(upbeat synth music)
- Hello, I'm Randall Pinkston,
and welcome to Ethics Matter,
sponsored by the
Carnegie Council
for Ethics in
International Affairs.
Our guest today is
Dr. Scott Sagan.
He is the Caroline
S. G. Munro Professor
in the Department
of Political Science
and a senior fellow, Center
for International Security
and Cooperation,
Freeman Spogli Institute
for International Studies
at Stanford University.
Welcome, Dr. Sagan.
- Thank you.
- You are the author
of several books,
articles on nuclear weapons.
I think your resume
runs about nine pages.
I counted them.
And you focus on issues such
as targeting, deterrence,
and the ethics of
using nuclear weapons.
Now, in recent months,
maybe even recent years,
we've heard a lot about
presidential executive orders.
Well today, our audience
is going to be introduced
to a presidential
directive that I suspect
not a lot of Americans know
about, the presidential guidance
on the employment
of nuclear weapons.
We'll get to that in a moment.
But first, let's talk about
your most recent work.
You are one of the coauthors
of Ethics, Technology, and War
and The Nuclear
Necessity Principle:
Making U.S. Targeting
Policy Conform
with the Ethics and Laws of War.
Now, both of those
articles, as you know
since you wrote them,
appear in the Fall issue
of Daedalus, the
quarterly publication
of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences.
Now, the bottom line,
you say, is that there is
a difference between
how America talks
about nuclear deterrence
and how it's practiced.
So, let's explore
that perspective,
beginning with one
of your quotes.
You write, "Technological
innovations
"and political
developments are changing
"the nature of warfare,
posing complex challenges
"to traditional standards,
which fall under the influence
"of international law and
the just war doctrine."
Before we talk about the
innovation and the changes,
would you just please
review, for those of us
who maybe never
learned it or forget,
exactly what is the
just war doctrine,
and would you talk about
those three components,
those three main
components of just war?
- Just war doctrine is a set
of philosophical principles
that most states, not all,
but most states aspire to.
Just war doctrine traditionally
is divided into
these three areas.
Jus ad bellum, which is the
justice of going to war,
for example, only
in self-defense,
or in perhaps
preemption, if it is done
as anticipatory self-defense
against an enemy who is
about to attack you and you
have no other alternative.
Then there is jus in bello,
justice of the fighting itself.
What are the laws
of armed conflict?
Once you're actually
in a conflict, what
do you have to do?
And those principles
would include
this noncombatant
immunity principle,
the principle of distinction,
you have distinguish
between military targets
and civilian targets,
principles of proportionality.
And there's a third one
here, which is often called
risk acceptance or
feasible precaution.
Michael Walzer, who is really
the dean of just war doctrine,
in his book, Just
and Unjust Wars,
gives an example
of a young soldier
in the First World War who
hears activity going on
in a cellar of a house
that he's passing by
in what had just been a
German-occupied village.
And his instinct originally
was to pull out a hand grenade
and toss it in
'cause this might be
a German sniper coming
out to kill him.
But instead, he opens
the door and shouts out,
"I've got guns on this building.
"Come out with your hands up."
Now, he took some
risk upon himself,
and it turns out that there
were just civilians down there.
What Walzer says is
that proportionality
and the principle of
noncombatant immunity
are not enough.
We also want our soldiers
to do something active
to try to protect civilians,
to take even some risk
to themselves, to
show some restraint
in their actions, even at
some risk to themselves.
And so those would be the three
main components, I would
say, of jus in bello.
- Let's talk about
that presidential
directive dealing
with nuclear weapons.
In 2013, former President Obama,
well, he was President at the
time, he issued new guidance
for the employment
of nuclear weapons
that directly correlated
with a key component
of the just war doctrine and
the Law of Armed Conflict.
Now, let me quote you
the operative phrase
from the President's statement.
Mr. Obama said, "All U.S.
nuclear plans must apply
"the principles of distinction
and proportionality,
"and seek to minimize
collateral damage
"to civil populations
and civilian objects."
Now, you and your coauthor
Jeffrey Lewis argue
that President Obama's doctrine
should result in a new doctrine,
which you call, "the nuclear
necessity principle."
