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The Second Nuclear Age, by Colin S. Gray
5. Nuclear Strategy
From the somewhat negative analysis of nuclear fallacies in Chapter 4, the discussion now moves into a positive vein. Unpopular though nuclear forces and nuclear strategy are to many people today, I brave the perils of political incorrectness and inquire how the United States should approach questions of nuclear strategy. This chapter argues the merit in adopting a strategic perspective for the consideration of nuclear arms, it proceeds to express reservations about the astrategic journey that is the START enterprise, 1 and it identifies and explains five strategic missions for U.S. nuclear forces in the second nuclear age. The discussion closes with consideration of the more vital of the similarities and dissimilarities between the first and second nuclear ages, a presentation that leads directly to providing general principles for the guidance of U.S. nuclear strategy and nuclear force planning.
A Strategic Perspective
To argue the corner of nuclear strategy as we approach the end of the twentieth century is to risk being bracketed with those who continue to deny any proven connection between smoking and ill health. In the United States, at least, nuclear weapons are not popular. Unfortunately, there are several conclusively persuasive reasons that the United States is obliged to remain a nuclear power:
I am substantially unfriendly to the idea of either minimal but existential or of virtual and postexistential nuclear weapons arsenals. The former idea is judged here to be merely imprudent, and the latter combines impracticality with a folly that could assume proportions amounting to criminal neglect of the polity’s prime duty to the safety of the citizen.
A so-called minimum (would-be) deterrent of, say, a couple of hundred weapons must be an exceedingly, and in the U.S. case a needlessly, blunt strategic instrument. Moreover, again in the U.S. case, a minimum nuclear arsenal would not only ill-fit a foreign policy of global engagement that included extended deterrent duties, it could prove dangerous. Low numbers on the U.S. part (deployed on how many platforms?) could fuel competitive fires abroad and gratuitously invite technical and military-operational vulnerabilities. These thoughts may point to anxieties that should not be well founded, but given that nuclear arms will remain the ultima ratio regum, why would a prudently governed polity ever consider taking needless risks in this area?
The idea of virtual nuclear arsenals—or postexistential nuclear arsenals for readers who delight in abstruse jargon—is basically unsound. 3 Virtuality for nuclear arms is a poor idea because (1) a global disarmament regime mandating that nuclear arms be virtual at most could not be monitored, verified, or enforced; (2) cheating, even on a small scale, could have catastrophic consequences—and, alas, assuredly it would not be the United States or Britain that cheated; (3) even if all parties to a treaty for the “virtualization” of nuclear arms were to adhere to its terms scrupulously—which they would not—what the treaty regime would preprogram would be the certainty in the future of a massively dangerous nuclear rearmament competition under the pressure of crisis or war; and (4) a nuclear arsenal operationally ready for strategic prime time cannot just be created overnight and then promptly switched on to do its pre- or intrawar deterrent or denial jobs—Western democracies might lose a nuclear rearmament competition or lose in non-nuclear conflict before they could reassemble the “great deterrent.” Fortunately, the idea of virtual nuclear arsenals is such a bad one that even many among the Western opinion leaders who routinely will endorse propositions for policy that staple together disarmament, antinuclear action, and clever-sounding theory are unlikely to be seduced.
This chapter on nuclear strategy opened by offering some body blows to the respectively poor and appallingly poor ideas of a minimum deterrent and a “virtual deterrent”—a concept that says it all, one suspects: Would one settle for “virtual love” or “virtual wealth”? The purpose of this discussion is to provide a useful contrast with a genuinely strategic approach to nuclear arms.
The mission of the chapter is somewhat daunting. Notwithstanding the disappearance, temporary removal at least, of a nuclear-armed peer competitor to the United States—politically the most necessary defining parameter of this second nuclear age—and the moderately plausible emergence of the United States as a supercombatant in non-nuclear information-led warfare, I argue here for the importance of nuclear strategy.
In common with every middle-aged strategic theorist and commentator, I have had to interrogate my Cold War–trained strategic toolkit in light of what appears to be happening in this second nuclear age. As a person reared on the thoughts of Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Schelling, and Herman Kahn, 4 among others, how much and which items of my strategic nuclear “knowledge”—intellectual working capital perhaps—remains reliable? Leaving aside the now blessedly retired question of who is (was) correct about Cold War nuclear strategy, the uncomfortable fact remains that most of our ideas on nuclear strategy are between thirty and forty years old. Not only has the technology of war changed radically over the past two decades, but—more challenging still—the revolution in political context has altered foreign policy demand for (extended) nuclear deterrence beyond Cold War recognition. These are tough times indeed for the nuclear strategist. U.S. nuclear strategists now have no worthy foe (except perhaps for U.S. antinuclear strategists) and are challenged in their relevance by the claim for supercompetence in information-led warfare that derives from expectations of routine U.S. achievement of dominant battlespace knowledge. 5 By the close of the decade of the 1990s, though, the U.S. theory of information-led war had been battered by Balkan realities, much as U.S. limited-war theory was humbled in Vietnam.
A leading text on nuclear strategy argues for the political utility of nuclear armament, even though military merit to nuclear options is denied. 6 Robert Jervis believes that “Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter”—admittedly in the context of superpower Cold War—because nuclear catastrophe is nuclear catastrophe. 7 The question now, however, is whether the shift in political context from first to second nuclear age erases what previously was standard wisdom about nuclear superiority. What apparently was strategically true with respect to U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1970s and 1980s may not be true for U.S.-Iranian or U.S.-Chinese relations in the twenty-first century.
This chapter has the following difficulties to overcome: (1) to persuade readers that there is a continuing military need for nuclear strategy; (2) to suggest persuasively that politically the United States will find a policy demand for nuclear support; and (3) to argue that wonderful though it is, and more wonderful though it will become, U.S. prowess in I-led warfare, or in I-(cyber)war itself, cannot meet all strategic demands. If an I-led RMA is the future for strategy, what need can there be for discussion of nuclear (or BC) weapons beyond the pressing merit alleged by some in their abolition?
An Aside on Arms Control
Force planning today for nuclear arms is challenged fundamentally by the unfamiliarity (to the United States in this century) of the condition of absence of an “organizing threat.” 8 START constraints—actual, pending, and possible—raise the kind of astrategic, even antistrategic, problems that arms control regimes are wont to raise. The arms control literature on strategic offensive weapons remains wedded to the foolish, or strategically irrelevant, pursuit of a “technological peace.” 9 The numbers negotiated in START I and START II, and subsequently bandied about for a START III, have no strategically accessible meaning. This is not the occasion on which I should express my strategic disdain for arms control processes yet again. 10 The whole of this book really is about the control of arms, and particularly of arms commonly termed WMD. Beyond the control of arms, the subject reduces to the policy challenge to prevent war—especially wars wherein WMD figure catastrophically—on terms tolerable for prudent definition of security.
My views on the START process in particular, and indeed on negotiated arms control in general, are without significance for the argument here. The nuclear force levels licensed by START I, and even by START II, present no obviously severe difficulties for U.S. nuclear strategy. 11 If the START process is not likely to give birth to a treaty regime that would require the United States to reduce its inventory of strategic nuclear weapons to the low hundreds, then one can be relaxed about the matter. Since focus should be upon the prevention of war on terms consistent with security, and upon the control of WMD (inter alia) to that end, it would be a mistake to key discussion of future U.S. nuclear strategy to negotiated arms limitation.
To readers who may be wondering why a chapter on nuclear strategy is indulging in an aside on arms control, the reasons are that some people see START as a threat to an intelligent nuclear strategy (if that is not an oxymoron), and others see strategy as a threat to START; both views are wrong. The START process is not very interesting for international security today and tomorrow. As a minor though practical support for the formal commitment to disarmament of the nuclear weapons states under the terms of the NPT, START has some merit. As an organizing framework for the nuclear disarmament of the non–Russian Federation nuclear-armed legatees of the USSR, again START has merit—though the merit is strategically more contestable, in this case because of the needs of balance-of-power politics. The problem with the START process fundamentally is political. The United States and Russia are neither allies nor friends, but assuredly they are not enemies. If the exploration of the political context provided in Chapter 2 carries conviction, then bilateral Russian-U.S. arms limitation agreements are likely to be regarded by the strategic historians of the twenty-first century much as today we regard the earnest endeavors of Britain and the United States to curtail each other’s naval power in the 1920s and early 1930s. 12 Looking to the future, Russia and the United States are more likely to be allies than foes. Although Russia has an irridentist agenda vis-à-vis the “near abroad” in Europe and central Asia, it can anticipate none too fancifully the medium-term emergence of genuine menace from a China already rising in Asia. Hostility toward the United States should be an unaffordable luxury for a Russia insecure in central Asia, Siberia, and the Far East.
