NUCLEAR DETERRENCEIs Nuclear Deterrence Ethical and Legal?
To state the obvious the nuclear situation will become more manageable and tolerable when great power relations are relaxed. When and if current tensions ease it would be wise to look for ways to reduce even more the risks of a nuclear calamity. If the weapons cannot be completely eliminated, however, then neither can the risks of the worst imaginable outcomes. Little can be gained by pretending otherwise.
During the early 1980s there were regular protests in the UK against nuclear weapons accompanied by intense debates about the morality and credibility of deterrence. Most memorable was the Woman’s Peace Camp outside the RAF base at Greenham Common where cruise missiles were to be based. On 1 April 1983 a 14-mile chain was formed by some 70,000 protesters from Greenham to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston and on to the ordnance factory at Burghfield. The camp remained in placed until 2000, long after the cruise missiles had left but with residents still protesting against the UK’s Trident program.
A Ministry of Defense official who was then having to answer correspondence on nuclear issues observed to me that dealing with most of the claims made by the activists was not that difficult. They were often quasi-strategic in character, for example asserting that the cruise missiles were ‘first strike weapons.’ Such assertions could be challenged both empirically and analytically. The government was confident in its case that these weapons reinforced deterrence even if they were not going to convince the activists.
What this official found truly difficult was when people wrote saying that we should have nothing to do with these weapons because they were wicked and that they feared for the future of their children. How could one say that inflicting mass death would not be a wicked thing to do? The argument was that preparing to do a wicked thing deterred others from acting in ways that were as wicked if not more so, but that was hardly claiming the moral high ground. For deterrence to hold nuclear use had to at least to be possible. And what would happen if deterrence failed? After vivid portrayals of the consequences of nuclear strikes (for example in the 1984 TV drama Threads which depicted a nuclear strike on Sheffield) how could one say that the prospect was not terrifying?
The cruise missiles came and went, removed because of a 1987 arms control agreement. These protests began in 1980, 35 years into the nuclear age. We have since survived another 44. But with international tensions high, routine threats from Moscow about how a false move from NATO will lead to Armageddon, and arms control agreements abandoned or in disrepair, anxiety has not only continued but if anything has reached new levels.
