Wohlstetter's legacy is that U.S. policymakers go to great lengths to satisfy themselves that they have done everything they reasonably can and hope that deters the baddies. Robert McNamara, for example, famously attempted to cap the size of the U.S. nuclear force by thought-experiment, imagining a series of 1-megaton thermonuclear weapons dropped sequentially on the Soviet Union. He stopped at 400 equivalent megatons not because he concluded that Khrushchev failed to care about Target #401 in the same way he cherished Target #400, but because the damage curve leveled off. Four-hundred megatons might not be enough, but after that there wasn't anything left to destroy. McNamara was satisfying himself that we simply couldn't do more. What the Soviets thought was anyone's guess.
This is still, more or less, how U.S. policymakers talk about the problem if you push them hard enough. I once sat in on a meeting at the Pentagon where a friend and colleague gave a senior official a very tough time over how, precisely, a small reduction in the reliability of warheads might change the calculations of an adversary. Even if the Russians knew our nuclear warheads were "only" 70 or 80 percent reliable, my friend pressed, how would this alter Russian calculations? Why don't we insist on equally high reliability standards for missiles? My colleague's incredibly persistent questioning produced an interesting response. The senior official argued that the problem was not deterrence, per se, but self-deterrence. We would be less confident in a crisis, he thought, if we didn't have some undefined faith in our nuclear stockpile. It was the closest I have ever seen a senior U.S. official to admitting that much of what passes for "deterrence" is about self-assurance.
That brings us back to sequestration. Ash Carter presumably does not believe that the Russian army will hurl itself onto Poland if the ICBM force reduced its readiness rate to 80 percent. And, presumably, Carter agrees that North Korea will continue engaging in all manner of nasty behavior, irrespective of the number of hours a B-2 pilot gets in during the third quarter of FY2013.
So we are left with the notion that Carter and other U.S. officials fret we will go weak in the knees if we do not fully fund the nuclear enterprise. It is strange that the Obama administration can talk about seeking the security of a world without nuclear weapons at the same time officials are terrified to reduce the flying time for B-2 pilots. But when Defense Department officials talk about deterrence, they are really attempting to convince us, as well as themselves, that they have done all they can.
If the Obama administration is serious about transforming our nuclear posture, that transformation needs to start with being honest that we have, at least in some important ways, been fooling ourselves all these years. We've talked about frightening our enemies when what we've really meant is giving ourselves a dose of courage.
Our attempts to get inside the hive-mind of our adversaries have been failures -- despite all the buzzwordery surrounding "tailored deterrence." The policy legacy of these efforts is downright embarrassing, starting with Keith Payne and Colin Gray's 1981 suggestion that we simply target every KGB office in the Soviet Union because a grateful populace will revolt in the wake of nuclear attack. (Greeted as liberators!) Their infamous essay "Victory Is Possible" (courtesy of FP) is actually a lot less insane if you see it as corrective to the despair of policymakers contemplating the futility of nuclear war. Well, it's a little less insane at any rate.
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