What is that?
How would it work?
- Let me take you back a
little bit to the beginning
to help understand how
there's been a tradition
in the United States, in my
judgment, of obfuscating,
of using euphemisms
about nuclear weapons.
Harry Truman, when he announced
the dropping of the bomb,
said it was dropped on
Hiroshima, a military base,
so that we could avoid as much
as possible noncombatants.
He later, when he
realized what this meant
and the destruction
involved, privately said
that he didn't want
to drop the third bomb
that he could have
because he didn't want
to kill all those
women and children.
So Harry Truman understood
what nuclear weapons
can do if they're
dropped on a city.
Hiroshima did have a military
industry along the edge of it,
but actually we moved the
target from the industrial site
to the center of the town so
that it would kill more people.
We were deliberately trying
to kill lots of people
to shock the Japanese
government into surrendering.
- Did President Truman know
about the moving of the target?
- No, no, but he
knew that Hiroshima,
along with a number of other
cities, had been left unscathed
by the U.S. conventional
bombing attack
precisely because we
wanted to blow it up
in as dramatic a way as possible
once we got the bomb
so that could compel
the Japanese government
into surrendering.
- Now, isn't there a line
of philosophical thought
that says that kind
of use of a weapon
in a war is appropriate
if it's going
to force the civilians
into putting pressure
on their government to
lay down their arms?
- There are people
who argue that.
And certainly it is a, I think,
reasonable argument to make
about threatening to do things
that you would not
necessarily want to do.
I think we would
not want to kill
lots of innocent civilians today
under any circumstances,
certainly not deliberately.
And we have signed
agreements that said,
the principles of distinction,
that we do not deliberately
target noncombatants.
What Obama did by signing
that executive order
on the employment of
nuclear weapons was to tell
the military that, "Even with
nuclear weapons, I want you
"to follow the principles
of noncombatant immunity.
"Do not aim deliberately
at civilian structures."
Now, back on this point that
we sometimes use euphemisms.
We've had a tradition
in the United States
that goes back a
long ways of saying,
"We don't target
populations, per se."
That was a Nixon
Administration-era statement.
But under that doctrine,
what we were doing
as the guidance was to tell
for the sake of deterrence,
this is during the Soviet Union,
during the Cold War period,
for the sake of deterrence,
the military was told that,
"You're supposed to
target the ability
"of the Soviet Union to
recover from a nuclear war."
Because if they can't
recover, that's going
to make sure that
they don't start it.
And so that was the logic
of it, but in doing that--
- That meant we
were going to target
their fertilizer plants
and food bins, and--
- We'd do all those
kinds of things.
We had this huge--
- Starve them to death.
- Huge number of weapons and
a huge number of targets,
and we were doing
studies to say,
"Well, how quickly
could they recover?"
We claimed that we weren't
targeting civilians, per se,
but our policy in
terms of the way it was
being implemented was
to starve them to death.
And to me, that's
the same thing.
That shouldn't be considered to
be an ethical way of targeting.
So what Obama is saying,
here's a President
who really cares about
just war doctrine,
who uses the Nobel Peace
Prize speech not to just talk
about peace but also
to talk about just war.
"There's evil in
the world," he says.
"There are times where
we have to go to war
"to combat that evil,
to respond to that evil,
"and we will follow
the principles of
just war doctrine."
So now he's putting his
money where his mouth is
by having the policy
really ingrained,
not just in the Laws
of Armed Conflict
what the military is now
trained to understand,
but also with our
nuclear weapons policy.
And what Jeffrey and I are
trying to do here is to say,
is it enough to
say, "Well, we will
"not deliberately
target civilians?"
Is it enough to say, "We will
"use the principles
of proportionality?"
Shouldn't we also say, "We
should not use nuclear weapons
"against any target in
which a nuclear weapon
"isn't necessary to
destroy that target?"
Because otherwise you could
say, "Well, we want to target
"that plant or
that military base.
"If it's absolutely
necessary for its destruction
"to use a nuclear
weapon, then you'd have
"to calculate whether
it's proportional.
