What to do about Iran Part I: New lyrics, same old tune…

Deterrence, Disarmament, Nuclear Diplomacy, Nuclear Security

Timed to coincide with the growing tension between the United States and Iran, the most recent print edition of Foreign Affairs arrived last week with Georgetown professor, Matthew Kroenig’s name next to the headline “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option” In response to the question, “should the United States attack Iran and attempt to eliminate its nuclear facilities?” Kroenig answers yes, given the option between a conventional conflict and the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran, the choice is clear; The U.S. should set back and potentially eliminate the Iranian nuclear program by bombing a yellowcake-conversion plant, a heavy-water reactor, centrifuge-manufacturing sites, and, of course, the contested uranium enrichment facilities is preferable to the alternative.

Kroenig is part of a new generation of “thought leaders” on issues of nuclear security being funded by the Stanton Foundation. Inaugurated in 2010, the Stanton Fellowship program was created in response to a perception that there are many new challenges in the field of nuclear security, but not many young scholars with new ideas on how to confront those challenges. So far Stanton has been successful at supporting people who are willing to put themselves out there in the contemporary foreign policy debate. In fact, another Stanton Fellow currently at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, Alexandre Debs, co-authored a rebuttal of Kroenig’s argument. In it Debs argues that attacking Iran is not “the least bad option” because Kroenig’s skepticism about containing a nuclear-armed Iran is unwarranted.

Yet, being part of a rising generation of scholars does not necessarily mean that these young men have come up with new ideas. All they have done so far is apply their forefather’s ideological framework to the current political environment. As currently framed this debate about Iran reproduces a predictable Cold War-era ideological split between deterrence pessimists and deterrence optimists.

Kroenig occupies the role of deterrence pessimist. This is an intellectual tradition with roots reaching back two generations to the work of Herman Kahn. Often vilified and derided, Kahn is famous for arguing that nuclear war was survivable and set out to prove it through a macabre mathematical analysis of who and what would survive an all-out nuclear war. Kahn’s intellectual project, like the work of all deterrence pessimists, was motivated by the belief that U.S. nuclear security strategy should be designed with the expectation that nuclear deterrence will fail. This belief leads to two operational doctrines. The first is escalation dominance; the idea that the United States should always be able to up the nuclear ante, one step at a time, responding proportionally to any attack and terminating any conflict through the threat of more to come. The second is damage limitation; the idea that the United States should always work to minimize its casualties. Kroenig’s support of escalation dominance is well known in Washington. In a recent article he argues “nuclear superior states are more likely to win nuclear crises because they are willing to run a greater risk of nuclear war in a crisis than their nuclear inferior opponents.” Also consistent with the deterrence pessimist position is Kroenig’s skepticism about the ability to contain a nuclear Iran and a desire to stop the threat before it starts.

On the other side of the aisle are the deterrence optimists, the most famous of whom is Nobel Laureate, Thomas Schelling. This school of thought advocates accepting the irrationality of nuclear war and the fact of mutual vulnerability. It does not advocate nuclear superiority, but rather seeks a condition of strategy stability. Debs’ rebuttal takes up the position of deterrence optimist as evidenced by the fact that he finds Kroenig’s skepticism about a nuclear-armed Iran unwarranted, and focuses on the success of containing a nuclear North Korea.

The only way to step meaningfully outside of this Cold-War era framework is to move away from placing the use of force in the foreground and start asking a different kind of question. The question shouldn’t be about whether or not to bomb Iran, but about what place the use of force has vis-a-vis U.S. leadership in a changing international environment. More immediately, it should be about next steps towards diplomatic solutions to the conflict over the Iranian nuclear program. Thus far, the best example of a contribution to this debate that refuses to accept Kroenig’s framing and offers and alternative is from Bill Keller of the New York Times. Instead Keller offers a parody of Kroenig’s argument in his op-ed “Bomb-Bomb-Bomb, Bomb-Bomb-Iran.” For those of you who like to get in the weeds, he also looks seriously at the elements of a nonproliferation strategy that focuses on the technical aspects of both uranium-enrichment technology and the politics of negotiations in an election year on his blog.

How many mathematicians are in a petaflop?

