated.)
Mm, I can certainly see the temptation to lean towards ‘nuclear weapons likely don’t actually work as deterrents’ if one didn’t have a strong conviction in the other direction.
I was under the impression that Beatrice seemed to be tentatively arguing that maintaining any sort of nuclear weapons capability would make an individual nation less safe from attack, but looking at the transcript again I think there is some potential ambiguity that means I could be mistrepresenting her postition.
Would be very interested to hear a more fleshed-out argument though.