“The Nukes We Need.” Dr. Strangelove Lives!

Just when you begin to feel that sanity might descend upon the earth you come across something that convinces you that you wait in vain. There was an article in the November/December, 2009 edition of Foreign Affairs, The Nukes We Need: Preserving the American Deterrent, by Lieber and Press that caused the latest concern.



KEIR A. LIEBER is Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. DARYL G. PRESS is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Coordinator of the War and Peace Studies Program at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.


One would think that after 50 years of study, the conclusion that tactical nuclear weapons are worthless would have sunk in. Not so! These authors are determined to demonstrate a need for low yield nuclear weapons, perhaps even a need for more sophisticated weapons.


The authors begin with a highly dubious premise.

“The success of nuclear deterrence may turn out to be its own undoing. Nuclear weapons helped keep the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War, preventing the bitter dispute from engulfing the continent in another catastrophic conflict. But after nearly 65 years without a major war or a nuclear attack, many prominent statesmen, scholars, and analysts have begun to take deterrence for granted. They are now calling for a major drawdown of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and a new commitment to pursue a world without these weapons.”

One could just as easily claim that it was miraculous that peace prevailed in spite of the presence of nuclear weapons. Those who make such claims apparently share the same asylum as those who claim that Ronald Regan brought the Soviet Union to its knees with his support of the absurd “Starwars” missile defense system.


This supposed need for low yield nuclear weapons is also based on a premise that strains credulity.

“Unless the world's major disputes are resolved -- for example, on the Korean Peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and around the Persian Gulf -- or the U.S. military pulls back from these regions, the United States will sooner or later find itself embroiled in conventional wars with nuclear-armed adversaries.”

“Preventing escalation in those circumstances will be far more difficult than peacetime deterrence during the Cold War. In a conventional war, U.S. adversaries would have powerful incentives to brandish or use nuclear weapons because their lives, their families, and the survival of their regimes would be at stake. Therefore, as the United States considers the future of its nuclear arsenal, it should judge its force not against the relatively easy mission of peacetime deterrence but against the demanding mission of deterring escalation during a conventional conflict, when U.S. enemies are fighting for their lives.”

The authors are telling us that we should be losing sleep over inevitable land wars in Korea, China or/and Iran. I know it was said before World War One that no one could afford a modern war, and that it would have to wind down within days, but this time such a statement would be appropriate. I expect to sleep well tonight.


This is the scenario that is of concern to them.

“The central problem for U.S. deterrence in the future is that even rational adversaries will have powerful incentives to introduce nuclear weapons -- that is, threaten to use them, put them on alert, test them, or even use them -- during a conventional war against the United States. If U.S. military forces begin to prevail on the battlefield, U.S. adversaries may use nuclear threats to compel a cease-fire or deny the United States access to allied military bases. Such threats might succeed in pressuring the United States to settle the conflict short of a decisive victory.”

The authors agree that a response involving massive destruction and death from high-yield nuclear weapons would not be productive. However they believe that it would be perfectly reasonable to respond to a tactical nuclear strike, or even the threat of a nuclear strike in this fashion.

“The least bad option in the face of explicit nuclear threats or after a limited nuclear strike may be a counterforce attack to prevent further nuclear use. A counterforce strike could be conducted with either conventional or nuclear weapons, or a mix of the two. The attack could be limited to the enemy's nuclear delivery systems -- for example, its bombers and missile silos -- or a wider range of sites related to its nuclear program. Ideally, a U.S. counterforce strike would completely destroy the enemy's nuclear forces. But if an adversary had already launched a nuclear attack against the United States or its allies, a response that greatly reduced the adversary's nuclear force could save countless lives, and it could open the door to decisive military actions (such as conquest and regime change) to punish the enemy's leadership for using nuclear weapons.”

It is hard to know where to start in discussing this statement. Remember, we are talking about a scenario in which a country is losing a conventional war to the U.S. and any allies. Presumably this limited nuclear strike or threat of a limited strike, perhaps on its own land (certainly not on U.S. territory), is to be responded to with a massive strategic response to eliminate all delivery systems, strategic as well as tactical. It is not clear how going from a threat of use to actually using large numbers of nuclear weapons is likely to “save countless lives.” That would appear to be the dumbest thing imaginable. There is also the impossibility of carrying out the described mission. Any country smart enough to build viable nuclear weapons is smart enough to know that you have to make at least some of them mobile if you ever plan on using them. Since our intelligence is not good enough to detect and locate large fixed facilities in closed countries, it is not clear how we might detect a few trucks carrying nuclear delivery systems out the hundreds of thousands that might be tooling around the countryside.


