9. Was Iran About to Get Nuked?
No, not really, but there’s still reason to worry.
What does one make of US President Donald Trump’s nuclear threat? Was it serious? Was he deliberately playing a madman? And did it work?
Trump made his threat on Truth Social on 7 April. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” he wrote. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” The US President ended his post rather incongruously with, “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”.
Destroying Persian civilisation would not require annihilating all 93 million Iranians, but it would, at the very least, require multiple nuclear detonations to vanquish the state, flatten urban centres, and terrorise the survivors. Even this would not necessarily destroy a distinctive civilisation forever, but it would leave permanent scars.
While Trump’s publicly-made nuclear threat may be unprecedented, it follows a long tradition of coercive statements and actions that date back to the Cold War. Even Trump’s intemperate remarks about extinguishing a civilisation must be placed in context: this is what large-scale nuclear attacks are meant to achieve. In a 1963 memorandum, America’s Joint Chiefs told defence secretary Robert McNamara that the US’ nuclear second strike ought to be capable of “destroying singly, or in combination, the Soviet Union and the Communist satellites in Europe as national societies.” Similarly, Pakistan’s objective from a large nuclear strike is “to destroy India as a functioning society”.
So, did Trump’s threat work? Superficially, it ought to have succeeded. The United States has nuclear weapons; Iran does not. No Iranian war aim was worth the destruction of its society. But if Iran had ignored the US deadline, would Trump have made good on his threat?
Most of us would say no, but why exactly?
An economist walks into a nuclear war
Before we proceed to answer this question, it behooves us to make a quick detour to pay obeisance to Thomas Schelling. In his 1966 work Arms and Influence, Schelling made the distinction between brute force and coercion, memorably describing coercion as “the every exploitation of enemy wants and fears”. Unlike brute force, coercion sought the adversary’s cooperation and was “most successful when held in reserve”, rather than when it was used..
However, for this coercion to be successful, it has to be credible. “Unhappily, the power to hurt is often communicated by some performance of it,” Schelling observed. Thankfully, committing violence is not the only way to establish credibility. The coercer can metaphorically burn their bridges, convincing the adversary they are committed to a course of action. Coercing states can also send costly signals by signing treaties or staking their reputations on a particular course of action.
Why Trump strained credulity
Donald Trump did none of these things. He did not demonstrate nuclear violence. He burnt no metaphorical bridges, (though he did follow Schelling in blowing a real bridge and threatening that there would be more to come on “Bridge Day”).
Trump’s talk was cheap. More importantly, he was wildly inconsistent about his war aims, leaving no one in any doubt that he was looking for a way out. Even on the matter of the Strait of Hormuz, he repeatedly said it was not an American concern and that it was the job of other navies to force open the waterway. Trump’s vacillations provided him flexibility to exit his war with Iran, but they were catastrophic for American credibility.
It didn’t help Trump’s case that he made his nuclear warning over and above his ultimatum to Iran threatening to blow up energy and infrastructure targets. Iranians might reasonably ask: which one is it? Are you going to hit us with conventional weapons and destroy our economy? Or will you conduct a large-scale nuclear strike and wipe us out for good?
This incoherence would also lead Iranians to conclude the nuclear threat was simply part of Trump’s now well-recognised negotiating style. The American President’s negotiations usually begin with blandishments and threats, crescendo with brinksmanship, and end with him making concessions to reach a deal. Iran’s leaders would have had no trouble understanding Trump’s behaviour.
Nixon and Trump
Schelling wrote of the virtues of “impetuosity, irrationality, and automaticity”. US President Richard Nixon took the idea to its logical conclusion, apparently drawing on his own experience to develop the so-called Madman Theory.
Nixon appears to have decided something drastic was needed. On 30/31 January 1968, the North Vietnamese Army and guerrillas in the south launched what came to be known as the Tet Offensive across South Vietnam. Though they were eventually beaten back, the offensive sapped American morale and nudged President Lyndon B. Johnson not to seek reelection.
Nixon wanted a way out of the mess if he got the top job. And the Madman Theory seemed to be his ticket. Nixon is supposed to have told his later Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman in the summer of 1968:
“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe that I’ve reached the point that I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
Nixon put his theory to the test once he came to power. He sent an ultimatum to the North Vietnamese leadership warning them that if some sort of deal was not reached by 1 November, 1969, he would be “obliged to have recourse to measures of great consequence and force.” Nixon also let the Soviets know of his threat, hoping they would apply pressure on the North Vietnamese as well.