Arms control processes often address yesterday’s strategic problems and address them poorly at that; START is but one example of this repeated phenomenon.
Strategic Missions for U.S. Nuclear Forces
Strategically, what does the United States require of its nuclear-armed forces? In contrast to the answers provided in the 1980s, 13 I cannot assume that anything is understood beyond need for explanation and justification. When the United States appears so potent a conventionally armed power and when there is no single dominant threat, what can be the roles for U.S. nuclear forces? I suggest five strategic missions.
Everyone is to a degree a prisoner of his or her own expertise. Whereas many analysts and other commentators see nuclear weapons preponderantly as a threat to public safety, certainly to public health, I confess to regarding these weapons predominantly as a threat to the strategical faculties. To my mind, at least, the potential awfulness of nuclear weapons is a given, but so also is the literal impossibility of revoking the nuclear discovery. Since that discovery is irrevocable, the only issue is how best to cope with nuclear facts. We are morally obliged to think strategically about nuclear arms. 14
None of the five missions for U.S. nuclear forces identified and discussed here are particularly novel or really even controversial. The reason this presentation may seem unusual is that the rationale for U.S. nuclear armament typically is not presented as holistically or directly as this. There are elements in this explanation of U.S. nuclear strategy that the U.S. government cannot comfortably make explicit.
The Nuclear Arsenal of a Superpower
The United States requires a scale and quality of nuclear armament appropriate to its standing as the global superpower. As potentially the last, and sometimes even the first, line of deterrence and defense for regional security around the world, the United States dare not appear less capable than any possible foe in the category at least of nuclear WMD. The general idea behind this first mission is as clear as its force-planning referents are opaque. The gold standard for adequate performance has to be the requirement for U.S. nuclear forces to be, and appear to be, “second to none” by any plausible test. This is not, at least not quite, a requirement for U.S. nuclear forces to be able to win wars militarily; such a task may be beyond their ability, even when the nuclear forces of a regional power are small in number and light in technical sophistication. Nonetheless, given the decreasing reliability of deterrence mechanisms, it would be exceedingly desirable were the global ordering polity, the currently hegemonic United States, able to impose military defeat on disturbers of regional peace at tolerable cost to itself, its forward-deployed forces, and its friends and allies.
The policy logic behind this mission essentially is the logic of Patrick Morgan’s “general deterrence;” 15 it is also the policy logic described by Thucydides as motivating Athens to maintain a very large fleet. Edward N. Luttwak’s interpretation of Thucydides is worth quoting at some length.
The Athenians have in particular left us a detailed record of their imaginative exercise of naval suasion. The trireme fleet was kept in service in “peacetime” from the time of Themistocles to the beginning of the Peloponnesian War; its commanders were political appointees rather than specialists; and the political dimension of naval power was well understood. In particular, it was realized that the size of the fleet (200 boats) reflected the level of Alliance resources and the scope of Athenian ambitions, rather than a response to the scale of perceived enemy threats. Athenians would not have thought it wise to reduce the size of their fleet merely because the Persian/Phoenician or Corinthian threat waned. Their deployment strategy was not responsive, but rather intended to provide the means needed for a positive affirmation of Athenian political goals. When war came, however, this “political” fleet fought, and by all accounts, it fought well. 16
At present, U.S. nuclear forces are sized—in the process of being downsized, that is—to meet START (I and eventually perhaps II) criteria that were negotiated to effect some essential equivalence with the long-range nuclear forces of Russia, yesterday’s foe. This is not a particularly intelligent way in which to approach the problem of nuclear force planning, but probably it is good enough. Some 3,000–6,000 strategic nuclear weapons, the active inventory zone of the START I to START II regimes (should START II ever be ratified and implemented by Russia) are quantitatively more than adequate, pro tem at least, to meet plausible U.S. strategic requirements. What matters is not that the United States’ nuclear forces should settle for no less than some mindless mathematical parity for its nuclear forces with those of Russia, but only that the world at large—given the theme of general deterrence—should not judge or even wonder whether Russian nuclear forces enjoyed a politically exploitable superiority. One should recall the wise words of Robert Jervis, a scholar not overinclined to theorize enthusiastically in praise of nuclear arms, when he wrote at the tail end of the Cold War that “although military victory is impossible, victory is not: nuclear weapons can help reach many political goals.” 17 Nuclear weapons may or may not be military weapons—we would be well advised to retain open minds on that—but assuredly they are political weapons. Not only are they political weapons, they are political weapons that can trump other weapons, including effectively upsetting the game table of strategy and statecraft as previously arranged.
Many people would like to believe that prestige today attaches primarily to demonstrated prowess with precisely usable conventional forces, not to WMD. One can argue readily that poison gas and viruses lack a heroic timbre, and indeed that they have a most odious reputation because of both their inherent character and their historical association. Even nuclear WMD may have lost some of their political magic, but one should not not rush to negative judgment on their prospective political utility. One should beware of being too quick on the draw in developing strategic arguments out of the widespread disgust—expressed, for example, in “taboos”—at the options for BC warfare. Prestige can rest upon fear, notoriety, and a respect for ruthlessly amoral ambition and behavior. This is not the prestige the United States craves or needs, but for some regional polities it may be the only prestige available. Perhaps political and strategic necessity knows no taboos.
The United States needs to conduct its global ordering duties with eminently usable, precise conventional arms under the top cover provided by the general, and occasionally the immediate, deterrent effect yielded by nuclear armament. As a general deterrent, U.S. nuclear arms are not threats with addressee labels; rather they are a general menace “to whom it may concern.” 18 For all the understandable excitement of the 1980s and 1990s about the emerging high potency of information-led conventional arms, it would be a grave mistake to undervalue nuclear arms. Nuclear weapons are WMD in ways that many people, including some defense professionals, may be in peril of forgetting. 19 As suggested in Chapter 4, the wake-up call of a small nuclear war in some troubled region of Eurasia would remind U.S. defense experts belatedly that their (conventional) weapons of choice were not the weapons of choice for all of the world’s belligerents. 20 A U.S. society that, though domestically violent, today recoils in horror from the prospect of suffering or inflicting almost any casualties in war will find itself politically, emotionally, and morally ill prepared to respond rationally to the body count from a real nuclear conflict.
Discourage, or Offset, the Nuclear Armament of an Emerging Peer Competitor
It is unlikely that the United States will face a reinvigorated Russian superpower in the twenty-first century. However, in some ways the current Russian reluctance to move expeditiously down the START II and III road toward a low scale in nuclear arsenals inadvertently serves well the interest of international security. Given that the nuclear era is here to stay, that there is no strong strategic (or other) virtue in very low levels of nuclear armament, and that Russia is not the prime candidate for “foe of the early century” after 2000, making haste only slowly in START has obvious attractions.
In the calculations and emotions of any regional power, the United States will probably long remain the security problem. Any country virtually anywhere in the world that seeks to become regional hegemon has to anticipate that the key opponent of that ambition will be the United States. Regional foes might just elect to try to balance the most rapidly rising polity of their own region, but they will be more likely to look extraregionally for help from the only operationally plausible source of such help, the United States.
The details of the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal will not be of great interest to an emerging regional hegemon with extraregional interests and ambitions, because it is highly improbable that the precepts of classical strategy would rule. In other words, the regional challenger would not anticipate being able to fight U.S. nuclear forces directly in quest of a favorable military decision. 21 Nonetheless, a regional foe seeking to challenge the United States to gain greater influence will be daunted if the United States has a huge advantage in nuclear weapons.
