Taboo

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term taboo was brought into English quite recently, in 1777 by Captain James Cook to describe his experience in Tonga in the South Pacific in which ‘Not one of [the Tongans] would sit down, or eat a bit of any thing […] On expressing my surprise at this, they were all taboo, as they said, which word has a very comprehensive meaning but, in general, signifies that a thing is forbidden […] When any thing is forbidden to be eat, or made use of, they say that it is taboo.’Footnote ¹

What does Tannenwald say?

Tannenwald tells us that a taboo is a norm, but a particular type of norm, entailing a sense of danger and ‘institutional mechanisms to localize the danger’. A taboo is ‘also generally associated with […] qualities such as absoluteness, unthinkingness, and taken-for-grantedness. Its authority depends on individuals not thinking in detail about it [… It is based] “not on considered reflection, but on revulsion”’. Tannenwald defines the nuclear taboo as a ‘powerful de facto prohibition against the first use of nuclear weapons. [It] is not the behavior (of non-use) but rather the normative belief about the behavior’. In other words, the essence of the nuclear taboo is that policymakers believe that the first use of nuclear weapons is forbidden. Tannenwald says that the nuclear taboo has some, though not all, of the characteristics of taboos more generally: ‘It is a prohibition, it refers to danger, [it] involves expectations of awful […] consequences or sanctions if violated […] It is also a “bright line” norm: once the threshold between use and non-use is crossed, one is immediately in a new world […] Crossing this line has a transformative effect’.Footnote ²

What are some differences between the nuclear taboo and taboos in general? Tannenwald says that under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for the declared nuclear weapons states, it is not forbidden to have tabooed objects (although it is forbidden if one is a non-nuclear signatory to the treaty). And the nuclear taboo is ‘more fragile than other kinds of taboos’, such as paedophilia or incest, which can withstand numerous violations but lose none of their taboo quality.Footnote ³ Moreover, although Tannenwald does not explicitly make this point, with nuclear weapons, it is not taboo to threaten to break the taboo. In other words, it is not forbidden to threaten that which – in the words of the US Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter of 1983 – a nation may never do.Footnote ⁴

What is deterrence, or at least deterrence of non-nuclear threats, but the oddly respectable threat to break the taboo and wreak unspeakable damage? We can see the difference between the taboo against nuclear use, where implicit and explicit threat is entailed in the possession of weapons, and other taboos such as cannibalism or paedophilia by imagining the kinds of serious threats made with nuclear weapons transposed to these other spheres: If you don't behave yourself Johnny, I'll eat you for dinner; or priests arguing how they may or might have sexual relationships with their minor charges, so long as they do not in fact. We can make such threats with nuclear weapons. We cannot with other taboos.

So, why should we think that there is a nuclear taboo, or, closer to Tannenwald's argument, why should we think there has been a slow emergence of a nuclear taboo, other than the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used since Nagasaki? Here Tannenwald convincingly shows that US restraint in not using nuclear weapons after Nagasaki was not simply a prudential tradition of non-use as Scott Sagan argues, that is, the fear of setting a precedent of use.Footnote ⁵ Tannenwald shows that more than a prudential tradition was operating for US presidents and high-level policymakers. She shows very nicely how some US presidents – Eisenhower and Nixon – felt constrained by domestic opinion and world opinion. For example, Eisenhower ‘noted the need to pay attention to the sensitivities of the allies’, but said that nevertheless he and Dulles agreed that ‘“somehow or other the taboo which surrounds the use of atomic weapons would have to be destroyed”’. Others – Truman, Kennedy, and high-level officials in the Bush I administration – went beyond a sensitivity to world opinion (and a determination to overcome it); they more thoroughly internalised a sense that nuclear weapons were ‘taboo’ and ‘fundamentally unusable’. Thus, by the presidency of George H. W. Bush, a senior army planner said, ‘“You lose the moral high ground if you use one of those stupid things”’.Footnote ⁶

Yet Tannenwald argues too vigorously against the implications of a second point made by Sagan: taboos are not easily broken by violation; traditions are. (Incest and sex with unrelated minors occurs with some frequency, but the taboos remain very strong). Tannenwald accepts Sagan's broad definitional point but disputes that nuclear use would necessarily break the taboo. On the one hand, she provides a nuanced and conditional argument: the nuclear taboo is ‘probably more fragile’ than other taboos – that is, if broken by nuclear use, it might not survive as a taboo; whether the taboo would survive would depend on the circumstances of use, specifically, was national survival at stake and on the response of the international community. Indeed, Tannenwald says ‘extraordinary measures would need to be taken to restore and reconstruct the world’.Footnote ⁷

