General George Lee Butler,who until 1994 was the military officer in charge of all US nuclear weapons, has taken the public argument a stage further. Deterrence, he now says, "worked best when we needed it least." In moments of calm it seemed to produce equilibrium and equanimity. But "in moments of deep crisis it became irrelevant." He observes that during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 there was no talk of deterrence during those critical 13 days. Both sides realized deterrence had failed. They were on a collision course, a countdown to nuclear war.
"What you had was two small groups of men in two small rooms groping frantically in the intellectual fog in the dark, to deal with a crisis that had spun out of control," he said.
If deterrence really worked rational men would not have allowed the situation to get so close to the danger point. One truth always overlooked by western proponents of deterrence was that the Soviets never believed in it; they thought a nuclear war was winnable.
Robert McNamara, who as Secretary of Defense was at the epicenter of the Cuban missile crisis, has long said, "We came within a hair's breadth of war." Nuclear deterrence, McNamara argues, is simply too dangerous. "It is very, very risky. Even a low probability of catastrophe is a high risk." And we now know not just the inner details of the Cuban missile crisis but how, at least a half dozen times, American nuclear missiles were nearly fired because of misinformation, insubordination or accident.
The fact is, as these men, intimate with the chain of command, know, the whole system was -- and still is -- on a dangerous hair-trigger, with a president or prime minister's ability to override it extremely circumscribed. This is why McNamara was moved to tell both presidents Kennedy and Johnson to their face, "Don't follow NATO policy. I don't care what happens, if the Soviet Warsaw Pact is, in fact, overrunning West Germany, don't launch nuclear weapons."
This brings us back to Pakistan. Are Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac quiet because although they know the tinder that lies between India and Pakistan is easily combustible, it is, in reality, a no more dangerous situation than it was when there was a civilian government in power? Yes, India and Pakistan are on a hair-trigger and there is a real danger of a nuclear war, but then the civilian buffer zone was so thin anyway it would only be a useless pretence if more fuss were made now than it was a couple of months ago.
If India and Pakistan are playing a dangerous game with nuclear matches then so indeed are the US, Russia, Britain, China and France. All that can be said is that with two more actors on the nuclear stage the probability of accident or miscalculation is now raised a few more degrees. In all likelihood, someone, somewhere will one day give the order to fire. We live with that. Why?
Jonathan Power is a syndicated columnist based in London.
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