Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Comparative Historical Analysis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Comparative Historical Analysis Geoffrey Forden (bio) Preventive Attack and Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Comparative Historical Analysis. By Lyle J. Goldstein . Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006 Pp. 280. $50. Lyle Goldstein's book is the latest addition to the ongoing debate between "nuclear optimists" and "nuclear pessimists." Nuclear optimists view the sixty-odd years since the last combat use of a nuclear bomb as a sign that, when both sides possess nuclear weapons, war becomes too terrible to contemplate. They conclude that it is better if more countries have nuclear weapons and are not excessively worried as it becomes easier and easier to acquire the necessary technology to build such weapons. By contrast, nuclear pessimists worry that the use of nuclear weapons will become more and more likely as more and more countries obtain them. After all, the history of the cold war has all too many examples of benign events being misinterpreted as threatening and nearly precipitating nuclear holocaust. Until recently, this debate has seemed safely academic. Unfortunately, it has become all too real with the invasion of Iraq and the rise of the "Bush doctrine." This doctrine holds that the spread of nuclear technologies to "radical" nations is the world's foremost danger. Goldstein refines the debate by examining cases where one country has a mature nuclear arsenal and debates whether or not to attack another just starting its journey toward nuclear weapons. Does this asymmetry, he asks, increase the likelihood of war? Unfortunately for the scholar, there has been only one war seemingly fought for counterproliferation purposes: the Second Gulf War, which began in 2003. (Goldstein makes an unconvincing argument that the First Gulf War, in 1991, was fought because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.) This shortage of examples creates a methodological problem that Goldstein solves by expanding his sample to cases that might have led to war if something—a cautious leader, perhaps—had not prevented it. Thus, among a number of case studies, he examines the 1950s debate in the United States about whether to launch a preventive attack on the Soviet Union, the discussions during the early 1960s about a possible attack on nuclear facilities in China, the Soviet contemplation of a similar attack on China in the late 1960s, the relationship between China and India, and Israel's attack on the Iraqi reactor in 1981. The problem is that this methodology leaves to inference the reason why a country might have attacked. A skeptic could come away from this study feeling that nuclear weapons played very much a secondary role to political or ideological motivations. It might be argued, for instance, that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations during the first half of the 1960s and the Kremlin during the later half considered bombing China's nuclear infrastructure more to teach that emerging regional power a lesson by destroying [End Page 251] something of value rather than to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Even more disturbingly, considering Goldstein's subtitle, is his failure to contrast two of his case studies by asking why, after the United States first proposed to the Soviets a joint attack on China's nuclear infrastructure in 1963, America rejected a similar offer from the Kremlin in 1969. If nuclear proliferation was the key concern and Goldstein's hypothesis that extreme asymmetries in nuclear arsenals were truly destabilizing is correct, then the United States should have accepted. After all, the nuclear imbalance between China and America had only increased over those six years. Instead, the Nixon administration saw China as an important counterbalance to Russia and cultivated it diplomatically: other geopolitical reasons easily dominated counterproliferation concerns. We can suspect similar subtexts at play in the run up to the Second Gulf War. Of Goldstein's major case studies, only the Israeli attack on Hussein's nuclear research reactor in 1981 presents a convincing case of preventive attack on a budding proliferator. But Goldstein fails to ask the obvious counterfactual question: would Israel have attacked even if it did not have a nuclear arsenal? Clearly, the evidence presented indicates that it would have. That would not comport with...