Nuclear Security

statlab-clipping

According to John Ptak at Ptak Science Books, the first use of the term “super computer” dates from 1929. The name of the machine was “Packard” (after the luxury car), but rather than talking about its horse power, its capabilities were measured in terms of mathematicians. Installed at Columbia University in 1931, this is what the equivalent of 100 mathematicians looked liked:

packard

Fast forward eight decades: The first four racks of Lawrence Livermore’s Sequoia were delivered on January 12th. When complete it will be the worlds largest supercomputer at 20 petaflops. How many mathematicians are in a petaflop?

The Sputnik Moment You May Have Missed

Nuclear Security
Picture of the delivery of the Dawn supercomputer, a predecessor to Sequoia, from the LLNL Community News FEBRUARY 6, 2009 VOL. 2, NO. 5.

Picture of the delivery of the Dawn supercomputer, a predecessor to Sequoia, from the LLNL Community News February 6, 2009 VOL. 2, NO. 5.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a self-described “premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to national security,” is famous for designing the advanced nuclear warheads that put the “super” in superpower and carried the United States through the Cold War-era arms race. Now Livermore wants to lead the way in the next race, and it has stiff competition. According to the “Top500 List,” a biannual ranking of the 500 most powerful computer systems, China surpassed the United States for the first time in the rankings this past summer, placing the U.S.’s Jaguar, the 1.75 Petaflop Cray XT5 system installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in third place behind first place Japan and second place China. Currently Livermore’s most powerful computer is ranked in 15th place. However, they do not plan to stay there for long. Livermore has a new machine, Sequoia, under construction and due to debut at number one in 2012.

The link between supercomputers and nuclear weapons may not seem obvious to those less familiar with the U.S. weapons complex, but these computers play an integral role in moving the U.S. away from the need to physically detonate nuclear devices in order to verify the reliability of its arsenal. Rather than detonating a weapon to prove that the U.S. maintains its ability to threaten nuclear attack, the U.S. can now simulate a nuclear explosion, taking into account the effects of time on the fissile materials at the core of a nuclear weapon. In effect, the U.S. is transferring the function of testing from the immediate physical ability to detonate a nuclear weapon to the physical ability to perform computational analysis as part of a program referred to as “stockpile stewardship.” The U.S. is no longer dependent on consuming individual weapons in its arsenal in order to maintain the credibility of its nuclear deterrent. Instead it can utilize supercomputers for that purpose. In other words, since its moratorium on testing in 1992, the U.S. has taken a step back from its physical dependence on the kinetic properties of nuclear weapons. The relationship to those properties is now mediated by the supercomputers that are used to verify that the weapons in the U.S. arsenal will in fact detonate. Rather than detonating a weapon in an underground test, the U.S. depends on the physical capability of supercomputers to process vast amounts of data in minimal amounts of time.

As a result, supercomputers are also developing a social meaning akin to nuclear weapons. The blogosphere’s journalists and pundits have already begun making the link between being number one in supercomputing technology and maintaining U.S. national security. In an article recently re-posted on The Daily Beast Dan Lyons goes so far as to refer to China’s surge forward in supercomputing technology as a “Sputnik moment” saying:

“To most of us, this might sound like no big deal, akin to Apple coming out with a faster smartphone than Microsoft. But to the scientists, industry titans, and world leaders who understand how delicate America’s position as a global superpower really is, this was a Sputnik moment. Only this time, it wasn’t Russia trouncing the U.S. in the space race, but China surging ahead in one of the most vital areas of national security.”

Producing and maintaining machines on the scale of supercomputers is no easy task. Not only do they require large amounts of technological expertise to design and run, but the they consume large amounts of energy as well. To offer some perspective, according to Lyons, “just one of Livermore’s supercomputers throws off so much heat that if the air-conditioning system were to fail, the computer would start to melt within minutes.”

In an era when more and more states are becoming nuclear capable, the task of building and running these machines is not something all states have mastered. Therefore the possession of a top ranked supercomputer can be used to distinguish between different kinds of states. Whether or not a country has machines that rank on the Top500 list is a good proxy for its overall international standing. In other words, supercomputers are not only important because of their technological advantages, but also because they are a manifestation of a national project and a material expression of a country’s underlying capabilities and resources. Expressing the limits of national technological capabilities was one of the functions of nuclear weapons during the Cold War, but someday producing vast numbers of very dangerous explosive devices and polluting domestic environments through testing may reach the point of appearing foolhardy. That will also be the day that supercomputers, rather than nuclear weapons, define states as superpowers. This is not to say that nuclear weapons will disappear, only that they would no longer define the global hierarchy. What this allows us to imagine, for better or worse, is moving beyond the limits of a world defined in terms of nuclear security to one defined in terms of cyber security.