There are several reasons the United States is going to continue to have difficulty achieving adequate levels of deterrent effect in regional crises; the problem, however, does not stop there. Within several would-be regional hegemons there lurk the possibilities of great powers almost peer-competitive with the United States. Much after the fashion of imperial expansion, one need not postulate exceptionally roguish ambitions in order to identify the growth of supraregional challenges to the U.S.-led international order. As an empire acquires additional holdings, or options on holdings to secure what it has already, so a rising hegemon could hardly be secure in its recently achieved regional prominence if it did not seek security through an extraregional balance-of-power policy designed to offset the influence of the United States.
There is not much that the United States can do effectively to dampen the ambition, especially the prudentially rational ambition, of would-be regional hegemons to ascend the slope from great power to superpower. But what can be done should be done, and that category of intended countervailing behavior includes U.S. retention of a nuclear arsenal incomparably greater than any that a still regional hegemon could acquire for many years. Beyond this logic, however, resides the need to recognize the strong probability that one day the United States will indeed be confronted by what amounts to a genuinely peer competitor. One must say “what amounts to,” because it is important to discourage an inclination to assume that the return in a third nuclear age to a dominant international axis of hostility would be a close replay of the great Soviet-U.S. contest of the Cold War. A Chinese peer competitor, for an example selected not entirely at random, would pose geopolitical and geostrategic—and an absence of ideological—challenges radically different from those familiar from the course of strategic history from 1945 to 1989.
Although deterrence always is more or less unreliable, the emergence of a superpower rival in China or—less likely—the resurgence of a superpower Russia could find the United States rather complacent about the dynamics of nuclear deterrence and strategy. Much as the U.S. defense community has had no little difficulty adjusting to a second nuclear age bereft of a dominant threat, so that community is in danger of allowing itself to be trained by and for this second age in accordance with terms and conditions that will be only transitory. Historians have noticed, for example, that England no sooner had learned which grand strategy to apply in order to beat the Dutch in the seventeenth century than the enemy changed—to France—and yesterday’s strategic assumptions no longer worked. 22 This familiar problem of the need to adapt to a changing strategic context is compounded when previous conflicts were concluded successfully. It can be hard to innovate both in a void of current threat and against the backdrop of recent victory. 23
When the United States approaches the task of planning for regional conflicts, even major theater wars, there ought to be several healthily redundant paths to success. For example, in 1991 Iraq could have been defeated more exclusively by Coalition airpower, much more exclusively by Coalition landpower and amphibious power, or even—politically improbably—by selective nuclear strikes. Major theater wars will not always play out as relatively cheap and easy military enterprises for the United States, but an expectation that several paths to victory will be available can become a near habitual expectation for a superpower. The United States is in peril of mistraining itself strategically against a second-rate or lower class of opponent. The British army looked invincible in December 1940 when it routed the Italians in Libya; it appeared much less invincible in March–April 1941 when it unexpectedly ran into Erwin Rommel and the Afrika Corps.
It is something of a paradox that relatively easy though it should be for the United States to defeat a regional power in war—though an NBC-equipped regional power could be a different matter (see below)—experience and logic advise us that deterrence is exceptionally unreliable in the asymmetrical strategic relations between a superpower and a regional power. The good news is that the United States ought to be able to win virtually any conflict against a regional power. The bad news is that the United States is quite likely to actually have to win such military conflicts because deterrence will fail. The huge disparity in physical strength between the United States and an Iraq, Iran, or North Korea is all but beside the point when there is perceived to be a no less huge disparity (to the disfavor of the United States) in intensity of national interest at stake. Moreover, the hegemonic qualities of the contemporary United States, married to popular classification of that country as the exemplar of Western civilization, themselves offer hope for diplomatic leverage, jiujitsu fashion, by ambitious regional powers. In 1990–1991, Iraq could not use international resentment of U.S. hegemony to sufficient diplomatic effect; other regional polities may well perform strategically better in that regard in the future.
A peer, at least more than strictly regional, rival to the United States could decide that nuclear capability is the path to fame and global fortune. Even a long U.S. lead in strategic nuclear arms—hovering, say, in the START II completion zone of 3,000–3,500 weapons—may appear more catchable than will the conventional power of U.S. information-led forces. If current trends continue, START-blessed U.S. strategic nuclear forces are going to be long in the tooth by the second and third decade of the twenty-first century. 24 It is as certain as anything can be in world politics that eventually a rival will arise to challenge the United States. As noted already, at present the leading nominee for the role of emerging peer competitor has to be China, 25 but it is worth recalling that at the beginning of the 1990s Japan was the leading candidate. An emerging (or reemerging) peer, be it China, Russia, “Europe,” an Islamic coalition, or other, most likely would have some or all of the following characteristics relevant to this discussion of U.S. nuclear strategy:
Deterrent effect is not, of course, a matter reducible simply to the menace in large nuclear forces. If that were the case, then we should have been much more secure than I believe we were in times of crisis during the Cold War, and Saddam Hussein should never have dared invade Kuwait or launch Scud missiles at Israel. Furthermore, suspicion of some future deficit in deterrent effect cannot reliably be answered by the elementary expedient of procuring larger forces. In addition, one cannot just extrapolate merrily from the strategic experience of the Cold War the basic rules for promotion of reliable deterrence and expect as a consequence that peace with security assuredly must ensue.
To know how to deter—if truly one does—is important and should be useful. That knowledge, however, is not synonymous with success in deterrence. As Clausewitz was at pains to explain, the theory of war can educate the commander, but it cannot deliver battlefield success. 28 The reasons that the United States predictably will have difficulty deterring an emerging peer competitor are likely to owe nothing of deep significance to any deficiency in the extant theory of deterrence. If the United States fails, the failure will reside in efforts to practice deterrence.
The challenge to U.S. nuclear strategy posed by an emerging would-be superstate rival is to be compared only in part with the strategic conditions in the early Cold War years. If, for example, China is the emerging peer rival, consider how different that rivalry must be from the context of the Cold War, in which the United States learned its deterrence lore.
An emerging peer rival to the United States—probably, but not necessarily, China—would be likely to place severe pressure on the U.S. ability to deter. The United States could not be sure either just what the rival would be seeking to achieve or what the current U.S. “ordered” security structure might concede safely. The most appropriate historical analogy for the rise of a peer competitor to the United States is not really the USSR of Cold War fame, but rather the imperial Germany that sought its place in the sun in the 1890s and 1900s. The inability of the European balance-of-power system to cope adequately with the geostrategic fact of a rising, and then returning rising, Germany is a vital part of the explanation of why the twentieth century witnessed the waging of two world wars. A like inability of the now global political system to cope adequately with the geostrategic fact of a rising China (or Russia, or “Europe,” or Japan, or “Islam,” and so forth) all too plausibly could shape strategic history toward a notable World War III.
The point is not only that by definition the emergence of a peer competitor to the United States would mean the emergence of a physically very strong power. Scarcely less important is the prediction that that very strong, emergent power genuinely would not know which actions would, and which actions would not, enrage the United States as the superstate hegemon in situ. One does not need to postulate awesomely villainous leaders of unquestionably rogue states in order to set the stage for large-scale conflict.
Extend Deterrence in Aid of Distant Friends and Allies
If the preceding analysis appeared to be focused unduly upon the strategic problems of tomorrow—those that would attend the emergence of a peer competitor—here one returns foursquare to the challenges extant, or immediately probable, today. U.S. strategic commentators understandably, even commendably, vectored toward damaging the foes of the republic occasionally need to be reminded that the protection of friends is strategically more important than is the punishing of foes—which is not to deny that the two tasks are related intimately.
The protection of friends and allies is a process of deterrence, of defense or denial, and of reassurance. A protecting power such as the United States today seeks influence over both the foes of its friends and its friends themselves. In few realms of statecraft is this latter point more salient than with reference to U.S. nuclear strategy. The analysis that follows considers the missions of U.S. nuclear forces and strategy with respect to three aspects of extended protection: threats to friends and allies from NBC-armed foes; threats to those friends and allies from powerfully conventionally armed foes; and the value of U.S.-provided deterrence and reassurance to help discourage friends and allies from proceeding down the path of self-help toward national nuclear arsenals.
