Strategy (31 page)

In the nuclear sphere, at one extreme, choice could be wholly conceded to the opponent by making the threatened action automatic, beyond recall unless stopped by an act of compliance. That was the notion of the “doomsday machine”: pass a line and nothing could be done to stop the detonation and the shared calamity. Removing all choice was unacceptable, so Schelling posed the problem in terms of progressive risk. The opponent would know that even if the threatener had second thoughts, the threat might still be implemented. This set up the possibility of a “competition in risk-taking” which could turn war into a contest of “endurance, nerve, obstinacy and pain.” This would be not quite a doomsday machine, but the threatened would know that the threat could not be wholly bluff because the threatener was not completely in control. Schelling called this “The Threat That Leaves Something to Chance.” The feature of such threats was that “though one may or may not carry them out,
the final decision is not altogether under the threatener's control
.”
²⁷
In his version of Clausewitz's friction, Schelling emphasized the ubiquity of uncertainty that gave this type of threat credibility:

Violence, especially in war, is a confused and uncertain activity, highly unpredictable depending on decisions made by fallible human beings organized into imperfect governments depending on fallible communications and warning systems and on the untested performance of people and equipment. It is furthermore a hotheaded activity, in which commitments and reputations can develop a momentum of their own.
²⁸

Whereas Clausewitz saw friction as undermining all but the most dogged of strategies, Schelling saw how these uncertainties might be used creatively, if
recklessly. The uncertainty would grow as a crisis turned into a limited conflict and then moved toward general war, getting out of hand “by degrees.”
²⁹
Skillful tactics would exploit this fact, not shrink from it. The assumption was that it was worth letting a “situation get somewhat out of hand” because the opponent would find such circumstances intolerable. Deterrence was possible because of a situation in which terrible things
might
happen (which was credible because of human irrationality) rather than a specific threat to do those things (which was incredible because of human rationality).

The potential rationality of irrationality was illustrated using the game of “chicken.” Two cars were driven toward each other by delinquent teenagers, Bill and Ben, anxious to prove their toughness. The first to swerve lost. If both swerved, nothing was gained; if neither swerved, everything was lost. If Bill swerved and Ben did not, then Bill suffered humiliation and Ben gained prestige. The matrix appeared as shown below.

TABLE
13. 1

The minimax strategy dictated that they both swerved as the best of the worst outcomes. This represented the natural caution displayed by both sides during the Cold War. Timing, however, made a difference. Bill was prepared to swerve, but Ben swerved first. Bill won because he delayed his commitment. He kept his nerve longer. Perhaps he was confident that Ben would swerve because he knew him to be weak-willed. Suppose that Ben was aware of this impression and sought to correct it. He wanted Bill to think him reckless or even a bit crazy. A number of ruses might reinforce such an impression: swaggering, boasting, or feigning drunkenness. Irrationality became rational. If Ben could persuade Bill that he had taken leave of his senses, Ben might just prevail.

This illuminates the basic problem with this line of argument. Even if one was apparently committed to a patently irrational course to impress the
opponent, a foot would still hover close to the brake pedal and hands would stay firmly on the steering wheel. What might work for two individuals was less likely to work for governments who needed to convince their own people that they knew what they were doing. Even if the internal audience was tolerant of ruses designed to suggest a loss of control, such stunts could not be a regular feature of crisis management. Whether the game involved individuals or states, it was difficult to pretend irrationality consistently, in one game after another. Like deceptive strategies, pretended irrationality would be difficult to repeat as it would affect perceptions of behavior next time round. Indeed it could be counterproductive if the other side overcompensated. The more often the game was played, the more dangerous it could become. The full importance of any strategic encounter lay not only in the implications for the matter at hand but also in the long-term impact on the relationship between the two adversaries. The results of strategies adopted in a particular game would affect their potential success if used in subsequent games. Game theory presented simultaneous decisions by players. Schelling understood that the moves often took place sequentially, so that the structure of the game changed each time.
³⁰

The mutual learning process was important to Schelling's schema. It was almost a mission to reorient game theory to take account of the fact that “people
can
often concert their intentions or expectations with others if each knows that the other is trying to do the same.” Unlike theorists who argued that equilibrium points could be found using mathematics, Schelling insisted that points would suggest themselves as being obvious or natural. This required “some common language that permits them to hold discourse.” Communication of this sort between adversaries would not allow for great subtlety or sophistication, especially if the language did not emerge through formal negotiations or declarations. It could be tacit as much as explicit, dependent on prominent symbols and values in a shared culture, guided by tradition and precedence, with mutual understandings created and reinforced through deeds as much as words. It would draw “on imagination more than on logic; it could depend on analogy, precedent, accidental arrangement, symmetry, aesthetic or geometric configuration, casuistic reasoning, and who the parties are and what they know about each other.”
³¹
Certain focal points would become salient. They would need to be simple, recognizable, and conspicuous. In
Arms and Influence
, Schelling gave examples of features that might suggest themselves to opposing forces who could not communicate directly:

National boundaries and rivers, shorelines, the battle line itself, even parallels of latitude, the distinction between air and ground, the
distinction between nuclear fission and chemical combustion, the distinction between combat support and economic support, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the distinctions among nationalities.
³²

Once proper communication was possible, and the players could use direct speech and overt bargaining, the “pure-coordination game,” Schelling suggests, “not only ceases to be interesting but virtually ceases to be a ‘game.' ”
³³

Yet for all the possibilities of indirect communication, the influence of norms and conventions of behavior, or the focal points thrown up by nature, it was hard to see how they could be more reliable than direct communications. In circumstances where the opportunities for direct communication were sparse, as was the case between the two ideological blocs for much of the Cold War, Schelling's insight about the possibility of still finding shared focal points by indirect means was valuable. But it could not be taken too far. It did not necessarily mean that these points would be found when they were really needed. Moreover, when two sides were working with such different sets of values and beliefs, what was salient for one might not be so salient for the other. Without direct communication to verify that an agreed point had been found, it was possible to miscalulate by assuming that the other side attached the same salience to the same point or by assuming that agreement on such matters was impossible. It could seem, as Hedley Bull observed in a review of
Arms and Influence
, that the superpowers would be “sending and receiving messages and ironing out understandings” with “scarcely as much as a nod or a wink.”
³⁴

Schelling argued that not only was it possible to think of nuclear strategy in terms of bargaining and coercion but it was unwise to think of it in any other way. This challenged the idea of a decisive victory directly by claiming that at least in the nuclear area it made no sense. That did not mean that there was no concept of what a decisive nuclear victory would look like. To ensure success it would have to take the form of a knockout blow that left the opponent no chance to retaliate. This was not a possibility that either side in the Cold War ever felt able to dismiss entirely. It provided part of the dynamic of the arms race between the two sides and governed calculations of risk. A “first-strike capability” came to refer to the potential ability to disarm the enemy in a surprise attack. No military operation ever conceived could be as fateful. It would be the first and only time it would be attempted and would
be launched in secret, using untried weapons against a range of disparate targets in a wholly unique scenario, using equally untried defenses to catch any retaliatory weapons. Whether such a capability was in reach depended on evaluations of the developing capabilities of offensive and defensive weapons.

In a celebrated RAND study of the mid-1950s, a team led by Albert Wohlstetter demonstrated that the air bases of the U.S. Strategic Air Command could be vulnerable to a surprise attack. Retaliation from such an attack would be impossible, thereby exposing the United States and its allies to Soviet blackmail.
³⁵
This challenged the prevailing view that nuclear weapons could be used solely in “counter-value” strikes against easily targeted political and economic centers. A “counter-force” strike against military targets would potentially be strategically decisive because it would leave the opponent without any way of retaliating. If, however, the attacked nation was able to absorb an attempted first strike and retain sufficient forces to hit back then it would have a “second-strike capability.” Wohlstetter believed that this study, drawing on “the tradition of operations research and empirical systems analysis,” far more than Schelling's musings, discovered the “vulnerabilities of strategic forces.”
³⁶

Suppose both sides had a first-strike capability. Brodie set out the alternative possibilities in a 1954 article in which he observed that in a world in which “either side can make a surprise attack on the other” it would make sense to be “trigger-happy.” As with the “American gunfighter duel, frontier style,” the “one who leads on the draw and the aim achieves a good clean win.” If neither side had the capability, however, trigger-happiness would be suicidal, and restraint only prudent.
³⁷
Depending on how the technology developed, there would either be powerful pressures to preempt at times of high political tension, which could lead to a dangerous dynamic, or there would be considerable stability, as no premium would be attached to unleashing nuclear hostilities. Thus, confidence in stability depended on expectations with regard to the opponent's attitude and behavior. In a compelling example of his mode of analysis, Schelling described a “reciprocal fear of surprise attack” to show how an apparently stable system of deterrence could suddenly be destabilized even when there was no “fundamental” basis for either side to strike first: “A modest temptation on each side to sneak in a first blow—a temptation too small by itself to motivate an attack—might become compounded through a process of interacting expectations, with additional motive for attack being produced by successive cycles of ‘He thinks we think he thinks we think … he thinks we think he'll attack; so he thinks we shall; so he will; so we must.' ”

To reduce any chance of such thoughts, nuclear systems should be unequivocally geared to a second strike: relatively invulnerable and relatively inaccurate. In practice this meant that cities would be threatened, not weapons.
The logic became even more uncomfortable and paradoxical. Nothing should be done to diminish the murderous consequences of a nuclear war because nothing should be done to encourage any thought that it was worth starting. “A weapon that can hurt only people, and cannot possibly damage the other side's striking force,” Schelling explained, “is profoundly defensive; it provides its possessor no incentive to strike first.” The danger lay with weapons intended to “seek out the enemy's missiles and bombers—that
can
exploit the advantage of striking first and consequently provide a temptation to do so.”
³⁸
The aim was to stabilize the U.S.-Soviet nuclear relationship. On this basis, Schelling noted, missile-carrying submarines were admirable for second-strike purposes. They were extremely hard to find and destroy at sea, but it was also hard (at the time he was writing) to use them for accurate strikes against the enemy forces. For this reason, Schelling argued that Americans should not want a monopoly on these submarines, for if they “have either no intention or no political capacity for a first strike it would usually be helpful if the enemy were confidently assured of this.”