"But if you could use
a conventional weapon
"for the same purpose and it
would be roughly equivalent,
"why would you want to use
the nuclear weapon at all?"
So, there have been
some who have responded
to this saying, "This
is just common sense.
"Of course we should add that."
There are others who say,
"No, because this would
"weaken deterrence,
because we want
"the collateral
damage that could come
"from a nuclear attack
against a legitimate target,
"the collateral damage
of civilians nearby,
"we want that for the
sake of deterrence."
- You want to put the fear of
a nuclear weapon in the enemy.
- But if you're using
collateral damage
for deterrence purposes,
it's no longer collateral.
It's now part of your purpose.
- Mm-hmm.
- So that's where I think
the debate is today.
And I think it's
an important one.
- You also talk in your article
about the decisions that
military commanders have to make
to comply with the rules
that are established
for the employment
of nuclear weapons.
- [Scott] Right.
- And, you say
that it's difficult
for them to know
exactly what to do
because they're
dealing with civilians
who have vague and sometimes
not-too-logically-thought-out
goals to employ
a military tactic, a weapon.
How does that work in
your necessity doctrine?
What's the military
commander who gets
the order, what are
they supposed to do?
- Well, my view would
be that the war plan
should be designed with
that principle in mind,
so that if there
are still targets
that require a nuclear
weapon for their destruction,
the weapons are limited to those
rather than saying
we're going to have
a large-scale first
use or second use,
and that the military commanders
following those
rules should have,
far fewer weapons
would be necessary.
Nuclear weapons
would be necessary,
Far more conventional
weapons would
be necessary under
that principle.
Now, there may be some
critics who would say,
by making war less costly,
you're making it more likely.
- Hm.
- And I think we have to
accept that criticism.
That is, by saying we're
going to reduce the role
of nuclear weapons in
U.S. national policy,
it might make it
more tempting for someone
to use conventional weapons.
But I would rather
have that temptation
than to have the
temptation of using
nuclear weapons when
you don't need them.
- You say that U.S.
military officers
want to follow the laws
of war, seeking to be
just warriors and
not illegal killers,
but they are in a nearly
impossible position
because of the expanded
definition of military optics,
the creation of loopholes,
the exceptions to rules.
And any of those,
or a combination of
those, could produce,
you say, tens of millions
of noncombatant deaths.
- [Scott] Yes.
- [Randall] Tens of millions.
- Yes, and these are huge
weapons, and if you're having
a thousand of them go off
in Russia or in China,
there could be tens
of millions of deaths.
And I don't want
the U.S. military to
ever have to do that.
But, we have loosened the rules.
In Laws of Armed
Conflict, as in all laws,
you have two different
kinds of rules,
one you can call rules,
one you can call standards.
Rules are rules
that are more tight.
Say, for example,
if you're driving,
that you can't drive
above 65 miles an hour.
- That's a rule.
- That's a rule.
A standard is I'm gonna
give you a standard
that you have to interpret,
like don't drive recklessly.
That's a standard.
Most of what we call the Laws
of Armed Conflict are standards.
They require interpretation
on the part of an officer.
And I would like to see
some of those standards
tightened up, become
more like rules.
And the example that's very
relevant here is the question
of what is a military target
and what is a civilian target.
Following the Laws
of Armed Conflict,
the lawyers,
civilian and military
in the Pentagon, have
rules that they say,
they've written these out,
and they're not classified,
that as an officer, you can
only target a military target.
However, if you see a civilian
target that you believe
could be used in the future
for military purposes,
we will deem that to be a
legitimate military target.
And the example that they
give is a civilian airport.
So in my judgment, that's
too loose of a rule.
That's a very loose standard.
You should make it a
more tightened rule.
- Well, tell me this.
You just mentioned the civilian
and the military
planners in the Pentagon.
What is the role of
civilians in establishing
targets, in deciding the
tonnage, the throw-weight?
What is the role of
civilians versus military?
Who controls our
nuclear arsenal?
I guess that's really
what I'm asking.
- I think there's
been a sea change
in the degree of control
on the part of civilians.
During the Cold War, when I
worked inside the Pentagon,
civilians had relatively
loose control.