Fetishism North Korea Style

Nuclear Security
Kim Jong Eun mourned Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang.

Kim Jong Eun mourned Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang.

My initial response to the media coverage of North Koreans wailing in public demonstrations of mourning over the death dictator Kim Jong Il was that it appeared bizarre to the point of being almost unintelligible. I’m familiar with ritualized wailing, but media coverage of it is still jarring:

This behavior has received a lot of media attention in America, and in other parts of the world too I assume, perhaps because it is so difficult for Americans to interpret. The most common reaction is to think that the North Koreans can’t possibly be serious, and yet some of these people are pretty convincing:

The mystery deepens once you combine the ritualized wailing with reports about the role of myth making propaganda in ensuring a smooth transition of power to Kim Jong Il’s son, Kim Jong Eun, as explained in the WSJ (link to full article here):

“Myth-building in North Korea is a serious business. Analysts say it is critical for the regime to ensure that the personality cult of the Kim family remains intact and its rule unchallenged.”

My personal favorite is the one about North Korea’s founder, Kim Il Sung, who was, “said to have made a hand grenade from a pine cone to blow up an American tank.” The claim that natural wonders have occurred in conjunction with significant events is also good:

“…when Kim Jong Il was born, propagandists reported that the sky was filled with lightening and thunder, as well as a rainbow.

As recently as Wednesday, Korea Central News Agency reported many natural wonders observed around the country, such as the sky turning red and a huge snowstorm suddenly stopping, as the people mourned their dead leader.”

The mystery started to unravel when I read the following quote from a North Korean defector: “‘The regime has to keep doing it, regardless of whether people believe it or not, because they need to establish the legitimacy of the family…”

The key lies in the fact that whether or not people actually believe in the myth of the Kim dynasty is irrelevant. As long as they continue to act as if they believe, the legitimacy of the regime remains in tact. This is exactly the same dynamic I point to in my analysis of nuclear fetishism.

I often use the example of a king to illustrate the practice of fetishism. A king is a king only in so far as his subjects submit to his rule. Yet, the claim to divine ordination passed through the hereditary characteristics of royal blood makes the power of the king appear inevitable–as if he would be a king even outside his relation to his subjects.

North Korea is one of the few true nation-states left on earth that still has an entire social and political system build on a racialized concept of social hierarchy in which divine right is supported by founding myths. Kim Jong Il is North Korea’s national fetish object. The sense of wonder that outsiders experience as they witness the ritualized practice of public mourning is entirely consistent with the experience of fetishism. What people like me don’t understand when we watch these ritualized practices is that for the people engaged in them, whether they believe or not is not entirely relevant. What is important is that as a collective experience their behavior is both powerful and normal.

The vision of a world in which nuclear weapons no longer functioned as the United States’ national fetish object would be characterized by a similar sense of bewilderment at the ritualized practice of nuclear deterrence. It would be populated by people who learned about the history of nuclear deterrence and thought, “It’s so crazy that they actually thought those weapons made them safer.”

“Why was there historically no doomsday machine as the ultimate deterrent?”

Deterrence

Dear Matthias,

I am feeling nostalgic for our time together at Stanford and grateful that you planned ahead by creating a virtual space for us to share. The following text is the comment you offered at my presentation (http://cisac.stanford.edu/events/nuclear_weapons_and_the_fetishism_of_force/)
last year, in which you not only took the logic of my argument one step further than I had, but also made meaningful reference to the dialog from Dr. Strangelove in the process. Taking my work one step further was the greatest compliment anyone had ever paid me. As I’m sure you remember, all I could say at the time was “touché.”

According to The Dead Hand by David Hoffman, the Soviets did design a doomsday machine, but they stopped short of building it, instead creating a semi-automatic hybrid that still required human initiative. So, technically, your question still stands.

Touché,
Anne

“Thank you Anne. Your work really opened a completely new way to combine several intellectual endeavors of mine, philosophy, nonproliferation and a new one since I am at CISAC: International Relations Theory.

The theories on which Anne?s work is philosophically based, were part of my own education – namely, german idealism with hegelian dialectics, Marx and political economy and especially Zizek and his unique dialectical merging of them with french structuralism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis and german critical theory.

