Unthinkable (49 page)

The events of October 1973 caution that in a world where Iran has nuclear weapons, crises can occur even if neither side is looking for a fight. The history warns that even if Tehran becomes more defensive after acquiring nuclear weapons, even if it were to give up its hegemonic aspirations, forswear Khomeini's ideology, disband the Quds force, and ban its “death to America” rhetoric, it is still possible that it would end up in nuclear crises from miscalculation or uncontrollable events simply because of the dynamics of a nuclear balance.

And crises with a nuclear Iran are likely to be particularly problematic.
Of greatest importance, the experience of various earlier crises demonstrate that three factors are critical to ensuring a nuclear crisis does not escalate to a nuclear war. First is the ability of the two sides to communicate. Second is that each side possesses a good understanding of the other's assumptions, goals, fears, decision-making procedures, and worldview. Third is the ability of both sides to “read” each other's signals so that when one side makes a gesture toward the other, the recipient interprets it as the sender intended.

The problem is that throughout the history of relations between the United States and the Islamic Republic, none of these factors has ever been present and it will be hard to engineer them in the future. Washington and Tehran have no ability to communicate directly. We have employed a variety of interlocutors over the years but no channel has proven reliable. Despite American offers to take steps that could improve communications—such as opening an interests section in Tehran and establishing rules for American and Iranian ships to interact in the Persian Gulf—the Iranians have refused to participate in any direct communications channels. As for the second problem, the frequency with which Iran and America have misread each other is staggering, reflecting the opacity of the Iranian system, both sides' constant mirror-imaging of the other, and our mutual tendency to ascribe the worst motives to each other. Similarly, whenever one side has attempted to signal to the other, the “miss” rate on such messages has not necessarily been high because the two sides tend to be blunt with each other to minimize misunderstanding. Yet misinterpretations still occur with a disconcerting frequency. There is no question, for instance, that Washington misread the import of the 1995 Conoco deal and possibly the 2003 Iranian note.

This is a troubling pattern, and the United States will have to take the lead to try to correct it. Establishing some kind of “hotline” as we did with the Soviets and even the North Koreans would be helpful, but doing so seems problematic given the Iranian regime's paranoia when it comes to direct contact with the U.S. government. Greater dialogue, academic and cultural exchanges, even military-to-military talks would all be positive
steps toward building understanding on both sides. A regional security forum at which Americans, Iranians, and all of the major regional states would gather to discuss both general and immediate concerns would be similarly helpful.
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The U.S.-Iranian dimension may be the least important aspect of this problem. It is at least as likely that Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, and other states will find themselves in a crisis with Iran—one in which the United States may or may not then become involved. In these cases, the risks are both worse and better than crises involving the United States more directly.

Such regional crises could be much worse because these countries would be far more vulnerable to whatever damage a nuclear Iran could inflict than the United States. The U.S. homeland is largely out of range (at least of Iranian nukes delivered by missile) and the American nuclear arsenal is so massive that we could probably be more relaxed about the prospect that Iran would even try to attack us directly. In contrast, Hashemi Rafsanjani famously warned the Israelis in 2002 that a single nuclear detonation would devastate virtually their entire population, and other regional states would not be much better off.
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However, it is also the case that these states have typically had more success getting their messages across to the Iranians. Even the Israelis have found back channels to Iran. Nevertheless, in the context of a nuclear crisis, whatever arrangements these countries have employed for exchanging signals with Tehran might prove inadequate; signals may need to be more complex, and the time and space needed to comprehend them may be unavailable. Consequently, it would be important to try to establish more reliable communications and interpersonal exchanges to mitigate these problems.
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But these problems will inevitably persist. They are dangers inherent in crises, and particularly so with nuclear weapons. It is the flip side of Brodie's comforting logic about nuclear weapons being the “absolute weapon.” Because their destructive power is so enormous, the vast majority of the time a country with nuclear weapons can feel secure that no
one, even another nuclear-armed state, would dare to attack it. It simply makes no sense to do so. However, when one country takes actions that lead another to believe that that country may be contemplating just such a strike, no matter how far-fetched, those same factors can reverse themselves abruptly. The second country may overcompensate to prevent an attack. And it is those overcompensating reactions that can start a crisis. Again, Brodie's basic logic is so powerful that no nuclear crisis has ever spiraled out of control, but a number of countries have felt the tug of these centrifugal forces. Given the Iranian regime's innate paranoia, difficulty comprehending the actions of the rest of the world, and tendency to ignore the impact of its own actions on others, Tehran seems more likely than most to experience these problems. While we should do everything we can to apply the lessons of the Cold War regarding how to mitigate this dangerous tendency, it is unlikely that we will be able to eliminate it altogether as long as the Islamic Republic rules Iran.

