CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

aised the stakes, significantly, still further and yet for a brief window also resurrected
an argument – in the West – in favour of preventive war. The simplicity of the
argument is in many ways compelling: if nuclear war between the West and the Soviet
bloc were to happen, it would be better for the West (and arguably the World) if it were
to happen whilst the West’s monopoly, and later superiority, in nuclear weapons would
ensure a rapid and decisive victory and with minimal destruction. 176 If the practicality
of the argument was undermined by the Soviet Union’s rapid catching-up in nuclear
capability, it was in any case based on highly questionable premises: firstly that war was
inevitable, and secondly that any early attack on the Soviet Union would result in early
and relatively uncostly victory. This particular case can be extrapolated to apply to all
argument for preventive war: when past cases are considered arguments both about
relative costs and inevitability of conflict are counter-factual; when future cases are
considered the arguments for both are unsubstantiated. Indeed, the argument for
inevitability risks being simply self-fulfilling! Moreover, as Brodie 177 points out, there
is a moral argument, too, that cannot be ignored. Preventive war must result in the loss
of lives (measured, potentially, in millions in the case of the nuclear war that was
Brodie’s concern) in the target state, of people ‘mostly innocent of responsibility, on the
inherently unprovable assumption that our safety requires it.’ Such immorality, valuing
a sense of security for US citizens over the lives of foreigners, Brodie, argued, was
simply unacceptable to the American people to an extent that only a dictatorship could
contemplate it:
It argues some want of imagination to assume – as many in fact once did assume
– that the American people could acquiesce in such a deed and then go about
their usual business of pursuing happiness, free of guilt as well as of fear. … …
in fact there now exists a powerful and rigid barrier, largely on moral grounds to
American planning of preventive war.
Indeed, such was the sensitivity of the issue that Major General Orvil Anderson was
dismissed as Commandant of the US Air War College for publicly arguing in favour of
preventive war. 178
Today, the barrier looks somewhat less rigid and we can see these arguments for
preventive war re-emerging. Indeed, they were present in the stated justification for the
2003 Iraq War. In an interview for The Christian Socialist, then UK Defence Secretary
223