Kaplan Double-Whammy

I like Fred Kaplan of Slate so much that I'm bringing you two columns of his today, in one convenient post. First off, let's talk about why Kaplan thinks a nuclear-armed Iran is a bad idea. In his column he's responding to an op-ed in the NY Times by Barry Posen, in which he says that the crisis over Iran is over-blown. Posen opines that nuclear weapons can be a force for stabiliziation in the Middle East, encouraging the Iranians to be more cautious and less "adventurous" in their foreign policy as they realize that other nuclear-armed powers can punish them for any hostile acts. But Kaplan believes, like many, that nuclear weapons in the Middle East are a dangerously de-stabilizing influence:

In these lines, Posen makes a very strong case against his own thesis. Do we really want to re-create the nuclear nightmare of the late 1950s and early '60s: the fear that one side in a confrontation might launch a nuclear first strike—and the equally grisly fear that the other side would pre-empt the strike by launching its own first strike first? Wouldn't everyone be better off it we could stave off the condition that might trigger even this possibility—that is, if we could prevent an Iranian nuclear arsenal from coming into being?

Kaplan also says this view obscures entirely the possibility that accidental nuclear war could be triggered:

This point raises another, more basic fallacy to Posen's argument. He ignores the possibility of accidental or unauthorized nuclear war. Cold War history is also chockablock with tales of U.S. early warning radar systems detecting a massive Soviet missile attack—when, on further examination, it turns out the radar had only picked up a flock of geese or had simply malfunctioned. There are also many cases of American military commanders (note: not "crazy mullahs," but "rational," Western-educated generals) who were eager to launch nuclear weapons but didn't because they were either politically constrained by the hierarchy of command authority or physically prevented from doing so by locks (known as "permissive action links" or PALs) that could be opened only by authorized orders.

If you don't believe Kaplan about the accidents that put us uncomfortably close to full-on nuclear war, read a list of them here. One thing that would-be nuclear strategists like Posen seem to ignore is that we and the Soviet Union were blessed with being on the opposite side of the world from each other. Though both sides continued to reduce the amount of time it would take to get a missile into the enemy's capitol, there was never any real chance that one side could hit the other without the other side knowing it was coming in advance; after all we didn't build a massive radar network or a fleet of sub-hunting submarines for nothing. This is important to the calculus of the infamous MAD "theory", and it's an element that is almost completely lacking in a possible nuclear conflict between two neighboring countries. It's much, much more likely that India could hit Islamabad without the Pakistanis knowing about it than it ever was that we could hit Moscow before the Soviets figured out what we were up to. Thus, nuclear armed states in proximity to each other-especially when they are hostile-are much, much more likely to think they can "win" a nuclear conflict where the odds are greater they can catch the enemy offguard and eliminate their ability to hit back in advance. That my friends, is a vastly destabilizing factor.

There aren't a whole lot of people saying a nuclear Iran isn't that big of a deal. You sure won't find that talk here at TWM. Neither will you find that we need to go full-bore into Iran right now with whatever we've got to prevent Iran getting nukes. Understanding the nature of the threat is crucial to understanding the appropriate response to that threat (I am as yet unsure if "meaningful consequences" counts as an appropriate response.)

You also won't find us saying that it's okay for our friends to get nukes so long as our enemies don't. Kaplan has a problem with this also, at least as it relates to the deal Bush recently concluded in which he gave the farm away to India:

India needed this deal more than the United States did. Yet it was India that got everything it wanted—and Washington that caved. Under the deal, India gets all the benefits of a country that has signed the Nonproliferation Treaty—without having to sign it or follow its most restrictive demands. That is to say, India gets to import nuclear fuel and technology to produce nuclear energy—while also continuing to build as many nuclear weapons as it desires.

Kaplan doesn't have a problem with a deal with India; he has a problem with this deal:

As I've written in Slate twice before, it's very much in America's interest to form a grand alliance with India—the world's largest democracy, one of the fastest-growing economies, an Asian counterweight to a rising China, and a vast market already inclined toward the United States. It's also long been clear that an alliance would have to entail some sort of nuclear partnership. India's energy needs are enormous; its energy resources are slender; and, as presidents from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton have realized when they tried to strike a deal, India just isn't going to dismantle its nuclear arsenal or sign the NPT, which would require it to do so. And so the earlier attempts collapsed.

George W. Bush's move, at once bold and reckless, was to smash through the barrier and form an alliance anyway. The question back in July, when he and Prime Minister Singh declared their intentions, was how Bush would reconcile the alliance with the NPT. The dumbfounding answer, it turns out, is that he won't. The deal with India, he and his aides have said, is a one-time exception. Other countries may view it differently.

It's been understood that American's long-standing strategy on nuclear proliferation is to prevent it entirely. We condemned India when they tested a nuke, then we condemned Pakistan when they tested theirs. As half-ass as we're going about it, we'd still like to keep Iran and North Korea from getting/enlarging their nuclear arsenals. Our hypocrisy on this issue has harmed us, without a doubt, but at least before we could say that only the countries that managed to get their hands on nukes before the NPT could keep them, which is at least some kind of principle. But there is no principle to this "deal" whatsoever. We've given India everything they wanted, asked nothing in return, and ignored the effect of the deal on our "ally" Pakistan and other smaller nations that want nukes. I have yet to see anyone explain what exactly we're getting out of this, or why the administration would even dive into this deal head-first. I have a theory for which I have no evidence and won't get into right now, but wouldn't it be nice if the Bush administration would tell us what was going on in their heads when they made this deal?