Keeping the Peace

For all of you who poured over Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising or Sir John Hackett's The Third World War, Der Spiegel has some interesting reading for you. www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,687920,00.html It examines massive military bunker complexes found in the former East Germany and their use in Soviet plans during the 1970s for taking Europe in 12 days. The military metrics are colossal: 100 divisions (2 million troops) in Central Europe, 7000 tanks, 6500 armored personnel carriers, 700 aircraft, 31 nuclear warhead depots. Although NATO had a roughly equal number of troops, almost half of them were based in the U.S. and doubtfully would have made it to the battlefront before the shooting was over. Viewed thusly, the Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered NATO on a roughly 2:1 basis. The equalizer was nukes.

The Russians never could be sure if they unleashed their divisions what the NATO, in particular the U.S., nuclear response would be. They were willing to sacrifice Eastern European allies to be sure. The battle plans noted above called for Polish divisions to race toward their objectives under clouds of radioactive fallout and achieve them before they were rendered combat incapable from radiation poisoning. Fresh (and uncontaminated) Russian divisions would then replace them and secure the objective. Nice. The Soviets, though, had not forgotten Hitler's almost successful incursion into Russia during WW II and that was with conventional weapons. Without doubt, they were carefully considering what the Motherland might look like when NATO tactical nukes got done with it, never mind the strategic nukes in reserve. As a consequence, the peace held, icy though it may have been. Uncertainty is a good thing sometimes.

Why is this important today? The answer is, of course, the Obama Administration's retooling of American nuclear strategy. Osama bin Laden has been quoted as saying that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is irrelevant because we lack the will to use it. Obama has now confirmed this in writing. Apparently this Administration thinks that this somehow stabilizes the international order (note the implicit assumption - we're the bad guys and have presented the threat to world stability) and all the other nuclear nations or wannabes will now lay their nuke pistols on the table too. Unfortunately, the opposite will occur.

As Charles Krauthammer writes, without the U.S. nuclear "big stick" being a wild card, the bad guys will be emboldened and our smaller non-nuclear allies will scramble to acquire nukes of their own to counter their aggressive neighbors. townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2010/04/09/nuclear_posturing,_obama-style A classic case in point is the Middle East.

There is no question that Iran intends to go nuclear. It is an aggressive country with designs on being the regional superpower, or more. As long as the U.S. could reliably keep them in check, Israel and the Saudis were willing to relax in the shade of the American conventional and nuclear umbrella. It is now very apparent, however, that this umbrella is pretty much shredded, so we can reasonably expect the Saudis to acquire nukes in the near term, probably from Pakistan. The Israelis may be heard from sooner than that. Two years ago I said that there would be a nuke popping off somewhere in the world within 5 years. This area is certainly going to be one of the favorites of the betting pool.

Robert Heinlein, the science fiction writer, wrote that, "An armed society is a polite society." The same is true at the national level. U.S. nuclear strategy has kept the peace for the last 65 years. It stopped the Soviets, perhaps the largest military power the world has ever seen. The uncontroverted evidence from history is that nations intent on empire-building will use any and all means available to them to do so. It is only the credible probability of superior force being used against them that has kept the peace, such as it has been. The path Obama is pursuing is foolhardy and will have precisely the opposite effect. This is not going to be a fun ride.