So what in general is the interesting thing about using these theories, which were born in german idealism? It is about the use of an paradigmatic shift in epistemology basically saying that what we conceive as objective reality is only accessible through the subject, and this in turn makes it impossible to symbolize a phenomenal reality without infecting the description by subjectivity. In return this paradigm shift also melts the perceived adamant unchangeable objective world out there and opens possibilities to shape what is usually considered to be given. How exactly this is happening and what exactly is the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity is under debate since.

The problem is that it is easy to fall into the illusion that the reality, the social order or sub-entities of it, like the role of nuclear weapons and the current political structure of nation states is simply given and almost or even completely unchangeable. Against this paradigm of a fixed “nature of things”, which is at the core of numerous different theoretical frameworks including those who have the noun ?realism? in them, all the mentioned theories are articulating skepticism and try to open up a space for new thinking. I think this effort is important.

Let me cite Michael J. Shapiro a political scientist Good social analysis does one or more of the following:

It adds voices and perspectives to a domain of thought or inquiry that has generated silences that narrow the scope of “the political.” It invents new concepts. It disrupts the process by which we have assumed that we are attaining a deeper understanding […]. It substitutes contingency for certainty. It historicizes what is treated as timeless. In short, it unsettles the process of settling how we should interpret the social and political world.

Critique:

Policy advice:

I do not want to discredit the use of theory, and I know that the constant demand to please break down complex theories into two sentences of policy advice can be annoying. But of course disarmament and nuclear weapons has to be also thought of as a problem of practice, and I sense that more could be done to connect the theory of nuclear fetishism to more direct policy advice to help disarmament. This is not a fundamental critique but meant as encouragement to think further.

Power and Materiality

According to Anne?s work nuclear weapons ultimately neglect the vulgar truth of treating violence as synonymous with power by bringing this identification to a final contradiction. In short: the most powerful weapons cannot be used in a warthey finally have no use value, they are useless, powerless.

But they are usable to threaten somebody. So if states or at least some states believe in such threats, then simply “possessing nuclear weapons can serve as proxy for the experience of power associated with winning a war” (Anne 11). Power here is still based on military strength AS IF nuclear weapons were a direct measure of power regardless of the use of them in a real battle. The hope of deconstructing this link of power to nuclear weapons is one of the main points in Anne?s work. And is it not also the hope of the four horseman to decouple power from nuclear weapons in thinking about different non-nuclear forms of deterrence? And is it not also the hope for disarmament that power is decoupled from military strength?

So let us assume we want to decouple power from nuclear weapons. Which role has the materiality of the weapons expressed in their use value. Anne states that the “materiality of nuclear weapons is very important, but it is not the source of their power” (Anne, 38).

One way to decouple power from nuclear weapons would be the dream of transforming the use value into a threat value. First dismantling the weapons, so the threat would be incorporated in fissile materials, then dispose the fissile materials so the threat would be in production facilities and in information about weapons. Without the use of nuclear power one could go even further and scrap all production facilities transforming the production technologies into knowledge about them. Finally the threat of nuclear weapons would fit onto a couple of DVDs and simulations on supercomputers. But still the use value is looming and one could argue that the world is not disarmed only the timeframes changed to load the gun.

And if we look at the topology of nuclear fetishism the use value is still incorporated in the threat value. The analogy of money and nuclear weapons, and Anne is well aware of this, obscures and thereby highlights an important difference. The difference is that the use-value of a nuclear weapon, the implication of the bomb to explode, is always going to be a part of the exchange value, as the term threat value itself implies. I cannot threaten with toothbrushes or with numbers on a Cayman island bank account. Money instead is a medium, it has no necessity for a material counterpart. It can become purely virtual.

Despite the efforts of the theorists to make sense out of the existence of nuclear weapons and to overwrite the use-value with the threat value, the use value is still quite factual as can be seen e.g. in the event of nuclear terrorism. In trying to decouple force from power, and despite all sympathy to constructivist descriptions of the symbolic order, I am not willing to forfeit the materiality of the world as being completely dissolvable into the symbolic order. It is precisely the excess of the materiality which cannot filled completely in the symbolic order. The destructive force, especially the one threatening to destruct the symbolic order itself is not dissolvable in it completely. Thus force cannot be completely separated from power, and nuclear weapons are therefore always a source of power by their very nature.