The President would give
a two-page guidance,
and it would go to the
Secretary of Defense
who would then add a little
more guidance language,
and then it would go to
the Joint Chiefs of Staff
and the Joint Chiefs of
Staff would add more,
and they would go to the
Strategic Air Command.
And, it would go from a two-page
document to a massive war plan.
It took lots of interpretation,
and the civilians
were often cut out of the loop.
- Did it ever go back to the
President for final sign-off?
- It went back to the
President for a briefing,
but it was a briefing
without a whole lot
of detail and without
a lot of staff--
- To explain it.
- To explain it and to go over,
"This is why this and this."
So you had times where we were
literally attacking Moscow
with 70, 80 weapons.
And so it got pretty
crazy because the military
was doing what they're
really good at,
which is following the
procedures that they have.
And they had you had to have
to have high damage expectance
against this target,
against that target.
We don't know the
conditions, whether we'll be
shooting first or second, so
therefore, you want to put
more weapons on in case
the ones you were going
to have weren't launched,
and it got out of control.
So under Reagan and then
Bush One, George H. W. Bush,
there was, I think, a
really important effort
for civilians to take
better control over this.
And, with a cooperative
Strategic Air Command,
they are the strategic command,
they got so that
they're actually now
much more integrated.
So civilians know more and
are following things more.
It doesn't mean that
necessarily you have to agree
with everything that
the civilians are doing,
but it's no longer, in my
judgment, a runaway military,
a military that doesn't
have sufficient guidance.
It has the guidance.
The question is, what
should that guidance be?
- Didn't you write that, I
think it was General LeMay,
at one point said, "There
are no innocent civilians?"
Was it General
LeMay who said that?
- [Scott] Correct.
- And, so I'm wondering,
so that's a mindset
of a military person, of
someone who is a warrior.
- [Scott] I think
that's the mindset
of a military person from 1945.
It's not the mindset of
a military officer today.
- Okay, all right, that's
my question, whether--
- I think American military
officers get it now.
They want to be warriors,
not to be murderers.
They know that there
are innocent people,
and they know that
their job is not just
to protect American
innocent people,
but to protect innocent
people in foreign countries,
even civilians who may support
their government that's
fighting against us.
But I'm worried about
the American public
and their responses
in this area.
Every August, there is
a poll that takes place
that is trying to gauge the
American public's support,
or lack thereof, for what
happened in August 1945.
Were we correct?
Did Truman do the right thing?
And that poll shows
that since its
height in 1945 at 85%
public support
for using the bomb
in Hiroshima, Nagasaki
is now down to 45%.
When I see that
data, many scholars
and pundits have
said that this means
that the public has
a nuclear taboo,
that we're not willing
to use nuclear weapons.
Looking at that, my
coauthor, Ben Valentino,
a professor at
Dartmouth, and I noticed
that you can't really
tell from that data
whether the public's
changed their views
about nuclear weapons
or whether they've just
changed their views about Japan.
Because maybe it was
just hard to imagine
using nuclear weapons against
our friends, the Japanese.
Moreover, none of
those questions
have ever put the audience,
the participants in the study,
into the situation that
we were at in 1945,
where we felt we had
at least to choose
between an invasion
killing lots of Americans
versus dropping the
bomb to try to shock
the Japanese government
into surrender.
So what Professor
Valentino and I did
was create a survey experiment,
taking a representative sample
of the American public,
having them read a story
that replicates in a
reasonable fashion,
or to a reasonable degree,
the conditions of 1945 today.
And we call this paper,
which is coming out
in International Security,
Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran.
- [Randall] In Iran.
- The story that everyone reads,
saying, "This is a fictional
story but we want to get you
"to read it and contemplate
what you think we should do,"
is that Iran is accused
by the United States
of violating the Iran
agreement, the nuclear deal,
and we put sanctions back on.
The Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps,
in retaliation
for the sanctions,
attacks and sinks a U.S.
ship, killing 2,406 people.
And the President and
Congress declare war.
The President calls for
unconditional surrender.
And after the initial
fighting begins,
he's told that, "You
have two options.
