In an impressively-prepared television documentary, The Fog of War, one-time US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara warned about the limits of rationality in world politics — and nuclear war. McNamara summarized succinctly: “Rationality won’t save us.”

International crises and confrontations are essentially inevitable, and the only way for powerful states like the United States to remain powerful is by demonstrating capacity and willingness to dominate high-value escalations. To best ensure such a perceived capacity, this country will need to take exceptional risks, but — simultaneously — avoid nuclear warfare.  

How should the incumbent American president proceed? In protecting the United States from deliberate nuclear attack, American strategists will need to accept core assumptions of enemy rationality. Critical dangers could be created by enemy hacking operations, computer malfunctions (accidental nuclear war), or decision-making miscalculation (whether by the enemy, the United States, or both). In the plausibly indecipherable third-case scenario, damaging synergies could arise that would prove difficult or even impossible to reverse.

Historical Context and Present Threats

In these matters, history deserves some evident pride of place. Since 1945, the global balance of power has been transformed, in considerable measure, to a “balance of terror.”

The more-or-less transient “solution” is to manage all prospectively nuclear crises at their lowest possible levels of destructiveness. Wherever feasible, of course, it is best to avoid such crises altogether and maintain reliable “circuit breakers” against strategic hacking and technical malfunction. At the same time, especially in furtherance of nuclear war avoidance, hope can never be a correct strategy.

Accordingly, US defense planners should focus more explicit policy attention on the expected consequences of President Donald Trump’s breach with NATO over Ukraine and on Israel’s changing ties with certain Sunni Arab states. These Israeli-Sunni Arab ties center on preventing a common enemy — Shiite Iran — from “going nuclear.”

Israel’s own nuclear security decisions will have serious implications for the United States. Though Israel currently has no nuclear adversaries, the rapidly accelerating approach of a nuclear Iran could encourage nuclearization by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and/or Turkey.

Moreover, non-Arab Pakistan will likely become a more direct adversary of the United States and Israel. Pakistan is an already nuclear Islamic state with close ties to China. Like Israel, Pakistan is not a party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

Furthermore, nuclear China has never renounced its right or intention to “recover” Taiwan by military force.

What is the probabilistic difference between a deliberate or intentional nuclear war and one that would be unintentional or inadvertent? Without carefully considering this core distinction, little of pragmatic use could be said about the calculable likelihood of any nuclear conflict. Though with greater “informality,” capable analysts and decision-makers will still have to devise optimal strategies for predicting and averting a nuclear war.

A Double-Edged Sword

Designed to guard against a US preemption, adversarial protective measures could involve the attachment of “hair trigger” launch mechanisms to nuclear weapon systems and/or the adoption of “launch on warning” policies, possibly coupled with certain pre-delegations of launch authority.

This means, incrementally, that the US could sometime find itself endangered by steps taken by an enemy state to prevent or minimize an American preemption. Plausibly, the United States would do everything possible to prevent such adversarial steps because of the expanded risks of accidental or miscalculated attacks against American populations.

Nonetheless, such steps could become a fait accompli, and Washington could calculate that a preemptive strike would be legal and cost-effective. Ironically, in this case, the American preemption would have been generated by enemy failures of “anti-preemption” measures. In principle, at least, this same ominous scenario could be played in the other direction. Here, a security-seeking United States, by deploying similarly destabilizing anti-proliferation safeguards, would spur mistaken or premature preemptive attacks by aptly apprehensive enemy states.

More fundamental issues will need to be analyzed in Washington. Above everything else, such existential matters should never be approached by American national security policy-makers as a narrowly political or tactical problem. Rather, informed by in-depth historical understandings and refined analytic capacities, US military planners should prepare to deal with a large variety of overlapping threat-system hazards. At times, the analyzed intersections could prove “synergistic” or force-multiplying.

Staying the Collision Course or Advancing Beyond “Dumb Luck”

In any global “state of nature,” there is little likelihood that the corrosive dynamics of nuclear risk-taking and nuclear deterrence would fade away on their own. Operating rationally in our centuries-old world system of belligerent nationalisms, the US president and his counterparts in Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel, and elsewhere will seek to prevail in multiple and possibly-interrelated struggles for “escalation dominance.” Amid unrelenting global anarchy, these leaders would have no real choice but to stay tethered to a “scripted” geopolitical course.

Over time, no matter how carefully, responsibly and rationally each state’s security preparations are carried out, an international order based on incessant power struggles will fail.

For the moment, the principal risk of such catastrophic failures stems from unintentional nuclear war. It follows, recalling Sun-Tzu’s timeless wisdom, that such existential risk “must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed.” Properly, this analytic task is a matter solely for disciplined thinkers and strategic theorists. Under no circumstances should any primary intellectual responsibilities be handed off to politicians or government officials. Next time around, prima facie, America could run out of McNamara’s “dumb luck.

Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018). 

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