So in a nutshell, I think that deconstructing nuclear weapons as reified objects symbolizing power is a very compelling narrative to reflect on the current events like NPT, Nuclear Postures, Arms Control, Disarmament and is truly revealing. Defetishizing their role in international relations as falsely incorporating power relations is revealing. But does this critique fail to take into account the invisible symbolic structure which regulates these same social power relations? Could it be that the fetish narrative hides the very nature of nuclear weapons as structuring the symbolic order itself? Is it then the social order reifying itself in a nuclear weapon or the materiality of the nuclear weapon structuring the social order? Of course Anne?s work is reflecting this reciprocal relationship, but I sense that some more thought could go in that direction.

Let us return finally to Zizek and I cannot finish without falling back into his jargon:

I would like to offer Anne a different explanation why nuclear weapons have a sublime quality or maybe even a sublime beauty as can be experienced in the aesthetics of nuclear explosion as expressed in movies like Koyaanisqatsi. NW are sublime objects because they participate at the symbolic death. It is the absolute death, the death of the network of meaning itself which is a lack in the symolic order and cannot be represented. This lack has to be concealed by feigning to have power over the artifact which allows to access and embodies the lack: nuclear weapons. But the truth is that absolute and failsafe control over nuclear weapons is not possible.

Symbolic death was always out of the grasp of human kind until nuclear weapons allowed the human species to wield ultimate destruction over itself. There is a homology between symbolic death and individual death. The finitude of one?s existence inscribes itself into the subject and makes it ultimately responsible for what it is doing thus making it an ethical subject. Likewise with NW the finitude of the human species described itself into the symbolic order of the human society. Thus we are now radically responsible for what we are doing as human species. And exactly this excess, the connection to the possible symbolic death, is a feature of the materiality of nuclear weapons. So the conclusion is that the bomb taught human kind maturity. What will happen if we get rid of it? Will the historic lesson prevail?

According to dialectics ala Zizek sometimes we can glimpse a bit of truth in the identification of the radical extremes of a contradiction, to see the hidden solidarity between the extremes or, to put it into hegelese, the speculative identity:

So let us give it a try here: The truth of the bomb is that it is sublime. Disarmament is secretly participating in the contradictions of the bomb and keeps the nuclear order alive, in short: disarmers love the bomb. And the bomb loves us. So, as strange as it is, stop worrying and love the bomb.

Now, here, in very thin air, and in this absurd moment, it is time to hand the microphone over to the ultimate fetishist: Dr. Strangelove. He is like myself a German and unlike myself displaces the contradiction of his former Nazi identity onto his left arm, which is alienated to him and lives a live of his own trying to kill himself the U.S. collaborator. The U.S., because of a crazy air force commander, so to say by accident, is currently conducting a first strike on the Soviet Union and the Soviet Ambassador, invited to the U.S. war room, is going to expose the existence of the russian doomsday machine and stating the identity of weaponization and disarmament with regard to the russian desire for washing machines. From Dr. Strangelove we are then going to hear the essence of deterrence theory [click here].

The question this will leave behind is: why was there historically no doomsday machine as the ultimate deterrent?”

Ecstasy and Extinction

Nuclear Security

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Nevada Nuclear Security (aka Test) Site with my fellow Stanton Nuclear Security Fellows from the Center for International Security And Cooperation (aka Arms Control). Michael Freedman, the CISAC Public Affairs Manager, joined us and wrote up a nice article based on our experience for The Atlantic: “Can We Unlearn the Bomb”.

I like his article not only because it’s a meaningful account of a personal experience, but also because it captures the significance of the interaction between personal and institutional relationships to nuclear testing.

The elements of a robust discourse

Deterrence, Disarmament, Nuclear Security

These thoughts on the elements of a robust discourse emerged from many attempts at explaining why theory matters to a policy oriented audience of nuclear experts:

The need for a new set of concepts through which to understand nuclear security has become increasingly apparent.  Neither nuclear terrorism, nor the proliferation of nuclear weapons to states outside the nuclear nonproliferation regime can be effectively countered by the logic of the existing deterrence paradigm. Previously robust, changes at the operational level have eroded the self-reinforcing nature of the existing paradigm. Deterrence theory has no answer for nuclear terrorism, and nonproliferation policy provides no guidance on how to relate to India, Pakistan, and North Korea, all of which have established nuclear weapons programs, and as such are not eligible for recognition under the Nonproliferation Treaty.

