Dan Snow's History Hit - Preventing Nuclear War

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

While Ukraine fights to defend itself from Russian forces, Putin makes a nuclear threat to the west and the rest of the world. Dr Jeremy Garlick, Associate Professor of International Relations and China Studies at the University of Economics, Prague, explains the strategies currently being used by Russia and the West, ‘game theory’ and nuclear deterrence between these two opposing forces through recent history.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm still in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, but I talked on a slightly dodgy Zoom line to Dr. Jeremy Garlick, the Associate Professor of International Relations and China Studies at the University of Economics, Prague. He is an international. He is a man who spends a lot of time thinking about the Cold War, about game theory, about nuclear strategy, about mutually assured destruction. The reason I wanted to talk to Jeremy is because, obviously, Ukraine is fighting to defend itself from Russian forces. The war is not going well for Russia. And Putin has responded, A, on the ground by moving to a kind of assault and battery mode, trying to destroy the built

environment of Ukraine, crush the morale, the willingness of Ukrainians to keep on resisting him. But he has also issued a nuclear warning to the West. The other day, I'm sure you and I were both filled with terror. Putin used some very incendiary language. He looked a bit unstable. He said, whoever tries to interfere with us should know that Russia's response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never experienced in your history. And he reminds everyone that Russia is today one of the world's most powerful nuclear states. On the 27th of February, he announced that Russian nuclear forces were being put on a special regime of combat duty alert. Is this bluff? Is this a sign of weakness? Is this a sign that as his conventional

options run out, he's breaking the glass and pulling the emergency lever? Possibly. Anyway, either way, I wanted to get Jeremy on the podcast to talk a little bit about nuclear strategy. It's worth remembering that Russia has around 6,000 nuclear warheads. They're typically more than 10 times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. A nuclear war between the Russians and the American-led alliance would lead to the near extinction of human life on this planet. So, you know, that's pretty cheery. So I've got Jeremy on to talk to me about nuclear threats, strategy examples of them being used during the Cold War, and a bit of a chat about game theory, how people are able to try and plot

what their opponents might do next. If you want to watch a documentary about Shackleton that I'm making down here in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, you can go to History Hit TV. If you want to watch a documentary about Shackleton that I'm making down here in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica, you can go to History Hit TV. If you follow the link in the description of this podcast, you just click on that little link and you sign up to join History Hit TV, the world's best history channel. Lots more coming at you in the next few weeks and months, folks. It's going to be an exciting time at History Hit, if we survive possible thermonuclear Armageddon. So here's hoping. In the meantime though folks, here's Dr Jeremy Garlick. Enjoy.

Jeremy, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thank you for having me here. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very happy to be here. Let's get straight into it. Why do nuclear weapons make this conflict different to the conflicts that we've seen sadly raging throughout the world in eastern Congo or South Sudan recently or the Sahel? Why do nuclear weapons make this existential? Well I think it's quite simply because obviously Russia has nuclear weapons and the question is also that Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and therefore had nuclear weapons on its territory when it was part of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union

dissolved in 1991, Ukraine still had nuclear weapons on its territory, I believe around about 1,700 warheads, and they had to decide what to do with them. And in the mid-90s, there was a meeting, you know, between the United Kingdom and Russia and some other interested parties to decide what to do with them. And in the mid-90s, there was a meeting, you know, between the United Kingdom and Russia and some other interested parties to decide what are we going to do with these weapons. And Ukraine decided to get rid of the nuclear warhead, sign the non-proliferation treaty on the understanding that it would be protected by the US, by Britain, by Russia. Russia signed off on it as well, that Ukraine's sovereignty would be respected and Ukraine would be protected and it didn't need nuclear missiles and

non-proliferation was the main point. And I think this now becomes important because Ukraine doesn't have that nuclear umbrella. It's not part of NATO. It's not being admitted to NATO, which I think Ukraine assumed it was going to be admitted to NATO. It's not part of the, it's not been admitted to NATO, which I think Ukraine assumed it was going to be admitted to NATO. It's not part of the European Union either. So it's a question of that Ukraine obviously did not, you know, while Russia has nuclear capability, Ukraine does not. So Ukraine could not use the nuclear deterrence argument to keep the Russians at bay. So the Russians had a free hand to come in because the nuclear deterrence question wasn't there. No nuclear deterrence on Ukraine's territory. Ukraine was not part of NATO. So the nuclear deterrence question then becomes