THE DANGERS OF AN IMMATURE ARSENAL.
Because a nuclear war has never been waged (thankfully), we have little real evidence to understand what it would be like. In the absence of that hard data, during the Cold War, both the United States and the Soviet Union employed extensive and creative academic exercises as surrogates to try to understand these considerations. Extensive theoretical exercises, war-gaming, and game theory produced ideas about nuclear war that became enshrined in superpower force structure and strategic thinking.

One of these is the danger posed by nascent nuclear arsenals. When a country first acquires nuclear weapons, it is likely to have only a small number. These weapons are often stored in relatively vulnerable structures, command and control is usually immature and brittle, and there is unlikely to be either the procedures or the physical capacity to conduct sophisticated operations under conditions of enemy attack. As a result, the nuclear force of a new nuclear power is often vulnerable to attack by an adversary—using either nuclear weapons or powerful and sophisticated conventional weapons.

These circumstances can produce a “use it or lose it,” or “first strike,” danger.
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Imagine a situation in which Israel and Iran become embroiled in a high-stakes crisis at a time when Iran has just a handful of nuclear weapons stored in only moderately hardened facilities known to the Israelis. Israel would calculate that if it attacked the Iranian nuclear arsenal first, it would have a good chance of 1) destroying the arsenal altogether, 2) crippling its command and control so that the Iranians were unable to launch, and/or 3) degrading the Iranian force so that any Iranian retaliatory strike would almost certainly be far less dangerous to Israel than if Iran were given the time and opportunity to launch on its own terms. This set of assumptions could create pressure on the Israeli leadership (which has a strategic doctrine emphasizing preemptive and preventive attack to minimize damage to Israel) to launch just such a strike, raising the likelihood that the crisis would descend into war and the potential use of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the Iranians would fear that Israel would launch just such a preemptive strike. This foreknowledge would, in turn, pressure Iran to launch an attack on Israel before the Israelis could preempt them. One side's vulnerability could push both countries into a war that neither wanted.

Traditionally, the “right” answer to this problem is for the new nuclear state to make its nuclear forces more difficult to destroy. This generally consists of hardening its nuclear sites to withstand attack, making nuclear forces mobile (by putting missiles on trucks, trains, or submarines) and dispersing them at the first sign of a crisis, and by having enough nuclear weapons that no adversary could reasonably expect that it would be able to destroy all of them (including by a combination of offensive preemptive strikes and ballistic missile defenses). This practice is typically what is meant by a “secure second-strike” capability: a nuclear force that is likely to have enough forces to survive an enemy's first strike, retain cohesiveness and control, and still inflict horrific damage on the other side. Once both sides achieve that capability, MAD is secure, and the dangers of the first-strike dynamic disappear.

At the simplest level, the United States might want a nuclear Iran
to develop a secure second-strike capability to get past the dangerous dynamic of its inevitable early vulnerability to a first strike. In terms of regional crisis dynamics, that would be preferable, but the issue is more complicated than that.