Counter NBC threats to friends and allies. With the rapid contemporary proliferation of ballistic and cruise missiles, the slow but eventually inexorable if modest-scale spread of nuclear weapon capabilities, and the quite expeditious dissemination of the more readily accessible BC assets, NBC menaces to U.S. friends and allies are certain to grow. Although no arms control regime should be assumed to be sacrosanct in time of war, and although international law can be held to allow at least some right of reprisal, 29 it is improbable that the United States and its NATO allies will be interested in acquiring—or reacquiring in some cases—the kind of offensive chemical, let alone biological, weapons that could be dedicated to efforts at symmetrical deterrence of BC threats. For political, strategic, and ethical reasons, the United States will seek to extend deterrence of BC use on behalf of regional order in general and selected valued friends and allies in particular by virtually any means other than a military response-in-kind. Should an Iraq or an Iran use chemical, toxin, or biological weapons against U.S. allies in the Middle East, or against U.S. forces deployed forward into that region, the military answer would take the form of a precisely devastating conventional air (including cruise missile) campaign; or, if the injury suffered were truly chronic, the answer would be distinctly limited nuclear action. Obviously, the United States would be exceedingly reluctant to use nuclear weapons. Not only would a hugely squeamish U.S. society—and U.S. government sensibly fearful of the “CNN effect”—recoil in horror from U.S. employment of WMD, but U.S. policymakers rightly would anticipate that such nuclear employment would inflict massive political damage upon the global nonproliferation regime (an “own goal” or “safety”).
Notwithstanding the points just registered, international order, which in this second nuclear age preeminently means U.S. guardianship, requires that the leading ordering power pose at least residual nuclear threats in order to deter, counter, or punish potential rogues who consider the merit in NBC statecraft and strategy. Regional nuclear threats, or use, at least provide an obvious license for the U.S. would-be protecting power to respond in kind; BC threats or use poses a tougher challenge, since, as just noted, they require strategically asymmetrical treatment. However, the challenge to U.S. strategy is less severe in practice than it may appear in principle, rather like NATO’s wonderfully opaque doctrine of flexible response during the later decades of the Cold War. To try to deter BC use, the United States would be obliged to have recourse to somewhat veiled nuclear menace, as it (and Israel) did in 1990–1991. In the dire event that BC weaponry actually inflicted heavy losses on U.S. troops, or on the soldiers or civilians of regional allies, then the United States might well elect not to respond with nuclear use, though controlling the nuclear options of a BC-damaged ally—Israel, say—would be quite another matter.
As long as the BC, let alone nuclear, peril remains strictly latent—at least insofar as the United States directly is concerned—one can speculate with some ease about the strong likelihood that veiled U.S. threats of a nuclear response to hostile BC use are one thing and are eminently sensible for their putative deterrent effect; but an actual U.S. nuclear response to BC use would be something else entirely. The United States would be the only power to have used nuclear weapons, again; and again those weapons most probably would be used against a non-Western polity and society. It is important, however, that analysis occasionally should dare transcend the boundary of the politically correct consensus on WMD. The United States hypothesized at this juncture is not the awesomely casualty-averse, NPT regime–oriented United States of today. Instead, one is considering U.S. grand and military strategy following the use of NBC weapons against U.S. citizens and the peoples of U.S. allies. In some respects, commendably, the United States does not want to kill, or even risk killing, innocent Iraqis or Serbs as a consequence of coercive air strikes intended to make a diplomatic point. But, how would the United States feel about its willingness to be responsible for, say, thousands (or more) of “enemy” (guilty and innocent alike) deaths had they just suffered NBC attacks that caused possibly tens of thousands of “friendly” casualties? The contemporary U.S. public mood, which appears to insist upon resort to war and coercion only if it can be effected without pain, would—one can predict—swing massively toward demands for punishment of the perpetrators of NBC horrors.
U.S. policy intended to maximize the prospect for the deterrence of NBC use against friends and allies must cope with harassment from a currently inalienable paradox. In order to extend protection of friends and allies against menace from WMD-armed foes, the United States must emphasize the political, strategic, and even perhaps military merit in its nuclear arsenal. U.S. nuclear deterrence on behalf of distant security dependents thus risks undercutting the global NPT regime. No matter what the United States says in criticism of WMD, U.S. actions in praise of the strategic effect of nuclear weapons for deterrence speak louder than words. This is not a criticism of extended nuclear deterrence; it is simply a reminder that national and international security requirements can pull policy simultaneously in apparently opposite directions.
Counter potentially overwhelming conventional threats to friends and allies. It is in part because of the incredibility of U.S. nuclear use to protect friends and allies against large conventional threats that several of those friends and allies have seen the merit in developing national nuclear arsenals. Although very few U.S. security dependents have proceeded to the actual nuclear threshold (or beyond) preponderantly for this reason—Britain, France, Israel, and Pakistan are more or less cases in point, though Taiwan and South Korea have flirted seriously with the idea—the strategic logic for nuclear acquisition thus motivated is distinctly powerful.
Strictly speaking, there are no “nuclear guarantees” either written into, or glued on, the NATO Treaty. 30 Nonetheless, during the years of the Cold War it was always NATO strategic doctrine, as encapsulated in the evolving strategic concept, that the Alliance would be prepared to have resort to nuclear weapons rather than acquiesce in defeat in a conventional war. The periodically renewed public debate, then and now, about “no first use (NFU)” of nuclear weapons, though foolish because no NFU declaration possibly could be worth the paper it was written on, nonetheless did refer to a topic that had symbolic political meaning. 31 Whatever the probable reality of military behavior under the pressure of a hot war, interest in NFU on the part of the United States was always likely to be interpreted by ever nervous and insecure allies as U.S. willingness to tolerate the conventional conquest of an ally or two rather than have resort to any level of nuclear employment. No first use may or may not have been the political reality of U.S. policy in some years of the Cold War; we can never know for certain.
So confident is the United States today in its information-led conventional military prowess that even the idea of nuclear deterrence of, let alone nuclear response to, regional conventional menace seems as inappropriate as it is contrary to the (American) spirit of the age. In contemporary U.S. debate about the extended deterrence mission, even the notion of U.S. nuclear use initiatives is deemed all but obscene. It should be self-evident to all right-thinking folk, not to mention military experts now well schooled in the ways in which the “U.S. RMA” must yield strategic advantage through “dominant battlespace knowledge,” 32 that the only strategically necessary and politically legitimate role of U.S. nuclear weapons is to act as a counterdeterrent or response to the WMD of regional rogues. As a strategic result of nuclear counterdeterrence, the regional ring can be kept square for decisive U.S. exercise of its precisely navigated conventional muscle. This is an attractive strategic vision. Moreover, it is an attractive strategic vision that is politically and militarily quite plausible.
On the military side, there should be few regular-style, which is to say tolerably symmetrical, military challenges that the United States could not defeat, or at least thwart, with its information edge enforced by formidable conventional forces. Of course, those U.S. forces might be busy elsewhere, but let us not muddy the waters unduly by raising doubts about the prospective adequacy of the size of the U.S. military establishment. 33 On the political side, surely one is right to be skeptical of the strategic relevance of nuclear options, because it is difficult to imagine the United States choosing to have resort to nuclear arms as a desperation move to alter the course of a regional conflict. The United States of today, notwithstanding the singularity of its superpower standing, does not exactly resemble the kind of country likely to choose nuclear war rather than condone the conventional defeat of a friend or ally. Whether or not that suspicion is well founded, the strategic calculation would differ significantly were large numbers of U.S. soldiers being engulfed in some regional conventional disaster. We shall return to this possibility under a separate heading below. Suffice it to note for now that the future is open-ended, and war, even conventional war in this information age, is a roll of the iron dice. 34 It may not seem likely that the United States would seriously consider employing nuclear weapons in a conventional war, but not all among the enemies of the United States in the future are going to be as militarily inept as was Saddam Hussein in 1991.
