I've been reading David R. Lake's "The Limits of Coercive Airpower" from the summer 2009 issue of International Security. It's an interesting analysis of the causes of the capitulation of Slobodan Milosevic in the conflict over Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. The Kosovo episode matters because it is often claimed by airpower advocates as clear evidence that a regime can be coerced by airpower alone.

What struck me about Lake's argument, however, was the way he talks about coercion. Here is his definition of coercion: "Coercion is the attempt to induce policy change in another entity through the issuance of threat." [Instead of "induce policy change" I would have said "take an action." By making policy the descriptor of what may be coerced you almost by definition limit coercion to governments of some sort. I think by most definitions of coercion individuals may be coerced as well.]

He goes on:

A target that does not believe it will pay a price or that fails to understand the potential consequences of noncompliance is unlikely to comply with the coercer's demands. To be effective, therefore, coercion requires that the target be able to make a rational assessment of its choices. Unless the target is concerned with the outcomes of its choices, has a preference ordering over those outcomes, and chooses policy based on anticipated outcomes, coercion is impossible.

This is a remarkable statement. Coercion is possible - by definition - only where a rational choice can be made. 

This strikes me as a peculiar definition of coercion. Mice that are trained in a lab with electrical shocks to prefer one form of behavior over another - they're rational?

William James says that human actions are usually motivated by an amalgam of thinking and feeling inextricably mixed together. My guess is that emotion plays an important role in coercion. Consider the following example: a ruler has 500 of his subjects captured. The bad guys threaten to kill one subject per day until the ruler agrees to turn over 100 pounds of gold to them. Or whatever. The ruler refuses and each day one subject is killed within sight of the ruler's walls. The ruler's resolution is strong, however. One day, however, the ruler's mother dies, it rains all day, and he falls down the stairs and hurts himself badly. The next morning, weighed down by grief, depressed by the weather, tortured by pain, the ruler submits and sends out the gold.

Did the ruler act rationally? Did the coercion work because of a rational weighing of costs? Is this scenario somehow wildly at odds with human behavior or extremely unlikely in some other way? Is this not coercion (because emotion affected the ruler's choice)?

Lake seems to be saying that any time a person chooses they are taking a purely rational action. Choice is, by definition, rational. This is not the way I understand choice at all.

Choice is the fateful selection of one action over another by a process that is as likely to be mysterious in retrospect as it was at the time. In many instances the only rational part of choosing is the rationalizing that goes on afterward in an attempt to convince ourselves that we had a reason for what we did. 

[In fact, this ex post facto rationalizing is a well-attested and closely studied phenomenon of human behavior. See, for example, chapters one and two of Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis.]

When someone says, "You're overwrought. Don't decide now. Wait until tomorrow and then see how you feel." We don't accuse such a person of talking gibberish or acting crazy. This is the sort of advice that is so unexceptional that it is a commonplace. These words make the place of emotion in decision making - and our acknowledgement of that place - clear.

 I find the way in which rational choice theorists blandly ignore considerable common sense and a fair amount of scientific research breathtaking.

Matthew Fuhrman has an article ("Spreading Temptation: Proliferation and Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation Agreements") in the Summer 2009 International Security that argues that giving countries assistance makes it more likely that they will acquire nuclear weapons. Initially this seems like quite a claim. If it were true, it would make assistance with nuclear power much more problematic. It does more than that, it fundamentally undermines the basic agreement on which the NPT is built.

But on closer inspection, there is less here than meets the eye. He gives a very thorough and useful description of the various sorts of help that different countries have received. The three case studies are illuminating. And he has done an impressive statistical analysis of assistance agreements (of which there are hundreds) in which nuclear nations help non-nuclear nations with civilian nuclear power. 

But there are only ten countries that ever decided to build nuclear weapons and then built them. One, South Africa, later had buyer's remorse and dismantled their nuclear weapons. Of these ten, four built their weapons without outside support or help in the form of civilians nuclear power assistance agreements: the United States, Russia, Great Britain and France.

This means that the total number of countries who both received assistance with nuclear power and went on to build nuclear weapons is six. I don't care how careful the analysis, six cases is not enough on which to build reliable conclusions.

When I was in Washington on Tuesday Miles Pomper, who's a Senior Research Associate of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, asked a good question at the book event for Elements of a Nuclear Disarmament Treaty. "The US doesn't need nukes because it can use precision guided munitions," he said, echoing a point in my presentation, "but what if you're a poor country. Doesn't it make sense to have nukes if you don't have the technology for precision guided munitions? How are you going to reliably blow stuff up without nukes?"

It's a good point. The United States doesn't need nukes because we have a far more sophisticated military with lots of other tools in our toolbox that can get the job done. But what if you don't have this expensive, technologically advanced toolkit? Don't nukes make a suitable replacement?

I think the answer is no. There are several reasons. First, building and maintaining nuclear weapons is enormously expensive. If you're going to spend that kind of money, you might as well build missiles and expensive guidance systems. You can buy cruise missiles and have a fairly reliable alternative for a lot less money.

