The opiate of deterrence
DEFENCE J. ENOCH POWELL, MP
It seems as if every generation needs an opiate to dull its senses and save it from the necessity of seriously contemplating a future war.
Between the First and Second World Wars this opiate was 'collective security.' It had a great advantage over its possible alterna- tive, 'disarmament.' One could talk about it as if it existed when it did not. After all, bearing in mind Arthur Henderson's imperishable dic- tum: 'if we do not have disarmament, we shall have armaments,' it was all too plain that, as we had armaments, we had not got disarma- ment. Collective security, on the other hand, could be assumed to exist even after the con- trary had been proved in practice in one case after another; for the addict would always assure himself that collective security was going to work next time. So when we went to war in 1939, we were still talking the language of collective security.
Since the Second World War disarmament has again come off a poor second, for the same reason. But this time the opiate 'of choice' (as the doctors say) has been 'deter- rence.' The nations of Western Europe, and Britain among them, have dosed themselves with deterrence into the conviction—to adopt Harold Macmillan's favourite and elegant wording—that 'there ain't gonna be no war.' While they dozed, wars came and went—in Korea, in Indochina. in India, in the Middle East, in Malaysia and now in Vietnam, but the addicts only murmured: 'No, no; we don't mean wars like that; we mean real war, war that would endanger us. That will not happen, because we have got deterrence.' This was the psychological fall-out from the mushroom clouds which rose over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
'It is difficult to believe,' thus the latest official statement of this country's defence policy, 'that any rational government would reckon to achieve by the use of force against Western Europe any political objective whose value would be remotely commensurate with the appalling risks. . . . Attack by accident, except at the lowest level of military force, is highly improbable. Large-scale attack by mis- calculation is no more likely.' (Statement on the Defence Estimates, /967, Cmnd. 3203, p. 4.) So there it is. No war, or if. by any remote improbability, it happens, the deterrent will still ensure we are no longer on hand to worry.
The opiate of deterrence is especially con- genial to nations whose policy is defensive or non-aggressive, which discern no advantage to be gained by a disturbance of the existing terri- torial or political balance. for as General Andre Beaufre once put it: 'When you wish to pre- vent something, that is deterrence; when you wish to achieve something, that is action.' It is to such nations that the conviction of the impossibility of war is most comforting and most necessary. They generalise their own state of mind, and attribute it to everyone else.
In a remarkable passage which has attracted less attention than it merited, the Secretary of State in a recent defence debate (Hansard, 27 February 1967, column 112) said: 'Everything we know of Soviet military doctrine shows that if war did break out in Europe, Russia would use nuclear weapons from the word "go." She has said so repeatedly; she has rejected every alternative. There is also much in the argument that, since our whole purpose is to prevent a war from breaking out, the deterrent value of our current posture gives Ifs greater security than any attempt to raise the nuclear threshold, which might tempt the other side to risk a conflict staying wholly conventional.'
Both the statements I have italicised are revealing. In the first place, Mr Healey asks us to believe that a nation, with standing con- ventional forces in Eastern Europe so large that it is officially considered hopeless for the Western alliance to resist them, 'has rejected every alternative' to instant nuclear warfare. If so, the Russians must be carrying bluff and deception to a fantastic point—and that when their whole safety would depend on their true intentions being known beyond a doubt. The second argument destroys the first; for it argues that the weaker are one's conventional forces, the surer the deterrent, because the plainer is one's reliance on it. This is the way a nation reasons when it is drugged by an idea.
It amounts to a refusal to think through the strategy of 'action'—in General Beaufre's sense of the word—to envisage how a nation pro- ceeds when it 'wishes to achieve something.' Under that title, Strategy of Action (translated by Major-General R. H. Barry; Faber 25s), General Beaufre has himself recently attempted in outline analysis to do just that. The opera- tions of Germany from 1934 to 1940 provided him with the most convenient material for his study; for Germany achieved more than har- mony, she achieved unity, between policy and strategy: every action was a complete follow- through from the intention via an analysis of the political and military situation of self, opponent and third parties; and the threat or use of force served as an adjunct to political pressures which were exerted at the weakest points of the victims and their potential allies and friends. Shrewdly, the General observes that in the end Germany failed because her analysis had even so been too restricted: 'the Blitzkrieg system was decisive, but only on the continent and in geographically limited campaigns; in fact, Germany's military apparatus was not adequate to her world objective.'
The opiate of deterrence presupposes a gigantic oversimplification of the possibilities of the future and therefore of the sources of a disturbance of the balance of forces, leading to war. It is a salutary corrective to this im- poverishment of imagination to read Beaufre's list of the contemporary dangers to Western Europe, parallel to the German, Soviet and Japanese dangers in the 1930s:
'there is the danger of hegemony by the super- powers, the United States and the USSR, which will increase as they draw closer together; there is the danger of serious crisis and even of war as a result of possible German claims in Central Europe or over-hasty liberalisation in one or more of the satellite states; there is the danger that the Vietnam conflict may escalate; finally in the background there is disquiet for the future because of the Chinese danger together with the threats which may arise from the Third World or the coloured problem in America.'
The list may appear to some incomplete, and to others selective; but it is a reminder that the variety and complexity of reality always outstrip our expectation.
To take one case from the General's list =war as a result of possible German claims in Central Europe'—it is not difficult to con- struct a course of events in which the theoretical deterrent would be hopelessly out- flanked. At each stage, the casts belli nuclearis would not seem to have arisen (Poland in 1939?), or the combatants in the immediate arena of action would be intermingled (Hun- gary in 1956?), or the political interpretation of events would be ambiguous (Czechoslovakia in 1938?), or, more simply, it would be clear to all that the will to self-destruction, which is the very essence of the deterrent theory, was lacking on the part of the victim or the victim's friends and allies.
It is this last doubt, above all, which in- validates the deterrent and threatens to let daylight reality into the dream-world of its addicts. All the more stridently the very possi- bility of doubt must be denied. In the passage following that which I have already quoted, the Secretary of State continued: 'There is no country on the continent which does not be- lieve that a prolonged conventional war would inflict damage on it quite as difficult to bear as the damage resulting from a strategic nuclear exchange. This is not an option which any of our European allies has the slightest intention of accepting.'
In fact, the option does not lie with 'any of our European allies,' except possibly France. The correct question is whether the damage to the continent would be as difficult for America—or conceivably for Britain—to bear as the damage to her from a strategic nuclear exchange. However, leaving even that aside, a deterrent which depends on such a proposition being believed belongs to the same realm of fantasy as the collective security which thirty years ago was also to have ren- dered war impossible.
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