The vulnerability of a nascent Iranian nuclear force could exacerbate crises with other regional states whose own capabilities might be greater than Iran's in the early years of an Iranian nuclear arsenal. However, in a crisis with the United States itself, Iran's vulnerability would be an enormous advantage for Washington, one we should be loath to surrender. Until Iran acquires ballistic missiles with intercontinental ranges that can quickly deliver nuclear warheads against American targets, Iran's ability to employ its nuclear arsenal against the United States will be
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limited. Iran would have to strike at regional targets that the United States values—bases in the region, possibly our allies—or it would have to find covert means of delivering a nuclear weapon to the United States (secreted on board a cargo ship, for instance), which would be difficult to pull off and could take weeks if it works at all.

American conventional and nuclear capabilities are so enormous that we would have a good chance of effectively disarming the Iranians. For some period of time even after Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, the United States will be able to do enormous damage to Iran—including only to Iran's nuclear forces if we choose—and the Iranians may have little or no ability to do significant damage to us in return. In Cold War parlance, that would give the United States “escalation dominance.”

In theory, such a situation could prompt the weaker state to attack first, again to exploit what capacity it has to cause damage while it can. However, in practice, escalation dominance has not produced that dangerous dynamic, but instead has prompted the opposite: the weaker state backs down, while the stronger state feels more secure and therefore does not need to act precipitously. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and even the early 1960s, the United States possessed a (diminishing) escalation dominance over the Soviets. As a result, in the 1946 Iran, 1948 Berlin, 1950 Korean, 1956 Suez, 1961 Berlin, and 1962 Cuban crises, the Russians knew that
they were in no position to provoke a war with the United States, and Washington knew that Moscow knew it. This is not to imply that those crises were not dangerous. By the early 1950s the Russians could theoretically nuke at least a few American cities, and that was far too many for America's leaders. But these crises were less dangerous than they might have been because both sides recognized the enormous American advantages and the Russians were careful not to push too hard as a result.
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One of the reasons that Khrushchev wanted to put nuclear missiles in Cuba was to redress this imbalance.
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However, because the longer-range missiles on Cuba were not operational at the time of the crisis, the United States still held a significant advantage, which was partly responsible for the Soviet retreat—and one reason why it was so important for Kennedy and his advisors to resolve the crisis before all of the Soviet missiles on Cuba were operational.
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In short, escalation dominance has proven to be a valuable advantage that the United States should retain for as long as possible, despite the near-sacred value attached to secure second-strike capabilities and MAD.

This history also suggests another point worth making. Although in theory, the “use it or lose it” dynamic exists, and in some historical circumstances one side or the other in a nuclear dyad contemplated a first strike against a rival, in practice it never happened. There were a few occasions when one country contemplated a nuclear first strike against a rival: some Americans advocated doing so to Russia early in the Cold War, and both the United States and USSR contemplated strikes against the Chinese nuclear program to obliterate it in its infancy. However, there is little evidence that anyone suggested pursuing this course of action during a crisis. Likewise, on both the American and Soviet sides, no one ever proposed launching a surprise first strike against the other to disarm it. The United States never discussed a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union during any of our crises, nor did the Soviets ever seriously consider launching first to preempt an American surprise attack.
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This history reinforces Bracken and Payne's warnings against assuming that our conduct during the Cold War should always serve as a model for
our conduct with other, smaller nuclear powers. In the case of a nuclear Iran, we can afford to act differently and should do so because of the huge advantages we will thereby accrue. In particular, the United States should do everything it can to maintain its escalation dominance over Iran. This determination could require developing a somewhat more versatile nuclear force than we possess. Right now, the United States has a lot of powerful, survivable, and accurate weapons. We also have a remarkably powerful and versatile conventional military. That gives us a wide range of options for how we might attack an Iranian nuclear arsenal. In the future, if Iran tries to diminish this advantage of ours, we may want to try to preserve it by acquiring nuclear forces with a wider range of capabilities, including focused blast, earth-penetrating, enhanced radiation, low-yield, hyper-accurate, or other features, to give us a much wider range of options to go after Iran's nuclear forces no matter how they are configured and deployed.
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