In 1914 and again in 1939, it was possible for the great military powers to consider war in classic Clausewitzian terms as an instrument of policy; one among other such instruments like diplomacy or economic pressure for achieving national objectives in the competitive arena of power relations. In 1914, all the major belligerents imagined that the killing and destruction would take place on enemy territory as their armies carried out war-winning offensives, while in the meantime their own homelands, their seats of political and industrial power, remained unscathed. Only in the course of four years of slow-burning attrition was this confident sense of immunity from the direct scourge of war gradually eroded. Even in 1939, with the example of the cumulative destructiveness of the Great War before them, it was possible for the Nazi leadership to march against Poland in the belief that it had to face no more than a local campaign against a feebler power, and that no inevitable or devastating consequence could befall Germany itself. Again it took long years of war before such retribution reached the point of destroying Germany as a modern industrial society.
But with the coming of the nuclear age, above all the thermo-nuclear age, it is no longer possible for any great military power to consider war against another as a rational, usable, instrument of policy; no longer possible for general staffs and cabinets in an international crisis to take decisions that risk, or bring nearer, the outbreak of armed conflict in that spirit of levity, certainly irresponsibility, in which Austria-Hungary in July 1914 issued its ultimatum to Serbia, or Nazi Germany fomented the Polish crisis in August-September 1939. For there can be no illusion now that the destruction will only occur far off in another country. It is as if in 1914 the consequences of Austria's going to war with Serbia were known in advance by the Austrians to be the immediate and inevitable destruction of Vienna and much else besides; as if in 1939 the consequences of Germany invading Poland were known to be the instant production of those scenes in Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden and the Ruhr that in fact took six years to complete.
Thus there can be no successful 'Schlieffen Plan' or 'Blitzkrieg' with nuclear weapons against another nuclear power. Nuclear weapons cannot serve as Clausewitzian instruments of national policy in the rivalry between nuclear great powers. They can only dissuade, by their menacing presence in the cupboard, the use of nuclear weapons by a hostile power, or prevent the employment of nuclear blackmail in diplomacy. Their only rational utility is therefore as a stand-off, as 'deterrence'.
It is not only that nuclear war itself is unthinkable as a profitable instrument of policy, it is also that it renders even conventional conflict between nuclear powers so loaded with the risk of ultimate nuclear devastation that such conventional conflict too has been rendered obsolete as an instrument of policy in great power rivalry.
Given that thermonuclear armories are unprofitable, indeed suicidally unusable, as the means of settling quarrels between nuclear states, there remains only the complex question of 'deterrence' itself. This, coupled with awareness of the appalling potential destructive power of those armories, has kept academics, military men, politicians and disarmers busy since the l950s debating on paper and platforms and in committees. The topic of nuclear deterrence has come to supply something of the intellectual role of religion in the Middle Ages, in that it has inspired a new generation of nuclear 'theologians' or schoolmen, mostly in American think-tanks, to argue the subtleties of deterrent and conflict theory with the ingenuity of a St Thomas Aquinas; and equally inspired a new breed of itinerant preachers blazing with fervour, warning of the wrath to come, and calling on men to nuclear repentance.
The problem for the non-specialist who would understand 'deterrence~ and inform himself of the differing views about the nature of effective deterrence adopted by the various nuclear powers (and hence their actual nuclear policies) has lain in trying to find a short, lucid, dispassionate and yet authoritative reference book. It is this hitherto empty slot that Group Captain Garden's Can Deterrence Last? so excellently fills.
The book is the fruit of a year at Cambridge University working for the degree of M Phil in International Relations, when Group Captain Garden was able to sieve through the massive literature of deterrent theory and at the same time study the evolution of differing national policies towards nuclear weapons. He brings to his analysis an extra dimen- sion of understanding, in that he is a serving airman who has himself lived with the responsibility of commanding a squadron of V-bombers with nuclear capability. He therefore knows at first hand the realities of what he is here writing about. His approach is practical and responsible as well as doubly well-informed. Moreover, the objectiveness of his analysis is enhanced by a studied coolness of language, and language mercifully free from unnecessary jargon.
Can Deterrence Last? opens with a clear and skeptical summary of the elements of deterrence theory as advanced by leading nuclear thinkers, discussing the role of such factors as a credible operational capability on the one hand and on the other a credible political will to respond with nuclear weapons if any enemy resorts to them. There follow succinct dossiers on the raisons d'etre for, and historical development of, the nuclear deterrent systems of the US, Soviet Russia, Britain, France and China, with glances at potential if not actual nuclear powers like Israel and India. Group Captain Garden's book concludes with an examination of the political and technological factors that make for nuclear stability between the powers, hence reducing to the minimum the risk of a catastrophic nuclear exchange, or that make for a perilous instability. He perceives little hope for successful arms agreement~ but believes that the best chance of continued stability lies in nuclear weapons systems that are invulnerable to a pre-emptive strike, so that an aggressor could never be sure of escaping retribution. He regards better 'hot-line' communi- cation links, coupled with the mutual sparing of national leadership centres in order to ensure command and control in the event of an 'accidental' nuclear discharge, as further means of enhancing stability. Group Captain Garden cannot offer some magical escape route from the fact of the existence of nuclear weapons, but he does leave us with the hopeful prognosis that it is this very existence which alone can best guard against their use.
Can Deterrence Last? ought to be in the library of every educational institution and on the bookshelf of every concerned person, for it constitutes an essential text for anyone wishing to form, or express, an opinion about nuclear weapons and their role in international relationships.
CORRELLI BARNETT 1984