If you use a nuclear weapon to take out a key military target - a command center in a city, for example - you create a number of problems. Nuclear weapons, because they are so large and clumsy, will necessarily kill a large number of civilians. This will have two consequences: 1) it will harden the resolve of your adversary almost to the point of fanaticism and 2) it will create enemies for you abroad.

People always imagine that using nuclear weapons will cow opponents. But killing civilians almost never leads to surrender. I won't say it has never happened. But for all the civilians killed in war the number of surrenders directly motivated by those killings approaches zero. Far more common is a spike in desire for revenge, increased enlistments, and hardened resolve. The attacks of 9/11 didn't inspire calls for surrender. They made people angry and filled with rage. A nuclear attack would kill far larger numbers of civilians than were killed in the United States in 9/11. Imagine the emotions created by 9/11 multiplied by a hundred. That's a lot of determination.

Also, attacks with nuclear weapons create problems around the world. The countries that felt inclined to ally with you draw back, the countries inclined to come to the aid of your opponent feel more inclined to do so. Possibly you incite countries to come into the war on the other side. You certainly create long term distrust and dislike in the world community. Bringing additional countries into the war against you is potentially disastrous. Creating long term enmity is a serious drawback.

So it seems to me that even if you didn't have the ability, as the United States does, to use precision guided munitions as a substitute, that it still wouldn't make sense to build nuclear weapons. You'd be far better off spending your money on conventional weapons that were not as clumsy and that had fewer negative side affects.

I don't think I had thought this through in my mind and Miles' question pushed me to do that. Thanks Miles.

The conventional wisdom has always been that a world without nuclear weapons would be dangerously unstable. Drawn by the power of nuclear weapons, nations would constantly be tempted to cheat. I show convincingly that this is not so in "Stable at Zero: Enforcing the Peace in a World Without Nuclear Weapons," a chapter in Elements of a Nuclear Disarmament Treaty just out yesterday.

George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn famously said that the world should move toward eliminating nuclear weapons. But their rationale for doing so (a rationale that has since been adopted by lots of people - in part because of the authority of these four) is, unfortunately, unlikely to lead to the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The four former Cold Warriors give two unelaborated reasons for moving toward elimination: 1) ongoing proliferation makes it increasingly likely that nuclear weapons will fall into the wrong hands, and 2) nuclear deterrence is "increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective." Neither of these arguments makes progress toward eventual elimination likely.

The "wrong hands" argument is popular because of all the attention and passion that Americans have poured into the notion of terrorist attacks. It also neatly explains why these four might have been in favor of nuclear weapons then (when they advocated for them) but are against them now. During the Cold War (it could be argued) nuclear weapons were tightly controlled and mostly only in the hands of the US, the Soviet Union or their allies. Now, however, more and more countries are getting or are interested in getting nuclear weapons. With so many arsenals, it's only a matter of time before terrorists or irresponsible regimes get their hands on them.

The problem with the "wrong hands" argument is that it will cause Americans to clutch more tightly to their nuclear weapons, not eventually let them go. Extensive research has been done on public attitudes about nuclear weapons. Mention "bad guys" and people react emotionally: they suddenly find themselves wanting the most effective protection available. And what could be more effective than the biggest bomb there is?

Frighten people, make them think of the strange, unpredictable, fanatical "other" and you harden the desire to keep nuclear weapons. The way to get rid of nuclear weapons is to make them seem like a common danger - one that threatens all of us. Recast nuclear weapons as being like hurricanes - enormously destructive to all - and you are likely to make progress. Remind people that they're afraid of strange people who have different ways and you are likely to impede progress.

On the second point (the notion that nuclear deterrence is getting less effective somehow) what's amazing is that this notion is so widespread while at the same time has so little solid intellectual foundation. I presume that what the Four have in mind here is that as more and more countries get nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence works less well. -That while two-sided nuclear deterrence might work, many-sided nuclear deterrence works less well or not at all. While this idea has a certain plausibility, there hasn't been, as far as I know, any formal development of the theory: no scholarly debate, no books expounding the point in a scholarly way, no equivalent to Strategy in the Missile Age or Arms and Influence. 

The suggestion that nuclear deterrence is a bit less effective doesn't lead toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. Even if full-fledged deterrence is less useful, one could argue, wouldn't it be prudent to keep a few nuclear weapons, say, 50, just in case? The "nuclear deterrence seems to be less effective" argument seems like a good reason to abandon old-style nuclear deterrence using strategic arsenals with thousands of weapons. But it doesn't force you irresistibly toward complete elimination.

Eliminating nuclear weapons will require strong, clear arguments that have been thoroughly discussed. And it will have to be based on a notion that points to the common danger that nuclear weapons pose to all people, rather than dividing the world into the "responsible" and the dangerous others.

Shultz, Kissinger, Perry, and Nunn are to be commended for changing and restarting the debate. But more needs to be done.