Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons. . - book review

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2001 by K.A. Beyoghlow

Lavoy, Peter, Scott Sagan, and James Wirtz, eds. Planning the Unthinkable: How New Powers Will Use Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000. 270pp. $45

The title says it all. This book is a compilation of empirical and analytical data on the strategic evolution of nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) agents and weapons in the twenty-first century. A central theme of the book is how new regional players (states and nonstate actors) are likely to convert prevalent conventional military doctrine and training into nonconventional means of warfare. The book is very ambitious in its scope; it attempts --overall, successfully -- to address systematically conceptual problems in the integration of such weapons into the military infrastructure, delivery systems, command and control procedures, and war plans. More importantly, the editors and the authors of the various case studies utilize a theoretical framework to explain and predict future trends of behaviors, intentions, and capabilities among very diverse players. Realism and neorealism, organizational theory, and culture are used to flesh out these unique differences in approach as well as in the implementatio n of NBC programs and doctrines.

Except for the conclusion and the chapter on terrorism, the chapters are case studies, focusing on Iraq, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. The authors are specialists who devote a great deal of effort to describing the relationship between strategy and policy, on one hand, and between national security and national military strategy, on the other. The result is a complex web of relationships, behavioral manifestations, and decision-making processes involving an amalgam of scientific, bureaucratic, and military institutions and forces. In the chapter on Iran, for example, Gregory Giles eloquently argues that Iran was reluctant on moral and religious grounds to use chemical weapons during the first few years of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-87) but that its policy changed abruptly as a result of rising Iranian casualties and fear of Iraqi chemical-warfare preponderance. Hence, realism became key to explaining the Iranian NBC doctrinal shift after 1987. Although Iran ratified the Chemical Weapons Convent ion within a few months of its coming into force, Iran has opted to pursue a clandestine NBC program. Such weapons are the subject of intense debate within the increasingly factionalized, institutionalized, and secularized Iranian political elite today. This has given rise to "multiple actors playing roles in a key strategic program[,] ... [ensuring] that there will be continued bureaucratic competition for resources, missions, and influence." More significantly, such competition has far-reaching political, economic, and military implications, associated primarily with command and control mechanisms. Israel (a chapter by Avner Cohen) and India (by Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu) also utilize NBC secrecy and ambiguity to enhance their conventional deterrence capabilities-Israel to keep its Arab adversaries off balance and to avoid American nonproliferation pressure, and India to keep China, not Pakistan, in check. Pakistan (Zafar Iqbal Cheema), however, apparently sees the development of its NBC program as a necessi ty--not a choice--because in the "absence of conventional security alternatives and nuclear security guarantees...[such] weapons were viewed as a necessary counter [to] a perceived threat from India." The chapter by Jessica Stern analyzes the dynamics of terrorism in the twenty-first century. She argues that the potential for nonstate actors to acquire, develop, deploy, and use NBC weapons is growing. Stern may be correct in her concern. Yet, although there is a precedent, in that terrorist groups such as the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo have used such devices, there is no hard empirical data to support a sustained argument that terrorists will be going the NBC route, at least in the near term. Terrorism has become complex indeed; acquiring, assembling, deploying, and using NBC agents does not mean that the selected device will be workable or effective. Moreover, the cost of embarking on such a program for terrorist causes will almost certainly outweigh the benefits. Terrorists, at least for now, will continue to o pt for conventional weapons, albeit at more sophisticated and lethal levels. There is evidence, however, of more credible linkages between terrorism and technology, and between terrorism and international finance.

Ultimately, one cannot escape the fact that among the newly emerging NBC players there is a diversity of doctrines and command structures. This will admittedly make it harder to predict possible political and military outcomes; more significantly, it means that the NBC genie cannot be put back in the bottle. Will the current U.S. debate on the Strategic Missile Defense Initiative exacerbate this already volatile situation?

If there is one criticism to make of this book, it is that it sometimes suffers from a lack of consistency in terms of units of analysis under examination (nuclear, biological, and chemical agents vary remarkably in scale of effects, timing, etc.); some essays weigh more heavily on one agent at the expense of the others.