important. It also becomes important because if NATO is then going to intervene in the conflict, if it was going to intervene actively, rather than just supplying some conventional weapons as it does at the moment. If NATO were to intervene on the territory of Ukraine, that would then become a conflict between two nuclear powers with the US at the head of NATO and Russia invading Ukraine, you then have a nuclear standoff potentially. So these questions of nuclear deterrence, for historical reasons, but also for current reasons, become very important in this conflict. And during the Cold War, since the invention of nuclear weapons in the mid-1940s,

have two nuclear armed powers ever fought a conventional war against each other, where they both refrained from using nukes. During the Cold War, I mean, the Soviet Union and the US avoided or tried to avoid head-on confrontations, as we know, you know, and a lot of proxy wars were fought. I think the situation where it got the tensest was obviously in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, where the USSR stationed nuclear missiles on Cuba. And then the US finding evidence of these missiles through aerial reconnaissance had to decide what are we going to do about these nuclear missiles? And this became very tense

and it didn't become a conventional conflict, but it could have easily. And there were moves on the US side to invade Cuba. Luckily that didn't come to pass and they managed to deescalate it and managed to prevent a conflict which could have become a nuclear conflict. And there were some very close calls. There was a very close call with a Soviet nuclear submarine that was armed with nuclear missiles that was having depth charges dropped on it from a U.S. vessel. The Soviet submarine didn't

know that these depth charges were just dummy depth charges being sent as a warning and the Americans were trying to communicate with them. They didn't receive the message and the Soviet submarine commanders had to stand there and decide whether they were going to fire a missile off or not. And luckily, one of the commanders vetoed it and said, we're not firing the missile or it could have been much worse than it was. So this is a conflict where, in a sense, nuclear deterrence worked because both sides were so afraid of a nuclear war that they didn't get into conflict, and they didn't even get into a conventional conflict. And so this is the problem that, as you say, you know, if there's a conventional conflict between Russia and the US, which there never really was during a Cold War. It was always proxy conflicts like Vietnam or Korea or other proxy conflicts. If they do get into a confrontation,

there's a question there that can they keep it conventional? Is it possible for it to remain conventional? Or does the nuclear question automatically come into it as it did in the Cuban Missile Crisis? So there's a question there of escalation and risk. If you have a confrontation between nuclear powers, nobody knows where it's going to go, or nobody knows how edgy each side is going to get. So conventional warfare between nuclear powers, we haven't really seen it, no. Which is the reason given for not directly intervening in Ukraine and even establishing a no-fly zone, which I think some people seem to think is a kind of intervention-like, but it involves shooting down

enemy aircraft. And basically, if it looks like war and moves like war, it probably is a war. There's definitely that risk. I mean, if I go to the principles of nuclear deterrence in international relations, which is my field, international politics, international relations, we talk about mutually assured destruction, right? We talk about mad in connection with nuclear deterrence. And that means anybody would be mad to start it off because it means, you know, you fire a missile at me, I'm going to fire a missile back at you. And then we're all doomed. Our cities are going to be wiped out. So the whole principle of nuclear deterrence is to avoid even starting off not even a conventional conflict because who knows where it's going to escalate to. And then you have this question of mutually assured

destruction or MAD where you're worried about destroying each other's cities and starting something off which you then can't de-escalate. It's interesting, Jeremy, isn't it, how over the Cold War, there do seem to be some kind of unwritten rules and practices of nuclear deterrence. For example, it seems fine for the Soviet Union, in the case of Vietnam, or America in the case of Afghanistan, or now Ukraine, to flood military equipment into a country to help kill the opposition. You know, whether it's Javelin anti-tank missiles now or shoulder-mounted rockets in Afghanistan,

they were doing terrible damage to Soviet and Russian forces. And yet, in a weird way, that's sort of acceptable, isn't it? It isn't seen as a trigger for nuclear war. Yeah, it's strange, isn't it? Coming on to the game theory question, if I give the example of Vietnam, which was, you know, obviously a Cold War proxy war, where it was essentially a civil war between North Vietnam, communist North Vietnam, and capitalist South Vietnam. And obviously, the Americans were backing the South, and they wanted to stop the communists in the

