The Price of Dominance: The New Weapons of Mass Destruction and their Challenge to American Leadership. . - book review

Parameters, Winter, 2001 by Keith W. Major Mines

The price of dominance: The new weapons of mass destruction and their challenge to american leadership. By jan lodal. washington: council on foreign relations, 2001. 160 pages. $19.95 (paper). Reviewed by major keith w. mines, usar, political-military affairs officer, us embassy, budapest.

For ten years we have tried to associate the demise of our greatest nuclear adversary with a reduction of the nuclear threat. It was folly, really, since the weapons were never strictly confined geographically except to the extent our opponent allowed; the Cold War, if anything, brought a level of control and discipline to the nuclear question that may never be replicated. The nuclear threat is back with a vengeance, but in response we have offered up an effort so compartmentalized that insurgents and terrorists could probably improve their craft by watching us--nonproliferators in one corner, arms controllers in another, nuclear strategists somewhere else, with the missile defense cabal now taking center stage. Jan Lodal believes this is a mistake, that if the world is to be safe from the new threats it will need a comprehensive strategy with strong American leadership.

If you read one book on weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Lodal's The Price of Dominance would be a good candidate. What sets Lodal's book apart from the other current books on WMD is simple comprehensiveness--he is not writing about a certain set of scenarios, or about one WMD experience, or about policy prescriptions for a single region or issue. Rather, he is outlining a new paradigm, that weapons of mass destruction must be given a place of prominence in our security policy, and that there must be a comprehensive approach to managing them. We are suffering, Lodal says, from "the lack of a sustainable national policy for dealing with WMD" because there is "no national consensus on how to proceed." He offers a way to proceed in clear, concise detail.

Lodal assumes up front the primacy of WMD to US national security policy by painting a brief picture of how we moved from a relatively safe and promising post-Cold War world to the current world full of emerging threats. From the premise that WMD are the greatest threat America faces, Lodal outlines three competing strategic visions, all of which are active in our policies today. The first--more arms control--would call for modernizing but maintaining the Cold War-era arms control regime with Russia and updating the multilateral nonproliferation conventions. The second--reliance on an undefeatable active defense--would abandon the current strategy of deterrence and adopt a robust national antiballistic missile defense. Third--nuclear abolition--would move America to a posture of "minimum deterrence" supported by no more than a few hundred nuclear weapons.

All of these strategies, says Lodal, are flawed. Arms control is gridlocked and has lost much of its core constituency; active defense might be politically popular but is technically unlikely; and abolition simply won't work. Our current policy, Lodal postulates, reflects the natural desire to keep the best of each of these strategies, despite the resulting inconsistencies. What is needed is a "new strategic vision that is internally consistent, protects America against the limited residual threat of nuclear war with Russia and China, and can deal with the new WMD threats stemming from terrorists and rogue states."

The greatest strength of Lodal's book is the simple recognition that everything in our nuclear policy is related to everything else. Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler's recent testimony and report on nonproliferation programs with Russia was a sobering reminder of the residual threat from the large Cold War stockpiles of nuclear weapons. But while they suggest a number of solid recommendations on reducing this threat, it would be pure folly to think that we can be successful in nonproliferation programs in Russia independent of the larger environment that includes force postures and active defenses as well. Everything we do affects everything else.

The book does, however, suffer from a questionable assumption. Lodal's key premise, from which the book derives its title, is that nations are developing weapons of mass destruction primarily to counter the absolute dominance of the United States. This is overly simplistic, and ignores the regional rivalries and simple drive to superpower status that have led to the recent acquisition of weapons. A proper understanding of the geopolitical landscape within which these new nuclear powers are emerging would be a helpful anchor to new policies, although I am not sure it would substantially change the outcome of Lodal's plan.

A second criticism is that while The Price of Dominance is one of the most comprehensive of recent books in its policy prescriptions, even Lodal might not go far enough. In a recent article, Ivan Eland suggests that "The Best Defense is to Give No Offense," arguing that one way to avert the nuclear threat is to not to provoke other nations in the first place. Similarly, Paul Bracken's Fire In the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age and Robert Chandler's The New Face of War: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Revitalization of America's Transoceanic Military Strategy state that overseas bases present an Achilles' heel to our adversaries, and we should focus instead on developing a strictly American-based long-range force. There is also a large question mark surrounding our ability to exert forcible control over weapons of mass destruction in a crisis. This is a current mission for select members of our armed forces, but should it not be the primary mission given its importance? T hese kinds of peripheral, supporting issues deserve some treatment as we develop a comprehensive strategy.