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The United States, Russia And Nuclear Peace [1st Edition]
 3030380874,  9783030380878,  9783030380885

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments......Page 5
Contents......Page 7
List of Figures......Page 9
List of Tables......Page 10
List of Charts......Page 11
Introduction......Page 13
1.2 Operation “RYAN”......Page 19
1.3 Intermediate Missiles......Page 21
1.4 Defense Shield......Page 22
1.5 Korean Airliner......Page 24
1.6 False Warning......Page 25
1.7 NATO Exercise......Page 26
1.8 The Sister Services......Page 28
1.9 Soviet Nuclear Perspectives......Page 30
1.10 Force Balances and Outcomes......Page 32
1.11 Conclusions......Page 36
2.1 Introduction......Page 42
2.2 Caveats......Page 43
2.3 Reasons for Optimism?......Page 45
2.4 Analysis Near and Far......Page 49
Evaluating the Forces......Page 50
Preliminary Verdict......Page 55
2.5 Conclusion......Page 57
3.1 Introduction......Page 65
Putin’s Challenge......Page 66
Drifting Toward Controversy......Page 68
3.3 Technology and Defenses......Page 69
3.4 Conclusions......Page 74
4.1 Introduction......Page 83
4.2 Chinese Military Modernization and Nuclear Weapons......Page 84
Perspectives......Page 91
Data Analysis......Page 93
Implications......Page 95
4.4 Conclusion......Page 96
5.1 Introduction......Page 104
5.2 Actors and Strategies......Page 105
5.3 What to Do About North Korea: Denuking and What Else?......Page 110
Forces and Outcomes......Page 114
Preliminary Findings and Indications......Page 117
5.5 Conclusions......Page 118
6.1 Introduction......Page 123
6.2 The Trump Nuclear Posture Review......Page 124
6.3 Restraining Presidential Power: Nuclear First Strike and North Korea......Page 129
Preemption or Prevention?......Page 130
Decision-Making and Constitutional Process......Page 133
6.4 Conclusion......Page 135
7.1 Introduction......Page 140
7.2 Deterrence: How Reliable?......Page 141
7.3 Escalation Control: Principles......Page 147
7.4 Escalation Control: New Challenges......Page 150
Approach......Page 155
Analysis......Page 157
7.6 Conclusions......Page 160
8.1 Introduction......Page 167
8.2 Cyber Wars and Information Operations: Perspectives......Page 168
8.3 Information and Infrastructure Operations......Page 170
8.4 Analysis......Page 174
8.5 Conclusion......Page 180
9.1 Introduction......Page 186
9.2 Realism and International Politics......Page 187
Independent or Dependent Variables?......Page 188
Formal or Efficient Causes......Page 189
Deterrence Rationality......Page 192
Historical Perspective......Page 194
9.5 Conclusion......Page 198
10.1 Introduction......Page 205
10.2 Minimum Deterrence: The Larger Context......Page 206
10.3 Alternative Nuclear Futures and Minimum Deterrence......Page 208
Measuring Minimum Deterrence......Page 211
10.5 Conclusion......Page 218
Chapter 11: Conclusion......Page 222
Appendix: Cold War and Present Requirements for US Nuclear C3 System......Page 233
Bibliography......Page 240
Index......Page 258

Citation preview

The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace Stephen J. Cimbala

The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace

Stephen J. Cimbala

The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace

Stephen J. Cimbala Distinguished Professor of Political Science Penn State University (Brandywine) Media, PA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-38087-8    ISBN 978-3-030-38088-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch / shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge many intellectual debts to colleagues who encouraged my work on this and other studies, who have offered informative critiques and thoughtful revisions of this or other works over the years, and who themselves have set higher academic standards for me to aspire to. These include: John Arquilla, Richard Betts, Bruce Blair, Stephen Blank, Paul Bracken, Joseph Collins, Jacquelyn Davis, Paul K. Davis, William Flavin, Peter Forster, Andrew Futter, Raymond Garthoff, Colin Gray, David Glantz, Jacob Kipp, Lawrence Korb, Adam Lowther, Roger McDermott, Olga Oliker, Keith Payne, Robert Pfaltzgraff, Pavel Podvig, Sam C.  Sarkesian, Gabi Siboni, Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski, Timothy Thomas, Dale Walton and John Allen Williams. Special thanks are due to James Scouras and James Tritten, colleagues and erstwhile co-authors, for the use of analytical models originally developed by them, for purposes of this study. They are not responsible for any arguments or errors in this study. I am also especially grateful to Daniel Cohen, Martin Edmonds, William Eliason, David Glantz, W.  Michael Guillot, Alexander Hill, Kirstin Howgate, Mackubin Thomas Owens, Hayden Peake, Lynne Rienner, Richard Russell, Gabi Siboni and Elisabeth Sieca-Kozlowski, among current and former journal or book editors, who encouraged my submissions, corrected my errors and/or taught me important aspects of pertinent subject matter. I am indebted to Roy Godson for my participation in his program at Georgetown University that brought together academics interested in national security and intelligence with professionals in the intelligence community. v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I appreciate receiving important research materials from: Henry Sokolski and his Nuclear Policy Education Center (NPEC); the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; the Belfer Center of Harvard University; Johnson’s Russia List from David Johnson, the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University; PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Research and Security) Eurasia; the Foreign Military Studies Office, Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas; the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), Philadelphia; the US Department of Defense, Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; US Army War College; US Air War College; US Naval War College; the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University; the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the RAND Corporation; the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; the National Institute for Public Policy; the Jamestown Foundation; Pavel Podvig’s blog on Russian nuclear forces and other sources too numerous to mention. I am grateful to Dr. Cynthia Lightfoot and Dr. Kristin Woolever of Penn State Brandywine; Dr. Lee Ann Banaszak, Head, Department of Political Science, University Park; and Dr. Madlyn Hanes, Vice President for Commonwealth Campuses and Dean of University College, for research support. I also appreciate the administrative support of Lisa Krol, who never gives up, and Penn State Brandywine’s indefatigable librarians and information technology specialists. Most of all, I thank my wife Betsy, my sons Christopher and David, my daughter-in-law Kelly and all of my wonderful extended family in and beyond Pennsylvania, for their love. None of the aforementioned persons is responsible for any of the arguments, opinions or other contents of this study.

Contents

1 Nuclear Learning from the Past: “Able Archer” and the 1983 War Scare  1 2 New Start and Beyond: Nuclear Modernization and US-Russian Nuclear Arms Control 25 3 Missile Defenses and US-Russian Nuclear Arms Control: Technology, Politics and Deterrence 49 4 China and Nuclear Arms Control 67 5 Nuclear Arms Race in Asia: Challenges and Containment 89 6 The Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review and Presidential Nuclear Prerogative109 7 Limiting Nuclear War: Mission Impossible, Inadvisable or Unavoidable?127 8 Cyber War and Nuclear Deterrence: A Manageable Partnership?155 9 Theory and Nuclear Proliferation in the Twenty-First Century: The Limits of Realism175 vii

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Contents

10 Toward Nuclear Minimalism? Minimum Deterrence and Its Alternatives195 11 Conclusion213 Bibliography231 Index249

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Contributory stimuli to NATO-Soviet tension in 1983 Fig. 3.1 Technology and policy environments for missile defense US-Russia. (Source: Author)

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 1.2 Table 2.1 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 9.1 Table 10.1

US and Soviet strategic nuclear forces, 1983 16 US and Soviet surviving and retaliating warheads, 1983 17 New START treaty aggregate numbers of strategic offensive arms27 United States surviving and retaliating weapons: 1550 deployment limit 144 Russia surviving and retaliating warheads: 1550 deployment limit145 United States surviving and retaliating warheads: 1000 deployment limit 145 Russia surviving and retaliating warheads: 1000 deployment limit145 Assumptions of major realist theories 176 Attributes of generic nuclear deterrence strategies 202

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List of Charts

Chart 2.1

Chart 2.2 Chart 2.3 Chart 2.4 Chart 2.5 Chart 2.6 Chart 2.7 Chart 4.1 Chart 4.2 Chart 5.1 Chart 5.2 Chart 8.1

US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1550 deployment Limit 2017 Plan. (Graphics based on force structures in US Congressional Budget Office, Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046 (Washington, DC: CBO, October 2017), pp. 33 and 44, www.cbo.gov/publications/53211)33 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1550 deployment limit US No ICBMs 34 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1550 deployment limit US No Bombers 35 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1550 deployment limit US 300 ICBM, 10 SSBN 36 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1000 deployment limit US Triad 37 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1000 deployment limit US No ICBMs 38 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1000 deployment limit US No Bombers 39 Constrained proliferation model: operationally deployed warheads77 Constrained proliferation model: surviving and retaliating warheads78 Asian nuclear arms race: total strategic weapons 100 Asian nuclear arms race: surviving and retaliating warheads 101 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus 1000 deployment limit: US triad 163

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List of Charts

Chart 8.2 Chart 8.3 Chart 8.4 Chart 8.5 Chart 8.6 Chart 10.1 Chart 10.2 Chart 10.3 Chart 10.4

US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus 1000 deployment limit: US No ICBMs 164 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus 1000 deployment limit: US No Bombers 165 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus defenses 1000 deployment limit: US triad 166 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus defenses 1000 deployment limit: US No ICBMs 167 US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus defenses 1000 deployment limit: US No Bombers 168 US-Russia total strategic weapons: 500 deployment limit 203 US-Russia arriving retaliatory weapons: 500 deployment limit204 Constrained proliferation model total strategic weapons: 500 deployment limit 206 Constrained proliferation model arriving retaliatory weapons: 500 deployment limit 206

Introduction

This introduction summarizes some of the main points to be made in the interior chapters that follow. The text offers a central argument. The United States and Russia share a major responsibility for maintaining global nuclear deterrence stability, for preventing outbreaks of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war and for collaborating on nuclear arms limitation and reduction, including efforts to restrain the spread of nuclear weapons among state and non-state actors. Washington and Moscow share this responsibility regardless of other issues, however significant or contentious those issues might appear to be. This “partnership” in nuclear security exists whether officials are subjectively willing to acknowledge it and despite challenges from new technologies or military-strategic priorities. As Russian nuclear arms control expert Alexei Arbatov has noted: In the current military and political environment, it is no longer inconceivable that war between the United States and Russia could break out in just a few days in the event of a crisis. Such a conflict might culminate with an exchange of nuclear strikes taking as long as just a few hours. During those hours, hundreds of millions of people in the northern hemisphere would be killed, and everything created by human civilization in the last thousand years would be destroyed.1

The following chapters explore various aspects of this shared nuclear responsibility and the decision dilemmas that it creates for policy makers and for military planners.

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Introduction

In Chap. 1, we revisit the year 1983 and the collision course on which the Americans and Soviets found themselves in that momentous time. Political relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were marked by the Reagan administration’s defense buildup and assertive rhetoric toward the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which Moscow, in turn, reciprocated with considerable brio. A series of events, including: the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s commitment to its “572” European theater ballistic and cruise missile deployments, in response to earlier Soviet deployments of intermediate-range SS-20 nuclear missiles and a Soviet intelligence tasking for indicators of an American and NATO imminent decision to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union and/or its Warsaw Pact allies. Into this mix, NATO added a command post exercise, Able Archer, in November of 1983 that included simulated procedures for nuclear release. The case study might hold lessons for NATO and Russia as they exit the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019 and open the door to renewed deployments of nuclear-capable intermediate and shorter-range missiles in Europe. In Chap. 2, the prospects for continued success or failure in US-Russian strategic nuclear arms control are evaluated and their implications drawn out. At this writing, turbulent political relations as between the United States and Russia have been roiled by many factors: including Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent destabilization of eastern Ukraine, Russia’s military intervention in Syria, US and European Union economic sanctions against Russia and other issues. Among the other issues has been Russian President Vladimir Putin’s determination to restore Russia’s military power and extend its geostrategic reach into former Soviet space. This agenda includes pushing back against NATO expansion, against US missile defenses deployed in Europe, and against “color revolutions” such as those in post-Soviet Georgia and Ukraine that threatened to spread the idea of democratization to the Kremlin’s very doorstep. Deteriorating Russian-American political relations also placed into jeopardy two landmark nuclear arms control agreements: the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty and the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) agreement. In Chap. 3, we discuss the relationship between US ballistic missile defenses (BMD) and Russian-American nuclear arms control. US missile defenses have been a source of continuing controversy for a long time as between the former Soviet Union and now Russia and the United States. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his military advisors have expressed

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particular concern about US missile defense systems deployed in Europe as part of NATO’s European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA). The United States and NATO maintain that the Aegis afloat and ashore missile defenses are intended as a deterrent against Iranian or other potential threats from the Middle East against Europe. On the other hand, Russia suspects that the global network of US missile defenses is intended to nullify Russia’s nuclear second-strike capability. Russian President Putin highlighted new offensive systems planned to circumvent US defenses in a major address to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2018: including hypersonic weapons of various kinds that purportedly could strike the American homeland with speeds and maneuverability that would overcome any defenses. Chapter 4 notes that China is engaged in a broad modernization of its strategic and other nuclear forces, including improved land-based and submarine-­launched ballistic missiles and nuclear-capable aircraft. China’s geostrategic thrust, at least for the moment, seems to emphasize A2/AD (anti-access, area denial) strategies as deterrents against the willingness of non-Asian powers to intervene in China’s self-defined core security zones. China’s nuclear modernization is therefore not necessarily intended to achieve nuclear-strategic parity with the United States and Russia in numbers of warheads or delivery systems. As for the possibility of including China in US-Russian nuclear arms reduction talks, the issue has two faces. From one standpoint, it seems illogical for the United States and Russia to go further in strategic nuclear reductions unless China (and perhaps other nuclear weapons states) are included: otherwise, Russia and the United States would be voluntarily relinquishing their top positions on the global nuclear ladder. From another perspective, getting China into the conversation about nuclear arms reduction bumps into China’s not very transparent approach to revealing exactly the size and composition of their strategic and other nuclear forces. Chapter 5 considers the prospects and risks associated with a nuclear arms race in Asia. North Korea has repeatedly tested nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles under the regime of Kim Jong-un and claimed to have developed an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the continental United States. On-again, off-again negotiations between the Trump administration and the Kim Jong-un regime produced promissory notes of North Korean willingness to disarm at least part of its arsenal—maybe. In return, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) (DPRK) expected the United States and others to lift economic sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for past nuclear and missile tests defying UN restrictions. It was difficult to imagine any set of

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Introduction

incentives that would cause North Korea to commit to US-demanded comprehensive and verifiable dismantlement of its entire nuclear program and infrastructure. Nuclear Asia also includes the Indo-Pakistan rivalry; Sino-Russian competition within a declaratory framework of mutual cooperation on strategic matters (read: we both agree that the United States is a dangerous hegemonic superpower and must be resisted, although we both remain wary of one another’s grand designs in the region); and the US Pacific presence, including nuclear-capable air and naval power and US defense commitments to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. In Chap. 6, we consider the Donald J. Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review as part of the larger issue of Presidential responsibility and prerogative on nuclear issues. The Nuclear Posture Review outlines Trump administration priorities with respect to nuclear force structure, modernization, policy planning and other issues. Compared to the Barack Obama administration, Trump calls for a wider range of limited nuclear options for deterrence across the spectrum of possible conflicts, prompted by alleged Russian interest in a theory of victory supported by nuclear first use as a means of de-escalation. However, Russia is also modernizing its conventional forces, including those for long range, precision strike, in order to implement a more credible pre-nuclear deterrence. The Trump administration NPR anticipates commitments to nuclear modernization beyond the ambitious program already approved during the Obama administration. Along with this, Trump also expects to augment US defense capabilities in space and cyberspace: the President has called for the creation of a space force that is organized as a separate arm of service, but initially it will be a subordinate command within the US Air Force. Chapter 7 takes up the problem of controlling a nuclear war and, especially, ending a nuclear war on something like acceptable terms short of the threshold of unrestricted attacks and multinational mass destruction. During the Cold War, the idea of limiting or controlling nuclear war seemed absurd, given the immensity of the American and Soviet arsenals. Since the end of the Cold War, reductions in the numbers of deployed Russian and American strategic nuclear weapons (those of intercontinental range) and the growth of additional regional nuclear powers have shifted the likely axes of a nuclear war from the center of Europe to other regions, including the Middle East, North and East Asia. One obvious flashpoint is the relationship between nuclear armed India and Pakistan. Another danger is the possibility that Iran will become a nuclear weapons state in the aftermath of US repudiation of the Iranian nuclear deal, creating the

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­ ossibility of nuclear conflict between Iran and Israel. An Iranian bomb p might also encourage Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Egypt to follow suit, creating a multinational challenge of proliferation problems and resulting crisis management issues. Chapter 8 reminds us that future uses of nuclear deterrence or coercive diplomacy, including any nuclear crisis management, will take place in a post-­Internet and cyber impacted environment. The establishment of US Cyber Command is testimony to the Pentagon’s recognition that “cyber” or “information” warfare is now a core competency for defense planners in the United States and elsewhere. Cyberwar has the unique feature that it is a domain of warfare (in addition to land, sea, air and space) but also wraps itself around the other domains: all are impacted by cyber technology and therefore, eventually, cyber-defined ways of thinking. For US nuclear planners, an obvious concern is whether nuclear command-control or launch systems can be hacked for purposes of immediate disruption or, equally dangerous, for depositing malware that can be activated on demand by a foreign power to disable systems and confuse personnel. The relationship between nuclear stability and cyber stability may have to be made explicit in doctrine and in policy, but that calls for cooperation between nuclear command channels and cyber experts, each with their own institutional and professional perspectives. In Chap. 9, we consider whether the realist approach to international politics is as robust for explanation and prediction of nuclear deterrence as it has been for conventional warfare. Realists have made a strong case for their preferred approach as an alternative to idealism or to constructivism. Realism offers an especially coherent paradigm and one that is especially sensitive to the relationship between force and policy. However, the realism that might apply to conventional warfare or deterrence could be mistaken or misleading as a guide to the pursuit of nuclear deterrence or arms limitation. Nuclear weapons are unique in their ability to create mass destruction in a short time period with irreversible damage to societies, cultures and climate. Therefore, whereas conventional deterrence depends primarily on the credible threat by the defender to respond by inflicting military defeat on the aggressor, nuclear deterrence emphasizes the credible threat of retaliatory punishment with unacceptable damage against the society and armed forces of the attacker. The “realism” of nuclear deterrence would seem to rest, not only on a scientifically rational calculation of costs and benefits, but also upon a moral compass that would not risk the unacceptable destruction imposed by even small nuclear wars.

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In Chap. 10, we ask whether the United States might prefer a strategic posture of nuclear minimalism. Nuclear minimalism offers a middle way, between nuclear abstinence and nuclear plenty. Nuclear minimalism would essentially accept the current New START-compliant US and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals as points of reference going forward. In a best case, these limits would be extended to 2026 by mutual agreement and perhaps further into the future. A stabilized Russian-American strategic nuclear relationship at New START or lower levels is the necessary condition for other nuclear power cooperation on arms limitation, nonproliferation and nuclear risk reduction. The possibility of moving from the current US-Russian plateau of mutual assured destruction as the basis for their nuclear relationship, toward minimum deterrence or some other alternative, is very low indeed in the current (2019) poisoned climate of political relations between Washington and Moscow. Nevertheless, an exploratory discussion of nuclear strategic stability based on lower numbers of weapons is important, not only in case political relations take a more permissive turn, but also because the idea of minimum deterrence might be extended to include other nuclear weapons states. The concluding chapter summarizes previous discussion and offers prospective views on the challenges to future deterrence stability, nuclear arms control and crisis management from developments in technology, politics and strategy.