"You can either
drop a nuclear bomb
"on the second-largest
city of Iran,
"and we think that
that will end the war.
"Or you could invade
and march up to Tehran,
"and we will lose 20,000
troops if we march to Tehran.
"We'll still win."
And then the respondents
are asked to say,
"Which of these options
would you prefer?"
And, regardless of what you
preferred, if the President
chose the nuclear
option, would you--
- Support it.
- Support it.
Would you approve of it?
And then with this
experiment side,
these are survey experiments.
We ask the same exact situation,
except you vary one thing.
So like a real experiment,
you can actually see
how that one additional
thing changes people's views.
So, we have one condition
where 20,000 Americans die
or 100,000, like
Hiroshima, Iranians.
And it's deliberately
designed to drop on a city.
We have a second in which two
million Iranians are killed,
still 20,000 Americans
versus two million.
And one where we say
we're going to drop
conventional weapons on the
city and 100,000 will die.
And what we find is
that rather than having
the below 50%, the 45% who say,
"Yeah, it was the right
thing to do against Japan,"
we now get 60% of
the public saying,
"We should drop the bomb.
"We would approve of
dropping the bomb on Iran."
And if you increase
it to two million,
you still get 60% of the public
saying we should drop
the bomb on Iran.
And if you say, "Well,
we're not gonna drop
"the nuclear bomb, but
we'll kill 100,000 people
"deliberately with
conventional weapons,"
we get 67% of the
public supporting that.
So we find this to be really
shocking and disappointing,
because these are not
collateral damage attacks.
These are deliberate
attacks, these are violations
of the laws of war, it's a
violation of our own principles,
and yet the public, when
it comes to revenge--
- Proportionality
is out the window.
- Absolutely.
- Distinction is out the window.
- And that is wrong, but
that is what we're finding.
So this is a really
disturbing piece of research
that suggests that we
have a lot more to do
to try to inculcate
these principles.
Now, I used to teach
just war doctrine
and Laws of Armed
Conflict by saying,
"We should look at these
laws, and do they comport
"with your moral compass,
with your moral intuition?"
And that's how we would
try to discuss them.
I now feel, however, that we
need the Laws of Armed Conflict
because they counter some
of our moral intuitions,
'cause our moral intuitions
aren't very moral sometimes.
They're filled with notions
of retribution and revenge.
- They are emotional responses.
- That's right.
- They are responses to fear.
- In one of our experiments,
we've asked people to describe
why they chose what they did,
and we found a slight increase
in the number of people
who made comments about Iranians
being animalistic,
not being human.
The more people you killed
in an experiment, the more
you made comments like that,
"The Iranians deserved it.
"They deserve to die."
So what we suggest is that
what people sometimes do
is not assign the
culpability of a target
based on what the target's done,
but how much they
need to justify it
because of what evil
we've done to them.
- To sum up our
discussion today,
you say that when it
comes to the employment
of nuclear weapons, the
rules as they now stand,
the principles of distinction
and proportionality,
they are not sufficient
to deal with the legal
and ethical challenges
posed by nuclear weapons,
that America now, and
our nuclear allies,
need to change their thinking
about nuclear weapons,
to reduce reliance on
them, and to only use them
when it's absolutely necessary
because nothing else will work.
- That is what I believe.
I think that we need to
have a much more open,
transparent debate
about these weapons
in a world in which
we have adversaries
who have nuclear weapons
and where the proliferation
of weapons to other states
is a very serious problem.
I don't see an easy way to
get rid of nuclear weapons.
I do think, however,
that the United States
could have fewer of
them and needs to think
really long and hard about
what are the purposes
that these weapons
might still hold.
And I think those
purposes should not be
the deliberate killing
of civilians under
any circumstances.
And I also think that we
could reduce the numbers
that we need for legitimate
deterrence purposes
by having a much
more conventional
weapon orientation
to our war plans.
Most of our war
plans are like that.
I think the Strategic
Command's war plans
should be increased in terms
of their conventional quality
rather than their
nuclear quality.
- Dr. Scott Sagan, thank you
for joining us on Ethics Matter.
- Thank you.
It's been a real pleasure.
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