We are in the process of ramping down nuclear arsenals. It is of no value to be conjuring up new uses for nuclear weapons. Mutually assured destruction was an ugly concept, but it worked. We should stick with it, rather than attempt to make nuclear war appear feasible.


There is a nice summary of the status of tactical nuclear weapons in the world that can be found here.


The world will be a better place when we have fewer nuclear weapons—and fewer people making a living trying to argue that they are useful.

Putting Predictions to the Test: Pundits Flunk

There is a psychology professor named Philip Tetlock who spent twenty years evaluating people who make their living by making predictions in the fields of politics and economics. He studied 284 people who ended up making 82,361 predictions over the course of that period. He wrote a book summarizing his findings: Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? The book came out in 2005. I stumbled across a reference to Tetlock’s work just yesterday. His conclusions are fascinating. There is a great review of the book in the New Yorker magazine by Louis Menand.

“It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book.... that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.”

Tetlock set up a system whereby he could perform statistical analyses by forcing the questions to be posed in a three component format. The three components might be stay the same, increase, or decrease; or they might be stay the same, get better, get worse.

“....the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.”

Now that Tetlock has the knife firmly implanted, he proceeds to twist it.

“Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. ‘We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,’ he reports. ‘In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in “reading” emerging situations’.”

Most might find this surprising, but psychologists spend their lives observing the biases, prejudices and emotional attachments that cause a supposedly rational human to make irrational decisions.


Tetlock was interviewed by CNN in 2009 concerning the financial crisis and the associated punditry. He had this advice about trying to assess a pundit’s credibility.

“The most important factor was not how much education or experience the experts had but how they thought. You know the famous line that [philosopher] Isaiah Berlin borrowed from a Greek poet, ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’? The better forecasters were like Berlin's foxes: self-critical, eclectic thinkers who were willing to update their beliefs when faced with contrary evidence, were doubtful of grand schemes and were rather modest about their predictive ability. The less successful forecasters were like hedgehogs: They tended to have one big, beautiful idea that they loved to stretch, sometimes to the breaking point. They tended to be articulate and very persuasive as to why their idea explained everything. The media often love hedgehogs’.”

Given the inaccuracy of “experts,” why do people still cling to their predictions? Tetlock had a very revealing answer.

“We need to believe we live in a predictable, controllable world, so we turn to authoritative-sounding people who promise to satisfy that need. That's why part of the responsibility for experts' poor record falls on us. We seek out experts who promise impossible levels of accuracy, then we do a poor job keeping score.”

Interesting stuff!

China Splurges in Africa: Can Both Benefit?

Western nations have spent decades lavishing aid on African countries to little avail. Dambisa Moyo addressed this failure in her book Dead Aid. She argued that the African countries would be better off if the Western countries had provided more funds in the form of direct commercial investments. She pointed out that China is the one country that had stepped up in this area. She provided a chapter titled “The Chinese Are Our Friends” in which she convinced herself that this was a good thing. Recognizing the distrust the Western nations had for China’s motives, she argued that both China and Africa would benefit.

“Bartering infrastructure for energy reserves is well understood by the Chinese and Africans alike. It’s a trade-off, and there are no illusions as to who does what to whom and why. There are those who see China as merely using Africa for its own political and economic ends....But for Africa it’s about survival. In the immediate term, Africa is getting what it needs—quality capital that actually funds investment, jobs for its people and that elusive growth. These are the things that aid promised, but has consistently failed to deliver.”

While people understand that China is acting in its own interests it seems to be doing it in a way that generates approval among the various nations.

“First, across the continent, favorable views of China (and its investments in Africa) outnumber critical judgments by at least two to one in almost every country....Second, in nearly all African countries surveyed, more people view China’s influence positively than make the same assessment of US influence.”

The discussion of China’s role has continued with two interesting recent articles: one enthusiastically positive, the second, ambivalent at best.


Deborah Brautigam has an article on the Foreign Affairs website: Africa’s Eastern Promise: What the West Can Learn from Chinese Investment in Africa. She provides a summary of China’s activities from her point of view.

“The first prong of Beijing's efforts is to offer African states resource-backed development loans, an initiative inspired by its experience at home. In the late 1970s, eager for modern technology and infrastructure but with almost no foreign exchange, China leveraged its natural resources -- ample supplies of oil, coal, and other minerals -- to attract a market-rate $10 billion loan from Japan. China was to get new infrastructure and technology from Japan and repay it with shipments of oil and coal. In 1980, Japan began to finance six major railway, port, and hydropower projects, the first of many projects that used Japanese firms to help build China's transport corridors, coal mines, and power grids.”

