Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Tuesday that the United States would hold “fully accountable” any country or group that helped terrorists to acquire or use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
The statement was the Bush administration’s most expansive yet in trying to articulate a vision of deterrence for the post-Sept. 11 world. It went beyond the cold war notion that a president could respond with overwhelming force against a country that directly attacked the United States or its allies with unconventional weapons.
“Today we also make clear that the United States will hold any state, terrorist group or other nonstate actor or individual fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction — whether by facilitating, financing or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts,” Mr. Gates said.
This only makes sense. When deterrence was formulated, any massive nuclear attack on us could only come from one source--the Soviet Union. Massively retaliating when hundreds or thousands of nuclear warheads hit us took exactly zero analysis to figure out the attacker. Even China was not a nuclear threat to our homeland. China barely is a nuclear threat today. Still, we'd have plenty of satellite and radar data to show that the missiles were coming from Russia.
But if a nuclear device goes off in an American city today, who do we respond to? We can't nuke a terrorist organization. We can only nuke a country that has supported or hosted the terrorist organization.
And retaliate with nukes we must. As I've argued many times, the first time we endure a nuclear attack without responding in kind is the day that deterrence dies:
We must not commit mass murder against innocents even if we are murdered in the millions. Our response must be designed not for vengeance but to prevent further nuclear attacks on our people. But part of this attack simply must include nuclear weapons. If we fail to respond to a nuclear attack with nuclear retaliation, we have destroyed deterrence. Who will believe we will ever respond with nukes in the future?
And just as important, we have to make it clear that we will retaliate up the chain of delivery. As Doctor Strangelove would have commented, a secret determination to retaliate against helpers for a nuclear attack on our soil is no deterrent against that help.
