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The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction

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The U.S. prosecution of the Cold War was based on the strategy of containment which was designed to prevent the further expansion of international Communism. Essentially the U.S. and its allies wished to maintain the status quo as it existed in the immediate post-WWII period. The doctrine of deterrence (or mutual deterrence to be precise) was a key component of this containment strategy. Payne argues that this doctrine was based on dangerously incorrect premises.

The doctrine of mutual deterrence was in part a response to the terrible destructiveness of nuclear weapons. The doctrine was predicated on the premise that faced with destructive power of nuclear weapons no rational leader would opt for war. As this book makes abundantly clear there is no empirical basis for this premise. Human behavior is enormously complex and Payne argues that unless both sides have the same definition of rational behavior, mutual deterrence simply will not work. He notes that U.S. strategists assumed that the behavior and thinking of Communist leaders would mirror the U.S. approaches to nuclear war. This Payne notes was wrong. The availability of information since the collapse of the Soviet Union demonstrates that the Communist Leadership had a very different understanding of acceptable damage and rational responses than the U.S. did. He points out that as the Cold War developed the U.S. crated a doctrine of mutual deterrence based on developing accurate counts of the number and type of nuclear weapons possessed by each side. This method reached its logical absurdity, of course, under Robert McNamara and the ultimate deterrence doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). MAD was based entirely on weapon counting and evaluation without any reference to human (leadership) factors and so was in effect irrelevant.

The thesis of this book is that deterrence is effective if, and only if, it is based on a through knowledge of culture, ideologies and personalities of the leadership aggregate that is to be deterred. Payne correctly argues that military decision making is often based on non-empirical factors and is seldom entirely governed by a rational review of military strengths and weaknesses.

Payne is not ready to give up on the concept of deterrence however; he rather wants to build deterrent strategies that reflect actual knowledge of the subjects to be deterred. He does not believe that analysis of arsenals alone can be the basis for a real deterrent strategy. As far as he goes he is right. But one has to ask what about other factors that might affect a nation's strategic choices? Specifically what of the growing 21st Century phenomenon of international economic interdependence and the telecommunications revolution of the Global Network? Both have to be factors in national decision making processes, whether rational or irrational.