Note 1. Alexei Arbatov, “Nuclear Deterrence: A Guarantee or Threat to Strategic Stability?”, Carnegie Moscow Center, March 22, 2019, https://carnegie. ru/2019/03/22/nuclear-deterrence-guarantee-or-threat-to-strategic-stability-pub-78663. See also: Stephen F. Cohen, “Washington’s Dr. Strangeloves: Is plunging Russia into darkness really a good idea?” The Nation, June 19, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #97 – June 20, 2019, davidjohnson@ starpower.net

CHAPTER 1

Nuclear Learning from the Past: “Able Archer” and the 1983 War Scare

1.1   Introduction Between 1979 and 1983, relations between the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet Union deteriorated gradually due to disagreements and controversies growing out of Cold War rivalry. Some Soviet leaders convinced themselves that there was a nontrivial likelihood of a US or NATO nuclear first use or first strike in the near future, and Soviet intelligence agencies were tasked to anticipate it. A NATO exercise in November of 1983, taking place in this hothouse atmosphere, lent itself to misperceptions of American and NATO intentions on account of its realism and some Soviet mind sets. The following discussion revisits the 1983 “war scare” episode by (1), reviewing high water marks in the political context leading up to the 1983 “war scare” situation, (2), considering quantitative evidence on US and Soviet strategic nuclear force structures and possible operational performances and (3) deriving from this analysis certain conclusions about the “war scare” of 1983 and its wider significance.

1.2   Operation “RYAN” In May 1981, Soviet KGB Chairman and future Communist Party General Secretary Yuri Andropov addressed a KGB conference in Moscow. He told his startled listeners that the new American administration of President Ronald Reagan was actively preparing for nuclear war. The possibility of a © The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_1

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nuclear first strike by the United States was a real one. Andropov announced that, for the first time ever, the KGB and GRU (main intelligence directorate of the Soviet Armed Forces general staff) were ordered to work together in a global intelligence operation named Raketno Yadernoye Napadeniye (Nuclear Missile Attack).1 During the next three years or so, the Soviet intelligence services were tasked to collect a variety of indicators, including political, military and economic information, suggestive of any US and NATO intent to launch a nuclear first strike. “RYAN” was, according to some sources, the largest intelligence operation conducted in time of peace in Soviet history.2 Collection of indicators continued well into 1984 and was contributory to the partial Soviet leadership paranoia that outran even the normal suspicions of intelligence professionals in Moscow Center. In an attachment to a Center directive to KGB Residents in NATO capitals in February 1983, it was stated that the threat of an immediate nuclear attack has acquired “an especial degree of urgency”.3 KGB were tasked to detect and assess signs of preparation for “RYAN” in political, military, economic and other sectors. The attachment noted that the United States maintained a large portion of its strategic retaliatory forces in a state of operational readiness. Soviet intelligence estimated that all American ICBMs, 70 percent of US “naval nuclear facilities” and 30 percent of the American strategic bomber force were alerted and capable of rapid response. Thus, according to the instructions in the attachment, it was imperative to detect US or NATO decisions or preparations for war as far ahead of D-Day as possible. The authors go into considerable detail summarizing US and NATO systems for military alert, including the aspects related to nuclear weapons.4 Information about the US Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for nuclear war, and about NATO’s general defense and nuclear support plans, was specifically emphasized in the tasking from Center to the various residencies. Uncovering of the process leading to a decision for war by the US and its NATO allies, and of the related measures by those countries to prepare for war, was imperative: it would enable Soviet leaders “to increase the so-called period of anticipation essential for the Soviet Union to take retaliatory measures”.5 What had brought the Soviet Union to this brink of pessimism and near fatalism about US intentions and, in the case of Andropov, nearly apocalyptic doomsaying? A series of events treated in isolation by political actors at the time apparently combined, in unexpected and potentially ­dysfunctional

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ways, to produce a mentality among some members of the Soviet high command that shifted policy expectations in Moscow tectonically from 1979 through 1984. If so, the sequence of events and their impact on Soviet decision-makers fulfill the law of unanticipated consequences that often appears in social and political decision-making. This “law” is well known to social scientists and everyday practitioners of the arts of politics. It says that some of the effects of any decision or action will be unexpected and unpredicted, and that some of these unexpected and unpredicted effects may be contrary to the policy intent of the original decision-makers. This problem of unanticipated consequences certainly applies to the possibility of a US-Soviet crisis slide in 1983, since the last thing that either intended was an actual outbreak of war.

1.3   Intermediate Missiles In December 1979 NATO took a decision to modernize its intermediate nuclear missile force (INF) by deploying 572 new cruise and ballistic missiles in five European countries beginning in November 1983. This “dual track” decision also called for negotiations with the Soviet Union with the objective of limiting or eliminating its SS-20 intermediate range, mobile ballistic missiles first deployed in 1977. The Soviets were strongly opposed to the NATO INF modernization: the connection between Soviet’s SS-20 deployments and NATO’s theater nuclear force modernization was one of challenge and response from NATO’s perspective, but not in the Soviet view.6 Moscow mounted an aggressive active measures campaign through a variety of European peace movements and in other ways in order to stop the scheduled NATO deployments. The Soviet campaign failed to divide the Western alliance or to dissuade it from beginning its deployments on the original timetable. US ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) first arrived in England in mid-November 1983, and on November 23 Pershing II intermediate range ballistic missiles were first deployed in West Germany.7 The Soviet military establishment was most concerned about the Pershings. Pershings deployed in West Germany could be launched across trajectories that Soviet early warning installations were poorly equipped to detect in good time. In addition, a Soviet intelligence appreciation in February 1983 estimated that the Pershings could strike at long-­range targets in the Soviet Union within 4–6 minutes. This compared very unfavorably with the 20 minutes or so that Moscow assumed it would have to detect and react to missiles fired from the continental United States.8

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The Pershings reestablished for NATO a credible threat of escalation dominance below the threshold of general (global) nuclear war. Moscow could not initiate the use of theater nuclear weapons in Europe with any confidence that it could establish local or regional military superiority while American and Soviet strategic nuclear forces remained uninvolved, and their respective homelands spared. NATO and Soviet assessments of one another were complicated by the dual-purpose character of each side’s modernized theater missiles. The missiles served to enhance deterrence, but they would also increase nuclear warfighting capabilities if deterrence failed. The missile deployments were a competition in political intimidation as much as they were an enhancement of deployed and usable military power. This competition was also an issue of alliance unity and management for the United States. NATO’s steadfastness or weakening in the face of Soviet threats and blandishments would signal diminished US influence within the Western alliance and a collapse of alliance unity on nuclear force modernization. Moscow’s defeat, once NATO INF deployments began, was an affirmation of NATO solidarity and renewed US leadership competency in alliance nuclear affairs. These political effects meant more to beleaguered Soviet military planners and political leaders than NATO’s commitment to deploy additional firepower in Europe.

1.4   Defense Shield On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan surprised many of his own advisors as well as American listeners with his proposal for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), rapidly dubbed “Star Wars” by media pundits and critics. Reagan also surprised allied NATO and Soviet audiences. The President shared with the US public his vision of a peace shield that would protect the US homeland from nuclear attack, even a large-scale attack of the kind that the Soviets could mount in the early 1980s. The reaction in Moscow was predictably negative, but unpredictably hysterical. The Soviet leadership might have denounced the US initiative as a potential abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and a complication of the US-Soviet relationship of mutual deterrence, while at the same time pointing out that no feasible near-term technology could accomplish what the President demanded. Instead, the Kremlin reacted with public diplomacy filled with venomous denunciations of the Reagan administration and privately concluded that SDI was part of a US plan to

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develop an effective nuclear war fighting strategy. Even if SDI were not a feasible technology within the present century, making sure that the United States could not deploy enough missile defense to neutralize Moscow’s deterrent might cost a strapped Soviet economy more than it could bear. As Former US Defense Secretary and Director of Central Intelligence Robert M.  Gates has noted: SDI was a Soviet nightmare come to life. America’s industrial base, coupled with American technology, wealth and managerial skill, all mobilized to build a wholly new and different military capability that might negate the Soviet offensive buildup of a quarter century. A radical new departure by the United States that would require an expensive Soviet response at a time of deep economic crisis.9 SDI therefore presented to the Soviet leadership a two-sided threat of military obsolescence and of economic stress. As in the case of INF, a Soviet propaganda campaign against SDI (in part by drawing upon well-­ informed US critics who pointed to the gap between aspirations and available technology) failed to deter the Reagan administration from persisting in its research and development program on missile defense. This attempted great leap forward in defensive technology, combined with a US strategic nuclear offensive force modernization and increased defense spending that began under President Carter and continued under Reagan, faced the Kremlin leadership with depressing possibilities far into Moscow nights. The Soviet economy would not permit matching of US offensive and defensive force innovation and modernization. A future time of troubles might confront Soviet leaders by the end of the decade, faced with upgraded US theater and intercontinental missile systems and early SDI technology for antimissile defenses. Even a first-generation SDI system might, according to Moscow pessimists, introduce enough uncertainty into the estimated effects of a Soviet second or retaliatory strike to weaken confidence in mutual deterrence and in strategic stability. A group of Soviet scientists issued a statement in May 1983 opposing the US antimissile system in language that also reflected the views of top Soviet political and military leaders: In reality, an attempt to create a so-called “defensive weapon” against the nuclear strategic weapons of the other side, which the US president has announced, would inevitably result in the emergence of another element strengthening the American “first strike” potential… Such a “defensive weapon” would leave no hope for a country subjected to

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massive surprise attack since it (the weapon) is obviously not capable of protecting the vast majority of the population. Antimissile weapons are best suited for use by the attacking side to seek to lessen the power of the retaliatory strike.10

1.5   Korean Airliner Another factor contributory to exacerbating US-Soviet tensions in 1983 was the shooting down of Korean Air Lines flight 007 (KAL 007) by Soviet air defenses on September 1, 1983. US intelligence monitored and recorded the transmissions between the pilot of the Soviet fighter-­ interceptor that shot down the plane and his ground controllers. American policy-makers, including President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz, referred to the contents of these intercepts as proof that the Soviet Union had deliberately and knowingly destroyed the civilian airliner in cold blood. UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, playing selected excerpts from the pilot’s transmissions for the benefit of UN and American media audiences, claimed that the Soviets “decided to shoot down a civilian airliner, shot it clown, murdering the 269 people on board, and then lied about it”.11 Moscow’s reaction was anger and disbelief in US characterizations of the Korean airliner’s reason for straying over Russian territory dotted with secret military installations and noted on international aviation maps as a forbidden zone for civilian overflight. The Soviet leadership charged that the airliner had been on a US intelligence mission. Some US intelligence sources later concluded that Soviet air defenses might have confused the path of the Korean airliner with the nearby track of an American RC-135 reconnaissance plane. The CIA reported in the President’s daily intelligence briefing of September 2 that throughout most of the time interval when Soviet air defenses were attempting to track the “intruder” and deciding what to do about it, they may have thought they were tracking a US RC-135 reconnaissance plane monitoring a Soviet ICBM test.12 This supposition was not an unlikely hypothesis, given the well-known weaknesses of Soviet air defenses (painfully demonstrated four years later in the Gorbachev era when a German civilian flew a Cessna single-engine light aircraft through Soviet air defenses and landed it in Red Square). The Soviet leadership maintained the official position that KAL 007 was a deliberate intelligence provocation and that US public denunciations of the Soviets for the shootdown were a deliberate escalation of East–West

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tension.13 One consequence of KAL 007 was to add to the high priority already assigned to Operation “RYAN”. According to Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Party Chairman Andropov spent the last months of his life after the KAL 007 shootdown “as a morbidly suspicious invalid, brooding over the possible approach of a nuclear Armageddon”.14 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian government made public transcripts of the September 2, 1983, Politburo meeting to discuss the incident. Those high officials in attendance, especially Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov, believed that Soviet actions the previous day had been appropriate and resented US depiction of their actions as barbaric. Although the actual impact of the shootdown on day-to-day US-Soviet foreign relations was slight, the Soviet perception of anti-Soviet rhetoric in Washington, together with Soviet concerns about SDI and INF modernization, raised the level of Kremlin anxiety about American intentions in the autumn of 1983 to levels not seen for many years.

1.6   False Warning On September 26, 1983, a false alarm occurred in a Soviet missile early warning installation that could have, given the previously described mood of the Politburo in 1983 and the tense atmospherics of US-Soviet political relations, become more than a footnote in history books. The incident took place in a closed military facility south of Moscow designed to monitor Soviet early warning satellites over the United States. On September 26, at this installation, designated Serpukhov-15, a false alarm went off signaling a US missile attack.15 According to Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant colonel who observed and participated in the incident, one of the Soviet satellites sent a signal to his command bunker in the warning facility that a missile had been launched from the United States and was headed for Russia. Soon the satellite was reporting that five Minuteman ICBMs had been launched. The warning system was white hot with indicators of war. However, Colonel Petrov decided that the satellite alert was a false alarm less than five minutes after the first, erroneous reports came into his warning center. He based this decision partly on the fact that Soviet ground-based radar installations showed no confirming evidence of enemy missiles headed for the Soviet Union. Petrov also recalled military briefings he had received, stressing that any enemy attack on Russia would involve many missiles instead of a few.16

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Under the circumstances, Colonel Petrov’s decision was a courageous one. He was in a singular position of importance and vulnerability in the command structure. He oversaw the staff at his installation that monitored satellite signals and he reported to superiors at warning system headquarters who, in turn, reported to the Soviet General Staff. The immediate circumstances were especially stressful for him because reported missile launches were coming in so quickly that general staff headquarters had received direct, automatic notification. At the time, the Soviet version of the US “football”, or nuclear suitcase linking political leadership with nuclear commands, was still under development. This made prompt alert directly to the general staff necessary. Soviet investigators first praised and then tried to scapegoat Petrov for the system failures. The false alarm was actually caused when the satellite mistook the sun’s reflection off the top of clouds for a missile launch. The computer program designed to prevent such confusion had to be rewritten.17 The September warning incident took place less than four weeks after the KAL 007 shootdown and shortly before the start of a NATO military exercise (see below) that may have been the single most dangerous incident contributing to the war scare atmosphere in 1983.

1.7   NATO Exercise According to several accounts, the most dangerous single incident in 1983 related to military stability between the superpowers was the Soviet reaction to NATO command post exercise (CPX) “Able Archer”. The exercise took place from November 2 to 11 and was designed to practice the alliance’s procedures for nuclear release and alert. Unfortunately, it took place within a context overshadowed by Soviet fears of US and NATO plans for initiating a war in Europe and/or a nuclear war between the superpowers.18 As “Able Archer” got under way, Soviet and allied Warsaw Pact intelligence began routine monitoring of the exercise. NATO was, of course, observing and reacting to the Soviet monitoring of “Able Archer”. Soon the British and US listening posts detected that “something was going badly wrong”.19 Intelligence traffic from the other side suggested that the Soviets might be interpreting “Able Archer” not as an exercise but as a real prelude to a decision for war. Soviet “paranoia” at Moscow Center during this time might have been fueled by the awareness that Moscow’s own contingency plans for surprise attack against NATO used training exercises to conceal an actual offensive.20

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According to Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, there were two aspects of “Able Archer” that caused particular concern in Moscow. First, message formats and procedures used in previous exercises were different from the ones being used now. Second, the command post exercise simulated all phases of alert from normal day-to-day readiness to general alert.21 Thus “Able Archer” seemed more realistic to Soviet monitors than earlier exercises had. In addition, thanks to Operation “RYAN” and the increasingly sensitive Soviet nose already out of joint and predisposed to find sinister meaning behind standard operating procedures, “Able Archer” rang unusual alarm bells in KGB and GRU intelligence channels. Thus KGB reports at one point during the exercise led the Center to believe that there was a real alert of NATO forces in progress, not just a training exercise. Moscow Center on November 6 sent the London KGB residency a checklist of indicators of Western preparations for nuclear surprise attack. The checklist included requirements to observe key officials who might be involved in negotiations with the US preparatory to a surprise attack, important military installations, NATO and other government offices, and communication and intelligence centers. Several days later, KGB and GRU residencies in Western Europe received “flash” (priority) telegrams that reported a nonexistent alert at US bases. The telegrams suggested two probable reasons for the “alert”: concerns about American military base security following a terrorist attack against a US Marine barracks in Lebanon; and, US army maneuvers planned for later in the year. But the telegrams also implied that there might be another reason for the putative US “alert” at these bases: the beginning of plans for a nuclear surprise first strike.22 Soviet reactions to “Able Archer” apparently had gone beyond warnings and communications within intelligence bureaucracies. During the NATO exercise, some important activity took place in Soviet and Warsaw Pact military forces. Elements of the air forces in the Group of Soviet Forces, Germany and in Poland, including nuclear capable aircraft, were placed on higher levels of alert on November 8–9.23 Units of the Soviet Fourth Air Army went to increased levels of readiness and all of its combat flight operations from November 4 to 10 were suspended. Soviet reactions may have been excessive and driven by selective perception, but they were not posturing. According to then (1983) Deputy Director of Intelligence Robert M.  Gates, writing in reflection after the end of the Cold War:

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Intermediate Missiles

Strategic Defense Initiative

KAL 007

Missile Warning

Able Archer

Fig. 1.1  Contributory stimuli to NATO-Soviet tension in 1983 After going through the experience at the time, then through the postmortems, and now through the documents, I don’t think the Soviets were crying wolf. They may not have believed a NATO attack was imminent in November, 1983, but they did seem to believe that the situation was very dangerous. And US intelligence had failed to grasp the true extent of their anxiety.24

Figure 1.1 summarizes some of the important decisions and actions contributing to an atmosphere of suspicion and mistrust, as previously discussed.