North. And in terms of the use of game theory, they were, you know, overtly using game theory at that time. And they reasoned that if they used extreme force on the North Koreans, if they use things like body counts, if they killed as many of them as possible, or made them understand that they couldn't win, and that they were going to suffer extreme destruction using conventional, so-called conventional weapons, which actually included things like Agent Orange and napalm and very unpleasant things, which we might say are conventional weapons, but not really ones we would usually think of as conventional weapons, like chemical weapons. The reasoning was that if they used an extreme amount of force like this, that the Vietnamese

would understand that they couldn't win and would just back down and would just surrender and the war would be won using these conventional means. And the interesting thing is that it didn't work because what the Americans didn't understand in this case, and I think this is relevant to Ukraine as well, what the Americans didn't understand was that the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese, were not just fighting for ideology or were not just fighting a conventional war. They were fighting for their survival. They were fighting for the survival of their nation. They were fighting for their sense of patriotism. So it wasn't just about reasoning, making a rational calculation. It was like they were going to fight to the bitter end because it was the survival of their country and the survival of their families. fight to the bitter end because it was the survival of their country and the survival of their families. So this is where Henry Kissinger, who was the Secretary of State at the time,

even called the Vietnamese insolent because he completely failed to understand the Vietnamese mentality that the Vietnamese were fighting for survival and fighting for their nation, and they were not going to back down. So this attempt to use conventional weapons to kind of flatten the opposition, in this case, it didn't work because the North Vietnamese ended up winning the war and driving the Americans out and the Americans lost the Vietnam War. So to come back to your question about conventional weapons, in that case, how can we really condone that killing of thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers and civilians using conventional weapons, it's sort of supposed to be okay, but it's not really okay, because you're

still killing thousands of people in horrible ways. And why is that more okay? Well, it's more okay, from a certain point of view to use that the nuclear weapons, because obviously, nuclear weapons, it just escalates into a completely different level where you're flattening cities and you're wiping out tens of thousands of people with one bomb. So it's sort of scarier, but it doesn't make the use of conventional weapons all right either, I would say. Listen to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking about mutually assured destruction. Listen to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking about mutually assured destruction. Hello, I'm James Rogers, and over on the History Hit Warfare podcast,

I bring you cutting-edge military histories from around the world. Why was Sitting Bull such a remarkable leader? What was Napoleon's greatest ever battle? How did the Cuban Missile Crisis almost turn the Cold War hot? And who dropped the world's largest nuclear bomb on the Arctic? Through interviews with world-leading historians, policy experts, and the veterans who served, we find the answers to these questions and so much more. So come and join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front lines of military history. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Vladimir Putin raised the level of nuclear readiness in Russia you see that during the Cold War don't you what's the choreography of raising levels of awareness what does that mean because it sounds very scary it does sound scary and the point is I think that he wants it to sound scary because he wants to send out a signal, you know, back off.

He's trying to send a signal to NATO, back off. I'm increasing the level of nuclear deterrence. We're increasing it to the next level. And you better be careful. Don't come in. So it's trying to send a signal. It's really what we call a game. If I come to the game theory part of it, there's a game called the chicken game, right? Which I think is not so, you know, I'm British, it certainly wasn't

familiar to me when I was growing up in Britain, but it's very familiar to Americans. The chicken game is simply a game that is played between teenagers where, you know, two teenagers drive a car towards each other and wait until the last minute to swerve and whoever swerves last is the winner you know so the principle of the chicken game which we could also call brinkmanship is to try to get an advantage by scaring the other side you know by pushing things to the limit you try to get a concession from the other side so in this case case, I think we can understand Putin's escalation of the nuclear deterrence level as a chicken game or as brinkmanship. He's trying to get a concession. He's trying to make sure that NATO thinks there's too much risk to come in and sort of backs off.

So I think this is the essential principle of nuclear deterrence. You know, as I said, mutually assured destruction. Everybody's too afraid to come in. And he hopes that NATO is not going to challenge him and back off and leave him a free hand in Ukraine. So do you think this conflict fits within those kind of Cold War conflicts, like in the Middle East, like in Korea, Vietnam, where there was mention of nuclear weapons to sort of bring pressure on the other side, but thankfully not much realistic chance that they were actually going to be deployed on the battlefield. Yeah, I mean, it's surprising. Yeah, as a child of the Cold War myself, you know, I grew up in the 1970s, 1980s, when the Cold War was still running. I mean, we felt very, you know, aware of this threat. I mean, it seems I teach now younger students who are in their 20s,

who did not experience the Cold War. And they, I think, have difficulty understanding what it was like at that time that we understood this as the main threat as the primary threat to the world, the threat of going to nuclear war. So I think, you know, in terms of the nuclear threat, we hope that it doesn't happen. And I think, as I said before, it would be mad to use the nuclear threat. We hope that it doesn't happen. And I think, as I said before, it would be mad to use the nuclear weapons. But of course, the problem is that once you have two sides in confrontation with each other, so let's say in this case, it would be Russia and NATO, Russia and the US. Once you have two sides in direct confrontation with each other that are in possession of nuclear weapons,