Reassure friends and allies, thereby demotivating them from the pursuit of a national nuclear option. Because of the potential liability to the would-be nuclear extended deterrer, nuclear guarantees worthy of the name are more difficult to extract from NPT-licensed nuclear weapons states than is water from desert sands. To be a nuclear protector, in the sense that one extends protection over distant countries against nuclear menaces, is by definition to risk the suffering of nuclear damage on behalf of others. The protection business is very much what being a great power has always been about, but the incurring of risk of damage by WMD on behalf of foreigners is something else entirely. As Karl Marx insisted, quantity changes quality. To fight, even to fight bloodily in a protracted conflict for the protection of an ally whose fate is significant for your national security is one matter; knowingly to hazard one’s forces and one’s country itself with the risk of nuclear catastrophe is a different matter entirely. NATO-Europeans during the Cold War were not as understanding as they should have been of the historically unprecedented character of risk that the United States willingly ran in part on their behalf. 35
Potential nuclear proliferants long have sought security guarantees as a price for adherence to the formally discriminatory NPT regime. As a general rule, the best promise they could extract took the undersatisfactory form of negative security assurances. Specifically, non-nuclear weapon adherents to the NPT regime are assured that they will not be the victims of nuclear threats or attacks. This kind of assurance is of a class with promises of NFU and for detargeting by nuclear-armed missiles. The problem is that the negative security assurance is worthless because it has no operational authority. Unfortunately, the kind of security assurance, or reassurance, that potential nuclear proliferants seek is not confined to the thwarting of threats by WMD. The Pakistani nuclear program, for example, is not driven solely by the need to provide a counterdeterrent to Indian nuclear weapons; if that were the case, the subcontinent would be rendered reasonably safe for the conduct of yet another conventional war. Understandably enough, Pakistan has judged that a national nuclear arsenal must help deter both nuclear intimidation by, and conventional attack from, India.
Forward deployment of U.S. armed forces can create that credible commitment to a distant friend that the words alone of foreign policy are unable to effect. For example, the United States cannot promise credibly to wage nuclear war on behalf of, say, Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan. But it is all but self-evident that the United States would employ whatever weapons were necessary to protect its own forces deployed in defense of those countries. It would be difficult to exaggerate the strategic significance of the reassurance that such U.S. support can provide.
Admittedly it is difficult, probably to the point of impossibility, to distinguish among the United States as the global superpower, the United States as militarily the most potent power on earth, and the United States as a nuclear-armed polity. The overwhelming reason the countries of East-Central Europe want to join NATO is that the Alliance, uniquely, is seen as the security club whose members are guaranteed in their enjoyment of their most vital interests by the U.S. superpower. Such would-be NATO members as Romania and Lithuania are not interested in the detail of their potential security nexus to the United States; what counts, what really counts, is that the United States is the superpower. U.S. nuclear armament is but one, albeit one significant and necessary, element of that currently unique superstate classification. The point is that the other players in world politics, including potential player-victims, naturally subsume nuclear armaments as a dimension of U.S. power writ large. Most emphatically, this does not mean that U.S. nuclear armament is a trivial matter in the context of U.S. strength overall. Information-rich U.S. armed forces, able to strike precisely and conventionally against located targets—one day even against located and moving targets in bad weather—worldwide, could be rendered strategically irrelevant by the “knight’s move” of plausible nuclear threats. Counterdeterrence by U.S. nuclear arms might not work in a regional context where there was a huge disparity in intensity of interest between the superpower and its regional foe.
As a general rule, the greater the willingness of the United States to protect potentially embattled friends and allies à outrance, the less likely is it that those embattled friends and allies will be moved to proceed decisively toward (or beyond) nuclear-threshold status. There are, alas, two emerging strategic challenges to the practical authority of this political logic. First, in a second nuclear age in which there is no globally dominant hostile relationship, the United States is acutely short of popularly powerful reasons for accepting exceedingly high risks on behalf of others. U.S. vital—let alone survival—interests are not obviously engaged in regional disputes around Eurasia today. Second, just as the intensity of U.S. interest has diminished, so the intensity of risk to U.S. forces, and eventually even to the U.S. homeland, is in the process of increasing exponentially. Americans may well have been willing enough to risk their all on behalf of NATO-Europe and Western Civilization in the great Cold War, but how do they feel about knowingly placing themselves at NBC risk on behalf of only “major”—not vital, and certainly not survival-level—national interests at stake in regional conflicts in this second nuclear age? 36
It is only responsible to emphasize the perils in extended (nuclear) deterrence. Those perils can be reduced, though one should hesitate to add controlled, both by military defensive and offensive preparation and by considerable care in policy. All of that properly granted, still it is an important mission for the U.S. nuclear arsenal to stand between potentially menaced regional friends and allies and their foes. Regional friends and allies who feel confident enough in the dissuasive authority of U.S. nuclear-backed diplomatic support are friends and allies who should have the political and military arguments necessary to defeat domestic pressures for nuclear acquisition.
Provide war-fighting options against high-priority very hard or elusive targets. It is a commonplace belief today that the military effects of nuclear weapons can be achieved by precisely targeted conventional weaponry. Commonplace or not, this belief is unfounded. It is true that accuracy in targeting is more important than energy yield in consequence for lethal effect, but that mathematical physical relationship does not mean that circular error probable (CEP) is everything. 37 Although nuclear weapons by their energy yield can offset some intelligence uncertainties about target coordinates, those weapons also can apply unmatchable destructive effect against targets that are superhardened or otherwise elusive or difficult to destroy with conclusive assurance. For example, and notwithstanding what cinema audiences were told in the movie The Rock, VX nerve gas and many other chemical, toxin, and even biological agents (which, of course, tend to be fragile as living organisms) are extremely difficult to destroy definitively, as opposed merely to disperse, except by means of the extraordinary heat generated by nuclear explosives. This is not to claim that counterforce action against BC weapons has to take a nuclear form to be effective. But the reliable forcible elimination of BC weapons and stockpiled agents is a military niche of growing strategic importance for which mission nuclear arms are uniquely well suited. 38
As this second nuclear age settles somewhat uncomfortably into an inter-war zone between post–Cold War and pre–next great contest, 39 it is all too easy to assume that the unique military virtues of nuclear weapons have no place in satisfaction of future security needs. Preeminently, it has become commonplace to acknowledge no role for nuclear weapons beyond that of deterrence of threat or use of WMD by rogue polities. 40 But what if an enemy has military forces or military production facilities—for example, a chemical weapons factory (more likely a chemical weapons factory masquerading as an insecticide plant 41 )—of cardinal strategic significance that cannot be targeted for thoroughly reliable total destruction either by U.S. special operations forces or by information-led conventional weapons (even with warheads designed for deep penetration)? Truly superhard underground targets generally can be destroyed or reliably sealed off only by nuclear weapons. This is not strategically fanciful. Deep underground basing of key military assets was practiced by Germany and Britain in World War II, was a feature of Soviet and Chinese military construction during the Cold War, is a feature of the Libyan and North Korean WMD factory complexes today, and—frankly—is military common sense. Moreover, as stated above, the problem with the targeting of BC weapons is not confined strictly to penetration of their physical defensive barriers of rock and concrete, but also pertains to reliable elimination of agents that can be lethal even in very small doses.
A similar military logic applies to mobile, and some other forms of elusive military, deployment of unusually important assets. Superhardening and mobility are both atypical and unwelcome because they are extraordinarily expensive to organize, build, and operate. The point is not that some U.S. nuclear weapons should be custom designed to menace superhard and mobile targets just because those targets may exist. In a context wherein several regional powers are likely to seek to protect their strategic and political “crown jewels” (WMD, delivery vehicles, political leaders, and key staff) by means of physical barriers or positional uncertainty, U.S. policy should recognize that its nuclear arsenal might well be uniquely capable of offsetting such efforts for survivability. Given that the stakes at issue could be the vulnerability of U.S. and allied forces, and homelands, to assault by NBC weapons, one should not be too hasty in recoiling in politically correct horror from the possibility of U.S. first use of nuclear weapons for “niche” war-fighting purposes.
Hedge against the large-scale degradation or outright failure of conventional fighting power. At this point some readers, because they are not professional strategic theorists and commentators, will complain that I am worried about something very implausible: a conventional-level U.S. military defeat.
