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Unlimited Weapons and Limited Wars: Confronting the Dilemmas of Nuclear

ipcs.org
Age| Book Review by Yogesh Joshi
Yogesh Joshi
Research Officer, IPCS
email: yogeshjoshidec11@gmail.com

Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy

Henry Kissinger
Harper and Brothers: New York
Year of publication-1957
The nuclear age has confronted decision makers with a conundrum: how to synchronize nuclear weapons
with the use of force in international relations. The history of the Cold War highlights this dilemma. Even
though the USA had a clear monopoly on atomic weapons till 1949, it was unable to take advantage of this
asymmetry during the Berlin blockade. Despite the Soviets attaining nuclear capability in 1949, the
Americans had the advantage due to its possession of the Hydrogen bomb and in overall numbers. But, it
needed to fight a war of attrition and settle for a political stalemate in the Korean War. George Kennans
concept of containment provided the bedrock of US foreign policy to confront the Red menace, but the
Soviets instigated the Hungarian uprising and the West could do nothing. Clearly, for the first ten years of
the Cold war, nuclear weapons and foreign policy appeared to be incongruent. Why, asks Henry Kissinger.
Henry Kissinger, in his monumental work; Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, confronts the nuclear
dilemma head on. For him, the challenges of the nuclear age are very different form the past. First, nuclear
weapons provided belligerents with an excess of firepower. Unlike the wars of the past that were restricted
by the dearth of resources and ability to project power, nuclear weapons have obliterated all constraints on
war limitation. To think of a total war- a war in which total capitulation of the enemy is desired- is quite
unthinkable since total war would mean complete annihilation. Why would any country whose national
survival is threatened resort to nuclear weapons? If they are used, would nuclear war achieve anything?
Nuclear weapons dovetailed with the concept of total war according to Kissinger, leads to situations where
the will to fight is paralyzed. Second, if excess power, which nuclear weapons symbolize, leads to paralysis
of will in projecting force, then the Clausewitzian dictum of war as a continuation of politics by other means
is invalidated. However, in the anarchic realm of international politics, where the principle of sovereign
equality rules supreme, and there is no overarching authority to settle disputes, the resort to force and
economic sanctions are the final instruments available to states for pursuing their political goals. Due to this
impasse, foreign policy is doomed to failure. Third, and of some significance is the fact that, in the nuclear
age, creating a balance of power does not need allies. What it needs is nuclear weapons. Since the politics
of alignment becomes anachronistic, so does the institution of diplomacy. Internal balancing, to use
Kenneth Waltzs words, becomes the norm in the nuclear age.
The implications of the technological revolution were made more precarious by the political revolution
which the end of WWII witnessed. The flourishing of communism, for Kissinger, was fundamental to
understanding what the nuclear age holds for America. Unlike the territorial balance of power issues that
plagued the kingdoms of Europe in the 19th century, the two super powers were engaged in an ideological
conflict. The Soviet Union being the revolutionary power, according to Kissinger, had a fundamental
advantage in the nuclear age over a status-quo power like the USA. This was because a power dissatisfied
with the existing international order has a greater propensity to take risks. Since deterrence is essentially a
psychological phenomenon, this inclination for risk-taking leads to a reaction by the status-quo state by
challenging
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the risk taking behavior of the revolutionary power. However, the fear of nuclear
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challenging the risk taking behavior of the revolutionary power. However, the fear of nuclear catastrophe
can compromise the will to react on the part of the status-quo power because it is satisfied with the existing
order. Hence, for Kissinger, the Soviet Union can effectively utilize the space between all out nuclear war
with USA and a limited local confrontation on the periphery, which the status-quo power would not wish to
fight, out of the fear that the war might get nuclearized.
If these are the challenges of the nuclear age, the key to resolve them lies in strategic doctrine. According
to Kissinger, the task of the strategic doctrine is to translate power into policy. However, for Kissinger,
strategic doctrine is the area where the US lagged behind. The challenges of the nuclear age which
confronted its decision-makers in Korea and Hungary were creations of this deficiency. According to the
US strategic doctrine, as expressed in the New Look policy enunciated by Dulles, atomic arsenals were
to be used against the unambiguous threats of the communist bloc against the free world. The doctrine of
massive retaliation was designed to induce deterrence in the mind of the belligerents by threatening
unacceptable punishment. However, the fundamental question remained: how do we define this
unambiguous threat. Was crossing the Yalu River by the Chinese an unambiguous threat? Or was the
suppression of the Hungarians by the Soviet tanks? The answer was hard to find. This is the classic
dilemma of nuclear red lines. The threshold for massive retaliation eluded definition: a clear result of the
atomic stalemate in the mid-1950s, as the US was now susceptible to Soviet nuclear counter-attack.
Kissinger wrote that, in this situation, "our notion of aggression as an unambiguous act and our concept of
war as an all-out struggle have made it difficult to come to grips with our peril.Clearly, it was not possible
to translate nuclear power into political power.
However, the malaise lay deeper. The doctrine of massive retaliation was inadequate to handle different
types of threats but, by emphasizing the unambiguity of threat and massive response, it sought the most
extreme course of action. In other words, it tried to convert all conflicts into total wars. As Kissinger
explains the effect of such extreme thinking was that, The more stark the consequences of all-out war, the
more reluctant the responsible political leaders will be to employ force. This overemphasis on totality of