you can never be sure that it's not going to escalate or that somebody is not going to make an unfortunate decision at some point. During the Cold War, there were near misses. There was a case where the Russian nuclear shield was activated, you know, because there was some atmospheric interference and they got a signal that the Americans had fired some missiles and they had to make a decision. Are they going to fire back? And it turned out later, it was just a mistake in the system. This was in the 1980s. It only came out later. But what I mean to say is that there's a possibility of accidental escalation. There's a possibility of if you get two sides into confrontation that have nuclear weapons, there's a possibility that it accidentally escalates or that somebody somewhere along the line who's in control of a nuclear missile, as I gave the example before of the nuclear

submarine, it only would take one decision by one person to fire off a missile. And then you've got a completely different level of conflict. off a missile. And then you've got a completely different level of conflict. So this is where I think NATO has to be very careful about how they approach Ukraine, what action they decide to take, because the possibility of escalation is very dangerous for everybody, and not just Ukraine and Russia and NATO, but for the whole planet. So you've mentioned game theory a couple of times. Just quickly give me a pricey of what game theory is. And are people doing it at the moment, do you think? Game theory, I'll do it very briefly.

It comes from economics, but I'm not going to talk about the economic modelling. I'll just talk about the international politics security issues related to it. So game theory is really a way of modeling interactions between actors or players in a game as if real world situations were like games. So you're trying to predict outcomes by modeling people's behavior. And in the early days of it, in the 50s, they were actually doing experiments with people and finding out how they reacted in certain situations and they were trying to get patterns out of their behavior and Trying to see what were the rational reactions or the most predictable and common reactions to certain situations So, you know already talked about the chicken game. I'll give you another example of a game that is very often

Mentioned is the zero-sum game and a zero-sum game is something like a game of chess. In a game of chess, somebody wins or somebody loses. You can also have a draw, of course, where it's like half a point each, but there's only a fixed amount of victory to go around. Both sides can't win at the same time. One wins, the other one loses. It's a zero-sum game. There's a fixed amount of outcome you can have. So think of it as like a pizza. If you order a pizza and you've got six people eating the pizza, if somebody takes four slices, they've taken half the pizza and there's less pizza for everybody else. There's only one pizza and you can't expand the pizza to make more pizza. So this would be the idea of a zero-sum game. And how does this come into this situation? In questions of territory or warfare or power, we think of the territory of Europe. There's only one territory of Europe. If somebody conquers it, as Hitler did in the Second World War, nobody else has that pizza, you know, like Europe.

It only belongs to one person. It's a fixed amount of territory, and you can't, once somebody's conquered it, it's not divisible anymore, right? So game theory is about calculating outcomes based on what people usually do or what people could be expected to do. I think the problems with game theory are, I mean, there's three problems here. I think one problem is rationality. I mean, you expect people to behave in a rational way. And as I already gave the example of Vietnam, what the Americans expected the Vietnamese to do from a rational perspective was not the understanding of it from the North Vietnamese

side, right? So one person's rationality can be another person's irrationality or vice versa, right? So this is where we get into questions like people calling putin mad or there's a tendency through history to call dictators crazy but if you look at things from their perspective there are reasons why they're doing the things which are not as irrational as it might appear to our side right so one problem is questions of rationality another question is perfect information i I mean, we never in warfare, we never have perfect information. If you're playing a game of chess, you have perfect information, you can see all the pieces, you can see where everything

is. If you can calculate well enough, you know, if you use a computer and calculate the position, you should be able to calculate the optimum outcome. Warfare is not like that. It's messy, right? We don't know how many tanks there are. We don't know if they've got fuel. We don't know whether the nuclear weapons, what condition they're in. We don't know about supply lines. There are a lot of different factors, a lot of unknowns that make it impossible to get perfect information. So the lack of perfect information makes game theory break down, makes these sort of calculating and using models, it breaks down a bit. And I think the third problem I would say is that life is simply not a game, right? Games and life, that's two different things.