1.8   The Sister Services Even prior to “Able Archer”, The KGB enlisted allied intelligence services, especially the highly regarded East German foreign intelligence directorate (HVA) of Colonel General Markus Wolf, in its Operation “RYAN” intelligence gathering and reporting. According to Ben B. Fischer of the CIA’s History Staff, Wolf created an entire early warning system that included required reports keyed to a KGB catalogue of indicators of US or NATO preparations for war; a large situation center for monitoring

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global military operations with a special link to the KGB headquarters; a HVA headquarters staff dedicated to “RYAN”; special alert drills, annual exercises and military training for HVA officers that simulated a surprise attack by NATO.25 Of special interest is that East German wariness about a possible nuclear attack continued after the war scare atmosphere had apparently calmed down in Moscow. Acting in his capacity as head of foreign intelligence and deputy director of the East German Ministry for State Security, Wolf tasked the entire ministry in June 1985 to conduct an aggressive search for indicators of planning for a nuclear missile attack. His Implementation Regulation of June 5 directed that the operational and operational-­ technical service units of the ministry engage in “goal oriented operational penetration of enemy decision-making centers”. Top priority, he stated in the same message, are “signs of imminent preparations of a strategic nuclear-missile attack (KWA)” as well as other imperialist state plans for military surprise.26 In addition, the East German political leadership had built a large complex of bunkers (Führungskomplex, or leadership complex) near Berlin designed to save the military, political and intelligence elites from nuclear war.27 Markus Wolf was more skeptical than alarmists in Moscow about the urgency for “RYAN”. But he carried out orders to increase surveillance and collect indicators pertinent to a possible surprise attack for reasons of alliance solidarity, fraternal intelligence sharing and bureaucratic self-protection. Although the foreign intelligence services of East Germany and the Soviet Union often cooperated for obvious reasons, their specific reactions to Cold War situations of threat were by no means always identical. Wolf’s reputation as an intelligence icon (allegedly the model for John Le Carre’s fictional spymaster Karla, although Le Carré denies it) and his tenacious competency at intelligence (respected by friends and enemies alike) made him the least likely intelligence officer in the entire Soviet bloc to overreact to indicators of crisis or possible war. Wolf’s reputation, to the contrary, was that of an intelligence supervisor who was careful, methodical and politically astute in his judgments about allies and adversaries.28 Wolf contends, in fact, that his service eventually provided a definitive estimate that no threat of war was imminent, based in part on NATO documents obtained by one of his agents who worked at the alliance’s Brussels headquarters.29 He was careful not to dispute any of Moscow Center’s pessimistic assumptions about NATO intentions in real time, however.

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1.9   Soviet Nuclear Perspectives Nuclear forces have quantitative and qualitative attributes. Numbers of warheads and launchers matter, but so, too do the operational characteristics of forces and the military-strategic assumptions on which they are deployed. By 1983, the Soviet Union had long since attained parity in numbers of deployed systems and the capability for assured retaliation after surviving a first strike. On the other hand, there were important qualitative differences between US and Soviet force structures, related to assumptions made by American and Soviet political and military leaderships about the requirements for deterrence and for war if necessary. Speaking broadly, the Soviet view of deterrence was different from the American one, and involved some additional subtleties. Soviet military writers distinguished between deterrence as sderzhivanie (forestalling or avoiding) and deterrence as ustrashenie (intimidation).30 Deterrence in the Soviet view was not a deterministic outcome of force balances. It was as dependent on political as it was on military factors.31 Thus military-­ strategic parity, or an essential equivalence in deployed force structures, was not in itself a sufficient condition for military stability. The imperialist camp led by the United States and NATO was a political threat by virtue of its existence and regardless of particular fluctuations in its patterns of military spending. Therefore, Soviet survival in the nuclear age could not be trusted to force balances alone. How the forces would operate in time of crisis or threat of war had to be taken into account. This stance of many Soviet military thinkers was quite logical from their perspective. One must remember that, notwithstanding their disclaimers about the historical inevitability of socialist victory, some Soviet leaders by the 1980s recognized that their economy had failed. As dedicated Marxists they knew what might follow from that: if the economy could not be saved, then neither could national defense and the communist grip on Soviet power. Somehow resources had to be freed up for economic growth and renewal, but this required a favorable threat assessment. This combination of a reduced threat assessment and economic restructuring was not attempted seriously by the Kremlin leadership until Gorbachev became party chairman in 1985. In the early 1980s the Soviet leadership was in a bind. The need for reduced defense expenditures and for economic restructuring was obvious. But the perceived threat from the West, was not judged to have been diminished compared to previous decades: quite the contrary. The Carter

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projected defense buildup, followed by Reagan’s even larger increases and hostile rhetoric, convinced the Soviet leadership that there were no immediate prospects for US-Soviet detente. The explicitness of Carter military doctrine (PD-59) on the requirement for protracted nuclear war fighting (for deterrence) had resonated in Moscow in the same way as the INF deployment decision a year earlier had. For present purposes, the point is not whether any of these US or NATO decisions was correct or incorrect in themselves. It is the cumulative effect of these decisions as seen from Moscow and in the context of Soviet threat perception that is pertinent to our discussion. Soviet force structure in 1983 also affected its view of the requirements for deterrence and of nuclear crisis management. The makeweight of Soviet strategic retaliatory forces was its ICBM force. In order to guarantee their survival against a US first strike (which might, in the view of Soviet military planners, come as a “bolt from the blue” or from escalation after conventional war fighting in Europe), these land-based missiles would have to be launched before US warheads exploded against their assigned targets.32 In American military parlance, Soviet ICBMs would have to be launched “on warning” (LOA) or “under attack” (LUA).33 Only launch on warning could guarantee that sufficient numbers of Soviet ICBMs would survive a well-orchestrated US first strike. Soviet leaders could not rely upon retaliation after riding out that first strike to do so.34 According to Western experts, the Soviet armed forces were eventually tasked to prepare for a continuum of retaliatory options from preemption to retaliation after ride out. However, leaders’ decisions about a preferred option in actual crisis or wartime would have been constrained by capabilities available at the time. During the later 1960s and early 1970s, improved capabilities for rapid launch and better warning, communication and control systems made it possible for Soviet leaders to place more reliance upon launch on warning and to be less dependent on preemption.35 The option of preemption was not discarded. The variety of accidental or deliberate paths by which a nuclear war might be initiated left the Soviet leadership no choice, in their view, but contingent preparedness for a spectrum of possibilities. Differences between US and Soviet force structures would also have implications for the willingness of either side to rely upon launch on warning as its principal retaliatory option. US retaliatory capabilities in 1983 were spread more evenly among three components of a strategic triad: intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); submarine-launched ballistic

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missiles (SLBMs); and long-range bombers, compared to Soviet forces. The most survivable part of the US deterrent was its fleet of ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), virtually invulnerable to first strike preemption. The US bomber delivered weapons, including air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs), gravity bombs and short-range attack missiles (SRAMs), were slow flyers compared to the fast flying ICBMs and SLBMs. Nevertheless, the highly capable US bomber force, compared to its Soviet counterpart, forced the Soviets to expend considerable resources on air defense and complicated their estimates of time on target arrivals for US retaliatory forces. The effects of force structure and doctrine combined created some significant pressures for Soviet reliance upon prompt launch to save the ICBM component of their deterrent. Doctrine suggested that crises were mainly political in their origin and were to be avoided, not managed. The onset of a serious crisis would lead to a threat of war. The US view, that brinkmanship could be manipulated to unilateral advantage during a crisis, struck most Soviet leaders before and after Khrushchev as a highly risk-­ acceptant strategy. The Soviet leadership, after Khrushchev’s enforced retirement, did engage in rapid nuclear force building in order to eliminate American strategic nuclear superiority, but they also eschewed “adventurism” in the forward deployments of nuclear weapons and in the use of nuclear forces for coercion because they were pessimistic about “managing” a crisis. Once a confrontation was forced upon them (in their view), Soviet leaders would have to include in crisis preparedness a capability for, and perhaps a bias toward, prompt launch to save the Strategic Rocket Forces. Pessimism about crisis management combined with an ICBM-heavy deterrent constrained Soviet leaders’ choices once general deterrence (the basic Hobbesian condition of threat created by the international system of plural sovereignty and the security dilemma) turned to immediate deterrence (a situation in which one state has made an explicit military threat against another or others).

1.10   Force Balances and Outcomes If political relations in 1983 had deteriorated into a crisis that raised the likelihood of nuclear war, as between the United States and the Soviet Union, what possible ranges of outcomes would military planners have had to consider? The point of this estimation is not to doubt the inescap-

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ably disastrous humanitarian situation that would have resulted from any nuclear war between the respective Soviet and US-NATO nuclear forces. Instead, the data are interrogated to inspect the extent to which either the United States or the Soviet Union would have felt excessive pressure toward either nuclear preemption or “launch on warning” in order to preserve its second strike retaliatory force. If so, such a crisis would have been all the more dangerous and could have generated a self-destructive feedback loop of reciprocal first strike fears. Table 1.1 lists the deployed US and Soviet strategic nuclear forces in 1983. Table 1.2 displays the outcomes of nuclear war simulations by summarizing the numbers of surviving and retaliating warheads for each state at various stages of response to attack. Outcomes are grouped into four alternative states of prewar alertness and operational launch doctrine: (1) forces are on generated alert (GEN) and launched on warning; (2) forces are on generated alert and ride out the attack before retaliating; (3) forces are on day-­to-­day alert and launched on warning; and, (4) forces are on day-today alert and ride out the attack before retaliating. The results of the preceding analysis show several things. First, the US and Soviet strategic nuclear force sizes, and the diversity of their various intercontinental launch platforms, involve a great deal of nuclear redundancy, from the practical standpoint of military operations as well as from the perspective of “how much is enough?” for deterrence. A surfeit of weapons was available for both Soviet and US planners and operators with which to attack a wide variety of targets: including strikes against opposed nuclear forces, conventional forces, command-control systems and national infrastructure. Long before arsenals had been exhausted the conflict would have become politically pointless and elusive of anything resembling victory at an acceptable cost. Second, the numbers of weapons deployed and the survivability of their launch systems (variable, depending on whether they were launched on warning, under attack or after attack) should have been sufficient to reassure political leaders and force commanders against the alleged necessity or dubious appeal of nuclear preemption. There are some disparities in the performances of various arms of service (land-based missiles, submarine-­ launched missiles and bombers) with respect to their expected rates of survivability and command vulnerabilities, but even pessimistic assumptions about those attributes “under fire” create little temptation for a “use them or lose them” argument in Washington or Moscow.

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Table 1.1  US and Soviet strategic nuclear forces, 1983 US Forces Platform ICBMs Titan II Minuteman II Minuteman III Total ICBM SLBMs Poseidon C-3 Poseidon C-4 Trident C-4 Total SLBM Air B-52 FB-111A Total Air TOTALS

Launchers

Warheads/launcher

Total warheads

50 450 550 1050

1 1 3

50 450 1650 2150

304 192 48 544

10 8 8

3040 1536 384 4960

241 55 296 1880

12 11.4

2892 627 3519 10,619

Warheads/launcher

Total warheads

Soviet Forces Platform ICBMs SS-11M1 SS-11M2M3 SS-13 SS-17 SS-18 SS-19 Total ICBM SLBMs SS-N-20 SS-N-18 SS-N-8 SS-N-6 SS-N-17/SS-N-5 Total SLBM Air Tu-95 Bear A/B/C Tu-95 Bear B/C Tu-95 Bear H16 Mya-4 Bison Total Air TOTALS Source: Author

Launchers 100 420 60 150 308 330 1368

1 2 1 4 10 6

100 840 60 600 3080 1980 6660

21 224 288 384 60 977

10 3 1 1 1

210 672 288 384 60 1614

30 75 10 52 167 2512

2 4 16 4

60 300 160 208 728 9002

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Table 1.2  US and Soviet surviving and retaliating warheads, 1983 US Forces GEN, LOW

Total

Available

Alert

Surviving

Arriving

ICBM SLBM Air All GEN, ROA ICBM SLBM Air All DAY, LOW ICBM SLBM Air All DAY, ROA ICBM SLBM Air All

2140 4960 3519 10,619

2140 4464 3167 9771

2140 4464 3167 9771

2140 4464 3167 9771

2140 4018 2565 8509

2140 4960 3519 10,619

2140 4464 3167 9771

2140 4464 3167 9771

214 4464 3167 7845

193 4018 2565 6776

2140 4960 3519 10,619

2140 4464 3167 9771

2140 2991 0 5131

2140 2991 0 5131

1926 2692 0 4618

2140 4960 3519 10,619

2140 4464 3167 9771

2140 2991 0 5131

214 2991 0 3205

193 2692 0 2884

Soviet Forces GEN, LOW

Total

Available

Alert

Surviving

Arriving

ICBM SLBM Air All GEN, ROA ICBM SLBM Air All DAY, LOW ICBM SLBM Air All DAY, ROA ICBM SLBM Air All

6660 1614 728 9002

6660 1526 655 8841

6660 1526 655 8841

6660 1526 655 8841

5994 1373 531 7898

6660 1614 728 9002

6660 1526 655 8841

6660 1526 655 8841

666 1526 655 2847

599 1373 531 2503

6660 1614 728 9002

6660 1526 655 8841

6660 1022 0 7682

6660 1022 0 7682

5994 920 0 6914

6660 1614 728 9002

6660 1526 655 8841

6660 1022 0 7682

666 1022 0 1688

599 920 0 1519

Source: Author, based on Arriving Weapons Sensitivity Model (AWSM)@ developed by Dr. James Scouras. Dr. Scouras has no responsibility for its use here

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Much would depend on how rapidly the crisis developed and whether sufficient time was permitted for negotiations and consultations as among the United States, NATO and the Soviet leaderships, in order for cooler heads to prevail. An immediate jump from a peacetime posture to a nuclear “bolt from the blue” was always less likely than a slow boiling crisis in Europe that moved through various stages of escalation, each stage offering its own threshold for crisis management by means of international diplomacy supported by military power. On the other hand, slowing down a crisis would not necessarily guarantee a favorable outcome. Misperceptions on both sides are attributes of many political crises. In the case of a possible NATO-Soviet nuclear crisis of the 1980s, a NATO movement beyond practice for nuclear release into actual approval for nuclear first use involved a complicated series of alliance political decisions and military operations. The Soviets might have misperceived NATO intent at any stage of this process.

1.11   Conclusions The 1983 “war scare” as between Moscow and the West was a sufficiently serious and dangerous Cold War confrontation to merit retrospective interest and analysis. Not all aspects of the issue can be dealt with here. A series of apparently discrete events between 1979 (NATO’s INF modernization decision) and November 1983 (“Able Archer”) cumulated ­unexpectedly into a “positive feedback loop” of negative expectations. Soviet foreign and military intelligence, tasked by their uptight political masters, reported back to Moscow Central some indicators and pessimistic appraisals that seemed to confirm initial suspicions that the West was up to something unusual. Fortunately, neither all Soviet and allied intelligence organs, nor most of the Soviet leadership, adopted the most pessimistic interpretation of US and NATO military exercises in the fall of 1983. In addition to findings with implications for policy, the study also holds implications for policy-relevant theorizing in international relations and in security studies. There are two different ways in which the manipulation of risk, within the context of nuclear crisis management, can take place. The first context is that a risk with a known and bounded range of outcomes is used by one side to test the resolve of the other. This is a true competition in risk taking: the uncertainties have mainly to do with the willingness of each side to stay in the bidding. Games of “chicken” played on highways by risk

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acceptant motorists (or by policy makers in crises) illustrate one dangerous variation of this kind of competition. Another kind of competition in risk taking differs from this linear test of resolve. In the more complicated kind of risk manipulation, the universe of potential outcomes is more unstructured. Because the range of outcomes is less predictable, the ability of leaders to rank order or otherwise prioritize preferred outcomes, or to attach probabilities to desired outcomes, is reduced in comparison to the bounded-outcomes case. One reason why nuclear bipolar systems may be more manageable and more stable than multipolar systems is that bipolar systems reduce the cognitive complexity of leaders’ assessments by offering them a more structured array of potential outcomes. A two-sided crisis or war cannot usually be complicated by third parties unless those parties have sufficient military power and political influence for a seat at the great power table. The 1983 war scare also reminds us that policy makers are challenged to keep distinct the possibility of two kinds of failure in crisis decision-­ making: miscalculated escalation and loss of control. Miscalculated escalation is a deliberate but mistaken decision taken to raise one side’s military stakes and/or policy commitments, in the erroneous expectation that the other side will back down as a result. Loss of control is an inadvertent or accidental lapse of policy control over military actions, or the failure of standard operating procedures to cope with the stress of crisis management, that is neither designed nor intended. Examples of miscalculated escalation are provided by the behavior of various European heads of state during the July crisis of 1914. Examples of loss of control were apparent during the Cuban missile crisis, including a U-2 “routine” air sampling mission that strayed into Soviet air space at one of the tensest moments of that confrontation. A nuclear crisis could be marked by either miscalculated escalation, loss of control or both to some degree. In the case of the war scare of 1983, there was less of an aspect of loss of control and more of a danger of miscalculated escalation based on flawed or tendentiously interpreted intelligence. Fortunately, neither the Soviet Union nor NATO undertook provocative military moves in Europe that would have confirmed the worst case fears of Soviet or US threat assessors. Finally, as Paul Bracken reminds us, institutions matter—and so do people.36 Persons so tasked by intelligence organs, following orders from superiors, fed expected indicators into action channels. The interpretation of accumulated anecdotal and other intelligence pertinent to RYAN was

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left to higher levels but there was not necessarily effective coordination across those “stovepipes” of intelligence and policy making. Fortuitous disconnection within and between stovepipes might have decelerated the shock effect and dissipated the alarmism otherwise held in some more threat-inflating bureaucratic quarters. Ironically, had the Soviet command-­ control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) systems been operating according to principles of modern hyperactive “network-centric warfare”, the amount of misinformation in the system and its exchange velocity between and among bureaucratic channels might have been greater than it was. People also matter. It mattered that Soviet Colonel Petrov used his head in late September 1983 and remained skeptical of a false missile attack warning, due to the absence of confirming indicators from other sources. Given the tense political atmospherics as between the US and the Soviet Union at the time, a less clearheaded thinker and a more backside-­ covering bureaucrat might simply have rocketed the warning up the chain of command, with unpredictable results. It also mattered that an experienced spymaster like Markus Wolf was in a key position to separate fact from fiction, and to distinguish concern from undue alarmism, in collecting and analyzing intelligence relative to RYAN tasking. Germany was, after all, the most likely place for an eruption of miscalculated escalation based on false positives among indicators of plans for nuclear attack. With respect to people, it also mattered that Ronald Reagan was US President because, notwithstanding his tough rhetoric toward Moscow, Reagan was horrified by nuclear weapons and actually attracted to the idea of nuclear abolition and-or negation by futuristic defense systems. This deep structure of Reagan’s thinking about the Soviets and nuclear war led him to draw some conclusions about nuclear danger after 1983 that paved the way for US-Soviet rapprochement when Gorbachev came to power in 1985. Reagan’s view, that a nuclear war could never be won and must never be fought, was reinforced by the experience of Able Archer and other events of those dangerous days. The significance of nuclear deterrence in the “war scare” episode of 1983 is debatable. It could be argued that the two sides’ nuclear forces inhibited undue adventurism and any outbreak of war in Europe, not only in 1983 but throughout much of the Cold War. On the other hand, it is notable that the “war scare” of 1983 was about fear of nuclear attack and specifically about Soviet leaders’ possible fears of US and NATO intentions with respect to nuclear first use or first strike. More broadly, deter-

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rence as an intellectual construct for discourse among academics, policy makers and others had certain uses as a common frame of reference that expedited discussion about strategy and policy. But deterrence theory offered little guidance for military tactics and operational art, and even more problematically, often fell short of strategic effect when it failed to create a viable “bridge” between policy and the threat or use of force.37 In the aftermath of the US and Russian decisions in 2019 to abrogate the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987, a mainstay of Cold War and later nuclear arms control that eliminated an entire class of ground-launched missiles with ranges from 500 to 5500 kilometers, the nuclear uncertainties of Europe in the 1980s suggest warning lights for twenty-first-century US, allied NATO and Russian leaders.38

Notes 1. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story (NY: HarperCollins 1990), p. 583. 2. Andrew and Gordievsky (eds.) Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions: Top Secret Files on KGB Foreign Operations, 1975–1985 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp.  68–90 provides a full account of “RYAN”. 3. See References No. 373/PR/52, Attachment 2, The Problem of Discovering Preparation for a Nuclear Missile Attack on the USSR, in Andrew and Gordievsky (note 2) pp. 74–81, citation p. 74. 4. Ibid. pp. 77–81. 5. Ibid. p. 76. 6. My appreciation of the Soviet perspective here owes much to helpful comments from Raymond Garthoff. See also Raymond L. Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC: Brookings 1985) pp. 864–72. 7. Robert M.  Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (NY: Simon & Schuster 1996), p. 262. 8. Andrew and Gordievsky, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions, p. 76. Soviet fears of the preemptive value of Pershing II seemed excessive from the US and NATO perspective. The range of the Pershing II given by US official sources would not have permitted prompt attacks against main military command bunkers in or near Moscow. However, Soviet military planners might have feared that, once in place, Pershing II missiles could be enhanced and given extended ranges bringing Moscow and environs within their reach.