On the other hand, Tannenwald reaches too far, claiming that the use of nuclear weapons might actually strengthen the nuclear taboo – despite having argued that the nuclear taboo is a ‘bright line’ norm. How can this be? Tannenwald claims that the first use of nuclear weapons might lead to such revulsion that in response the taboo would be made stronger. But what basis do we have for thinking this outcome more likely than second use in retaliation, which Tannenwald has conveniently defined as not part of the nuclear taboo? The example provided by Tannenwald of use that might not break the taboo is the US. If there were first use by the US, she asks ‘Was US survival at stake? Were all other options exhausted?’Footnote ⁸ But can we really imagine first (or second) use by the US that would not break the taboo? It strains credulity to think that over a period of sixty years the first use of nuclear weapons by the US has become virtually unthinkable by highest-level policymakers, and yet that such use would not break the nuclear taboo.

Well, perhaps Tannenwald's claim is the result of some over-caffeinated evenings of writing since the thrust of the book – that the norm of non-use has greatly strengthened over time – runs counter. But here I also found myself analytically disturbed. The overall tenor of the book is a bit Whiggish: that is, despite disclaimers, it has a whiff of a developmental inevitability of an increasingly robust taboo. Tannenwald does convincingly argue that there has been an increasing acceptance by highest-level policymakers that nuclear weapons should not be used; the problem is that deep bureaucratic differences have been largely read out of her interpretation. And this takes me to my second point.

Nuclear war planning

Tannenwald does not drill down into the subterranean bureaucratic processes that shaped ideas and routines that could in fact have led to nuclear use. Contrary to the deterrence logic of political leaders, the logic of the military is, well, military. If, for civilians, nuclear threat is the primary ‘use’ for nuclear weapons, for the military, potential nuclear use has its own deep logic: in an emergency situation, to be able to destroy the enemy's capability to attack, that is, to ‘limit damage’ to the US or its allies, or, stated more bureaucratically, to inflict sufficient damage on enemy forces and command structure, including political leadership, so as to preclude or at least erode the enemy's ability to attack. For example, the first objective military officers were told to achieve in preparing the US nuclear war plan in 1961 ‘under the several conditions under which hostilities may be initiated’ was ‘to destroy or neutralize the Sino-Soviet bloc strategic nuclear delivery capability and primary military and government controls’.Footnote ⁹ This is not primarily a logic of dissuasion, though such a destructive capability may dissuade, but a logic of preparation for actual use, whether first, pre-emptive, or launching under attack. And, although over the decades, the articulation of timing has become ever less explicit, it is not inherently a logic of no first use.

This military logic is well understood by scholars who write about nuclear war planning, yet often glossed over by those who concentrate on the political level. But should we be confident that because civilians have ultimate authority over military operations, the military logic can be discounted? We should not for several reasons: many consequential aspects of nuclear war planning are not well understood at the political level; in an emergency, political officials would likely give much more weight to military opinion than in peacetime; and in an emergency, pre-planned military processes could likely be set very rapidly in train with formal approval, but no time for reflection, by political authorities.Footnote ¹⁰

A year after Ronald Reagan had discussed abolishing nuclear weapons with Mikhail Gorbachev at Reykjavik, former commander-in-chief of the US Strategic Air Command Russell Dougherty explained the military logic. In an interview, he argued against ‘the option to sit there and launch from the ashes. Why would you want to do that? See, if you do that, you're going to say I'm prepared to sit here and ride out and be cremated and then take what I can get out of the ashes.’ In the name of deterrence, General Dougherty thought that presidential choices should be constrained so that he would not be tempted to ‘ride out’ an attack. ‘As a decision-maker, you make me an easy way out, and I'll take the easy way every time. And the easy way out is not to fire […] You know, if the president has to sit there and assimilate what those weapons are going to do, with blast and fire on impact, and then if he starts thinking about what the fallout's going to be, what it's going to do to the fields, and nuclear winter, the water's all bad, the crops die. You know, you can get immobilised. But […] you can't do that. That's not our job to do that. Our job is to give him a capability that [slight pause] is relevant to the circumstances of the attack.’Footnote ¹¹

In a statement looking toward a new US presidential administration taking office in January 2009, Janne Nolan and James Holmes laid out the stakes:

Tannenwald does not explicate the logic of nuclear war fighting, nor explore the assumptions and routines of US military organisations where that logic is deeply entrenched, nor give proper weight to the history that could have occurred but did not. Of course, because a possible history did not occur does not, in and of itself, mean that it could have occurred with any reasonable probability. The burden in arguing for a counter-factual to be taken seriously requires showing that positions were taken or options considered at the time that could have led to an alternate history.