The deterrence paradigm took more than 15 years to mature. At the RAND Corporation, scholars found a unique kind of institutional support for an active theoretical debate, which yielded implementable strategic policies, and effective operational and technical systems. These systems in turn influenced the theoretical ideas, leading back to revised strategic policies. Thus, as a fully mature discourse, the deterrence paradigm included robust debate and activity at a the concrete, operational level, at the level of applied ideas as realized through the strategic policies that directed those actions, and at an abstract level of theoretical analysis through which we comprehend the nature of human interactions with social and material environments, articulate what is politically possible, and make value judgments about what is desirable.

Unlike deterrence, disarmament was never a fully mature discourse. Disarmament, defined as the abolition of nuclear weapons, has existed in the shadow of deterrence as the major competing paradigm since the 1950’s. While the discourse of deterrence operated at all three levels (operationally, politically, and theoretically) the discourse of disarmament was and is primarily an operational discourse. There was never a fully mature theory of disarmament, and therefore no effective strategic policy for how to achieve the desired operational outcome of zero nuclear weapons. Even today in the midst of a renaissance in disarmament politics, disarmament has not matured into a fully robust paradigm.

This brief comparison between deterrence and disarmament is meant neither as a defense of deterrence, or advocacy of disarmament, but rather as an illustration of the importance of fostering a fully robust nuclear paradigm to counter new nuclear threats. Debate needs to thrive at the level of theory, policy and operations in order to produce actionable steps to stable outcomes.

Accounting for the time of a polymath

Uncategorized
Accounting for the time of a polymath

From Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.

This schedule is a different twist on the usual time management tool. BF not only lists what he plans to do, but schedules in terms of meta-level reflection on the purpose his actions serve. In BF’s ideal world his activities are an answer to a question about “the good.” In other words, he makes explicit the connection between the substance and the purpose of his actions.

I came across this schedule as I was in the process of setting up a new version of the document with which I project manage my life, but it occurred to me that this image might also be useful in thinking about the substance versus the purpose of arms control and disarmament treaties and negotiations (AC&D). I argue elsewhere that the explicit substance of AC&D is the control of nuclear weapons and their constituent elements, but the implicit purpose of them is to resolve disputes about dominance and hierarchy between the great powers. Since one of the purposes of this blog is to have a place to collect all the marginalia that might contribute to thinking about nuclear philosophy, I am sticking this image up here to remind myself to think about the substance and purpose of AC&D in terms of an answer (substance) to a question (purpose). For instance, to what question is the Limited Test Ban Treaty an answer?

Confidence and Contradiction in the Nuclear Order

Nuclear Diplomacy, Nuclear Security

I am posting my notes from the presentation I gave at this year’s International Studies Association annual conference. As you will see, I grabbed the text from my previous post about the two questions framing the current debate to set up my critique:

“Confidence and Contradiction in the Nuclear Order”
ISA Presentation
March 19, 2011

The ideas I’d like to share with you today are one aspect of a much larger project in which I reinterpret what nuclear weapons are by asking questions about the special kind of relationship between nuclear weapons and the experience of power in international politics.

The motivation behind this project is a basic belief that if you want to produce new ideas, it is not enough to operate within an establish framework of debate, but rather it is necessary to question the terms of the debate itself.

There are two big questions framing academic debate about U.S. nuclear strategy—these are the same two questions that have framed the debate for more than half a century. The first question is often phrased quite simply as “How much is enough?” by which the speaker means something like “How many nuclear weapons are necessary to maintain peace and security?” In principle, this question could organize a conversation between advocates of disarmament (defined as zero nuclear weapons) and advocates of nuclear deterrence (defined as discouraging military aggression through the threat of nuclear retaliation). However, there is little scholarly literature on disarmament. In contrast, there is a great deal of scholarly literature on deterrence.

Thus, in practice, this question drives debate among a community of deterrence theorists all of whom presume that nuclear weapons are here to stay, but take differing positions on how many weapons the U.S. should maintain in its arsenal, construing the question narrowly as “What are the military requirements of deterrence?” The second question frames a debate about the dynamics of nuclear proliferation and the implementation of the nonproliferation regime. In academic jargon, scholars ask, “What are the determinates of nuclear weapons proliferation?” by which they mean, “Why do states build nuclear weapons?”

Although nuclear weapons are the subject of both questions, scholars typically presume that deterrence and nonproliferation are different kinds of behaviors with different kinds of logic. Deterrence is a military strategy. It explains how and why states maximize their security by doing some things with nuclear weapons, and avoiding others. There is no treaty or agreement that governs the requirements of deterrence. The logic of nuclear deterrence theory governs deterrence and compliance is driven by self-interest.

In contrast, nonproliferation is not a strategy. It is a collective bargain codified in legal agreements, which together form the nonproliferation regime. Compliance is presumed to require enforcement to ensure that states prioritize the collective good over their individual self-interest narrowly construed.

The problem with a debate that presumes deterrence and nonproliferation are different kinds of behaviors with different kinds of logic is that it actually obscures more than it reveals.In this presentation I argue that deterrence and nonproliferation are actually much more similar than they are different.

Rather than treating nonproliferation as a regime, in which compliance is achieved through collective enforcement, in this presentation I recast nonproliferation as a strategy much like the Cold War era strategy of extended deterrence. Extended deterrence required the U.S. to behave in a manner consistent with two mutually exclusive, but equally plausible interpretations of that behavior.

Consistent with the principle that it is rational to threaten an act, even if that act would be irrational to carry out, it had to be believable both that the U.S. could (and would) fight and win a nuclear war in response to a Soviet invasion of Europe, and that the sole purpose of the U.S. nuclear arsenal was to prevent the war that it was built to fight. In other words, extended deterrence required states to maintain a strong distinction between the substance of its declaratory nuclear policy, and the purpose of that same policy. Throughout the Cold war, policymakers were able to create and maintain the existence of two mutually exclusive interpretations by distinguishing between a formal, public discourse about what the U.S. was prepared to do with its nuclear arsenal (a message intended for consumption by an outside audience), contradicted by a second, informal discourse (meant for consumption by an internal audience) about the purpose of that same deterrent.

I argue that the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) exhibits the same structural dynamics as extended deterrence, and therefore should be understood not simply as a treaty or agreement, but as a strategy. Namely, maintaining confidence in the legitimacy of the NPT requires states to accept a distinction between two contradictory interpretations of the same text. These two mutually exclusive interpretations are maintained through, on the one hand, the formal substance of the agreement (the management of nuclear technology), and on the other hand, the informal, but mutually understood, purpose of that same agreement (to reduce nuclear danger while allowing the U.S. and Soviet Union to maintain their nuclear arsenals).

At the core of the substance of the NPT is a political trade-off for non-nuclear weapon states between military security and economic development. Non-nuclear weapon states agree to trade sovereignty over the military decision to produce a nuclear arsenal—and accept invasive inspections to verify that fissile materials have not been diverted from a civilian nuclear program—in exchange for assistance with building and fueling civilian nuclear reactors and the promise that some day nuclear weapons will be eliminated and the two tier system abolished.

While the substance of the NPT is the management of nuclear technology, but the purpose of the NPT was for the U.S. and the Soviet Union to secure their collective interest in the maintenance of a bi-polar system against the diplomatic efforts of France, China and the non-aligned movement led by India and Brazil to construct a formally egalitarian order. Politically, this struggle played out as a fight over whether or not the NPT would restrain both vertical and horizontal proliferation, and whether or not the agreement would contain a timeline to disarm.

In other words, just as confidence in the U.S. extended deterrent required states to maintain the credibility of an incredible threat, confidence in the NPT requires states to maintain the credibility of an incredible pledge to disarm.

What this reinterpretation reveals is that nonproliferation is not a step along the way to disarmament. In fact, effective nonproliferation policies actually decrease the likelihood that the U.S. will eliminate its nuclear weapons. Rather than brining us closer to disarmament, experience suggests that effective nonproliferation reduces the incentive to disarm.

What it does suggest is that the desire to eliminate nuclear weapons has a lot to do with the perception of nuclear danger. Every meaningful diplomatic agreement about nuclear technology has occurred during a period of heightened tension.

For instance, the U.S. and Soviet Union concluded the Limited Test Ban Treaty shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, and the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was concluded after all five members of the U.N. Security Council had their own nuclear arsenals and it appeared that the cascade of new nuclear powers would spin out of control. Yet, by quelling those fears, arms control and nonproliferation treaties also quell the political will to take meaningful action on essential aspects of disarmament such as the establishment of an international fuel bank, or U.N. Security Council reform.

The current renaissance of interest in disarmament is driven by renewed fears of nuclear danger, (the proliferation of nuclear weapons programs; Iran’s development of an uranium enrichment program; the discovery of A.Q. Kahn’s black market in nuclear materials; and the threat of nuclear terrorism posed by new non-state terrorist groups).

What this reinterpretation tell us about the Obama administration’s nuclear agenda is that it will not harness the political will to enact meaningful change towards the goal of disarmament. Rather, the Obama administration’s nuclear agenda is a plan to motivate other states to cooperate in reducing nuclear danger by convincing the world that the U.S. would disarm if it could by apologizing for the fact that it can’t and it won’t. What Obama’s plan will do is reinvigorate a Cold War era nonproliferation regime that effectively postponed nuclear disarmament for more than 25 years.

However, as the instability of the nonproliferation regime over the past decade has already proven, the problem with this approach is that maintaining the credibility of a pledge to disarm is difficult when there is no concrete plan for how to eliminate nuclear weapons. Unlike extended deterrence, the effectiveness of which is difficult to falsify, it is much easier to observe whether or not states are working toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Thus, the nonproliferation regime is likely to suffer intermittent crises as the credibility of the pledge to disarm declines, and confidence in the regime is undermined.

The disarmament movement will have to develop a more stable solution to the problem of nuclear danger. If there is one lesson to be learned from this article’s analysis of the relationship between nonproliferation and disarmament, it is that the credibility of an incredible pledge to disarm cannot be sustained indefinitely.

Reading and time: A dialectic between academic expectation and academic frustration

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Anne forwarded me this small beautiful exchange between scholars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSdHoNJu5fU

I wanted to add that

I do not agree… You never need anything to read anything.

Actually to understand Derrida it is not necessary to read e.g. Sein and Zeit. The question is then of course, what exactly did you understand in reading “Grammatology”, and even more, re-reading it: will you still understand the same? The tricky thing is that claiming to understand anything in philosophy is to a certain extent always a lie.

My problem is that I did not understand this and a lot of times felt dumb and helpless.

So I do not understand Zizek and it took me years to understand him.

The awful thing is that one has to “with-stand” philosophy to “under-stand”. Interestingly in german under-stand is ver-stehen. The  “ver” means that by doing something actively you somehow actively do something not intended.

E.g.

ver-zeihen – for-give (par-don, lat. pro [veniam] dare)

ver-führen – seduce, führen – lead

ver-sagen – fail, sagen – say

Most interesting of those is

ver-sprechen –

It means to promise and to make a slip of the tongue or to make a mistake, sprechen – speak

So by understanding something by the pure meaning of the word verstehen in german you misunderstand while understanding.

So far to the subtelities of language and philosophical meanings. Fortunately Heidegger is making these differences most of the time quite clear.

Still, I read once for training Pablo Neruda in German and Spanish side by side. In german it sounded awful. In spanish it made me get tears in the eyes.

Now to something completely different:

At the end I want to share one of my favorites regarding understanding philosophical texts. But in 2 Translations. Note that the last subsentence is missing in the first.

Hegel’s night of the world.

First in German “von hier“:

Der Mensch ist diese Nacht,

dies leere Nichts, das alles in ihrer Einfachheit enthält
– ein Reichtum unendlich vieler Vorstellungen, Bilder, deren keines ihm gerade einfällt – ,
oder die nicht als gegenwärtige sind.
Dies die Nacht, das Innere der Natur, das hier existiert reines selbst,
– in phantasmagorischen  Vorstellungen ist es rings um Nacht, hier schießt dann ein blutig Kopf,
– dort eine andere weiße Gestalt plötzlich hervor, und verschwinden ebenso
– Diese Nacht erblickt man,
wenn man dem Menschen ins Auge blickt
– in eine Nacht hinein, die furchtbar wird,
– es hängt die Nacht der Welt hier einem entgegen.

In dieser Nacht ist das Seiende zurückgegangen.”

Now in English from here:

“The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful.

it suspends the night of the world here in an opposition. In this night being has returned.”

And here:

“The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity – a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here – pure Self – [and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out toward us.”

Matthias