war had also created fundamental problems within the force structure of the US military. Following the
importance of the Air Force in WWII, and no other means available to carry out the nuclear threat (missile
development was still in its infancy), the largest chunk of defence budgets went to the Air Force which
believed that nuclear retaliation was its exclusive preserve. This led to much infighting between the
services. Considering the importance of nuclear weapons in budget allotments, each service began
developing a hypothetical role for them selves to ensure massive retaliation leading to a duplication of
weapon systems and combat roles among the services.
The solution suggested by Kissinger is a strategic doctrine which provides for the widest range of
challenges. In fact, Kissinger was trying to build what later came to be known as the doctrine of flexible
response. However, Kissingers emphasis was on limited wars. For Kissinger the biggest challenge of the
nuclear age was to employ nuclear capabilities to achieve political ends, and to reinstate the relationship
between force and diplomacy. Limited Wars could provide the way out. For Kissinger, the nature of conflict
in the nuclear age was highly diffused, which necessitated a spectrum of responses rather than the one
single strategy of an all-out war. Limited wars, in fact, provided the link between physical power and
political will. By responding proportionately to threats, deterrence can be made more credible since it would
inform the Soviets that the US is ready to run the risk whenever the Communists seek to threaten. By
creating a ladder of responses, the onus is placed on the adversary to stop escalation.
Kissinger goes beyond the concept of limited wars which were, until then, considered to be conventional in
nature. Introduction of nuclear arms into the conflict did not automatically mean total war. For Kissinger,
this de-linking was fundamental for evolving an effective strategic doctrine. Fighting Soviet aggression in
conventional terms had been tried in Europe and the Korean Peninsula. However, it was clear that this kind
of 2aofstrategy
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was expensive and provided clear advantages to the Soviets, since their Jul
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of a strategy was expensive and provided clear advantages to the Soviets, since their conventional
capabilities were enormous. According to Kissinger, the need was to incorporate the element where the US
had clear upper hand which was in the domain of nuclear weapons.
The fundamental premise of limited nuclear war is based on the assumption that avoidance of an all-out
nuclear war is mutually beneficial for both sides. A common and overwhelming interest in preventing the
conflict from spreading, as Kissinger puts it, can allow belligerents to keep the conflict limited. Kissinger is
quick to point out that a limited war could remain limited to the extent that the national survival of both the
sides is guaranteed. Short of a threat to national survival, any other result would not force the belligerents
to resort to a Nuclear Armageddon. This is because a political settlement would be a much better bargain
than complete nuclear annihilation. However, this common interest needs to be supplemented by many
other factors. Kissinger identifies three of these prerequisites. First, defining threshold conditions beyond
which any side would resort to an all-out nuclear confrontation. This, in modern parlance, is called the
nuclear red lines. Nuclear signaling therefore becomes critical and so is the institution of diplomacy.
According to Kissinger, the enemies need to make each other understand what they mean by limited
nuclear wars, and what limitations they are ready to observe. Second, according to Kissinger, the need is
to develop a framework where limited nuclear wars can actually be fought. This necessitated an agreement
among enemies where values and ideologies are separated from the art of war fighting, so that even small
victories and defeats should not be couched in existential terms. Thirdly, political leadership should prevail
over the military compulsions. This was because, in the fog of war, militaries cannot decide the difference
between tactical victories and political goals. By their very organization, armed forces are meant to fight
decisive wars. In a limited nuclear war, it is the political element which decides the length and breath of the
military effort.
Such was the nature of the task Henry Kissinger undertook during the heyday of the Cold War. In fact,
limited nuclear wars became fashionable for international relations experts. A lot of work was done on this
concept by Robert Osgood and Hermann Kahn, to name some. However, the basic contradictions of
limited nuclear war persist as was evident in the confrontation between India and Pakistan in Kargil. The
basic problem with limited nuclear wars is that it assumes complete rationality in the Other. It
presupposes that the Other would do exactly what one expects it would do. This problem is most evident
in the task of defining nuclear red lines. How would the votaries of limited nuclear war adjust to the fact that
states would like to shift their nuclear thresholds according to the developing situation? If Pakistan lowers
its atomic threshold, would India be ready to call the bluff by pursuing its limited war strategy? The
inhibitions are mutual, and there is no way out of this vicious circle. Another important factor to be taken
into account is the nature of domestic politics. Its pressures and compulsions may not allow a political
settlement to take place, and could force the war to be taken to its logical extreme. Finally, how would
militaries be controlled despite the fog of war? Wars have their own dynamics and are seldom controlled by
extraneous forces.
Limited nuclear war is an extreme expression of nuclear optimism. Though the dawn of nuclear age has
brought an uneasy peace in international relations; this logic cannot be taken to its farthest end.
(The first part of the title of the book review is taken from a paper by Bernard Brodie titiled Unlimited
Weapons and Limited Wars, The Reporter, 18 November 1954)
The Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies (IPCS) is the premier South Asian think tank which conducts
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For3 of
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in South Asia and elsewhere, the IPCS website provides a comprehensive analysis
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