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9. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 264. 10. Statement of Soviet scientists on SDI quoted in Andrei A. Kokoshin, Soviet Strategic Thought, 1917–91 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1998) p. 182. 11. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 268. 12. Ibid. p. 267. 13. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 597. 14. Ibid. p. 598. 15. See David Hoffman, ‘“I Had a Funny Feeling in My Gut”: Soviet Officer Faced Nuclear Armageddon’, Washington Post, 10 Feb. 1999, p. A19. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. For recent accounts of Able Archer and its significance, see: Jill Kastner, “Standing on the Brink: The Secret War Scare of 1983,” The Nation, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018  – #99  – May 31, 2018, d ­ [email protected]; Nate Jones, Tom Blanton and Lauren Harper, editors, The 1983 War Scare Declassified and For Real: All-Source Intelligence Report Finds US – Soviet Nuclear Relations on “Hair Trigger” in 1983, National Security Archive, Briefing Book No. 533, posted October 24, 2015, [email protected]; Douglas Birch, “The USSR and US Came Closer to Nuclear War Than We Thought,” The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com, May 28, 2013, in Johnson’s Russia List 2013 – #97, May 29, 2013, [email protected]. See also: John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), pp.  225–228; Andrew and Gordievsky, pp.  599–600; Gates, From the Shadows, pp.  270–3. See also Gordon Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds: Soviet Postwar Defectors (NY: Weidenfeld 1989) pp. 328–35. 19. Brook-Shepherd, The Storm Birds, p. 329. 20. Andrew and Gordievsky, KGB, p. 599. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. p. 600. 23. Peter Vincent Pry, War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink (Westport, CT: Praeger 1999) p. 41. 24. Gates, From the Shadows, p. 273. 25. Ben B. Fischer, ‘Intelligence and Disaster Avoidance: The Soviet War Scare and US-Soviet Relations’, Ch. 5 in Stephen J. Cimbala (ed.) Mysteries of the Cold War (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate 1999) pp. 89–104, esp. p. 98. I gratefully acknowledge Ben Fischer for calling this important aspect of Operation “RYAN” to my attention. 26. Council of Ministers of the German Democratic Republic, Ministry for State Security, Deputy of the Minister, Implementation Regulation to Order Nr. 1/85 of 15.2.1985: Comprehensive Use of Capabilities of the Service Units of the MfS for Early and Reliable Acquisition of Evidence of Imminent Enemy Plans, Preparations and Actions for Aggression (Berlin: 5 June 1985).

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27. Fischer, “Intelligence and Disaster Avoidance,” p. 98. 28. Markus Wolf, Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster (NY: Times Books, 1997) is a first-person account of his amazing career. 29. Wolf, Spionage Chef im geheimen Krieg: Erinnerungen (Dusseldorf and Munich: List 1997), p.  332, cited in Fischer, “Intelligence and Disaster Avoidance,” p. 101. 30. Raymond L.  Garthoff, Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine (Washington, DC: Brookings 1990) pp. 24–25. 31. William E.  Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 1–15 is excellent on this point. See also Garthoff, Deterrence and Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine, pp. 16–22. 32. Ghulam Dastagir Wardak (compiler) and Graham Hall Turbiville Jr. (gen. ed.) The Voroshilov Lectures: Materials from the Soviet General Staff Academy, Vol. 1 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1989), pp. 69–75. 33. In theory according to some US distinctions, launch “on warning” would take place in response to multiple indicators that an attack had been launched but prior to the actual detonations of warheads on US soil. Launch “under attack” would be delayed until after actual detonations had occurred. Skeptics can be forgiven for assuming that launch “under attack” was a euphemism in declaratory policy for action policy that was likely to be launch “on warning”. Launch on warning would be necessary to save the ICBM force from prompt destruction: the difference between LOW and LUA might, at most, affect some components of an already partly alerted US bomber force. 34. Bruce G.  Blair, The Logic of Accidental Nuclear War (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1993). 35. Garthoff, Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine, p. 78. 36. Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and The New Power Politics (New York: Henry Holt – Times Books, 2012). 37. This concept of strategy is explained in Colin S. Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). There is room for well-crafted and appropriately applied deterrence strategies, as Gray notes: “A strategy of deterrence, say, chosen for the purpose of preventing war, can be said to be more important than are plans for the conduct of war, at least until it fails” (Ibid., p. 98). 38. For pertinent reflections, see Tom Nichols, “Billions Dead: 5 Times Russia and America Nearly Started a Nuclear War: Some history that should never be forgotten,” The National Interest, April 1, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #55 – April 2, 2019, [email protected]

CHAPTER 2

New Start and Beyond: Nuclear Modernization and US-Russian Nuclear Arms Control

2.1   Introduction US-Russian nuclear arms control is in imminent danger of collapse—or even worse, of obsolescence overtaken by events.1 Arms control, like other aspects of security policy, is subject to the priority of politics over technology. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and ongoing destabilization of eastern Ukraine violated the precedents and prior expectations against imposed border changes in post-Cold War Europe. As Russian nuclear expert Alexei Arbatov has noted: Since the events of 2014  in Ukraine, intense military confrontation between Russia and NATO has been renewed in Eastern Europe, the Baltic and Black Seas, and the Arctic. Regular large-scale military exercises (including with the participation of strategic systems and the imitation of nuclear weapon use) are frequent demonstrations of force. Dangerous close encounters of combat ships and aircraft are a common occurrence. The possibility of a major war between Russia and NATO, which seemed irrevocably consigned to the past just a few years ago, hangs over Europe and the world.2

Nor did relations between Washington and Moscow improve after the election of Donald J. Trump as US president. US charges of Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential elections led to Congressionally mandated sanctions against Russia (in addition to those imposed by the United States and Europeans for Russia’s actions against Ukraine). The © The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_2

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United States and Russia also disagreed over Russia’s military support for the Asad regime in Syria. Additional fuel was thrown on the fire by Vladimir Putin in his March 1, 2018, address to the Russian Federal Assembly, in which Putin outlined a new generation of weapons that he claimed would be able to evade any American antimissile defenses.3 Finally, US and Russian decisions to depart the iconic Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty in August 2019 could jeopardize the future of other nuclear arms control and nonproliferation efforts, including the New START agreement.4 Despite these and other frictions in their international relations, the United States and Russia both declared that they had met their obligations under the New START strategic nuclear arms limitation agreement, signed in 2010 and entering into force in 2011. The agreement required each state to limit its total numbers of operationally deployed nuclear weapons on intercontinental launchers to a maximum of 1500 warheads, deployed on no more than 700 operational launchers.5 In addition, both parties agreed to limit their total numbers of deployed and nondeployed launchers to 800. The required reductions were to be achieved by February 2018, and scheduled to expire in 2021. If they agreed, Washington and Moscow could exercise the option to extend the agreement for another five years, until 2026. The agreement also provides for a verification regime that includes numerous inspections and data exchanges, as well as a Bilateral Consultative Commission to resolve disagreements over interpretation and implementation.6 The New START-compliant numbers of American and Russian launchers and warheads as of March 1, 2019, are summarized in Table 2.1.

2.2   Caveats Despite Russian and American apparent success in meeting the required New START limits in time, observers in the United States and in Russia remained skeptical about the future of the New START agreement in particular, and about the prospects for any related nuclear arms limitation beyond that. Reasons for this skepticism included (1) uncertainty about the willingness of either the Trump or the Putin administration to agree the five year extension of New START limits;7 (2) nuclear modernization plans in the United States and Russia and their possible incompatibility with New START restraints;8 (3) US and Russian charges of noncompliance with the terms of the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty of

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Table 2.1  New START treaty aggregate numbers of strategic offensive arms Category of data

United States

Russia

Deployed ICBMs, Deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers Warheads on Deployed ICBMs, on Deployed SLBMs, and Nuclear Warheads Counted for Deployed Heavy Bombersa Deployed and Non-deployed Launchers of ICBMs, Deployed and Non-deployed Launchers of SLBMs, and Deployed and Non-­ deployed Heavy Bombers

656 1365

524 1461

800

760

Source: US Department of State, New START Treaty Aggregate Numbers of Strategic Offensive Arms, Fact Sheet (Washington, DC: US Department of State, March 1, 2019), https://www.state.gov/t/avc/newstart/290759.htm See also: Hans M.  Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Russian nuclear forces, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 2 (March 4, 2019), pp. 73–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1580891 and Hans M.  Kristensen and Matt Korda, “United States nuclear forces, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 3 (April 29, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1606503 Under New START counting rules, each bomber counts as one warhead

a

1987, and both states’ decision in 2019 to withdraw from that agreement; (4) a Trump administration Nuclear Posture Review that called for new sea-based nuclear weapons, and Congressionally mandated research and development on possible US offsets for Russian INF deployments;9 (5) continuing Russian objections to US missile defenses in Europe and Russia’s insistence that future arms limitation agreements include limits on missile defenses as well as offenses; and (6) US concerns about Russia’s possible interest in lowering the threshold for nuclear first use in Europe under certain extreme conditions that could require “escalation for de-­ escalation” to avoid defeat in a conventional war.10 According to Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley, Jr., Director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency: Russia assesses that the threat of nuclear escalation or actual first use of nuclear weapons would serve to “de-escalate” a conflict on terms favorable to Russia. Russian defense officials have spoken publicly about “de-escalating” a conflict through limited nuclear use and it is a fact that the Russian military has prepared plans and is well trained to transition rapidly to nuclear use in order to compel an end to a conventional conflict. Russia’s perception that nuclear use could terminate a conflict on terms favorable to Russia increases the prospect for miscalculation.11

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More broadly, Stephen Blank notes that Russian military strategy, with respect to nuclear weapons, “clearly comprises both the real threat of nuclear operations and the constant reality of a threat to use those weapons as a means of deterrence and intimidation or in other words, a strategy of perceptions management”.12 Related to this are US expert warnings of the potential for Russian use of advanced technology, low-yield nuclear weapons in Europe and their implications for the credibility of US extended deterrence.13 In addition, within weeks of the official US departure from the INF treaty on August 2, 2019, the Pentagon tested a ground-launched cruise missile of more than 500 km range. Department of Defense (DOD) officials stated that the United States has no plans to develop or deploy a nuclear ground-based cruise missile capability, but Secretary of Defense Mark Esper stated that DOD will “fully pursue the development of these ground-launched conventional missiles as a prudent response to Russia’s actions and as part of the joint force’s broader portfolio of conventional strike options”.14 The Pentagon is reportedly planning or developing four land-based missiles that would have contravened the INF Treaty’s limits: the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) to replace the Army ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System)—with an extended range of 700 kilometers; a cruise missile with a range of 1000 kilometers (both for European deployment); a land-based ballistic missile with a range of 3000–4000 kilometers, presumably for deployment in the Asia-Pacific region; and a less publicly detailed fourth missile system, of medium-range and possibly also a hypersonic development program.15 How this would overlay with Russia’s expectations was not clear: according to experts, military planners at Russia’s General Staff headquarters “have developed several tiered strategies for escalation management, believing in the coercive power of long range conventional weapons, nonstrategic nuclear weapons, and their strategic nuclear forces”.16

2.3   Reasons for Optimism? The preceding discussion might convince readers that the prospects for extension of New START until 2026, or the conclusion of other nuclear arms control agreements as between the United States and Russia, range from improbable to impossible. On the other hand, although nuclear complacency is not in order, some reasons for optimism can be put forward. First, the United States and Russia have finite resources to

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spend on nuclear and other military modernization. Although the Trump ­administration has called for increased US defense spending in proposed future budgets, competing priorities, including research and development for conventional forces, will impose some restraints on nuclear modernization. Russian nuclear modernization may be aggressive in the short term, but eventually come up against the limitations of Russia’s economy besotted by sanctions, by hyper-dependency on hydrocarbon and weapons exports, and by legal and other obstacles for Western investment to support technological innovation.17 Second, both the United States and Russia must recognize that future threats to international stability connected to nuclear weapons are as likely, or even more likely, to originate outside of Europe: especially in the regions of the Middle East, South and East Asia. Future conflicts in these regions between nuclear capable and-or nuclear aspiring states may not follow the playbook with which US and Soviet or Russian interlocutors became so familiar during the Cold War. Instead, in the so-called Second Nuclear Age, a multipolar nuclear order, without a secure management structure that characterized the US-Soviet Cold War nuclear system, offers a menu of possible surprises for the great powers, including Washington and Moscow.18 Instead of focusing on the deterrence of nuclear or conventional war as between the United States and Russia, the two nuclear superpowers may be forced to collaborate on reducing the risks of nuclear first use or escalation outside of Europe. Especially urgent might be the need for nuclear restraint to be imposed on first-use miscreants who might otherwise escalate a limited war into a regional holocaust. A third reason for some optimism about the possibility for future US and Russian nuclear collaboration is the evolving issue of missile defenses. Strategic missile defenses were virtually taboo during the Cold War because missile defense technologies were undeveloped compared to offenses, and because the theory of deterrence by threat of retaliatory punishment (mutual assured destruction) regarded defenses as provocative rather than stabilizing. As noted above, US missile defenses deployed in Europe have become a point of contention for Russian President Putin. On the other hand, since the end of the Cold War, technologies for local and regional missile defenses have improved and have performed reasonably well in tests or under duress. Technologies for national territorial defense, as against large scale compared to limited strikes, are still immature and uncertain of performance under realistic conditions

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of attack. However, possibly new approaches to BMD, including boost-­ phase intercept based on UAVs (unpiloted aerial vehicles) deployed within prompt striking distance for the use of air-to-air or air-to-ground missiles, and “left of launch” techniques for cyberattack prior to or during launch sequence, are among adaptive approaches being considered among future BMD options.19 Nevertheless, it remains the case that, relative to US-Russian strategic nuclear deterrence and arms control stability, defenses are of little or no value unless offensive nuclear force modernization is constrained by mutual agreement (in either New START or successor agreements). Unconstrained growth of offenses leaves defenses facing an uphill battle unless, or until, entirely new physical principles for defenses are discovered and embodied in force structure. In addition, within a constrained offensive arms race, US-Russian collaboration on missile defenses against threats originating outside of Europe becomes more realistic. European missile defenses that presented no serious threat to Russian or American second-­ strike capability could conceivably protect both NATO and Russia from nuclear threats originating from the Middle East. A fourth incentive for continuation of Russian-American collaboration on strategic nuclear arms limitations or reductions is the growing improvement in both states’ conventional high-precision, long-range strike systems. For example, the US research and development program for conventional Prompt Global Strike (PGS) systems, together with improved reconnaissance and surveillance, could threaten some targets previously thought to be vulnerable only to long-range nuclear attacks. The Trump administration has requested nearly $100 million for fiscal year 2020 to support development of three new missile systems that would exceed the limits previously imposed by the INF treaty: including a ground-launched variant of the Navy’s Tomahawk sea-launched cruise missile with a range of about 1000 kilometers, and a ground-launched ballistic missile with a range of 3000–4000 kilometers.20 For its part, Russia is also modernizing its conventional land-based, sea-based and airborne strike systems, especially within range of the European theater of operations. As Eugene Rumer has noted: The new geography of the NATO-Russia standoff, combined with long-standing Russian concerns about U.S. superiority in precision-­ guided weapons, underscores that sense of vulnerability. Putin, in his

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February 2019 address to the Federal Assembly, warned the United States that new Russian weapons would let Russia hold the United States at risk the same way U.S. systems in Europe threaten Russia.21

This improvement in both states’ conventional weapons, delivery systems and supporting C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) has a two-sided aspect. On one hand, improved conventional weapons might raise the threshold for nuclear first use by one or both sides. But the opposite danger is also implied. With improved conventional fighting power, either Russia or NATO (or both) might be overconfident of engaging in high-­ intensity conflict without breaching the taboo of nuclear first use. Some experts caution against the assumption that under the exigent circumstances of conventional land-based missile attacks by the United States against Russia or China, nuclear escalation is an inevitable result: It is not self-evident that nuclear escalation is as automatic as critics presume. Consider the calculations of a country on the receiving end of an incoming missile salvo launched by the United States. Leaders of that country would not likely reflexively conclude that they were coming under nuclear attack and thus immediately order a counter nuclear strike, a response that would guarantee a devastating, if not regime-­ ending, nuclear riposte. The stakes would simply be too high for decision makers to succumb to such knee-jerk reactions.22

Of course, at this point we enter into a Clausewitz-like world in which the fog of war permits leaders to misperceive the intentions of the other side and to misjudge their opponents’ willingness to bear costs and risks. Nuclear deterrence depends for its success on this very uncertainty, about the exact degree of risk that leaders are willing to accept and about leaders’ tolerance for additional losses relative to the expectations embedded in their “theory of victory”. The difference between leaders’ best-case expectations, prior to an outbreak of war, and their evaluation of ongoing outcomes, as war progresses, is an important part of their decision-making process for or against escalation. Not only might leaders incorrectly estimate their opponents’ expectations and risk assessments in good time; they might also fail to understand their own, under the pressure of unforeseen events.

