May 2015
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I
The war against Hitler cost somewhere between 60 and 80 million lives, most of them civilian. This exceeded the human cost of the first world war by at least three times. It also reduced so much of Germany to rubble that some observers thought that she would never recover. The scale of destruction was massive. The Red Army, which was largely responsible for breaking the Nazi war machine, was a major cause of it, as was the RAF’s bomber command. The allies’ war, therefore, was already one of mass destruction long before American planes dropped atomic bombs upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nevertheless, the vast majority of Britons, both north and south of the border, think that it was justified. They think that the fact and threat of Nazi tyranny was so very terrible as to warrant the appalling costs of fending it off. The question of quite how high a price we should pay for justice – the question of when that price is proportionate – is a very difficult one to answer. In the course of waging war between 1939 and 1945 allied bombing killed 70,000 French civilians – not intentionally, of course, but because more accurate bomb-aiming technology wasn’t available. But if resisting Nazism was worth the lives of 70,000 civilians, can we say with confidence that it wouldn’t have been worth 100,000, 500,000, or even a million? I don’t think we can.
It seems that most of us recognise that it can be right to pay a very high price indeed to resist tyranny. What’s more, even some of the victims have recognised it, too. During the invasion of Normandy in 1944 allied bombing trapped a civilian in the cellar of a house in Caen. As he slowly suffocated to death, he took the trouble to scratch on the wall: ‘I will never see this liberation for which I have waited for so long, but I know that through my death others will be set free. Long live France! Long live the allies!’. (‘Les Larmes de la Liberté’, France 3 Normandie television, June 1994.)
So here was someone whose innocent life was fated to be among the terrible costs of the struggle for justice, but who himself reckoned it a price worth paying. He didn’t deserve to die, but tragically his death was necessary to defend a more or less humane civilisation from systematically atrocious tyranny. And if that was true of him, then why wouldn’t it also be true of thousands or even millions of others?
II
Nuclear weapons are also causes of mass destruction. A single strategic Trident warhead is about eight times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, which killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people; and even a sub-strategic warhead is still around half as powerful. These weapons are obviously very much more destructive than any single weapon deployed in the second world war. Does that mean that it would be immoral ever to use them?
Not necessarily. Some sub-strategic nuclear weapons could be used without incurring any civilian casualties at all – for example, against incoming missiles or submarines. But what about strategic weapons? It’s most unlikely that these could be used without causing hundreds of thousands civilian deaths. Neither ethics nor law, however, prohibit the causing of such deaths as such. They only prohibit them when they are indiscriminate.
To kill indiscriminately doesn’t mean simply to fail to avoid killing civilians; it means to positively desire to kill them – to deliberately target them – say, to terrify an enemy government into submission. Accordingly, a policy of counter-city strikes, where nuclear weapons are deliberately aimed at population centres in order to maximise civilian casualties, would be immoral; whereas a policy of aiming weapons of the minimum necessary power at vital military objectives, with the foreseeable side-effect of probably or certainly massive civilian casualties, would not be.
Arguably, much targeting policy during the Cold War was indiscriminate and therefore immoral. But if that was so then, it is so no longer. Nuclear weapons are now far more accurate than they were in the 1970s, and are therefore able to destroy their objectives more efficiently and with less explosive force. As a result ‘city-bombing is no longer the central tenet of nuclear strategies…Gone are the multi-megaton city-busters’, affirms the leading French expert, Bruno Tertrais (‘In Defense of Deterrence’, 2011).
‘In most countries, nuclear deterrence does not focus at all on the destruction of cities. Nuclear strategies concern military objectives, assets that adversaries hold dear and centres of power; not cities per se or populations, which may not be valued by dictatorships’ (‘The Four Straw Men of the Apocalypse’, Survival, 2013). The UK adopted this discriminate focus as far back as 1980, when it justified its acquisition of Trident on the ground that it wanted to be able to pose a credible threat only to ‘key aspects of Soviet state power’ (‘The Future United Kingdom Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Force’, 1980).
But surely any use of nuclear weapons, however limited at first, would risk escalation to full nuclear exchange, and so be immorally reckless? Whether or not such use would risk escalation, and how high that risk would be, would depend on the circumstances. It cannot be determined in advance and in abstraction. Presumably if nuclear weapons were used to respond to aggression by a non-nuclear state, there would be no risk at all. No doubt the circumstantial contingency of risk was among the reasons why, in its Advisory Opinion of July 1996, the International Court of Justice declined to judge illegal the use of nuclear weapons against a nuclear state ‘in an extreme circumstance of self-defence, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake’ (‘Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons’, 8 July 1996).