Getting no results, Nixon ratcheted up the pressure. In October, he triggered a series of actions with US nuclear forces that would be “discernible to the Soviets, but not threatening in themselves.”
Despite these somewhat risky efforts, Nixon could not get his adversaries to budge. By the end of October, US nuclear forces returned to normal operations. The November 1 deadline came and went.
Why did Nixon’s threats fail? In Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy, Todd Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann identify three reasons. One, Nixon was clearly trying to hide the nuclear alert from the American populace, avoiding “actions that would easily be observable, such as dispersing bombers to civilian airports.” This detracted from the credibility of Nixon’s threat. Two, the Soviets did not really believe Nixon would risk a major nuclear crisis to end the US involvement in Vietnam. Three, the Soviets seem to have been unsure about the reason for American coercion, since the nuclear alert also overlapped with the tail-end of the seven-month Sino-Soviet crisis.
Nixon’s nuclear threat involved much greater preparation than Trump’s. It also took place in a different context, with the Soviet Union, a nuclear superpower, being a key member of the intended audience. If there’s a common thread that runs through both Nixon’s threat and Trump’s simulacrum of the Madman Theory, it is how these threats are met with skepticism. Few seem to really believe a nuclear threat will actually be carried out.
Why Nuclear Compellence Usually Fails
Schelling made a distinction between two types of coercion: deterrence and compellence. Deterrence seeks to discourage an adversary from pursuing a course of action. Compellence seeks to get an adversary to give up something they already have. While this neat distinction can blur in real life, the sort of compellence that Nixon and Trump attempted is harder than deterrence.
There’s a slim body of literature attempting to make the case for nuclear compellence. However, the weight of evidence thus far suggests it doesn’t usually work. Once again, Sechser and Fuhrmann identify three reasons. The first is that nuclear weapons are usually unsuited to the task at hand or simply redundant. Nukes are blunt instruments and pain can be inflicted through more targeted means such as conventional military operations. This was evident in Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian infrastructure, which preceded the nuclear threat by a day.
The second reason is the long-term costs of using nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state. These costs include diplomatic isolation, the creation of balancing coalitions hostile to the coercer’s interests, and the escalatory precedent of nuclear use. These are not idle concerns. For example, in 1950, US President Harry Truman desisted from nuclear use during the Korean War because he feared it would cause the UN coalition fighting the war to fall apart and present a setback for America in the broader Cold War. Specifically, Truman feared that a nuclear attack against Chinese forces in the Korean peninsula would convince the world “we reserve atomic weapons exclusively for Japanese and Chinese”. Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru also echoed this sentiment, warning of a “widespread feeling in Asia that the atomic bomb is a weapon used only against Asiatics”.
To these, we may also add concerns about the spread of nuclear weapons. However hyperbolic Trump’s threat to Iran may be, it does a lot to convince even the most pacifist Iranians that their country must possess a nuclear deterrent of its own. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear signalling in September 2022 is likely to have had similar effects. Concerns about the ‘nuclear proliferation’ ought to dissuade leaders from making nuclear threats in the first place. But if they fail at that task, they ought to dissuade them from actually using nuclear weapons.
The third reason nuclear compellence fizzles out is the mismatch in stakes. Nuclear deterrence is most effective when it is focused on national survival. When the stakes become smaller, nuclear threats sound hollower.
Why We Should Still Worry
Past performance does not necessarily predict future results. There are at least two factors that could spur nuclear compellence and possibly nuclear detonations. One is a problem of personalities. Nixon only pretended to be mad. Future leaders may be unhinged enough or callous enough to not worry about the consequences of nuclear use.
The other factor is that nuclear weapons can be made more usable. Weapons like the B61 nuclear gravity bomb can be set to have yields as low as 0.3 kilotons, giving it only two percent of the explosive force of the device used over Hiroshima. Alternately, states could detonate nuclear weapons at high altitudes or underwater. These explosions may cause few casualties, but would provide powerful evidence that a state is willing to unleash a greater nuclear storm if its demands are not met. In the right circumstances, nuclear compellence may just work.
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