Several answers to such a complaint beg for attention. First, the professional strategic commentator who has read Clausewitz and studied military history knows that friction rules; things go wrong “on the night.” Second, the professional strategic commentator has read Luttwak on the paradoxical logic of conflict 42 and is likely to assume an intelligent enemy. In practice, future strategic foes of the United States may prove to be ineducably strategically stupid, or wise in understanding and decision but hopelessly inept in strategic behavior. All things are possible, but as hypothetical defense planners, how should we bet? Can we safely assume that U.S. foes will stand up conveniently in open terrain to be “Desert Stormed”? For example, what if a rising regional polity, whose collective strategy IQ-equivalent reaches triple digits, should notice U.S. dependence upon space systems for military effectiveness? More to the point, what if such a perceptive polity were able to contest, not necessarily win, space control? 43 U.S. information-led military power might find itself at least temporarily deprived of much of the information that derives from space systems upon which its combat lethality depends. A United States deeply wedded to the conduct of network-centric warfare would be profoundly embarrassed militarily if its network “went down” ungracefully.
Having failed to deter war, U.S. conventional forces also could fail to deliver the necessary strategic effectiveness in war. Should that occur, a United States sensibly, as well as legally, bereft of offensive BC options would face a straight choice between accepting military defeat in conventional war or using nuclear weapons. One cannot predict how a U.S. president would choose, especially since no particular scenario dominates this strategic logic—unlike the former Cold War context with its leading edge comprising NATO’s Central Front along the border of the then West German Federal Republic. Nonetheless, one can predict that there could be cases wherein a president would prefer nuclear first use to non-nuclear defeat. That general prediction gains authority if one postulates large-scale loss of U.S. life in the unsuccessful conduct of a regional war.
The strategic logic that argues the salience of this mission for nuclear forces—to serve as a hedge against the failure of conventional forces—works both ways. Actual or persuasively imminent U.S. defeat in regional conventional combat must licence U.S. policymakers to conduct urgent examination of nuclear options. But the alternative generic scenario of great U.S. conventional success in a regional conflict also raises the nuclear specter, though this time initially in the form of desperation options for the regional power that is facing non-nuclear defeat. In this second case, the mission for U.S. nuclear strategy, though probably not the burden on U.S. decisionmakers, is likely to be almost as heroically difficult to perform successfully as was true for the first case. To recap, in a regional conflict that has the United States pitted against a rising regional power, conventional defeat for either side could, indeed must, fuel policy interest in the prompt use of nuclear (and BC, though particularly chemical and toxin weapons on the regional power’s side) weapons to offset conventional failure. Underpinning this argument is the fairly plausible assumption that in the future one must presume that any power able to be militarily at least somewhat competitive with the United States in a regional conventional conflict also would have the resources, and certainly the motivation, to acquire real NBC options. It is true that biological weapons must lack the promptness in effect that renders chemical, toxin, and nuclear arms so militarily attractive, but the military deficiencies of BW may well find ample compensation in the terror that their menace would engender.
I am not predicting that U.S. conventional forces will be defeated by some rising regional power, and neither am I asserting that either the United States or a regional foe assuredly would prefer to escalate the military character of a war into the nuclear zone rather than acquiesce in defeat. U.S. conventional military prowess is today, and will be tomorrow, incontestably impressive. There are some caveats, however, that a professional strategic commentator is obliged to note.
* * *
The understandable warm glow of self-satisfaction with which one regards Western triumphs in the Cold War and the Gulf War should not induce blindness toward less happy episodes in U.S. strategic history. The fact that these famous victories are recent is a source of concern at least as much as a source of confidence. The U.S. armed forces able to see off the late and unlamented USSR and dance operational arabesques around the static, unimaginatively commanded, and then literally paralyzed forces of Saddam Hussein plainly had military virtues that, though possibly a wasting asset, nonetheless should retain a notable half-life. But history teaches us that victory in war is far inferior an educator than is failure. German armies in 1940–1941, and Japanese in 1941–1942, both suffered ultimately fatally from “victory disease.” Rephrased, one begins to believe in one’s own invincibility—a malady with symptoms that include a pathological inability to assess risks prudently. Polities that “win big”—as, for instance, the United States in the Cold War and the Gulf—are prone to believe that the normal lore of statecraft and strategy does not apply to them because they are blessed, sanctioned, and enabled by some variant upon History’s Purpose or Divine Will. By analogy, a gambler on a winning streak comes to believe that Luck, not a truly randomly working chance, is with him or her. The possibility of catastrophic failure fades from the consciousness. How many Germans could conceive, let alone tentatively predict, in midsummer 1940 that their Third Reich would overreach itself fatally within only two years and suffer one of history’s more complete defeats within only five?
It is hard to imagine defeat when every strategic project appears to prosper. The United States should recall, however, that its strategic history shows a pattern of defeat early in war, because that peace-loving democracy is systemically inclined to respond late to security challenge. 44 The United States eventually may well win every armed conflict in which it engages for the next half century. But as a general rule, which is to say unlike the Gulf War of 1991, the U.S. armed forces will not be donated the strategic and operational initiative. An intelligent foe, able over a number of years to study and plan against particular U.S. military capabilities and able to select the time and place for initial hostilities, could inflict substantial damage on U.S. forces. Moreover, that damage need not necessarily be imposed by NBC weaponry. Any regional power that plans and is able to impose a large scale of loss, up to and including a level that translates as outright defeat, upon the U.S. armed forces is very likely to have bought itself NBC counterdeterrent “cover” to dissuade the United States from nuclear escalation.
This speculative commentary and theory appears less fanciful when one makes the effort to frame the immediate strategic historical context with a wide-angle lens. All but inconceivable though it may be to people whose strategic memories are challenged by reference to events prior to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is not long ago that the U.S. armed forces quite widely were regarded as “the gang that could not shoot straight.” Remember Vietnam? Remember Desert One (the abortive Iranian hostage rescue mission of 1980)? Remember Beirut and the Marine Corps barracks in 1983? Remember Grenada in 1983? Somewhat more controversially, even Panama 1989 and Somalia 1993– 1994 were less than exemplars of immaculate military performance. This short history should remind any readers in need of reminding that friction rules in war and U.S. soldiers, just causes or not, are not guaranteed by History to perform immaculately. The rapid demise of the Soviet empire, closely succeeded by a kind of victory in the Gulf, appears to yield evidence of one’s strategic—not to say political and ethical—superiority of a kind and on a scale that discourages a strategically healthy self-doubt. I am inclined to predict that the mixture of (1) success in the Cold War, (2) campaign victory over Iraq in 1991, and (3) confidence in U.S. exploitation of information technologies will combine to produce a United States perilously vulnerable to intelligently planned military initiatives by a nuclear (and BC)-armed (for counterdeterrence) regional foe who is a niche peer competitor even in conventional ways of war.
* * *
The potential value for public policy in this analysis of the strategic missions for U.S. nuclear forces depends almost entirely upon the spirit in which the analysis is approached. The purpose here is that of the policy scientist, meaning the person who explains the structure of the relevant problem area. This chapter presents a full-frontal array of arguments that should guide the future development of U.S. nuclear strategy. The missions identified and analyzed are not popular, they are not self-evidently necessary of performance today, and they cannot reliably be projected as dominant concerns tomorrow; they are, nonetheless, the ones the United States will need performed. Recall the problem of defense comprehension in a democracy: the more successfully U.S. nuclear forces perform deterrent missions, the more difficult is it to demonstrate the need for performance of those missions. The fourth and fifth missions, to provide war-fighting options against high-priority superhard and other elusive targets and to serve as a military “hedge” against conventional defeat, are, of course, missions whose successful performance could be assessed readily.