III
Still, even if the use of nuclear weapons could be morally justified in extreme circumstances, the scale of destruction would be absolutely appalling. That’s why the UK’s policy of deterrence aims to prevent such circumstances from ever arising, by leaving an enemy in no doubt at all that the costs of aggression would be prohibitively high.
But in order to deter, we have to threaten. Therefore the government refuses to exclude the possibility of using nuclear weapons in defence of vital interests, and indeed it refuses to rule out first use: ‘We deliberately maintain ambiguity about precisely when, how, and at what scale we would contemplate use of our nuclear deterrent. We will not simplify the calculations of a potential aggressor by defining more precisely the circumstances in which we might consider the use of our nuclear capabilities. Hence, we will not rule in or out the first use of nuclear weapons’ (‘The Future of the United Kingdom’s Nuclear Deterrent’, 2006).
The Church of Scotland, however, objects. In its 2009 report, ‘The Ethics of Defence’, it exhorts us to trust in God instead of placing other people ‘in a position of fear or threat’. By threatening others rather than seeking to be reconciled with them, a policy of nuclear deterrence is, it implies, immoral.
But this is facile. For sure, fear and mistrust are not symptoms of a happy, healthy relationship. Ideally, they wouldn’t exist. In the world as we have it, however, persons and states sometimes do unjust things that give others very good reasons to fear and mistrust them. In that case, the road to reconciliation doesn’t lie in pretending that nothing has happened and just holding out the hand of friendship anyway. It begins, rather, with signalling to the wrongdoer that he has done wrong by opposing it and pressing him to think again and change his ways in such a fashion that trust could be restored. It may be true – as I believe it is – that we should always trust God. But it really doesn’t follow that we should always trust Vladimir Putin or Islamic State.
Besides, rational mistrust can (and should) be moderated by an earnest desire to overcome it, and policies of deterrent threat can (and should) be complemented by confidence-building ones. Even during the Cold War the US and the USSR developed protocols to enhance communication and transparency, and to reduce the scope for catastrophic misunderstanding. That’s what the famous ‘hot line’ was all about.
IV
So there’s nothing immoral about nuclear deterrence as such. But does it actually work? If it doesn’t, it’s a waste of a vast sum of public money – and if the waste isn’t exactly criminal, it would certainly be tragic. In favour of the efficacy of deterrence are the following facts: there has been no direct military conflict between the major powers in the 70 years since the nuclear era began; there has been no direct, all-out conflict between two nuclear states; no nuclear state has ever been invaded; and no state covered by another state’s nuclear ‘umbrella’ has ever been the target of a major state attack.
Correlation doesn’t amount to causation, however; and it is impossible to prove that these happy effects were caused by nuclear deterrence. Some argue that other causes have been responsible – for example, the development of international institutions since 1945 and the rise of global trade. These, however, don’t seem sufficient, since rising global trade didn’t prevent the outbreak of war in 1914, nor the League of Nations its outbreak in 1939.
Besides, there is first-hand testimony that the fear of nuclear war, and even ethical considerations, did indeed shape the policies of American and Soviet decision-makers during the Cold War. Lawrence Freedman, widely regarded as Britain’s foremost strategic analyst, has commented that ‘to one who has spent some time researching the views of policymakers during the most tense moments of the Cold War, the suggestion that the fear of nuclear war was of scant importance in inducing caution and designing policies is preposterous’ (‘Eliminators, Marginalists and the Politics of Disarmament’, in John Baylis and Robert O’Neill, eds, ‘Alternative Nuclear Futures: The Role of Nuclear Weapons in the Post-Cold War World’, 2000).
Counting against the efficacy of nuclear deterrence, maybe, are the many instances of a non-nuclear state defying a nuclear armed adversary. Thus the Soviets were not deterred by American nuclear weapons from blockading Berlin in 1948, China routed US troops in North Korea in 1950, the Arab states attacked Israel in 1973, the North Vietnamese overthrew a US client state in Saigon in 1975, Argentina annexed the Falkland Islands in 1982, and Saddam Hussein bombarded Israel with Scud missiles in 1991. Surely these all demonstrate that nuclear deterrence doesn’t work? Not really.