You can use a game as a metaphor for these situations, and sometimes it helps you to understand it, like the chicken game or zero-sum games. But there are many situations where it's more serious than that. If civilians are being bombed and killed, then this is not a game, right? This is real life. So I think game theory can be useful for modeling some situations or conceptualizing situations like nuclear deterrence, but there are limitations on it. So as someone looking at the current situation, how useful do you think your game theory is? I think for me, there's two parts of it that I think are important. And the one is, as I mentioned, the chicken game, the brinkmanship. People understanding that Vladimir Putin is going

to use that tactic, is going to push, is going to try to get concessions. You have to know that he's trying to do that. So it's necessary. I think the people in NATO understand this very well. It's very important to understand that he's going to use that strategy. He's going to try to make NATO back down. He's going to try to push. So you can't allow yourself to be pushed backwards. You can't make too many concessions. You have to still stand up somehow. So I think this part of it is useful. And I think the other part that's useful is, as I mentioned, the idea of zero-sum games, because there are also non-zero-sum games. A non-zero-sum game is where, instead of one side winning and one side losing, we look at it in terms of both sides winning or losing together. It's possible for both sides to win or both sides to lose.

And what do I mean by this? Well, in this case, if you're talking about nuclear weapons, both sides winning is there's no nuclear war. If there's no nuclear war, then it's kind of a victory for everybody. But if there is a nuclear war, then everybody loses. It's important to understand this principle, I think, of we need to avoid certain outcomes. We need to work towards outcomes that are more beneficial for most people. Unfortunately, in this case, Ukraine is in the

middle, right? So what do we do about Ukraine and Ukrainian civilians and people dying there? That's a big question. That's the question that's difficult to solve, because they're sort of caught in the middle of this. So that's going to be a very difficult calculation for NATO to make. If Russia begins to make progress across Ukraine, that's where we may see the calculations coming in and what NATO does next. Because can you allow Russia to sort of expand across Ukraine and conquer the whole of Ukraine or does there come a point where you have to say stop and make an intervention that's the calculation they're going to have to come to the better outcome would be that Russia

gets stopped by the Ukrainian forces before it gets to that point and then that situation doesn't arise but that's the kind of calculations I think game theory can help with. But I would say there are limitations on it. And if you go too deeply into modeling and trying to model mathematically people's behaviors, then you're getting into a very messy and dangerous situation. So it's important not to expect too much from game theory. But I think at a conceptual level, it's important to use it to understand how to react to the Russians and how to react to Putin. While I've got you, before I let

you go, you mentioned a little bit about some possible future outcomes. But everyone's got a hot take at the moment. What's your personal hot take on where things are heading in Ukraine as we sit here in the first week of March? It's really difficult to say, and I'm not really keen on making predictions for the simple reason that I've made predictions in the past, and then they turn out to be wrong. So it's difficult to predict. But I think we can come up with some scenarios, some different possibilities of what might happen. As I said, I think one possibility is that Russia intensifies the attack and increases the bombardment and just tries to demoralize the Ukrainians.

And I think that's probably what they're trying to do at the moment, demoralize Ukrainian civilians, demoralize the army in the hope that they're going to eventually give up, right? Like a siege mentality. If it goes on and on and they feel besieged and they get into worse and worse conditions, they might just give up. I think that's what the russians would be hoping so this is one possibility that ukraine gives up another possibility is that like the north vietnamese ukrainians are unified and become more patriotic and more determined to preserve their nation and

they just don't give up and they just fight tooth and nail. And if they fight tooth and nail, which actually my personal opinion would be that they would, they would keep going. They wouldn't at this point because there's, I think, more than 90% support now for the president. I think they will keep going. And hopefully it's more likely that the Russian army would become demoralized as they come to understand. And we've seen some videos of captured Russian soldiers saying they made a mistake

and they didn't understand what was happening and they didn't have enough information. If the Russian army got demoralized by this conflict that they see as an unnecessary one, then hopefully the result would be that the Russians would back down rather than the Ukrainians. So I kind of would see it those two ways. And we'd have to hope that it doesn't come to the point where NATO is having to confront Russia, because this is, as I say, very dangerous. You're not wrong there. Thank you very much indeed. Tell everyone about your most recent book. The book that I have now out in paperback is called The Impact of China's Belt and Road Initiative from Asia to Europe. I'm a China specialist mainly, so it's about China's Belt and Road Initiative and exploring what China is doing in various regions of Asia and Central and Eastern Europe.

So it does include Central and Eastern Europe. Obviously, I can't say that I have anything much in there about Ukraine, but it's about how China is expanding using the Belt and Road Initiative. So that book is out in paperback. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you, Dan. Thank you very much for inviting me. school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you

very much indeed. that really does make a huge difference it's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account so please don't ever do that can seem like a small thing but actually it's kind of a big deal for us i really appreciate it see you next time