Indeed, against the grain of her argument, and to her credit, Tannenwald does vividly show how the military, and military-thinking civilians, again and again considered nuclear weapons to be useable. She provides especially telling evidence in the chapter on Nixon's waging of war in Vietnam. To take but the most vivid four of the dozen examples in this chapter, Tannenwald recounts how, first, in the mid-1960s, US plans for escalation in Vietnam featured first use of nuclear weapons. The US Pacific Command planned extensively for the possibility of China's entry into the conflict. In such an event, US war plans mandated that ‘Strategic Air Command (SAC) would strike selected targets in China using nuclear and/or non-nuclear weapons, as directed by JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff]’. Additionally, although the US never sent nuclear warheads to Vietnam, the military did stockpile them in the region and equipped troops with ‘nuclear-capable’ artillery. Second, convinced that conventional forces would be insufficient to repel Communist forces, Admiral Harry Felt, commander in chief, Pacific Command, argued ‘that it was essential the US commanders be given the freedom to use [tactical nuclear weapons] as the contingency plans assume’.Footnote ¹³ Third, Seymour Deitchman of the Institute for Defense Analysis noted ‘recurring talk around the Pentagon’, in light of the failures of conventional bombing to disrupt North Vietnam's supply lines from Laos, of ‘using tactical nuclear weapons’ instead.Footnote ¹⁴ Fourth, General Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outlined the potential role for nuclear weapons in defending the American position at Khe Sanh. On 3 February 1968, he wrote to President Johnson, ‘“Should the situation in the DMZ area change dramatically, we should be prepared to introduce weapons of greater effectiveness against massed forces. Under such circumstances I visualize that either tactical nuclear weapons or chemical agents would be active candidates for employment.”’ Moreover, despite assuring a Senate sub-committee that Khe Sanh could be defended conventionally, Wheeler also stated that if the situation severely deteriorated, the JCS would ask President Johnson to authorise the use of nuclear weapons.Footnote ¹⁵

Nor do such instances cease later. For example, in the first Gulf War: General Norman ‘Schwarzkopf may have requested a contingency plan to knock out all Iraqi electronic equipment through exploding a nuclear device high over Iraq and may also have endorsed making a nuclear threat.’ Tannenwald shows this, but she argues otherwise: ‘The seriousness of such propositions and contingency plans is always difficult to assess, however […] The overall picture is thus one of no serious consideration of nuclear options by top leaders.’ And note the overly careful wording by White House Chief of Staff John Sununu as recounted by Tannenwald: ‘“There's been no one, even from the military, that has suggested” resorting to nuclear weapons if Iraq used chemical weapons in the war.’ Sununu would lead us to think that the military did not suggest resorting to nuclear weapons – but Tannenwald has shown that the suggestion to use a nuclear device was for another purpose altogether: to destroy the functioning of Iraqi electronic equipment.Footnote ¹⁶

In sum, Tannenwald presents a double story: one emphasising the highest-level understandings of the non-usability of nuclear weapons, a history that Tannenwald convincingly shows becomes more robust over time; and another, falling somewhat outside her analytic lens, that there was considerable interest and activity on the part of the military in developing war plans in which nuclear weapons would be used.

I would be more convinced of the account of increasing robustness of the nuclear taboo if: a) it were no longer legitimate to implicitly threaten to use nuclear weapons first, as the US government does when it refuses to explicitly take all options off the table and, b) it were not a legitimate and authorised activity of a very important government institution: the US military, whose responsibility it still is to make plans to use nuclear weapons.

All this said, the evidence Tannenwald provides for a somewhat contrary reading of her book is one of its greatest strengths. The Nuclear Taboo is a rich and subtle account, vigorously argued, and supported – if also challenged – by a depth and breadth of empirical research that makes this an important and provocative work of Cold War history. It is a very significant achievement.