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2.4   Analysis Near and Far Given these factors for and against the possible success and significance of Russian and American strategic nuclear arms control, what options are feasible and what might be their probable consequences? We might start from where we are: with New START in place until 2021 (and possibly until 2026). US and Russian strategic nuclear forces under these conditions should meet the criteria of deterrence, crisis and arms race stability. In addition, future (beyond 2026) American and Russian strategic nuclear force modernization must also meet these standards. To assess the likelihood of their doing so, we project future New START-compliant US and Russian strategic nuclear forces at two possible levels of maximum deployment: (1) forces with a maximum number of 1550 deployed warheads for each state on intercontinental launchers and (2) a reduced force with a smaller maximum deployment limit of 1000 warheads on intercontinental launchers. New START counting rules are used in both illustrations, which are heuristic and not necessarily predictive of actual force deployments as time goes on and older systems are retired in favor of newer ones. In order to extrapolate beyond the immediate period of New START, we used projected US strategic nuclear force structures at or below New START limits through the year 2046 and notional Russian forces of similar size.23 Alternative US force structures under a New START deployment limit (1550 maximum warheads) included (1) the 2017 US plan for nuclear force modernization, assuming a triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and heavy bombers;24 (2) a US force without ICBMs; (3) an American force without bombers and (4) an American triad with reduced numbers of ICBMs (300) and ballistic missile submarines (10), or SSBNs, compared to other options.25 For comparison of US options below New START limits, with a maximum number of 1000 deployed warheads, alternative force structures included (1) a 1000 warhead triad, (2) a 1000 warhead dyad without bombers and (3) a 1000 warhead dyad without ICBMs.26 Charts 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 summarize the outcomes of nuclear force exchanges for each of these alternative New START and lower US and Russian forces. We calculated the numbers of surviving and retaliating warheads for each state and for each force size under the following operational conditions: (1) forces are on generated alert and launched on warning, (2) forces are on generated alert and ride out the attack before

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33

Rus Bal Triad 1550

681 568

545

Number of Warheads

454 363

341 273

Rus Rus Gen/LOW Gen/RO Series1

454

545

454

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

363

273

U.S. U.S. Gen/LOW Gen/RO 681

568

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

454

341

Chart 2.1  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1550 deployment Limit 2017 Plan. (Graphics based on force structures in US Congressional Budget Office, Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S.  Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046 (Washington, DC: CBO, October 2017), pp.  33 and 44, www.cbo.gov/ publications/53211)

retaliating, (3) forces are on day-to-day alert and launched on warning and (4) forces are on day-to-day alert and ride out the attack. Scenario (1) is often referred to as Maximum Retaliation; scenarios (2) and (3) as Intermediate Retaliation; and, scenario (4) as Minimum Retaliation.27 Evaluating the Forces United States or other nuclear forces could be tasked according to their ability to accomplish required tasks under four standards of assessment, relative to the objectives set for those forces. The first such standard would be that of deterrence by the credible threat of retaliatory punishment (i.e.,

34 

S. J. CIMBALA

Rus Bal Triad 1550 831

693

554

545 Number of Warheads

454

Series1

416 363 273

Rus Gen/LOW

Rus Gen/RO

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

U.S. Gen/LOW

U.S. Gen/RO

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

545

454

363

273

831

693

554

416

Chart 2.2  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1550 deployment limit US No ICBMs

assured retaliation). According to this standard, the United States would be able to retaliate against any aggressor with enough survivable nuclear weapons as to inflict “unacceptable” damage on the attacker. During the Cold War assured retaliation or its counterpart, assured destruction, was defined in various ways. It included both counterforce (against enemy forces and command systems) and countervalue (against cities and other societal values, including economic recovery). US Cold War nuclear response plans also reportedly assigned certain numbers of weapons to Soviet political and military leadership targets.28 A second and more demanding standard for nuclear forces might be termed victory denial or military denial. Instead of relying only (or mainly) upon the credible threat of retaliatory punishment, a military denial strategy would also demand that US nuclear forces be able to deny an attacker the ability to accomplish its objectives at any point on the spectrum of

2  NEW START AND BEYOND: NUCLEAR MODERNIZATION AND US-RUSSIAN… 

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Rus Bal Triad 1550

704

587 545 469

Number of Warheads

454 363

352 273

Rus Rus Gen/LOW Gen/RO Series1

545

454

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

363

273

U.S. U.S. Gen/LOW Gen/RO 704

587

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

469

352

Chart 2.3  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1550 deployment limit US No Bombers

nuclear conflict. This strategy would imply a larger and more diverse force structure than the numbers of warheads and launchers required for assured retaliation. In addition, it would be necessary to have tailored force options that could introduce into a conflict mini-nukes (perhaps in the range of several kilotons) as a proportionate response to an adversary who introduced tactical nuclear weapons into a conflict.29 A third level of assessment, beyond that implied by the objectives of assured retaliation or victory denial, is that of nuclear prevailing and-or damage limitation. In this strategy, the United States must plan to limit damage to its own forces and society while ensuring that its surviving nuclear forces can outperform those of the opponent at every level. This strategy implies that damage limitation might be accomplished by the use of counterforce strikes, by improved survivability for forces and for command systems, and by selective counter-control targeting. A difficulty with

36 

S. J. CIMBALA

Rus Bal Triad 1550

614 545

512 454

Number of Warheads

409 363 307

273

Series1

Rus Gen/LOW

Rus Gen/RO

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

U.S. Gen/LOW

U.S. Gen/RO

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

545

454

363

273

614

512

409

307

Chart 2.4  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1550 deployment limit US 300 ICBM, 10 SSBN

this demanding version of objectives for US nuclear forces was the absence of strategic anti-missile defenses capable of dealing with probable Soviet first or retaliatory strikes.30 A requirement for preservation of continuing control over nuclear forces during the extended phases of a nuclear war, in order to exercise whatever targeting restraint might be possible in the exigent circumstances, was also implied. Related, but distinct, some describe the Carter administration strategy as a “countervailing” strategy: not optimistic about damage limitation, but providing for a degree of retaliation such that, in any scenario of attack, the Soviets could be denied victory by even the standards of their own military. This posture would require flexible counterforce and the ability to place at risk the Soviet leadership who might otherwise emerge from the ashes to guide and control a favorable post-attack outcome.31 A fourth possible standard of assessment would be minimum deterrence. In this model, the United States and Russia would each seek to

2  NEW START AND BEYOND: NUCLEAR MODERNIZATION AND US-RUSSIAN… 

37

Rus Bal Triad 1000

446 372 342

Number of Warheads

228

223 171

Rus Rus Gen/LOW Gen/RO Series1

298

285

342

285

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

228

171

U.S. U.S. Gen/LOW Gen/RO 446

372

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

298

223

Chart 2.5  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1000 deployment limit US Triad

maintain a survivable force sufficient to destroy a number of cities and other societal values, which might be accomplished with as few as several hundred survivable warheads.32 Arguments for minimum deterrence assume that the credible threat of second strike retaliation need not necessarily include strikes against the attacker’s nuclear or other military forces, military and political leaders and control systems, or other targets needed to disarm or otherwise to nullify the opponent’s nuclear strike capability. Nor would a capability for flexible nuclear targeting to support intrawar deterrence and war termination be essential for deterrence. Unlike the other types of objectives summarized above, minimum deterrence is based on a limitation of means, and thereby implies a certain reductionist view of the purposes for which nuclear weapons are useful and appropriate: deterrence only (as opposed to deterrence mainly, but also including selective nuclear war fighting capabilities).

38 

S. J. CIMBALA

Rus Bal Triad 1000

532 444 355

342 Number of Warheads

285

Series1

266 228 171

Rus Gen/LOW

Rus Gen/RO

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

U.S. Gen/LOW

U.S. Gen/RO

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

342

285

228

171

532

444

355

266

Chart 2.6  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1000 deployment limit US No ICBMs

Preliminary Verdict We can apply the preceding standards to the plausible US and Russian New START and post-New START forces circa. 2021–2026 or even thereafter. Either the Russian and American New START forces or a modestly smaller force (maximum 1550 or maximum 1000 operationally deployed warheads on intercontinental launchers) can fulfill the requirements for assured retaliation inflicting unacceptable damage on any attacker. These forces are sufficiently survivable and diversified in launch platforms to provide for second-strike capability that includes attacks on some counterforce targets as well as countervalue missions. On the other hand, below 1000 operationally deployed warheads, the United States or Russia would be challenged to provide for sufficient resilience and flexibility to remain in the top rank of nuclear powers. Thus, absent a multilateral

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Rus Bal Triad 1000

447 373 Number of Warheads

342

Series1

298

285 228

224 171

Rus Gen/LOW

Rus Gen/RO

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

342

285

228

171

U.S. U.S. Gen/LOW Gen/RO 447

373

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

298

224

Chart 2.7  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads 1000 deployment limit US No Bombers

forum that brings to the table all of the existing nuclear powers, it is difficult to see how the United States or Russia can maintain credible leadership in nuclear arms control and nonproliferation with only minimum deterrent forces. Neither military denial objectives, nor the more ambitious goals of countervailing strategy and damage limitation, seem necessary or appropriate for current and foreseeable US and Russian forces. Future requirements for nuclear force modernization will be more qualitative than quantitative: the substitution of newer for older launch platforms, and the refurbishing of older warheads or the manufacturing of newer ones. The United States and Russia will be challenged by a rising China with global reach and by aspiring regional powers in the Middle East and Asia. They will be more likely to rely on improved long rang precision

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strike, antimissile and air defenses, and improved C4ISR to support high-end conventional warfare, together with capabilities for “hybrid” or mixed conventional-unconventional conflict, compared to assertive nuclear policies and strategies. The challenge for the United States and for Russia will be to coordinate policy efforts toward containment of nuclear-aspiring or nuclear-rogue states (Iran and North Korea) before the number of nuclear weapons states outside of Europe reaches a tipping point: posing tests for deterrence stability that existing framework and approaches cannot meet.

2.5   Conclusion US-Russian nuclear arms control faces an uncertain fate. New START has a life preserver until 2021 and might continue on autopilot until 2026. After that, future US and Russian force modernization may remain within the parameters of New START, exceed the New START deployment guidelines, or reduce forces below New START levels. In each of these cases, Russia and the United States can meet the requirements for stable deterrence as well as nuclear crisis stability and arms race stability. As well, the United States and Russia can offer (if they choose to do so) more credible leadership on international nonproliferation issues, having accepted their own self-imposed constraints on the sizes of their arsenals. Some experts have even argued for more ambitious objectives. For example, Joseph Cirincione, president of the Plowshares Fund and nuclear policy expert, sees opportunities for a fundamental rethink of US nuclear strategy and policies: The need to change US nuclear policy has never been in question. Our policies are dangerous, outmoded, and expensive. Making that change has always been a question of mobilizing the requisite political will, then linking it to a strategy that can overcome the substantial bureaucratic and economic resistance that will be mustered against any effort to reform US nuclear policies and programs.33

On the other hand, New START does not constrain US or Russian nuclear modernization that emphasizes the deployment of additional sub-­ strategic or non-strategic nuclear weapons, including those of very low yields deployed on one or more existing “strategic” launch platforms. Unless Washington and Moscow add limitations on tactical nuclear weapons to their

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“to do” list of cooperative security measures, the threshold between conventional warfare and nuclear first use, especially in Europe, may be lowered.34 A problematical aspect of this issue for Russia is that also needs significant numbers of tactical nuclear weapons for deployment in its Far East, for deterrence in case of disagreements with China. Therefore limits on non-strategic nukes would have to be regionally specific.35 Another sticking point going forward for US-Russian nuclear arms control is the demise of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. No nuclear arms reduction agreement has contributed more to the status of Europe as a (relatively) peaceful security community. Russia’s alleged violation of the treaty has already provoked proposals in Washington, including in Congress, for countermeasures: either as “bargaining chips” or deterrents. Russia fears that it faces a gap in INF-range ballistic missiles available to other states, including some that might be targeting Russia. However, Russian or American abrogation of the INF Treaty, and resumed deployments of intermediate or shorter-range nuclear missiles in Europe, could return us to the dangers of the late Cold War and undermine nuclear-strategic stability otherwise achievable. As Alexei Arbatov has warned: [N]uclear deterrence can serve as a pillar of international security with one crucial reservation: namely, that it can work only in conjunction with negotiations and agreements on the limitation, reduction, and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. Without such checks, nuclear deterrence goes berserk. It endlessly fuels the arms race, brings the great powers to the brink of nuclear war in any serious crisis, and sometimes the very dynamics of nuclear deterrence can instigate confrontation.36

Notes 1. For appraisals and arguments, see: Ernest J. Moniz and Sam Nunn, “The Return of Doomsday: The New Nuclear Arms Race – and How Washington and Moscow Can Stop It,” Foreign Affairs, August 6, 2019, https//www. foreignaffairs.com/articles/Russian-federation/2019-08-06/returndoomsday, also in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #124  – August 7, 2019, [email protected]; Lawrence J. Korb, “A path toward renewing arms control,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 18, 2019, https:// thebulletin.org/2019/07/a-path-toward-renewing-arms-control/;

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Andrey Kortunov, “Is There Life After Arms Control Death?” Valdai Discussion Club, June 14, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #99 – June 24, 2019, [email protected]; Daryl Kimball, “New START Must be Extended, With or Without China,” The National Interest, May 27, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List – #88 – May 28, 2019, davidjohnson@ starpower.net; Lawrence J. Korb, ‘Why it could (but shouldn’t) be the end of the arms control era,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 23, 2018, https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/why-it-could-but-shouldnt-be-theend-of-the-arms-control-era/; Lyle J. Goldstein, “Trump Should Uphold Arms Control, Not Destroy It,” The National Interest, May 14, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #83 – May 15, 2019, davidjohnson@starpower. net; Steven Pifer, “With US-Russian arms control treaties on shaky ground, the future is worrying,” Brookings, April 25, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #72  – April 29, 2019, [email protected]; Theodore Postol, “Are Trump and Putin Opening Pandora’s Box?”, New York Times, February 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/ inf-treaty-missile-defense.html;; and Michael R.  Gordon, “Russia Warns U.S. Moves Threaten 2011 Nuclear Pact,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #9 – January 15, 2019, [email protected] 2. Alexei Arbatov, “Nuclear Deterrence: A Guarantee or Threat to Strategic Stability?”, Carnegie Moscow Center, March 22, 2019, https://carnegie. ru/2019/03/22/nuclear-deterrence-guarantee-or-threat-to-strategicstability-pub-78663 See also: Alexander Golts, “Presidents without brakes. The threat of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States is becoming increasingly real,” The Insider, July 9, 2019, https://theins.ru/opinions/165182 3. Vladimir Putin, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, March 1, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #39 – March 1, 2018, [email protected], also http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957. See also: Angela E. Stent, Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest (New York: Twelve – Hachette Book Group, 2019), pp. 311–313. 4. James Marson, “NATO Grapples With Collapse of Missile Treaty,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #122  – August 1, 2019, [email protected]; Michael R. Gordon, “After Treaty’s Demise, Pentagon Will Develop Two New Midrange Weapons,” Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #42 – March 14, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Stephen Blank, “Arms Control and Russia’s Global Strategy After the INF Treaty,” RealClearDefense, June 19, 2019, https://www.realcleardefense.com/ articles/2019/06/19/arms_control_and_russias_global_strategy_after_ the_inf_treaty_114513.html; Andrey Kortunov, “The World After the INF

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Treaty: How to Get Out of the Dead Zone,” Valdai Discussion Club, January 21, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #13 – January 21, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Justin V.  Anderson and Amy J.  Nelson, “The INF Treaty: A Spectacular, Inflexible, Time-Bound Success,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 2 (Summer 2019), pp. 90–122; Tom Nichols, “Mourning the INF Treaty: The United States Is Not Better for Withdrawing, Foreign Affairs, March 4, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #35  – March 5, 2019, [email protected]; William Tobey, Pavel S. Zolotarev, and Ulrich Kuhn, The INF Quandary: Preventing a Nuclear Arms Race in Europe  – Perspectives from the U.S., Russia and Germany, in Russia Matters, Issue Brief, January 2019, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, www.russiamatters.org/; and Jacob Cohn, Timothy A.  Walton, Adam Lemon and Toshi Yoshihara, Leveling the Playing Field: Reintroducing U.S.  Theater-Range Missiles in a Post-INF World (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2019), pp.  29–30, https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/leveling-the-playingfield-reintroducing-us-theater-range-missiles-in-a-post-INF-world 5. Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (Washington, D.C.: U.S.  Department of State, April 8, 2010), http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/140035.pdf. See also: Jon Wolfsthal, “A US-Russia-China Arms Treaty? Extend New START First,” Defense One, May 22,019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #76  – May 6, 2019, [email protected] 6. See: Felicia Schwartz and Michael R. Gordon, “U.S., Russia Say They Have Met Nuclear-Reduction Targets Under Treaty,” Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #26 – February 6, 2018, [email protected]; and John Kerry, “America’s Crucial Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty With Russia,” Boston Globe, February 5, 2018, http://carnegieendowment.org/2018/02/05/america-s-crucial-nuclearnonproliferation-treaty-with-russia-pub-75460 7. See, for example: “Putin Says Russia Prepared to Drop Arms Control Treaty If U.S. Not Interested in Renewal, “RFE/RL, June 6, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #95 – June 6, 2019, [email protected] 8. For U.S. nuclear modernization, see: Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “United States nuclear forces, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 3 (April 29, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1606503; and Jon B. Wolfsthal, Jeffrey Lewis and Marc Quint, The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad: US Strategic Nuclear Modernization Over the Next Thirty Years (Monterey, Calif.: James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, January 2014), http://cns.miis.edu/opapers/pdfs/140107_trillion_dollar_nuclear_triad.pdf. According to President Vladimir Putin, Russian

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nuclear modernization will include offsets to overcome any U.S. or NATO missile defenses. See: Putin, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly; and MacFarquhar and Sanger, “Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at U.S. Vulnerabilities”. On the implications of Russian nuclear modernization for arms control, see: Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Russian nuclear forces, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 2 (March 4, 2019), pp.  73–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1580891; and Polina Sinovets, “How Russia’s Nuclear Buildup Offers a Good Opportunity for Renewed Arms Control Dialogue,” PONARS Eurasia, February 2018, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/how-russiasnuclear-buildup-offers-good-opportunity-renewed-arms-control-dialogue 9. In addition to earlier sources, see: David Axe, “Arms Race Redux! A U.S. Intermediate Range Nuclear Missile Test Shows Russia Was Right to Worry,” The Daily Beast, August 21, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #133 – August 21, 2019, [email protected]; Viktor Murakhovsky, interviewed by Dimitri Alexander Simes, “Are Russia and America Headed Toward Nuclear War?” The National Interest, July 23, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #116 – July 24, 2019, [email protected]; Dr. Mark Schneider, “Russian INF Treaty Violations: Implications for the Nuclear Posture Review and the Future of the INF Treaty,” National Institute for Public Policy, Issue No. 424, September 5, 2017, [email protected], and Mike Eckel, “With Fraying U.S.-Russian Ties Comes Fraying Arms Control,” RFE/RL, July 11, 2017, https://www.rferl.org/a/us-russia-fraying-ties-erode-armscontrol/28611015. See also: Michael R.  Gordon, “U.S.  Plans New Nuclear Weapons: Pentagon weighs ‘low-yield’ warhead and sea-based cruise missile, igniting debate over strategy,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List #11, January 16, 2018, davidjohnson@ starpower.net, and “Mattis: Proposed U.S. Cruise Missile A Bargaining Chip With Russia,” RFE/RL, February 6, 2018, https://www.rferl. org/a/russia-mattis-cruise-missile-bargaining-chip/2902394. See also: Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, February 2018), https://dod.defense. gov/News/SpecialReports/2018NuclearPostureReview.aspx 10. For perspective on this, see: Kristensen and Korda, “Russian nuclear forces, 2019,” pp. 75–76, and Brad Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016), pp. 130–134. Experts are challenged to obtain reliable estimates for the exact numbers of Russian tactical or non-strategic nuclear weapons actually deployed, let alone planned. See: Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Tactical nuclear weapons, 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 5 (2019), pp. 252–261, https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019. 1654273

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11. Lt. Gen. Robert P.  Ashley, Jr., Director Defense Intelligence Agency, Russian and Chinese Nuclear Modernization Trends, Remarks as prepared for delivery, Hudson Institute, May 29, 2019, https://www.dia.mil/ News/Speeches-and-Testimonies/Article-View/Article/1859890/russian-and-chinese-nuclear-modernization-trends/. See also: Luca Ratti and Alessandro Leonardi, “Reviving Flexible Response: An Assessment of NATO’s Russian Strategy on the Alliance’s 70th Anniversary,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, no. 2 (April  – June, 2019), pp.  135–158, esp. pp. 146–147. 12. Stephen Blank, “Arms Control and Russia’s Global Strategy After the INF Treaty,” RealClearDefense, June 19, 2019, https://www.realcleardefense. com/articles/2019/06/19/arms_control_and_russias_global_strategy_ after_the_inf_treaty_114513.html 13. See: David Axe, “Is Russia Testing Nuclear Weapons in Secret?”, The National Interest, May 30, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #90  – May 30, 2019, [email protected]; and Michael R.  Gordon, “U.S. Says Russia Likely Conducting Low-Yield Nuke Tests, Defying Test Ban Treaty,” Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #89 – May 29, 2019, [email protected]. See also: James R. Howe, Briefing, “Potential Military Utility of Russian Employment of Advanced Technology Nuclear Weapons in Europe – Implications for US Extended Deterrence,” Nuclear Deterrence Summit, February 20–22, 2018, Arlington, VA, [email protected] 14. Aaron Mehta, “Watch the Pentagon test its first land-based cruise missile in a post-INF Treaty world,” Defense News, August 19, 2019, www. defensenews.com/pentagon 15. Steven Pifer, “The Death of the INF Treaty Has Given Birth to New Missile Possibilities,” The National Interest, September 18, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #153 – September 19, 2019, davidjohnson@ starpower.net 16. Dmitry Gorenburg and Michael Kofman, “5 things you need to know about last week’s explosion in Russia,” Washington Post, August 17, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #132 – August 20, 2019, davidjohnson@ starpower.net 17. Russian strategic and non-strategic nuclear modernization are discussed in Ashley, Russian and Chinese Nuclear Modernization Trends, in addition to sources previously cited. 18. Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New World Politics (New York: Henry Holt and Co./Times Books, 2012). See also: Stephen J. Cimbala and Paul Bracken, “Crises in the Second Nuclear Age,” Johnson’s Russia List, April 24, 2017, [email protected]

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19. David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, “Downing North Korean Missiles Is Hard. So the U.S. Is Experimenting,” New York Times, November 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/us/politics/northkorea-missile-defense-cyber-drones.html. See also: Arthur Herman, “Boost-Phase Intercept Is Still the Best Defense Against the North Korean Nuclear Threat, National Review Online, June 15, 2017, https://www. hudson.org/research/13686-boost-phase-intercept-is-still-the-bestdefense-against-the-north-korean-nuclear-threat 20. The budget request reportedly also included funds for Army development of a mobile, land-based, medium range missile, presumably with a range between 1000 and 3000 kilometers, as well as a land-based hypersonic missile. See: Kingston Reif, “Trump Increases Budget for Banned Missiles,” Arms Control Association, May 2019, https://www.armscontrol.org/ act/2019-05/news/trump-increases-budget-banned-missiles 21. Eugene Rumer, “The Primakov (Not Gerasimov) Doctrine in Action,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 5, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/06/05/primakov-not-gerasimov-doctrinein-action-pub-79254 22. Jacob Cohn, Timothy A.  Walton, Adam Lemon and Toshi Yoshihara, Leveling the Playing Field: Reintroducing U.S. Theater-Range Missiles in a Post-INF World (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2019), pp.  29–30, https://csbaonline.org/research/publications/leveling-the-playing-field-reintroducing-us-theater-rangemissiles-in-a-post-INF-world 23. Alternative future US strategic nuclear force structures are defined in: U.S. Congressional Budget Office, Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017–2046 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Budget Office, October 2017), www.cbo.gov/publications/53211 24. The case for maintaining and modernization all three legs of the US strategic nuclear triad is presented in: General C. Robert Kehler, USAF (ret.), “The U.S. Needs a New ICBM Now,” National Institute for Public Policy, Information Series, Issue No. 444, August 16, 2019, InformationSeries@ nipp.org 25. Ibid., p. 33. 26. Ibid., p. 44. 27. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Dr. James J.  Tritten for use of a model originally developed by him as part of this analysis. He is not responsible for its use here, nor for any arguments or findings. 28. Desmond Ball, “The Development of the SIOP, 1960–1983,” Ch. 3  in Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 57–83. Ball, Desmond,

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“U.S. Strategic Forces: How Would They Be Used?,” in Steven E. Miller, ed., Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 215–244. 29. For a discussion of this concept in the context of future US nuclear force planning, see Congressional Budget Office, Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046, p. 24. 30. For comparative perspective on alternative nuclear strategies, see: Charles Glaser, “Why Do Strategists Disagree about the Requirements of Strategic Nuclear Deterrence?” Ch. 2 in Lynn Eden and Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 109–171, esp. pp. 137–142. 31. Walter B.  Slocombe, “The Countervailing Strategy,” International Security, no. 4 (1981), pp. 18–27. I am grateful to Paul K. Davis, RAND Corporation, for helpful clarification of this topic. He is not responsible for my argument here. 32. Forsyth, James Wood, Jr., B.  Chance Saltzman and Gary Schaub Jr., “Minimum Deterrence and Its Critics,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, No. 4 (Winter, 2010), pp. 3–12. 33. Joe Cirincione, “A new, hopeful moment for US nuclear policy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 17, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/04/ a-new-hopeful-moment-for-us-nuclear-policy/; See also: Richard Burt and Jon Wolfsthal, “How Trump Can Transform Nuclear Arms Control,” The National Interest, May 10, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #81 – May 13, 2019, [email protected] 34. Lawrence J. Korb, “Why Congress should refuse to fund the NPR’s new nuclear weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 7, 2018, https://thebulletin.org/commentary/why-congress-should-refuse-fundnpr%E2%80%99s-new-nuclear-weapons11493 35. Hans Kristensen, “Is The Pentagon Exaggerating Russian Tactical Nuclear Weapons?”, Forbes.com, May 7, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #77 – May 7, 2019, [email protected] 36. Arbatov, “Nuclear Deterrence: A Guarantee or Threat to Strategic Stability?”

CHAPTER 3

Missile Defenses and US-Russian Nuclear Arms Control: Technology, Politics and Deterrence

3.1   Introduction Among the areas of contention between the United States and Russia, from the time of Vladimir Putin’s return to the Russian presidency in 2012, and even earlier, were missile defenses, including US and NATO missile defenses deployed in Europe.1 Russian political leaders and leading military commanders have specifically cited missile defenses as examples of US unilateralism and potential threats to Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent.2 Russia’s already challenged commitment to peace and stability in Europe, and Russian-American cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation and other issues, might be hostage to further disruptions in political relations, including over missile defenses. In this chapter, we first consider the political setting for Russian and American disagreements about missile defenses and related issues of nuclear arms control and deterrence. Second, we discuss the technology environment pertaining to missile defense and its relevance to US and Russian security issues. Third, we draw pertinent conclusions and policy implications from the preceding discussions.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_3

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3.2   Political Backsliding Putin’s Challenge On March 1, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on a number of policy issues. Among these, Putin included the national security threat to Russia posed by US missile defenses. He contended that, since the United States pulled out of the ABM Treaty in 2002, Russia has consistently tried to engage the United States on issues of strategic stability. In this respect, the Russian President argued that Russian efforts have mostly been disappointed. He did acknowledge some success by signing in 2010 the US-Russian New START agreement for the reduction and limitation of strategic nuclear weapons and launchers. On the other hand, according to Putin, the New START agreement and its restrictions have since been devaluated by the continuing buildup of a global ballistic missile defense (BMD) system. In his words: However, in light of the plans to build a global anti-ballistic missile system, which are still being carried out today, all agreements signed within the framework of New START are now gradually being devalued, because while the number of carriers and weapons is being reduced, one of the parties, namely, the U.S., is permitting constant, uncontrolled growth of the number of anti-ballistic missiles, improving their quality and creating new missile launching areas. If we do not do something, eventually this will result in the complete devaluation of Russia’s nuclear potential. Meaning that all of our missiles could simply be intercepted.3

In response to this perceived threat, the Russian President announced that Russia would develop countermeasures, including new weapons systems that could defeat US ballistic missile defenses by various means.4 Putin specifically indicated a number of these advanced systems in his presidential address. These included: –– a new intercontinental ballistic missile called Sarmat to replace the Voevoda (SS-18 Satan in NATO terminology) ICBM system. According to Putin, Sarmat has a greater range than the SS-18, can attack targets by flying trajectories over the North or South poles, and “will be equipped with a broad range of powerful

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nuclear warheads, including hypersonic, and the most modern means of evading missile defence”5; a long-range, nuclear-powered cruise missile described by the President as “a low-flying stealth missile carrying a nuclear warhead” with “almost an unlimited range, unpredictable trajectory and ability to bypass interception boundaries”. This missile, according to Putin, would be “invincible against all existing and prospective missile defence and counter-air defense systems”6; a nuclear powered, unmanned submersible vehicle, carrying conventional or nuclear warheads over great distances and extreme depths, at speeds many times faster than existing submarines. They are also quiet, highly maneuverable and capable of attacking targets including coastal fortifications, infrastructure and aircraft groups7; a hypersonic air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM) named Kinzhal that can fly at ten times the speed of sound, maneuver during all phases of its flight trajectory, and evade existing and prospective air and missile defenses, with a range of over 2000 kilometers. Reportedly, testing has been successfully completed and the system has begun trial service in the Southern Military District8; a hypersonic boost-glide system (Avangard) that can carry a nuclear payload over intercontinental ranges, can maneuver vertically and horizontally to evade air and missile defenses, and is capable of speeds in excess of Mach 20.9

From all indications, these systems are in various stages of development and-or readiness for near term deployment.10 Pavel Podvig, director of the Russian Nuclear Forces Project, noted that Putin’s disclosures were not entirely unexpected, but there were some new developments. “This is the first time I’ve heard about the nuclear powered cruise missile  – or the Kinzhal system. Sarmat seems larger than we thought, although I would be skeptical about Putin’s numbers  – 200  tons missile and all that”.11 Podvig and Michael Kofman, a research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses and a specialist in Russian military affairs, concur that the weapons described by Putin are feasible. Podvig noted that the Russians “apparently tested all that Putin showed, so it is all feasible”, and Kofman agreed: “Most of this is reality, it’s just a question of near or distant reality”.12 Podvig noted that whether these systems made sense in terms of Russian policy or strategy was a larger question.13

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Drifting Toward Controversy Russia and the United States have been drifting into separate orbits on issues related to nuclear arms control since the conclusion of the New START agreement signed in 2010. Included among the bones of contention is the question of US ballistic missile defenses, including American national territorial antimissile defenses and US contributions to NATO’s European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) for missile defenses in Europe.14 Russian President Vladimir Putin and other high Russian officials have raised objections to US plans to deploy components of missile defense systems ashore and afloat in Europe. Russian political and military leaders have indicated that they may hold hostage other nuclear arms control agreements and, as well, engage in offensive countermeasures to thwart any US defenses. As Brad Roberts noted in 2016: In sum, for nearly two decades, the United States has been trying to address Russian concerns about ballistic missile defense. Over this time Russian opposition has only deepened.15

Russia’s improved economy under Putin from 2001 to 2010, compared to the 1990s, created additional confidence that Russia can remain in the ranks of major nuclear states. This remains the case despite the US and European Union economic sanctions imposed on Russia after its annexation of Crimea and destabilization of Ukraine in 2014 and subsequently. Russia expects to modernize its strategic nuclear forces under the constraints of the New START treaty signed in 2010 and entering into effect in February 2011. The treaty requires that the United States and Russia must each reduce its numbers of operationally deployed warheads on intercontinental launchers (including intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs; submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs; and heavy bombers) to 1550 by 2018. In addition, the treaty provides for inspections and verification measures to ensure compliance with its embedded timetable.16 Nuclear weapons grew up with the Cold War and with the adjustment of the Americans and Soviets to the idea of mutual deterrence and its military supports. The Cold War superpowers and their militaries had time to adjust to the oxymoronic condition that the threat-of-nuclearwar could be a necessary means to the avoidance of nuclear war: or conventional war with a significant possibility of escalation into nuclear first

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use. The ­post-­Cold War environment is unlikely to proceed at such a leisurely pace as did the First Nuclear Age.17 Instead, new nuclear forces in Asia and elsewhere will be chasing a clock of nuclear multipolarity and missile profligacy. Already nuclear armed states in Asia include Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Other aspirants, presumably, wait in the wings. Decisions by Washington and Moscow about their bilateral nuclear deterrence relationship are also related to the issue of nuclear proliferation: in Asia and elsewhere. Chinese nuclear modernization has immediate implications for Russia, for India, for the United States and for Taiwan. Iranian nuclear weapons mated to appropriate delivery systems could threaten NATO Europe and Israel: not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. North Korean nuclear weapons raise issues with respect to future Chinese, Japanese, Russian, US and South Korean foreign policy. The ability of the Americans and Russians to impose Cold War-style proliferation discipline over candidate and aspiring nuclear powers is an historical artifact.18

3.3   Technology and Defenses Missile defenses have been controversial almost from the dawn of the nuclear age. Nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles seemed to overturn the historical dictum that, for every offense, there was (at least eventually) a defense. Despite the research and development efforts of American and Soviet or Russian scientists throughout the Cold War and afterward, neither was able to deploy nationwide missile defenses competitive with the speed and destructiveness of offenses.19 However, since the end of the Cold War missile defense technologies have improved. Nationwide missile defense for a continental territory against large-scale nuclear-missile attacks remains as a formidable challenge. On the other hand, regional and local antimissile defenses have been deployed in Europe, in the Middle East and in Asia and hold considerable promise. In addition, the US ground-based midcourse national missile defense system might successfully defeat attacks from North Korea or future “rogue” nuclear powers with comparatively small nuclear arsenals. Currently the United States deploys five ballistic missile defense systems: the Ground-­ based Midcourse Defense (GMD), Aegis BMD ships, Aegis Ashore, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot missile

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defense systems.20 The requirement for capable regional missile defenses is immediate, as the Trump administration 2019 Missile Defense Review acknowledges: The global offensive missile threat environment represents a sea-change in the operational setting that U.S. forces will have to navigate in future regional conflicts. The United States and allies can no longer assume the capacity to concentrate forces in secure, forward locations and launch military operations against adversaries from these secure locations. Defending effectively against offensive missile threats will help deter adversaries, assure allies and partners, preserve U.S. and allied freedom of action, limit the potential for coercive adversary missile threats, and reduce the effects of potential adversary regional missile strikes.21

Part of the problem was that the task of missile defenses is so much harder than that assigned to offenses. Unless they are constructed on new physical principles and based in space (contrary to treaties), missile defenses had to “hit a bullet with a bullet” during one of the four phases of the trajectory of a ballistic missile in flight. Interception had to take place within 20  minutes or so of enemy launch. Attack characterization and choice of response require strategic and tactical indications and warning (I&W), reconnaissance, surveillance and command-control systems that have to perform flawlessly or nearly so. Because of the destructiveness of nuclear weapons, the attacker needs to penetrate the defenses with only a small percentage of its first strike weapons. The defender, in contrast, has to achieve perfect or nearly perfect intercept and destruction of attacking warheads: otherwise, even if retaliatory forces were saved from destruction, collateral damage to populations would be enormous. The problem of indications and warning provides one example of the difficulty of challenges facing prospect BMD systems. As Gen. Paul Selva, Vice Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff has noted, new generations of offensive weapons, including hypersonic ones, could upset the premises upon which current I&W systems are sustained: If you’re going Mach 13 at the very northern edge of Hudson Bay, you have enough residual velocity to hit all 48 of the continental United States and all of Alaska. You can choose (to) point it left or right, and hit Maine or Alaska, or you can hit San Diego or Key West. That’s a monstrous problem.22

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New information and electronics technologies may bring new hope to proponents of missile defenses. The US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is supporting research and development into competitive technologies for ground-based, sea-based, airborne and space-based BMD interceptors and supporting command, control and communications. The United States began deploying nationwide missile defenses in Alaska and California during the first term of President George W. Bush. It would not be too surprising if the present century witnessed dramatic technology breakthroughs in missile defenses. After all, ballistic missiles date from World War II and are now qualified for Social Security benefits. And, as Freeman Dyson has noted, it is not merely a matter of means, but also of ends, whether missile defenses are desirable: When we are thinking about defensive weapons in general and about ballistic missile defense in particular, we should distinguish sharply between ends and means. Our experts in the arms control community have never maintained this distinction. They are so convinced of the technical superiority of offensive over defensive weapons that they let the means determine the ends. I say that we have no hope of escape from the trap we are in unless we follow ends which are ethically acceptable. The ends must determine the means, and not vice versa. The only acceptable end that I can see, short of a disarmed world, is a defensively oriented world.23

In recognition of the possibility that missile defenses may improve, offenses are unlikely to stand still. The standard scenario of US-Russian nuclear missile attack, with multiple firings of land and sea-based missiles and air-launched weapons, will give way in the present century to improvised scenarios developed by new proliferators and smaller nuclear powers. Nuclear-capable short and medium range ballistic missiles may be commingled with conventional ground and tactical air forces. Regional enemies could pose the credible threat of nuclear or conventional first strike (supported by tactical nuclear weapons in reserve) within minutes that deprived the other side of unambiguous warning or accurate attack characterization. The avoidance of these regional nuclear wars may rise to the gold standard of deterrence for the first half of this century. In this political environment, technologies for “theater” or regional missile defenses will appeal to besieged leaders.24 This is especially the case as ballistic missile systems with advanced liquid or solid propellant propulsion

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are becoming more survivable, reliable, mobile and accurate—along with the ability to strike targets over longer distances.25 Offenses may also evolve away from dependency on ballistic missiles as first strike weapons. Cruise missiles offer precision strike power from land-­ based, sea-based and airborne launchers—and over a variety of ranges. They can be armed with conventional, nuclear or other WMD (weapon of mass destruction) warheads. Cruise missiles can be made highly survivable against ballistic missile attack—making states less dependent on the “use or lose” dilemma. Cruise missiles require the mastery of first-generation information age technology, but that technology has been “out there” for many years. Although viewed as a second strike weapon in many nuclear scenarios, in conventional warfare cruise missiles have demonstrated their potential for prompt attacks. The United States has used cruise missiles to good effect in wartime and in coercive diplomacy during and since the Gulf war of 1991. Future US weapons for conventional prompt global strike (CPGS) could include hypersonic weapons such as scramjet-powered cruise missiles, capable of speeds comparable to ballistic missiles but with increased accuracy.26 Cruise missile technology might be employed to adjust the intended flight pattern of ballistic missiles. This tactic would be designed to complicate the task of the defender’s BMD systems by varying the flight path of attacking missiles after initial launch. Whether such a hybrid ballistic-cruise missile (or a smarter ballistic missile) could adapt in flight to the defender’s tactics would be a complicated command-control problem, as well as a question of prewar strategizing. For example: is the defender’s shooting strategy one of “random intercept” or first come, first serve against a wave of attackers? Or, does the defender have a “preferential defense” algorithm that provides for prioritizing of threat vehicles based on various criteria? An additional possibility in the development of missile defense technology is the use of cyber capabilities against enemy first strike weapons and nuclear command-control systems. US defense experts are looking into the concept of full spectrum defenses that would include not only protective or defensive measures against an attack already launched, but also proactive or preventive attacks by means of kinetic or cyber capabilities to blunt or forestall an attack.27 The appeal of full spectrum missile defenses is based on the increased diversity of ballistic missile attack systems, on the limitations of traditional BMD technology against more complicated threats, and on the ability of US technologists to leverage the information revolution in favorable directions. On the other hand, existing US

