Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ndmmz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-03T14:37:24.181Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Dilemma of Theater Nuclear Weapons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Harold A. Feiveson
Harold A. Feiveson
Affiliation:
The Princeton Center for Energy and Environmental Studies.
Get access

Abstract

Observers have recently challenged the fundamental tenets of NATO's nuclear doctrine, above all its potentially fateful threat—or bluff—to employ theater nuclear weapons to repel Soviet conventional attacks. One group of these commentators has come to view NATO theater nuclear weapons as an anachronism that is neither necessary for deterrence and defense nor usable under any prudent calculation. Another group envisages new weapons and new doctrines that would make theater nuclear weapons more credible instruments of U.S. and NATO foreign policy. The article explores briefly some of the sources of this radical disagreement.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , January 1981 , pp. 282 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1981

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Iklé, Fred, “Can Deterrence Last Out the Century?” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 51 (January 1973), 267.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 U.S., Department of Defense, Report of Secretary of Defense to the Congress on the FY 1980 Budget. Annual Report, January 25, 1979, 82Google Scholar; see also Alain Enthoven, in U.S., Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Hearings on Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, 93rd Cong., 2d sess., 1974, pp. 84–85.Google Scholar

3 Report of Secretary of Defense … (fn. 2), 83.

4 U.S. Army Operations Manual, Operations, FM 100–5 (July 1976).Google Scholar

5 Halperin, , in Hearings on Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy (fn. 2), 17–18.Google Scholar

6 Alain Enthoven, ibid., 85. See also Nerlich, Uwe, “Theatre Nuclear Forces in Europe: Is NATO Running Out of Options?” The Washington Quarterly, III (Winter 1980), 100–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Gray, , “Theater Nuclear Weapons: Doctrine and Postures,” World Politics, XXVIII (January 1976), 301.Google Scholar

8 Dyson, , “Avoiding Nuclear War,” Winds of Change Seminar, Michigan State University (April 16, 1970).Google Scholar

9 Report of Secretary of Defense … (fn. 2), 84.

10 The dilemma is sharply stated, for example, in Steinbruner, John, “Beyond Rational Deterrence: The Struggle for New Conceptions,” World Politics, XXVIII (January 1976), 223–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Frye, Alton, “Nuclear Weapons in Europe: No Exit from Ambivalence,” Survival, XXII (May/June 1980), 98–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 The moral issue has been carefully framed by Kavka, Gregory S., “Some Paradoxes of Deterrence,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 75 (June 1978), 285–302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Kavka shows that deterrence theory poses a problem for theoretical ethics, in addition to the more obvious issue of practical moral choice. See also Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 269–86.Google Scholar

12 Freeman Dyson has recently forwarded a defense-dominated strategy as a way out of the moral dilemma of nuclear deterrence more generally, beyond simply the European theater. A moral and strategic preference for defense over deterrence (offense) of course flies in the face of most contemporary theory, which has elevated the doctrine of mutual assured destruction into a sine qua non of strategic stability. But such a doctrine, Dyson argues, is not technologically inevitable. A defensive strategy provides “a middle ground, one on which reasonable people can stand, a ground which allows killing in self-defense but forbids the purposeless massacre of innocents.” Dyson, See, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 172–75.Google Scholar

13 Iklé (fn. 1), 270.

14 Recent discussion of precision-guided weapons may be found in Mearsheimer, John, “Precision-Guided Munitions and Conventional Deterrence,” Survival, XXI (March/April 1979), 68–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gouré, Daniel and McCormick, Gordon, “PGM: No Panacea,” Survival, XXII (January/February 1980), 15–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar (and rejoinder by Mearsheimer, 20–22). See also Burt, Richard, “New Weapons Technologies: Debate and Directions,” Adelphi Paper No. 126 (Summer 1976)Google Scholar, and Digby, James, “Precision-Guided Weapons,” Adelphi Paper No. 118 (Summer 1975).Google Scholar

15 Burt (fn. 14), 3.

16 See, for example, Report of Secretary of Defense … (fn. 2), 84: “These capabilities permit us to exercise nuclear options [in Europe] without immediately having to resort to strategic nuclear forces.”

17 Iklé (fn. 1), 285.

18 This aspect of the crisis in democracy implicit in Schell's analysis was pointed out to me by Sanford Levinson.

19 Treverton, Gregory, “Nuclear Weapons and the ‘Gray Area’,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 57 (Summer 1979), 1075–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar