The Abyss Gazes Also

Three years ago, the Blasphemy Blog was in the same room as Franklin Miller, who at the time worked for the National Security Council. His job portfolio included nuclear weapons, and he was in the room to discuss the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. The United States doesn’t generally build and test new nuclear weapons these days, but some people, including Mr. Miller, thought this “bunker buster” bomb would be a good idea, because it could blow up Osama bin Laden’s bunker even if he were really, really far down underground.

Mr. Miller was big on deterrence theory, which argues for maintenance of strategic influence by, to quote him more or less directly, “holding at risk that which the enemy values.” In Mr. Miller’s eyes, the power of the United States came not from Chairman Mao’s barrel of a gun, but from the threat and the idea of the gun. Mr. Miller argued that the fact that we threatened to use, but did not use, our nuclear weapons made the United States a more moral country than our adversaries, who would certainly use nuclear weapons on us if they had the chance.

This line of reasoning, if you accept that the United States is basically good and that its adversaries are evil, works. But it works only to a point. This is because a threat to use force must be backed by the genuine belief in the minds of one’s adversaries that force will be used. Therefore, deterrence can only be moral to a point.

In order for deterrence to be effective, we have to convince our enemies that we’re just crazy enough to drop the big one. But the only way to convince people we are violent is to be violent. If all we do is talk about being violent, our enemies assume that we don’t really mean it. In order to convince our enemies that we are not really as good as we are, we have to actually not be as good as we are.

This is the unfortunate thing about violence: it uses our best intentions to propagate itself. Do we use it with the best of intentions? Of course we do. But violence, like a virus, uses us as well. It takes on a life of its own. And its intentions are far from noble.