Scare Tactics

October 22, 2010

Money is the mother's milk of politics; motivation is the mother's milk of the politics of treaty ratification.  Arms control battles in the United States tend to be uneven fights -- and not just because skeptics need only 34 votes to quash a treaty in the Senate. The "arms control lobby" has not been known for its corporate backers or deep pockets. (If someone out there has the time and interest, it might be useful to compare the resources used by The Arms Control Association and The Heritage Foundation to wage their respective campaigns over New START.) Arms controllers have to compensate for the money advantage and right-mindedness of treaty opponents with equally strong commitment and a very smart game plan.

Treaty critics rely heavily on scare tactics to advance their causes. In times of polarity, conviction politics can override substance - especially when blocking action does not require a majority vote.  So naysayers borrow scripts developed for the talking heads on Fox, on the assumption that if arguments unsupported by facts are repeated often enough, enough people - in this instance Senators - will believe them to be true.

Opponents of the New START agreement reprise classic Cold War arguments. As in the 1970s, they argue that the treaty makes America more vulnerable to attack and unable to be properly defended. Since the Soviet Union and the ABM Treaty are both dead, this line of argument takes some explaining, especially since New START permits the United States to maintain the strongest nuclear deterrent on the planet, secures additional billions to modernize the nuclear weapons complex, and allows as much of a build up of missile defenses as the administration, the Pentagon, and the Congress see fit to pursue. If critics actually had their way in sidelining New START, working Congressional majorities over strategic force levels, modernization programs, and missile defenses would unravel.  Then arms control critics would really have something to worry about. But fear tactics are always circular: whatever happens, ratification or no ratification, treaty critics will argue the sky is falling.

That constitutes a smart game plan for treaty backers? One approach, again reprised with New START, is to swallow reservations and agree to spend large sums of money on nuclear programs to alleviate enough concerns in the Senate. When these commitments serve to undermine the objectives and purposes of the treaty under consideration - as was the case with U.S. and Soviet modernizations programs accompanying the SALT I Interim Agreement - bad news awaits. But for New START, additional resources actually reinforce the objectives and purposes of the treaty: these investments provide confidence in a long-term process of strategic arms reductions.

Is a smart game plan for treaty ratification to play on fear? There is usually great ambivalence among supporters of arms control to fight fire with fire by employing scare tactics to advance the cause. (One exception is the subject of nuclear terrorism, where the tactics employed by arms controllers and anti-arms controllers are often indistinguishable.)  Treaties dealing with strategic nuclear forces are usually not advanced by scary stories, especially when the treaty in question promises modest gains. The argument that "things could be worse" absent the treaty is suspect when the agreement offers too little, or when the treaty partner is already behaving badly. Both conditions conspired to torpedo SALT II. One of the reasons why treaty ratification is so difficult is that successful scare tactics tend to work for one side only.

There are other reasons to doubt the efficacy of scare tactics when used by arms controllers. Successful arms control is a long haul enterprise. Scare tactics can focus attention and generate support for the short term, but sooner rather than later, this tactic wears off on uncommitted listeners. Those who repeatedly seek to motivate through fright begin to sound like the boy who cried wolf.  They may well eventually be right, but by then, most people will have tuned out. Besides, the unintended, take-away message of drum-beating nuclear dangers can be to convince listeners of the magnitude and hopelessness of the tasks ahead - when in actuality, extraordinary progress has been made to reduce nuclear dangers over the past two decades. Last but not least, fear-based strategies can lead to significant over-reactions and costly errors in judgment and policy.

If fear is not the way to advance the short-term politics of treaty ratification, and if scare tactics are not politically sustainable, how could they possibly work in a long-term campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons?  It's very hard to mobilize public concern and governmental action without scaring the living bejeezus out of everybody. Warnings of immediate danger rarely translate into long-term gains in this business, and long haulers don't run sprints very well.

Waves of public concern over nuclear danger crest and recede. Whether the tide is running in or out, mixed messages are the right messages: Yes, there are very serious nuclear dangers out there, and more is required to tackle these problems.  But there's no reason for despair: the United States and others have made great progress in reducing these dangers since the Cold War ended, and we have the tools to reduce them further, including the occasional treaty.

This essay was also posted on www.armscontrolwonk.com

Photo Credit: "New START Negotiations, Russian Mission in Geneva" U.S. Mission: Eric Bridiers, April 2010-10-22