“Since 2004, China has concluded similar deals in at least seven resource-rich countries in Africa, for a total of nearly $14 billion. Reconstruction in war-battered Angola, for example, has been helped by three oil-backed loans from Beijing, under which Chinese companies have built roads, railways, hospitals, schools, and water systems. Nigeria took out two similar loans to finance projects that use gas to generate electricity. Chinese teams are building one hydropower project in the Republic of the Congo (to be repaid in oil) and another in Ghana (to be repaid in cocoa beans).”

Much of this infrastructure development is being performed by the Chinese themselves. Much of the money they put up goes back into their own economy. That is a smart move on their part. It is up to the African country involved to strike a deal that ensures sufficient labor and training are obtained by locals so that they have bettered themselves by the time the Chinese leave. Some countries strike a smart bargain, some don’t.

“In its second major experiment, China is helping to build special trade and economic cooperation zones in Africa. Seven such zones are in the works: two in Nigeria; the others in Egypt, Ethiopia, Mauritius, Zambia, and, possibly, Algeria. Special economic zones were an important feature of China's early development; today, China has more than one hundred such areas. The economists Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion, and John Page, of the Brookings Institution, argue in a recent report for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization that special economic zones can be a very promising strategy for industrialization and employment in Africa's least developed countries. It allows countries to improve poor infrastructure, inadequate services, and weak institutions by focusing efforts on a limited geographical area. And a targeted focus on boosting manufactured exports can help countries overcome the exchange-rate appreciation and the weakening of local non-energy industries that often accompany natural-resource exports.”

Brautigam seems to think that part of China’s motivation is to provide additional locations where they can offload low margin manufacturing (requiring cheap labor), and to create areas where it can move some of its environmentally damaging industries. That is what many developed countries did to China when it was hungry for investment. Now they will pass on the lesson learned.


As for the criticism that China will deal with any country, no matter how noxious the leadership might be, she has a ready reply.

“China may wind up supporting some dictatorial and corrupt regimes, but -- and this is an inconvenient truth -- the West also supports such regimes when it advances its interests. And given the limits of the West's success in promoting development in Africa so far, perhaps Westerners should be less judgmental and more open-minded in assessing China's initiatives there.”

The second article is by Howard W. French, The Next Empire. It appeared in the May, 2010 issue of the Atlantic magazine. From the snarky title one might expect that French’s assessment will be somewhat less rosy that Brautigan’s.


French spent time on the ground going across several countries in Africa observing and talking to people before ending up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. French is clearly suspicious and is on the lookout for negative things. If one looks hard enough there will always negatives to be found. Nevertheless, his report, while not exactly balanced, is not biased either. He even brings up a discussion he had with Dambisa Moyo. It was encouraging to note that she continues to be enthusiastic about the Chinese activities.


French uses the Congo-China agreement to illustrate the difficulties one can encounter.

“In spring 2008, Congo’s beleaguered government unveiled a package of Chinese investments totaling $9.3 billion, a figure later reduced, for complex reasons involving International Monetary Fund pressure, to $6 billion—still roughly half of Congo’s GDP. China will build massive new copper and cobalt mines; 1,800 miles of railways; 2,000 miles of roads; hundreds of clinics, hospitals, and schools; and two new universities. Speaking before the parliament, Pierre Lumbi, the country’s infrastructure minister, compared the package to the Marshall Plan, and called it ‘the foundation on which the growth of our economy is going to be built’.”

“In exchange, China will get almost 11 million tons of copper and 620,000 tons of cobalt, which it will extract over the next 25 years—a ‘resource for infrastructure’ swap that China first pioneered, on a smaller scale, in Angola in 2004. Congo will choose from a menu of Chinese construction companies—pre-vetted and supplied with credit by China’s Export-Import Bank—which typically begin (and end) their work quickly, dispatching hundreds or thousands of workers to do the job.”

French’s fear, and the fear of many Congolese he talked with, is that the Chinese will deliver exactly what they promised, but when they leave there will be schools without a school system, hospitals without medical staff, and infrastructure the country cannot maintain. That is a valid criticism, but who is at fault here? By French’s own account, he suspects the government officials who negotiated the deal were more interested in lining their own pockets than protecting their citizens. This is exactly the same result obtained with so much aid funding over the years. It is inappropriate to use this example to fault the Chinese or their general approach. Other countries showed greater foresight in ensuring they were moving in a sustainable direction when negotiating deals.


China’s activities do not resemble classical colonialism, they certainly do not involve aid grants, and there clearly is no altruism involved. Perhaps they most closely resemble the good business practices that Dambisa Moyo pleaded for the Western countries to impose on Africa in place of aid. In any event, there appear to be more positives than negatives at this point. Let us hope for the best. Africa could use a break.