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c­ apabilities for BMD and for conventional Prompt Global Strike systems have already caused concern in Russia and China about deterrence stability. Cyber capabilities for preemptive nullification of another country’s warning, command-control and missile launch systems (including socalled left of launch techniques to abort launches or distort their trajectories), however intended as part of a “full spectrum defense”, might instead be seen as components of a strategic first strike policy, in combination with conventional PGS systems and kinetic missile defense backup.28 Russia has also indicated its plans to place greater emphasis on its own air and missile defense forces, even as it continues to express doubts about the intentions of the United States and NATO in this regard. For example, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced in August 2015 the creation of the Russian Aerospace Forces, bringing under a single command the air force and the Aerospace Defense Forces.29 According to Shoigu: “Air forces, anti-air and anti-missile defenses, and space forces will now be under a unified command structure”.30 Some experts said that the Russian reorganization was at least a partial reaction to the perceived risk of NATO attacks against Russia, including those based on prompt global strike weapons.31 Others pointed to both technical and management obstacles in standing up and operating the new command, including rivalries among generals for new ranks and positions.32 The interest in BMD technologies is as likely to be driven by political threat perceptions as it is to be the product of “eureka” in research laboratories. One of the principal dangers of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile spread in Asia is that it could generate a reciprocal arms race in missile defenses, followed by an escalated competition in offenses, and so on. Although experts have focused on the dangers of a quantitative arms race in Asia and in the Middle East, the threat of a qualitative arms race is equally, or more, dangerous. Absent controls over regional nuclear proliferation, the appeal of BMD against missiles of short or medium ranges will grow: for reasons of deterrence as well as for reassurance.33 The symbolic reassurance that missile defenses seem to provide will be compounded by the “fallacy of the last move” arguments in regional arms races. Once a sufficient number of competitive offensive and defensive systems are out there, calculations relative to deterrence stability will be labor intensive. So, too, will be the debate about missile defenses. As Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg once lamented: “It’s the same argument over and over again. On one side people say, ‘We’ve got to do something to defend the country’…On the other side, people say, ‘Well, you may be worse off with a defense than you were without it’…It just goes on and on”.34

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3.4   Conclusions First, US and Russian policy makers will have to consider future relationships between nuclear-strategic offenses and defenses more explicitly than hitherto. Missile defenses cannot repeal the nuclear revolution and its creation of nuclear hostages among mass populations. Avoidance of nuclear war by means of deterrence remains the essence of the game. But improved missile defenses will complicate the estimates of military planners with respect to the survivability and penetration ability of their retaliatory forces, especially at lower levels of offenses. The future for missile defense in the US-Russian context is somewhat scenario dependent: first, on the performance of available technologies; and, second, on the evolution of US-Russian security relations tout court. One can envision a fourfold matrix of outside possibilities, as in Fig. 3.1: Policy environment favorable

Policy environment hostile

Technologies Improving

Options for defenseprotected build-down with lower limits on deployed offensive weapons; robust theater missile defenses seen as less threatening

Improved BMD technologies perceived as threatening, possibly stimulating arms race; Russia increases offensive force deployments and BMD countermeasures

Technologies Stable

Incremental progress on BMD for regional or national missile defenses; possible agreement on missile defenses deployed in Europe with additional NATORussian transparency

Continued U.S.Russian sparring over European missile defenses; Russia fears NATO BMD combined with U.S. long range precision global strike and cyber-electronic warfare

Source: Author

Fig. 3.1  Technology and policy environments for missile defense US-Russia. (Source: Author)

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Second, the combination of improved long range, conventional precision global strike (PGS) systems with missile defenses and cyber-electronic warfare raises the possibility of new and more dangerous first-strike capabilities. Modern information and reconnaissance systems make it increasingly difficult to conceal the locations of deployed nuclear weapons and launchers. What can be seen can eventually be hit—unless the target state decides to preempt. In addition, global precision strike weapons might be thought of as more “usable” than nuclear weapons projected over the same distance: on the reasonable assumption that collateral damage to populations from conventional long-range weapons will be less than collateral damage caused by nuclear weapons. The combination, of greater accuracies for transcontinental or transoceanic non-nuclear weapons and reduced damage compared to nuclear weapons, might lower the threshold for a conventional strategic first strike that ignites a nuclear war in retaliation. A third implication of these findings is that future competition between improving strategic defenses and nuclear offenses will create special stress tests for US and Russian military planners, and for their respective arms control negotiators. Even imperfect and unpredictable missile defenses will complicate both first and second strike planning. In addition, missile defenses have the potential to create issues of political divisibility for alliance partners, as in NATO. Exactly who is protected, and how much? A further conundrum is that some experts may prefer to use defenses of limited effectiveness to protect military and commandcontrol targets instead of populations. This might mean that BMD deployments would be recommended for the protection of retaliatory forces until more mature missile defense technologies allowed for reliable population protection. In addition, and fourth, the relationship between nuclear offenses and antimissile or air defenses will be further complicated by the potential for development and deployment of space-based weapons. For example, China and Russia are reportedly developing “peaceful” satellites for near term deployment that would be tasked to repair and-or refuel their existing satellites and to remove potentially damaging space debris. However, satellites with these “repair” capabilities could conceivably disable US or other countries’ satellites with little or no warning. The deterrent effect of the possibility of prompt attacks on satellites that the US requires to support vital C4ISR functions (command, control, communications, ­ computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) could be signifi-

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cant in a crisis. According to some experts, the US should accelerate the current Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plan for launching robotic servicing satellites, building many more of these spacecraft as bodyguards to protect against hostile spacecraft serving as anti-­ satellite weapons (ASATs). For example: the US might declare a self-defense zone around each of its satellites, prohibiting other states from deploying more than a threshold number of their own “repair” satellites within a certain distance of the US spacecraft.35 Fifth, missile defense technologies, especially with regard to theater or regional missile defenses, could improve relative to plausible threats. Technology development has proceeded with the various phases of the European Phased Adaptive Approach for deployment of sea- and land-­ based interceptors and supporting warning and battle management/command control (BM/C2) systems in NATO.36 But the development of EPAA proceeded within an already established NATO alliance template for security cooperation. A future challenge will be to extend protection to other regions such as East Asia.37 Increasing numbers of deployed ballistic missiles in Asia and worldwide suggest a regional and global growth market for missile defenses of various ranges. On the other hand, prospects for national missile defenses such as the US Ground-based Midcourse Defense system are more uncertain.38 Although the US Missile Defense Agency has expressed continuing optimism about the system’s potential, expert scientists outside the government have questioned its past test performances and future viability against expected threats. For example, a study by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded, with respect to the GMD program, that its test record is “poor”, that it has “no demonstrated ability to stop an incoming missile under real-world conditions”, and that “insufficient oversight” has obscured the system’s problems.39 Granted, even modestly performing US national missile defenses can contribute to regional strategic missions. Homeland defenses can reduce vulnerability to brinkmanship and coercion by regional “rogues” who could otherwise use threats of nuclear strikes against the continental United States to deter US military intervention in their neighborhoods (e.g., North Korea). Improvement in the performances of US national missile defenses can be expected: although technologies for boost-phase engagement may have to supersede the current reliance on midcourse intercept.

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Notes 1. For background on current and prospective US missile defense programs and Trump administration plans, see: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2019 Missile Defense Review (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2019), Executive Summary, https://www.defense.gov/Portals/1/ Interactive/2018/11-2019-Missile-Defense-Review/The%202019%20 MDR_Executive%20Summary.pdf See also: Gordon Lubold and Courtney McBride, “Trump Outlines Broader Missile-Defense Strategy,” Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #12 – January 18, 2019, davidjohnson@ starpower.net; and William J.  Broad and Annie Karni, “At Pentagon, Trump Announces Plans to Expand Missile Defenses,” New York Times, January 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17?us/politics/ trump-missile-defense-pentagon.html 2. Important context and perspective are provided in: Thomas Karako, “The Missile Defense Review: Insufficient for Complex and Integrated Attack,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 2 (Summer 2019), pp.  3–15; and Joan Johnson-Freese and David T. Burbach, “The Best Defense Ever? Busting Myths About the Trump Administration’s Missile Defense Review,” War on the Rocks, February 6, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/02/ the-best-defense-ever-busting-myths-about-the-trump-administrationsmissile-defense-review/ See also: George Lewis and Frank von Hippel, “Improving U.S.  Ballistic Missile Defense Policy,” Arms Control Association, May 2018, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-05/features/improving-us-ballistic-missile-defense-policy; Brad Roberts, The Case for Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016), pp. 117–140; Keir Giles with Andrew Monaghan, European Missile Defense and Russia (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S.  Army War College Press, July 2014); Andrew Futter, Ballistic Missile Defence and US National Security Policy: Normalization and Acceptance after the Cold War (New York: Routledge, 2013); Jacob W.  Kipp, “Russia’s Future Arms Control Agenda and Posture,” Ch. 1, pp. 1–62 and Steven Pifer, “The Russian Arms Control Agenda after New START,” Ch. 2, pp. 63–92, both in Stephen J. Blank, ed., Russia and the Current State of Arms Control (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, September 2012). An important study of missile defense literature is Dallas Boyd and James Scouras, Uncertainty, Deterrence, and Ballistic Missile Defense: A Review of the Literature (Ft. Belvoir, VA: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, June 2009).

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3. Vladimir Putin, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, March 1, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #39 – March 1, 2018, [email protected], also http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957 4. Neil MacFarquhar and David E.  Sanger, “Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at U.S. Vulnerabilities,” New York Times, March 1, 2018, https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/world/europe/russia-putin-speech. html. See also: Dave Majumdar,” “Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Buildup is Aimed at Beating U.S. Missile Defenses,” The National Interest, March 1, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #40 – March 2, 2018, [email protected]; Paul Sonne, “Pentagon looks to adjust missile defense policy to include threats from Russia, China,” Washington Post, March 2, 2018,, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #40 – March 2, 2018, [email protected]; and Eric Gomez, “Why Putin Is Obsessed with America’s Missile Defenses,” The National Interest, March 3, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #41 – March 5, 2018, [email protected] 5. Putin, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. For updates on these and other systems noted in Putin’s address, see: Dmitry Gorenburg and Michael Kofman, “5 things you need to know about last week’s explosion in Russia,” Washington Post, August 17, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #132 – August 20, 2019, davidjohnson@ starapower.net 11. Podvig, cited in Majumdar, “Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Buildup Is Aimed at Beating U.S. Missile Defenses.” 12. Ibid. 13. Putin’s new superweapons may not be as original or useful as he supposes. See: Yulia Latynina, “Putin’s Fancy Weapons? Everything Old is New Again,” New York Times, July 30, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List – #121 – July 31, 2019, [email protected] 14. As Pavel Baev has noted: “One remarkable aspect of this theme is that the very limited deployment of elements of US missile defense in Europe attracts greater attention than the strengthening and testing of the Ground-­ Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system deployed in Alaska”. Pavel Baev, “Threat Assessments and Strategic Objectives in Russia’s Arctic Policy,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies, no. 1 (2019), pp. 25–40, citation p. 27, https://doi.org/10.1080/13518046.2019.1552662

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See also: Karen Kaya, “NATO Missile Defense and the View from the Front Line,” Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 71, 4th Quarter 2013, pp. 84–89. See also: Steven J. Whitmore and John R. Deni, NATO Missile Defense and the European Phased Adaptive Approach: The Implications of Burden Sharing and the Underappreciated Role of the U.S.  Army (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, October 2013); North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), Fact Sheet (Brussels: North Atlantic Treaty Organization, May 22, 2012), http:// www.nato.int/nato_static/assets/pdf/pdf_topics/20120520_mediabackgrounder_NATO_ballistic_missile_defence_en.pdf, downloaded May 23, 2012. 15. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, p. 120. 16. Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (Washington, D.C.: U.S.  Department of State, April 8, 2010), http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/140035.pdf 17. On the differences between Cold War and post-Cold War nuclear challenges, see: Angela E. Stent, Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest (New York: Twelve – Hachette Book Group, 2019), pp. 295– 310; Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century; Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and The New Power Politics (New York: Henry Holt – Times Books, 2012); Michael Krepon, Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Patrick M.  Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Third Edition, 2003); esp. pp. 75–83; Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); and Colin S. Gray, The Second Nuclear Age (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), esp. Ch. 2. 18. The case of North Korea illustrates the point. See Roberts, The Case for U.S.  Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, pp.  58–78. See also: Joby Warrick, Ellen Nakashima and Anna Fifield, “North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say,” Washington Post, August 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/ north-korea-now-making-missile-ready-nuclear-weapons-us-analystssay/2017/08/08/e14b882a-7b6b-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story. html, downloaded August 8, 2017; and Ellen Nakashima, Anna Fifield and Joby Warrick, “North Korea could cross ICBM threshold next year, U.S. officials warn in new assessment,” Washington Post, July 25, 2017, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/north-korea-could-

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cross-icbm-threshold-next-year-us-officials-warn-in-new-assessment/201 7/07/25/4107dc4a-70af-11e7-8f39-eeb7d3a2d304_story.html, downloaded July 25, 2017. 19. For historical perspective on US and Soviet-Russian missile defenses, see: Mike Gruntman, Intercept 1961: The Birth of Soviet Missile Defense (Reston, Va.: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2015); Rebecca Slayton, Arguments That Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949–2012 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013); Donald R. Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 1944–1983 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1992); Frances FitzGerald, Way out there in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the end of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000); and Jennifer G. Mathers, The Russian Nuclear Shield from Stalin to Yeltsin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 20. THAAD and Patriot systems are terminal-phase ballistic missile defenses designed to intercept attacking warheads in the atmosphere (also slightly above it, in the case of THAAD) as the warheads descend toward their targets. See: Lewis and von Hippel, “Improving U.S.  Ballistic Missile Defense Policy,” and Johnson-Freese and Burbach, “The Best Defense Ever? Busting Myths About the Trump Administration’s Missile Defense Review.” 21. Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2019 Missile Defense Review, Executive Summary, xi. 22. Gen. Paul Selva, quoted in Patrick Tucker, “Nuclear Weapons Are Getting Less Predictable, and More Dangerous,” Defense One, May 16, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #84  – May 17, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Thomas K.  Hensley, Lloyd P.  Caviness, Stephanie Vaughn and Christopher Morton, “Understanding the Indications and Warning Efforts of U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense,” Joint Force Quarterly 78, 3rd Quarter 2015, pp. 91–97. 23. Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), p. 281. 24. For example: the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command plan for 2028 includes tasking to provide combatant commanders with a flexible, agile and integrated Air and Missile Defense force, capable of “executing multi-domain operations” and “defending the homeland, regional joint and coalition forces, and critical assets in support of unified land operations”. See: U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command/Army Forces Strategic Command, Army Air and Missile Defense 2028, March 29, 2019, https://www.army.mil/ standto/2019-03-29 25. Hensley, Caviness, Vaughn, and Morton, “Understanding the Indications and Warning Efforts of U.S.  Ballistic Missile Defense,” p.  92. See also:

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Zachary Keck, “U.S.  General: Iran and North Korea Will Likely Have Hypersonic Weapons,” The National Interest, April 21, 2018, https:// www.yahoo.com/news/u-general-iran-north-korea-111900311.html An informative case study is provided in Jacob L. Heim, “The Iranian Missile Threat to Air Bases: A Distant Second to China’s Conventional Deterrent,” Air and Space Power Journal, July–August 2015, pp. 27–50. 26. Robert Beckhusen, “Russia’s Future Air Force Could Resemble…The U.S.  Air Force,” https://medium.com/war-is-boring/russias-future-airforce-could-resemble-the-us-air-force.html, downloaded August 11, 2015. 27. I am grateful to Andrew Futter for calling this possibility to my attention. 28. Andrew Futter, “Full Spectrum Missile Defense: Why Using Cyber to Counteract Nuclear Threats Is a Plan Fraught with Danger,” Draft Paper, April 2016. 29. U.S.  Defense Intelligence Agency, Russia  – Military Power: Building a Military to Support Great Power Aspirations (Washington, D.C.: Defense Intelligence Agency, 2017), Appendix C, pp. 58–65. 30. Matthew Bodner, “Russian Military Merges Air Force and Space Command,” The Moscow Times, August 3, 2015, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/russian-military-merges-air-force-andspace-command, downloaded August 11, 2015. 31. Franz-Stefan Gady, “Russia Creates Powerful New Military Branch to Counter NATO,” The Diplomat, August 7, 2015, http://thediplomat. com/2015/08/russia-creates-powerful-new-military-branch-to-counternato.html, downloaded August 11, 2015. 32. Alexander Golts, “Russia’s Aerospace Forces Will Never Take Off,” The Moscow Times, August 10, 2015, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/ opinion/article/russia-s-aerospace-forces-will-never-take-off.html, downloaded August 11, 2015. 33. The strategic values of missile defenses, especially in the context of strengthening regional deterrence, are explained in Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, pp. 86–92. 34. Weinberg, quoted in Boyd and Scouras, Uncertainty, Deterrence, and Ballistic Missile Defense: A Review of the Literature, pp. 12–13. 35. For expert background and commentary on this topic, see Brian G. Chow and Henry Sokolski, “Growing U.S. satellite vulnerability: The silent “Apocalypse Next”,” Space News, August 22, 2018, https://spacenews. com/growing-u-s-satellite-vulnerability-the-silent-apocalypse-next/ 36. See Kaya, “NATO Missile Defense and the View from the Front Line,” for EPAA objectives and time lines. See also: Rachel Oswald, “Trump’s plans for European missile defense a mystery,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 7, 2016, http://thebulletin.org/trump%E2%80%99s-planseuropean-missile-defense-mystery10258, downloaded December 20, 2016.

