THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
The paradox of nuclear deterrence, like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, seems to require that conditions necessary for a satisfactory solution contradict the aims and preferences of the actor seeking to deter.
Whereas the United States is a nation whose public image is based on the fundamental values consistent with classical liberalism, deterring the potentially aggressive Soviet Union seemed to require abandoning a position of offering cooperation for cooperation and militaryengagement for aggression. Even though moving to the footing of NUTS contradicted the material fact that the world was not large enough to accommodate useful detonation of all the accumulated thermonuclear warheads, still strategists concluded that maintaining deterrence must rely on pursuing the bid for nuclear supremacy and credibly sustaining the intention to wage nuclear war if necessary.
However, in taking this path, strategists underplayed the threat of nuclear mishap through error, accident, or escalation and ignored the common ground of Earth’s inhabitants shared not just by the Soviet Union and the United States, but also by other nations, of living in a habitable environment. Leaving aside for the moment the difficultly of the puzzle of solving nuclear deterrence, we can conclude that by the 1980s the game theoretic approach to nuclear security stood as “normal science,” to invoke Thomas S. Kuhn’s paradigmatic language.[336] The game theorist Steven J. Brams published a comprehensive treatment of superpower conflict that modeled deterrence as a Chicken game and the arms race as a Prisoner’s Dilemma.[337] He concludes that “we may wish the strategic problems the superpowers face were not so obdurate, but, in a curious way, their obduracy forces the players to come to grips with the haunting dilemmas, especially involving the use of nuclear weapons, to which these game give rise.”[338] The puzzle of nuclear deterrence and the need to exercise sovereignty by deploying nuclear weapons coevolved with coming to view game theory as the canonical statement of purposive rationality.
Quoting the political theorist David Gauthier, Brams finds, along with the nuclear strategists sustaining credible deterrence and game theorists more broadly that “the alternative to eschewing all threat behavior, in the bluntest terms ‘can only be the willingness to accept victimization, to suffer passively a nuclear strike, or to acquiesce in whatever the potential striker demands as the price of its avoidance.’”[339] Thus Brams finds that both the exigencies of nuclear deterrence and the recommendations of strategic rationality necessitate moving to a stance of threatening harm as a vital means of self-defense.In 1980, the moral philosopher Kavka revisited the morality of deterrence and identified a firmer deference for MAD that denied both the Prisoner’s Dilemma structure of the problem and the all-inclusive reach of strategic rationality.[340] In his essay, Kavka provides a glimmer of clarity for the defensive realist and classical liberal who seek to assure others of their cooperative orientation yet have sufficient influence to deter predators. Dovetailing his analysis with rational decision theory and John Rawls’s appropriation of von Neumann’s mimimax principle to secure his second principle of justice, Kavka performs a rigorous utilitarian analysis of whether rational choice most supports (1) unilateral disarmament, (2) counter value deterrence via MAD, or (3) counterforce deterrence via NUTS.[341] In this second paper, Kavka concludes that, indeed, the position most consistent with nuclear strategic realities and utilitarian ethics is that of minimal deterrence via MAD. Disarmament is too likely to lead to Soviet domination. Counterforce targeting is too destabilizing for mimicking preemptive weaponry and granting such capability, and it perpetuates arms racing.[342] Kavka solves his earlier problem, which President Carter faced, of issuing a credible deterrent threat by focusing on the overall beneficial implications of maintaining deterrence.
Kavka argues that his worries articulated in “Some Paradoxes of Deterrence” may be overcome along the lines of Schelling’s invocation of chance: so long as the Soviet Union is not 100 percent certain that there will be no retaliatory consequences for its attack on the United States, deterrence is sufficiently plausible given the catastrophic nature of nuclear warfare.[343]The most interesting feature of Kavka’s proposed resolution of the nuclear security dilemma with MAD is that he takes up Schelling’s burden of answering the offensive realist’s challenge of how to deter an aggressor signified by accepting the PD model. Kavka observes, “One view of the balance of terror is that it results from each side selfishly pursuing its national interests, rather than adopting a moral posture and seeking to promote the interests of mankind as whole.”[344] In other words, no adequate resolution of the nuclear security dilemma can ignore this worry that either the United States or the Soviet Union seeks success through exploitation and risks annihilating both nations and more countries besides. Kavka concludes that given the impossibility of sufficiently reducing uncertainty about the other’s intentions, maintaining deterrence as opposed to disarming, for the time being, is essential for national security. Not only does Kavka reject NUTS in favor of MAD, but he also proposes that the long-term solution to dissolving the nuclear standoff will only arise from altering the other’s perceptions by assuring that party of one’s own cooperative intention. Thus, he recommends “changing U.S. and Soviet perceptions of each other and gradually building mutual trust between the two nations and their governments.”[345] Here, Kavka rejects offensive neorealism by suggesting that neither nation is inherently aggressive and proposes that each build trust, and he invites us to question the overarching reach of strategic rationality.[346]
Thus, Kavka’s proposed reconciliation of Cold War nuclear tensions offers a means to solve the problem of issuing a credible threat, accepts the challenge of a PD model for the security dilemma and arms race, yet recommends building trust over time by assuring the other of one’s reciprocal cooperation.
His philosophical work, which gained acknowledgment in the 1980s, seems to suggest that one can successfully defend MAD against NUTS even within the paradigm of strategic rationality.[347] However, in his 1980 defense of MAD, Kavka circumvents Schelling’s two admissions. He first insists on acknowledging uncertainty about the intentions of the other, ultimately suggesting that the demeanor of cooperation befits a superpower with appropriate moral values. Of course, the problem here is that once a superpower stipulates that it prefers mutual cooperation over mutual defection, then it will be flat footed in both the Chicken game of nuclear deterrence and bargaining in the overarching arms race. However, given that the common interest in avoiding nuclear war outpaces that of maintaining a bid for nuclear ascendance, the exercise of nuclear sovereignty invites placing national integrity consistent with defensive realism and classical liberalism on the highest level of priority. Hence, second, Kavka opens the door to recognizing trust as a category of action on par with reciprocal no-harm that exceeds the standard operationalization of strategic rationality.