U.S. Nuclear Forces for the Second Nuclear Age and Beyond: Principles for Guidance
I must confess to a prejudice of a methodological kind that may be less-than-universally shared. I am inclined to believe that once one has explained the structure of an issue area—in this case the strategic missions for U.S. nuclear forces—the details follow naturally and logically. It seems to me that the nuclear strategy and forces required by the United States follow from the analysis in the previous section without much scope for contentious argument. Furthermore, different though the second nuclear age certainly is from the first, the relevant lore for the guidance of nuclear force planning appears none too distinctive from that familiar from the late 1940s to 1989. 45
It is important to pay genuine homage to the question of the continuing working validity of the leading principles and assumptions that came, by the mid-1960s at the latest, to govern planning for and understanding of the structure and scale of U.S. nuclear forces. In the early 1990s, it was prudent and at least casually plausible to assume that the nuclear lore of the Cold War might no longer be valid. Just how valid U.S. nuclear lore of Cold War vintage actually had been, even for peace with security in the Cold War, is, of course, an unfinished story.
Scholars, and even a few among the more cerebral of policymakers, have speculated that our “knowledge” of nuclear strategy has been consigned to the garbage pail of history by the abrupt demise of the USSR. 46 As the United States switched grand strategic focus from global Cold War to regional conflicts, and as U.S. conventional military prowess—especially as packaged intellectually as an RMA—waxed and dominated, so nuclear strategy looked more and more like yesterday’s solution to yesterday’s problem. All that appeared to remain valid from yesterday’s estimate of the strategic merit in nuclear-armed forces was the prudential thought that our nuclear capability would offset, by a reliable deterrence, the putative strategic effect of the nuclear (and possibly the biological and chemical) capabilities of others. This is one of those cases wherein everyone is right, up to a point.
The largest problem for the U.S. nuclear force posture, excluding hypothetical and heroically challenging further START regimes, is the need to accommodate genuinely strategic rationales. When one considers nuclear-armed forces strategically, one discovers that the roles and missions for those forces today and for tomorrow look distinctly familiar. It should be recalled that U.S. nuclear-armed forces today need to be able to perform five strategic missions: (1) represent the nuclear force posture perceived as appropriate for a (or the) superpower, for general deterrent effect; (2) discourage or offset the nuclear arms of a would-be “peer” competitor; (3) extend nuclear deterrence to protect friends and allies; (4) provide specialized, “niche,” war-fighting capabilities against high-priority superhard or otherwise elusive targets; and (5) serve as a hedge, or insurance, against the military failure of U.S., or U.S.-allied, conventional forces. Notwithstanding the radical restructuring of the distribution of power in world politics effected by the demise of the USSR, those five strategic missions for U.S. nuclear forces look familiar.
During the Cold War, the United States had to procure and maintain nuclear-armed forces that not only were at or beyond parity with their Soviet counterparts but also looked as if they were such. In addition to appearing in general ways appropriate for the support of U.S. policy globally, nuclear forces in the Cold War were sized and shaped to deter, and if need be to fight, a USSR that after the early 1960s was believed to be very much a worthy peer competitor. The need to extend nuclear deterrence to protect far-flung friends and allies perennially was the major driving force behind the evolution of U.S. nuclear doctrine and nuclear force planning. In the Cold War, as today and tomorrow, U.S. friends and allies could be menaced by NBC perils, certainly were threatened by overwhelming conventional power, and generally could be discouraged from pursuing national solutions to problems of security by U.S. policy for extended nuclear deterrence. The United States developed a cumulatively large target list that included many hard, superhard, or otherwise elusive (or dispersed) Soviet targets that could be effectively threatened or struck plausibly only by nuclear weapons. 47 Finally, the failure of U.S. and U.S.-allied conventional forces in the defense of NATO-Europe was not only possible but expected and, to some degree, even preprogrammed and welcomed as necessarily raising in Soviet minds the credibility of nuclear escalation under what became after 1967 NATO’s doctrine of flexible response. 48
None of the points just registered undermines the broad pattern of argument of this book about the emergence of a second nuclear age noticeably different from the first nuclear age of Cold War. The issue at this juncture, however, is not whether the strategic context for U.S. nuclear forces has altered massively over the past decade; such a question does not merit even an article-length reply. Rather the question is whether the principles that guided U.S. nuclear forces and doctrine in the latter years of the Cold War retain strategic vitality for the different conditions that now obtain. Given the emphasis on continuity rather than discontinuity in the preceding paragraphs, it is important to record those leading differences between the first and second nuclear ages that might have implications for the U.S. nuclear force posture and the implications of those differences.
From the analysis in this chapter, it is possible to derive a short list of principles for the guidance of U.S. nuclear forces and doctrines: I suggest eight.
First, U.S. nuclear forces should risk erring on the side of being too large rather than too small. Although there is no need to plan to return from the START I–III zone of numbers to anything remotely resembling the scale of arsenal acquired by the 1970s and early 1980s, still there is everything to be said in favor of an arsenal that is too large to be overwhelmed on short order, perceptually or actually in war-fighting terms, by some rising polity.
Second, the United States should continue to attend carefully to the operational survivability of its nuclear forces. Some Western theorists have persuaded themselves that strategic metastability is the rule in a heavily nuclear-armed era. That belief may or may not be well founded. We have no way of knowing in detail how a would-be aggressor will choose to calculate and compare probable risks and costs with possible gains. By all means, relax from readiness for near-instant action (de-alerting) but not by such means that a putative aggressor discerns the dazzling eponymous prospect of “Pearl Harbor” possibilities. Diversity of nuclear-armed delivery agents—ballistic and cruise missiles, manned aircraft, land and sea basing—may be an expensive luxury for a metastable context, but insurance is prudent for the last line of deterrence and defense.
Third, it is essential that U.S. nuclear forces should enjoy secure connectivity with the National Command Authorities (NCA). Indeed, the machinery for essential strategic command and control needs to be as survivable as the forces that it is supposed to command. Nothing in this second nuclear age suggests any diminution in the significance of security of minimum essential command and control, even though the military threat to that security is in abeyance pending reemergence of a strategic peer, or even just emergence of a regional but potently niche competitor.
Fourth, for the reassurance of U.S. policymakers, as well as possibly (though only possibly) for the optimum deterrence of regional rogues, the United States’ contemporary “post-heroic” society requires as much precision in discriminating nuclear strike capabilities as can be devised. 53 The deterrent clout of nuclear arms, such as it may be, really resides in the fact that they are weapons of mass destruction, but the U.S. defense community cannot bring itself to think that way today. The United States has no visible notion of “bonus damage” attaching to its nuclear arsenal. Of course, it does not much matter how politically correct the United States strives to be when talking about discrimination and avoidance of unwanted collateral damage with reference to its nuclear arsenal. The potential enemies of the United States know that nuclear weapons, whether or not applied with great care and discrimination, are entirely in a class of their own as reliably predictable prompt WMD.
Fifth, U.S. nuclear-armed forces should be flexible and adaptable to fleeting strategic contexts. If imperial Germany’s Schlieffen Plan (1906–1914), 54 or the U.S. SIOP through much of the 1960s and 1970s, 55 was the epitome of preplanned rigidity—tied to an arguably admirable fixity of purpose—then nuclear force planning for the future should be substantially real-time adaptable and flexible. What General Sir Archibald Wavell called “the mechanism of war,” and what Clausewitz called war’s “grammar,” 56 must work to inhibit adaptability, but nonetheless one can strive for flexibility. Given the modest scale of target list that the United States’ regional nuclear- (and BC-)armed foes will present, the case for great flexibility all but makes itself.
Sixth, self-evidently the United States should not operate its nuclear-armed forces in a manner likely to render them prone either to technical accident or to missassessment of political intent by intended deterrees. It should be the case that the most secure nuclear arsenal is the least nuclear arsenal, but in practice so powerful are the reasons for choosing a more than minimal nuclear force posture that arsenal reduction cannot be the highest priority goal for policy.
Seventh, the United States should develop and acquire nuclear forces tailored not to ravage wide areas, but rather to effect the kind of damage to targets that other U.S. forces cannot impose reliably. Enemy military or political assets that are deep underground, whose position, though generally known, is not known precisely, or biological, toxin, and chemical agents that need to be vaporized should be at risk to U.S. nuclear weapons designed to penetrate the ground or to disable equipment over a wide area.
