The preventive/preemptive war doctrine cannot justify the Iraq war.

• Author: Lawrence, Robert M.

1. INTRODUCTION

   More than two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the debate continues about whether the threat from Baghdad warranted abandoning the traditional American national security Nuclear Deterrence and Containment policies in favor of President Bush's new Preventive/Preemptive War doctrine. This essay compares the logic informing the Nuclear Deterrence and Containment policies with the arguments supporting the President's Preventive/Preemptive War doctrine, and concludes that the former should not have been replaced by the latter. This essay then compares what happened in Iraq with a hypothetical scenario wherein Pakistan is a candidate for a Preventive/Preemptive War attack. This hypothetical demonstrates the extent to which the attack on Iraq cannot be justified by the announced parameters of President Bush's Preventive/Preemptive War doctrine.

2. NUCLEAR DETERRENCE AND CONTAINMENT POLICIES AND THE PREVENTIVE/PREEMPTIVE WAR DOCTRINE

   Has the world changed so much that President George W. Bush's Preventive/Preemptive War doctrine should replace the Nuclear Deterrence and Containment policies first adopted by President Truman in the 1940s and modified by President Eisenhower in the 1950s? More than two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, arguments persist whether that war in Iraq can be justified in terms of President Bush's Preventive War/Preemptive War doctrine. Should that doctrine become the model for other twenty-first century conflicts? The Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines "Preventive War" as: "A war initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater risk." (1) The same source defines "Preemptive Attack" as: "An attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent." (2)

   To answer these questions, it will be necessary to recall the logic which gave rise to the Nuclear Deterrence and Containment policy, and to compare that long-ago thinking with the rationale set forth by President George W. Bush in statements made prior to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

   1. The Logic Supporting U.S. Nuclear Deterrence and Containment Policies.

      1. Nuclear Deterrence.

         Among the first to envision, although dimly, the deterrent value inherent in nuclear weapons were three Hungarian physicists who fled to America in the late 1930s to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. (3) They were Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner. (4) This trio urged Albert Einstein to send his famous October 11, 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting the United States investigate the possibility of making an atomic bomb before Hitler's scientists achieved that feat. (5)

         Concerning the Hungarian scientists, Richard Rhodes wrote: "From the horrible weapon which they were about to urge the United States to develop, Szilard, Teller and Wigner ... hoped for more than deterrence against German aggression. They also hoped for world government and world peace, conditions they imagined bombs made of uranium might enforce." (6)

         Before the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Scientific Director of the American atomic bomb project, J. Robert Oppenheimer; the Danish Nobel Laureate in Physics, Niels Bohr; and the American Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson; also expressed their hope, in differing ways, that nuclear weapons could prevent large scale war in the future. Of course, if a large scale war had occurred, it would have probably been called World War III.

         According to Oppenheimer: "[T]he atomic bomb had to be used on a Japanese city, not in another test, because the world needed to know with graphic evidence that warfare had fundamentally changed in such a way as to require international participation in the quest for peace." (7)

         Stimson was ambivalent about the atomic bomb. Several months before the bombing of the Japanese cities, he wrote that such weapons "[m]ay destroy or perfect International Civilization" and that atomic bombs might be either a "Frankenstein or means for World Peace." (8)

         Bohr was more direct. During World War II (WWII), he arrived at the Los Alamos laboratory where the final work on both the uranium and plutonium bombs was proceeding. (9) According to Rhodes, Bohr asked the assembled scientists: "Is it big enough?" What he meant was: "Is it 'big enough' to force a change in the way the world deals with conflict, 'big enough' to force an end to war?" (10)

         History did not quite evolve as the three Hungarian physicists, Oppenheimer, Bohr, or Stimson, had predicted. However, it did not take long for strategic thinkers to comprehend the potential utility nuclear weapons offered. Less than one year after the atomic bombing of Japan, a group of scholars at Yale University's Institute of International Studies published the first book dedicated exclusively to analyzing the impact of atomic weapons upon world politics. (11)

         One of the authors, political science professor Bernard Brodie, captured the essence of what deterrence in the nuclear age would become when he wrote: "Thus, the first and most vital step in any American security program for the age of atomic bombs is to take measures to guarantee to ourselves in case of attack the possibility of retaliation in kind." (12) Then Brodie elaborated upon survival in the nuclear age:

         Reducing vulnerability is at least one way of reducing temptation to potential aggressors. And if the technological realities make reduction of vulnerability largely synonymous with preservation of striking power, that is a fact which must be faced. Under those circumstances any domestic measures which effectively guaranteed such preservation of striking power under attack would contribute to a more solid basis for the operation of an international security system. (13) Brodie anticipated the policies both the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) would adopt to ensure that an opponent's initial strike could not prevent a nation-shattering retaliatory blow. All subsequent deterrence thinking has been built upon this proposition.

         Over the four decades of their Cold War competition, the United States and the U.S.S.R. developed a mix of weapons deployments, which collectively provided for the pre- and post-launch invulnerability of their strategic nuclear forces. The mix was called the TRIAD; each country developed and deployed three separate strategic nuclear delivery systems: (1) long-range bombers; (2) land-based Intercontinental Range Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs); and (3) nuclear powered submarines carrying Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs).

         As early as 1959, Oskar Morgenstern, Princeton professor of political economy, wrote that the bombers and the land-based ICBMs would gradually lose some of their pre-launch invulnerability to the increasing accuracy of enemy missiles, but that the submarines would retain that most important characteristic into the foreseeable future. (14) Until the oceans become transparent, and that is not the case in 2005, it appears that Morgenstern was correct when he wrote: "Holding our main retaliatory force at sea makes the greatest immediate contribution to the defense of the country: it protects the force proper and it frees the country thereby from direct and indirect effects of a possible attack on this force itself." (15)

         Today, ICBM launch sites are in fact gradually losing their pre-launch invulnerability due to the increasing accuracies of Russian, and presumably later, Chinese, ICBMs and SLBMs. The fact that the B-2 bomber has a skin that absorbs radar beams, giving it post-launch invulnerability, does not protect the planes from being destroyed by a missile attack before take-off.

         Because the bombers and ICBMs have begun to lose their invulnerability, an American nuclear-powered submarine is the most pre-launch invulnerable component of the U.S. strategic nuclear forces. A single nuclear-powered submarine can threaten to destroy 192 enemy cities in a retaliatory attack should the United States be struck first; that is, twenty-four SLBMs multiplied by eight thermonuclear warheads each equals 192. (16) The United States currently operates eighteen of these submarines. (17)

         Pre-launch invulnerability of a nation's nuclear retaliatory force counts for nothing unless the force also possesses post-launch invulnerability. The United States addressed this problem when it added multiple independently-targeted reentry vehicles (MIRVs) and penetration aids to its ICBM and SLBM missiles. (18) The U.S.S.R., now Russia, followed with the same course of action. (19) Thus, a stable relationship between Washington and Moscow that came to be called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) was created over time. (20) In this fashion, deterring an attack upon the two nuclear superpowers' homelands became enshrined in both nations' national security policies. (21) Putting it another way, both competitors developed and deployed strategic nuclear forces capable of surviving a first strike; forces surviving the first strike could then be used in a retaliatory second strike. Thus, Brodie's call for invulnerable forces...