Eighth, and finally, by way of sharp contrast with U.S. policy in the Cold War, notwithstanding the praiseworthy flirtation of the Reagan administration after 1983 with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the United States requires nuclear-armed forces sustained in tandem with multilayered TMD and NMD (which would include space-based as well as as only space-cued BMD weapons). If regional foes, let alone a rising peer competitor, are not to “deter our [nuclear] deterrent,” 57 and if the United States is to discourage first use of most kinds of NBC weapons, it needs to build active defenses as part of a national military strategy that looks with favor upon denial options.
Endnotes
Note 1: START is scarcely less “strategic” than was SALT. See Gray, House of Cards, ch. 5. Back.
Note 2: Unanswerably persuasive statement of this central point is provided in Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, ch. 1. Back.
Note 3: Mazarr, “Virtual Nuclear Arsenals” and Nuclear Weapons in a Transformed World. Back.
Note 4: Baylis and Garnett, Makers of Nuclear Strategy, is uniquely useful. Back.
Note 5: Perry, “Defense in an Age of Hope.” Back.
Note 6: Jervis, Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, p. 22. Back.
Note 7: Jervis, “Why Nuclear Superiority Doesn’t Matter”; Waltz, “Nuclear Myths and Nuclear Realities.” Back.
Note 8: Gray, “Defense Planning for the Mystery Tour.” Khalilzad and Ochmanek, Strategic Appraisal 1997, reviews the whole subject intelligently. Back.
Note 9: An idea that surfaces usefully in Booth, “Teaching Strategy.” Back.
Note 10: Gray, House of Cards. Back.
Note 11: START I, which entered into force on 4 December 1994, allows each side 6,000 “accountable warheads” on 1,600 strategic offensive delivery vehicles (no more that 4,900 of the “accountable warheads” may be carried by ballistic missiles [ICBMs and SLBMs]). START II, if ratified, would constrain each party to 3,000–3,500 warheads on their strategic offensive forces and would prohibit all ICBMs with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). Back.
Note 12: Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age, p. 336, makes this point sardonically. Back.
Note 13: For my answer, see Gray, Nuclear Strategy and National Style, esp. ch. 9. Back.
Note 14: Gray, “On Strategic Performance.” Back.
Note 15: Morgan, Deterrence, ch. 2. Back.
Note 16: Luttwak, Political Uses of Sea Power, pp. 71–72, n. 31. Back.
Note 17: Jervis, Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, p. 22. Emphasis in original. Back.
Note 18: Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, p. 28. Back.
Note 19: See Gray, “Nuclear Weapons and the Revolution in Military Affairs.” Back.
Note 20: Freedman, Revolution in Strategic Affairs, ch. 3, “Asymmetric Wars.” Back.
Note 21: “Classical strategy” has become a term of art that refers to the requirement to defeat the military forces of the foe. Nuclear arms have been a challenge to classical strategy because their absolute quality translates strategically as the ability to defeat the enemy without first defeating the enemy’s armed forces. The probable fact that the enemy also could defy the precepts of classical strategy and defeat you by way of unopposable nuclear retaliation has understandably served to limit the appeal of this particular argument. Back.
Note 22: Jones, “Limitations of British Sea Power in the French Wars,” p. 35. Back.
Note 23: But see Rosen, Winning the Next War, and especially Murray and Millett, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period. Back.
Note 24: Cambone and Gray, “Role of Nuclear Forces in U.S. National Security Strategy,” esp. pp. 7–8. We note in this article that, for example, “the B-52s will be almost 65 years old in 2025,” p. 8. Back.
Note 25: Pilsbury, Chinese Views of Future Warfare, merits close attention. Back.
Note 26: Matthews, Challenging the United States Symmetrically and Asymmetically. Back.
Note 27: See Betts, “What Will It Take to Deter the United States?” Back.
Note 28: Clausewitz, On War, p. 161. Back.
Note 29: Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, ch. 13; Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law, pp. 466, 509–510. Back.
Note 30: Although NATO membership—and there is only one class of member—is widely regarded as the gold standard of national security in a superpower protection system, there is nothing in the NATO Treaty that strictly obliges the United States actually to do anything in particular on behalf of fellow members. Article 5 of the treaty does state that “the Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” But each party is obliged only to take “such action as it deems necessary” by way of assistance to its allies. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO Handbook, p. 232. Back.
Note 31: Quinlan, Thinking About Nuclear Weapons, pp. 50–54, sinks the NFU concept without a trace. For the leading statement of the NFU case, see Bundy et al., “Nuclear Weapons and the Atlantic Alliance.” Gompert, Watman, and Wilkening, “Nuclear First Use Revisited,” recommends a declaratory policy of NFU except for cases of response to attack by WMD other than nuclear weapons. Back.
Note 32: Nye and Owens, “America’s Information Edge”; Perry, “Defense in an Age of Hope”; Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Joint Vision 2010.” Back.
Note 33: For example, the U.S. Navy (USN) currently has programmed a decline in the number of its principal surface combatants from 138 to approximately 116. The USN of 2020, as a surface fleet, will comprise totally technologically high-end combatants. Predictably, the USN will find itself acutely short of numbers of hulls of low-end warships. Back.
Note 34: The great man said it all, as usual. Clausewitz, On War, p. 85. “No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance.” Back.
Note 35: Schwartz, NATO’s Nuclear Dilemmas; Haftendorn, NATO and the Nuclear Revolution; Heuser, NATO, Britain, France and the FRG. Back.
Note 36: On the distinctions among different levels of intensity of national interest, see Gray, Explorations in Strategy, pp. 116, 200–206. Back.
Note 37: CEP is a measure of accuracy expressed with reference to the rule that 50 percent of the ordnance will strike within a target circle of a given radius. Back.
Note 38: Starr, “USA Conventionally Challenged by Saddam’s Hidden Weapons,” reports accurately enough on the counter-BC limitations of the current U.S. conventional arsenal but does not discuss nuclear options. Back.
Note 39: Admittedly, this interwar categorization is distinctly parochial. Many people outside the G8 world are trying to survive in a period of conflict and even war—certainly a period characterized by much savage violence. Back.
Note 40: See Johnson, Niche Threat. Back.
Note 41: To be specific in the example, Libya’s chemical weapons production facility beneath a mountain at Tarhunal. Back.
Note 42: Luttwak, Strategy. Back.
Note 43: Lambakis, “Space Control in Desert Storm and Beyond,” and, by inference at least, Friedman and Friedman, Future of War, Part 3. Back.
Note 44: Heller and Stofft, America’s First Battles. Back.
Note 45: See Gray, “Nuclear Strategy” and “Strategy in the Nuclear Age,” esp. pp. 601–610. Garrity, “Depreciation of Nuclear Weapons in International Politics,” also reviews nuclear lore. Back.
Note 46: Booth, New Thinking About Strategy and International Security; van den Bergh, Nuclear Revolution and the End of the Cold War; Regina Cowen Karp, Security Without Nuclear Weapons; Gjelstad and Njolstad, Nuclear Rivalry and International Order. Back.
Note 47: Ball and Richelson, Strategic Nuclear Targeting; Martel and Savage, Strategic Nuclear War. Back.
Note 48: See Duffield, Power Rules. Back.
Note 49: For example, Blair, Feiverson, and von Hippel, “Taking Nuclear Weapons Off Hair-Trigger Alert”; Blair, “Plight of the Russian Military and Nuclear Control.” Pry, War Scare, is alarming if not necessarily alarmist. Back.
Note 50: Johnson and Libicki, Dominant Battlespace Knowledge. Back.
Note 51: Nye and Owens, “America’s Information Edge.” Back.
Note 52: The hazards to a persisting condition of military superiority are highlighted in Sumida, “Technological Innovation and Twentieth-Century Naval Force Structure.” Back.
Note 53: Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare.” Back.
Note 54: Ritter, Schlieffen Plan. Back.
Note 55: Ball, “ Development of the SIOP”; Blair, Logic of Accidental Nuclear War, ch. 3. Back.
Note 56: Wavell, Generals and Generalship, p. 10; Clausewitz, On War, p. 605. Back.
Note 57: With thanks to Nitze, “Deterring Our Deterrent,” for the phrasing of the problem. Back.
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