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37. Kevin Ayers, “Expanding Zeus’s Shield: A New Approach for Theater Ballistic Missile Defense in the Asia-Pacific Region,” Joint Force Quarterly 84, 1st Quarter 2017, pp. 24–31. 38. Deverrick Holmes, “Congress is not asking the right questions about missile defense,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 25, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/congress-is-not-asking-the-rightquestions-about-missile-defense/ 39. Union of Concerned Scientists, “Shielded from Oversight: The Disastrous US Approach to Strategic Missile Defense,” Executive Summary, http:// www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-weapons-/us-missile-defense/shielded-fromoversight.html, downloaded April 20, 2017. See also: John Mecklin, “Why Star Wars should remain a cinematic fantasy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 4 (2019, pp. 135–136, https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/ why-should-remain-a-cinematic-fantasy/

CHAPTER 4

China and Nuclear Arms Control

4.1   Introduction The National Security Strategy of the Donald J.  Trump administration identifies three main sets of challenges—including the revisionist powers of China and Russia as aspiring peer competitors.1 The United States and Russia, most recently in their New START agreement of 2010, conducted bilateral negotiations on nuclear arms reductions much in the same fashion as did the Cold War Americans and Soviets. Future negotiations of this type might arguably include China, but the agenda for doing so could be complicated. China’s views of military strategy and the role of nuclear deterrence differ in important ways from the Russian or American perspectives, including Chinese perspectives on nuclear transparency. China’s growing economic power will certainly enable it to improve its military capabilities, including those for nuclear deterrence. One unanswered question is how far China is willing to go in modernizing its long-­ range nuclear forces, and what that might imply for efforts to include China as a partner in nuclear arms control. As a thought experiment, we also describe and analyze a hypothetical multilateral nuclear arms control agreement that provides for nuclear-strategic stability among most currently recognized nuclear weapons states. Finally, we draw conclusions about the implications of China’s nuclear modernization for nuclear stability and arms control in Asia and elsewhere.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_4

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4.2   Chinese Military Modernization and Nuclear Weapons China’s plans for modernizing its nuclear missile and bomber forces are related to its political and military objectives in the near and longer term. Contrasting Russia and China, a recent RAND Corporation analysis suggested that “Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue”.2 Russia presents the more immediate military challenge, but China is the more promising peer competitor for global influence in decades to follow. And China’s military modernization has taken into account its status as a nuclear power and the need to establish a baseline of current and future nuclear force planning.3 US intelligence estimates of China’s current nuclear military capabilities are challenged by China’s reluctance to provide very much public information on this subject. Reading the tea leaves for future projections is even more difficult. Nevertheless, there are relevant indications or generalizations about China’s nuclear programs and policies that can be hazarded at this stage. China has often been described as a state that seeks only a minimum or finite nuclear deterrent. This assumption implies that China will be content to maintain a small number of survivable weapons that can inflict second strike countervalue attacks on enemy cities. On the other hand, China’s ongoing and planned nuclear modernization leaves the door open to a larger than minimum nuclear deterrent: depending on the capabilities of future Russian and US offensive nuclear forces and US missile defenses, among other variables.4 China is not modeling its nuclear program on the assumption that it needs to match Russia or the United States in every aspect of military-related nuclear capability. At the same time, China aspires to be taken seriously as a major nuclear power and to have an effective deterrent.5 As noted by Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley, Jr., Director, US Defense Intelligence Agency: China has developed a new road-mobile ICBM, a new multi-warhead version of its silo-based ICBM, and a new submarine-launched ballistic missile. With its announcement of a new nuclear-capable strategic bomber, China will soon field their own nuclear triad, demonstrating China’s commitment to expanding the role and centrality of nuclear forces in Beijing’s military aspirations. And like Russia, China is also working to field nuclear, theater-range precision-strike systems.6

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China’s military related aspirations have to do with enhancing its Indo-­ Pacific regional and wider strategic profile and economic influence. Accordingly, Chinese nuclear modernization will support deterrence of nuclear attack or blackmail against China proper, but also provide for coercive military backing of China’s growing regional assertiveness in Asia. With regard to the United States, for example, this implies that China will want to deter any conventional military intervention in the region against China’s vital interests, through a combination of improving conventional and nuclear missile and air forces. According to the 2018 US Department of Defense annual report to Congress on Chinese military and security developments, The Chinese armed forces (People’s Liberation Army or PLA) are undergoing transformation to support complex war fighting capabilities: The PLA is undergoing the most comprehensive restructure in its history to become a force capable of conducting complex joint operations. The PLA strives to be capable of fighting and winning “informatized local wars”  – regional conflicts defined by real-time, data-networked command and control, and precision strike.7

China’s nuclear forces also serve as a measure of escalation control on favorable terms should conventional war in its early stages not go according to Beijing’s expectations. With respect to strategic nuclear forces, modernization should provide a canopy, atop a range of Chinese military capabilities, that will have integrity from the lowest to the highest rungs of the escalation ladder. For example: China’s nuclear modernization includes unprecedented modernization of its ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers, but also the development of next generation nuclear warheads with smaller yields and high accuracy.8 Along with this, China’s fleet of nuclear attack submarines supports an ambitious anti-access, area denial (A2/AD) strategy to deter US military intervention to support allied interests in Asia against Chinese wishes.9 In addition, experts warn that, as China’s military capabilities for power projection expand, so may its strategic aspirations: Since anti-access strategies are adopted by nations who perceive their potential opponents as strategically inferior, China is likely to shift defense resources away from A2/AD systems and toward power

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­ rojection and expansion capabilities once this perception of inferiority p dissipates. Indeed, China is preparing to make this shift.10

Under President Xi Jinping, China has also been more assertive on other military-strategic issues, including the construction of Chinese military airfields on disputed islands in the South China Sea; claiming extended “air defense identification zones” whose transit would require permission from China; and developing a larger inventory of cyberweapons to support its diplomatic and military strategy.11 China’s diplomacy also creates additional space for maneuver on arms control and other issues. As nuclear arms control expert Alexei Arbatov has noted, Beijing’s “cautious and multivectored” policies “have allowed it to assume the role to which Russia has traditionally aspired – that of a balancer between East and West. In fact, it is Russia, with its new policy of “Eurasianism,” that has become the East”.12 On the other hand, China’s political and military objectives in Asia and worldwide differ from those of the United States and Russia, reflecting China’s perception of its own interests and of its anticipated role in the emerging world order.13 China’s military modernization is intended to support its rising global profile and expanded portfolio of international interests: focused on “investments and infrastructure to support a range of missions beyond China’s periphery” including “power projection, sea lane security, counterpiracy, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR), and noncombatant evacuation operations”.14 Entering China into the US-Russian nuclear deterrence equation creates considerable analytical challenges, for a number of reasons. First, China’s military modernization is going to change the distribution of power in Asia, including the distribution of nuclear and missile forces. China’s military modernization draws not only on its indigenous military culture but also on careful analysis of Western and other experiences. As David Lai has noted: The Chinese way of war places a strong emphasis on the use of strategy, strategems and deception. However, the Chinese understand that their approach will not be effective without the backing of hard military power. China’s grand strategy is to take the next 30 years to complete China’s modernization mission, which is expected to turn China into a true great power by that time.15

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China’s ballistic missile force—the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF)—is among the beneficiaries of its military modernization. The PLARF, established in 2016, is responsible for maintaining conventional and nuclear weapons and for the “ability to deter and strike across the entire defense area”. It is also tasked to “enhance nuclear deterrence and counter-strike capacity” with the ability for long and medium-range precision strike.16 Chinese military publications have identified a number of missions that might be undertaken by nuclear or conventional missile-rocket forces in peacetime or under conditions of crisis or war, including war prevention, escalation control, using nuclear deterrence to “backstop” conventional operations, and strategic compellence of enemies by means of deterrent actions.17 Chinese military modernization and defense guidance for the use of nuclear and other missile forces hold some important implications for US policy. First, Chinese thinking is apparently quite nuanced about the deterrent and defense uses for nuclear weapons. Despite the accomplishments of modernization thus far, Chinese leaders are aware that they are far from nuclear-strategic parity with the United States or Russia. On the other hand, China may not aspire to this model of nuclear-strategic parity, as between major nuclear powers, as the key to war avoidance by deterrence or other means. China may prefer to see nuclear weapons as one option among a spectrum of choices available in deterring or fighting wars under exigent conditions, as well as means of supporting assertive diplomacy and conventional operations when necessary. Nuclear-strategic parity as measured by quantitative indicators of relative strength may be less important to China than the qualitative use of nuclear and other means as part of broader diplomatic-military strategies.18 As the United States Defense Intelligence Agency has noted: In 2015, Beijing directed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be able to win “informatized local wars” with an emphasis on “maritime military struggle.” Chinese military strategy documents also emphasize the growing importance of offensive air, long-distance mobility, and space and cyberspace operations. The PLA views space superiority, the ability to control the information sphere, and denying adversaries the same as key components of conducting modern “informatized” wars.19

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Second, China is expanding its portfolio of military preparedness not only in platforms and weapons, but also in the realm of C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and information technology, including for cyber war and space deterrence.20 Having observed the US success in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, Chinese military strategists concluded that the informatization of warfare under all conditions would be a predicate to future deterrence and defense operations.21 China’s growing portfolio of smart capabilities and modernized platforms includes, in addition to items previously noted, stealth aircraft, antisatellite warfare, quiet submarines, “brilliant” torpedo mines, improved cruise missiles, and the potential for disrupting financial markets. As Paul Bracken has noted, the composite effect of China’s developments is to make its military more agile: By agility I mean the ability to identify and seize opportunities and to move more quickly than rivals. This nimbleness is reflected in China’s mobile missiles, a reactive air and sea response against the U.S. Navy, and information warfare. What all of these have in common is quick action.22

The emphasis on agility instead of brute force reinforces the traditional emphasis in Chinese military thinking since Sun Tzu on the acme of skill as winning without fighting, but, if war is unavoidable, getting in the first and decisive blows. It also follows that one should attack the enemy’s strategy and his alliances making maximum use of deception, based on superior intelligence and estimation. The combination of improved platforms, command-control and information warfare should provide options for the selective use of precision fire strikes and cyberattacks against priority targets, avoiding mass killing and fruitless attacks on enemy strongholds.23 As former defense official Robert O.  Work has explained, an important component of China’s military strategy is the concept of “system destructive warfare” that focuses on “disabling the sensor, command and control, and effects grids common to all battle networks”.24 More broadly, China is determined to dominate future AI and cyberspace research and development and its application for military purposes. According to US Naval War College cyber expert Chris C. Demchak: With the real revolution in AI found in the emerging applications of so-called deep neural learning that require massive computational

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resources, Chinese command of AI and eventually quantum computing will massively increase the speed at which its actors can compute likely outcomes across societal-scale problems and threats. They’ll then be able to coordinate rapid actions to enhance, dampen, disrupt, or destroy the essential elements of targeted processes in any opposing nation.25

A third aspect of the Chinese military modernization that is important for nuclear deterrence and arms control in Asia is the problem of escalation control. Two examples or aspects of this problem might be cited here. First, improving Chinese capabilities for nuclear deterrence, and for conventional warfighting, increase Chinese leaders’ confidence in their ability to carry out an A2/AD strategy against the United States, or against another power seeking to block Chinese expansion in Asia. This confidence might be misplaced in the case of the United States. The United States is engaged in a “pivot” in its military-strategic planning and deployment to Asia, and toward that end, is developing its doctrine and supporting force structure for “AirSea Battle” countermeasures against Chinese anti-access strategy.26 A second aspect of the problem of escalation control is the question of nuclear crisis management as between a more muscular China and its Asian neighbors or others. Asia in the Cold War was a comparative nuclear weapons backwater, since the attention of US and allied NATO policy makers and military strategists was focused on the US-Soviet arms race. The world of the twenty-first century is very different. Europe, notwithstanding recent contretemps in Ukraine, is a relatively pacified security zone compared to the Middle East or to South and East Asia, and post-­ Cold War Asia is marked by five nuclear weapons states: Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. The possibility of nuclear first use, growing out of a conventional war between, say, India and Pakistan, or China and India, is nontrivial, and North Korea poses a continuing uncertainty of two sorts. It might start a conventional war on the Korean peninsula, or the Kim III regime might implode, leaving uncertain the command and control over its armed forces, including nuclear weapons and infrastructure.27 Further to this issue, the uncertain implications for China of United States’ withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty have yet to be worked out, including the possible US deployment of conventional land-based ballistic and cruise missiles with INF-range capabilities in the West Pacific.28

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The problem of keeping nuclear armed states below the threshold of first use, or containing escalation afterward, was difficult enough to explain within the more simplified Cold War context. Uncertainties are even more abundant with respect to escalation control in the aftermath of a regional Asian war. Then, too, there is the possibility of a US-Chinese nuclear incident at sea or a clash over Taiwan escalating into conventional conflict, accompanied by political misunderstanding and the readying of nuclear forces as a measure of deterrence. The point is that US and Chinese forces would not actually have to fire nuclear weapons to use them. Nuclear weapons would be involved in the conflict from the outset, as offstage reminders that the two states could stumble into a process of escalation that neither had intended. There is an important correction or cautionary note that needs to be introduced at this point. Policy makers and strategists have sometimes talked as if nuclear weapons always serve to dampen escalation instead of exacerbating it. This might be a valid theoretical perspective under normal peacetime conditions. On the other hand, once a crisis has begun, and especially after shooting has started, the other face of nuclear danger will appear. Reassurance based on the assumption that nuclear first use is unthinkable may then give way to its becoming very thinkable. The challenges posed for US leaders, in balancing deterrence and reassurance with respect to China, are considerable. American policy makers seeking to influence Chinese decision-makers might emphasize either deterrence or reassurance, or they might prefer a combination of the two. Signals of deterrence or reassurance will be perceived by the intended recipients based on the recipients’ own perceptual and motivational or reasoning biases.29 As Steve Lambakis notes, in discussing US options for space deterrence with respect to China’s growing potential for military operations in space: Chinese viewpoints should be the basis for forming a sound U.S. space deterrence strategy against China … The challenge for U.S. defense planners is to understand why China’s leaders might believe they are free to interfere with U.S. space systems and then design and execute a deterrence strategy to change Beijing’s calculations.30

But perceptual and reasoning biases are not only independent variables that provide motivational constraints for leaders. Perceptions and motivations are also subject to influence as dependent variables by the exigent

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conditions of a particular situation, including the interactions among policy makers and other leaders. Thus, during a crisis involving the possible use of force by one or more states, leaders’ motivational constructs may vary across a spectrum of cognitive constraint and subjective judgment. For example, some members of the Kennedy administration’s “ExComm” senior advisory group for the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 shifted their assumptions about the motivations of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, as well as their preferences for stronger or weaker action to remove the Soviet missiles based in Cuba, quite drastically during their 13 days of deliberation. Others even wondered whether Khrushchev had been deposed by the Politburo from his position as head of government.31 As Michael S. Chase has warned, with regard to the issue of US-Chinese crisis management: Miscalculation in the midst of a crisis is a particularly troubling possibility, one that could be heightened by uncertainty over the message that one side is trying to convey to the other or by overconfidence in the ability to control escalation. The most serious concern is that some of the signaling activities described in Chinese publications could easily be interpreted not as a demonstration of resolve or as a warning, but as preparation to conduct actual nuclear missile strikes, possibly decreasing crisis stability or even triggering escalation rather than strengthening deterrence.32

The preceding discussion is not an argument for Chinese inconsistency in the application of their strategic thinking to actual practice. Nor does it suggest that China would be any more predisposed to the prompt use of nuclear force than other nuclear weapons states. The commentary on this aspect of escalation control emphasizes, instead, that there is likely to be a considerable amount of two-sided improvisation about escalation control during any future nuclear crisis in Asia.

4.3   Methodology and Assessment Perspectives The previous section has established that China’s geostrategic view and its military modernization cannot be fitted easily into existing models of nuclear conflict. However, Chinese participation in future evolutions of

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strategic nuclear arms control will require their military planners to prepare some estimates of the outcomes of nuclear force exchanges. Odds are that nuclear war between China and either Russia or the United States is extremely unlikely. But, since politics has a way of driving strategy, sometimes over the brink, Chinese as well as US and Russian armed forces will have to plan for unexpected as well as more probable wars. In addition, the nuclear balance matters insofar as China prefers to maintain a secure second-strike capability against the United States or Russia, regardless the pace of their modernizations. The debate within China relative to its nuclear force modernization doubtless includes arguments about “how much is enough” to accomplish this fundamental mission of assured retaliation under all conditions. The preceding considerations also suggest that descriptions of China’s nuclear modernization as a “minimum deterrent” are probably misleading. Smaller forces are not necessarily less potent than larger ones for the purpose of supporting their states’ political objectives. This is true, not only because a small number of nuclear weapons can do such considerable damage, but also because the “leverage” provided by nuclear weapons lies not only in their assumed value for deterrence of nuclear attack. It also lies in their usefulness as backdrops for political influence, for international status and for crisis management support. In addition, deterrence might fail in stages instead of all at once in a crisis among two or more nuclear weapons states. The “first use” of a nuclear weapon since the bombing of Nagasaki might not be a purposeful or deliberate shattering of the nuclear “taboo” as commonly understood, but an ambiguous or unclear event such as nuclear accidents, tactical launches by unauthorized commanders, or incidents at sea involving nuclear capable ships and headstrong commanders.33 The preceding arguments suggest that including China in strategic nuclear arms limitation talks is a necessary condition for doing the serious business of nuclear nonproliferation. On the other hand, China is unlikely to buy into the necessary challenges of bargaining and transparency implied by multinational arms control unless other current nuclear weapons states, especially in Asia, are also included. So a tripartite forum for strategic nuclear arms control will need to expand into a multilateral forum including eight acknowledged or de facto nuclear weapons states: the P-5 permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus India, Israel and Pakistan. The assumption of nonparticipation by North Korea is based on the uncertainty of situations there: Iran is under international agreement

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to cap its nuclear research program short of weaponization.34 In the eight-­ sided multilateral forum just described, a hypothetical tiered agreement among the existing nuclear weapons states could be constructed as follows, based on the numbers of operationally deployed nuclear weapons on long-range launchers (defined as weapons of intercontinental or intermediate range): (1) Tier One, the United States and Russia, permitted a maximum of 1000 each; (2) Tier Two, China, France and the UK, allowed a maximum of 500 operationally deployed weapons per state; and (3) Tier Three, India, Israel and Pakistan, permitted a maximum of 300 operationally deployed weapons. Data Analysis In Chart 4.1 we summarize the numbers of operationally deployed weapons assigned to each nuclear weapons state under the agreed protocols, as described above. The weapons for each state are also categorized by type of launcher. Of course, these numbers are hypothetical, but they are 600

Total Strategic Weapons

500 400 300 200 100 0

ICBM SLBM AIR

Russian Forces 318 384 294

United States Forces 300 392 308

PRC Forces

Israeli Forces

UK Forces

204 96 200

100 64 136

0 480 0

Indian Pakistan French Forces Forces Forces 110 64 126

112 32 156

0 288 212

Chart 4.1  Constrained proliferation model: operationally deployed warheads

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900

Arriving Retaliatory Weapons

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

GEN, LOW GEN, ROA DAY, LOW DAY, ROA

United Russian States Forces Forces 812 812 641 569 495 483 324 240

PRC Israeli Forces Forces 407 242 236 70

241 160 125 44

UK Indian Pakistan French Forces Forces Forces Forces 389 389 260 260

233 153 99 14

240 150 106 13

388 388 156 156

Chart 4.2  Constrained proliferation model: surviving and retaliating warheads

c­ onsistent with states’ capabilities for modernization and past emphases in force building.35 In Chart 4.2 we summarize the outcomes of nuclear force exchanges among the powers by comparing their numbers of second strike surviving and retaliating forces, according to canonical standards of assessment and under each of four operational conditions: (1) retaliating forces are on generated alert, and launched on warning; (2) forces are on generated alert and ride out the attack before retaliating; (3) forces are on day-to-day alert and launched on warning; and, (4) forces are on day-to-day alert and riding out the attack before retaliating.36 These results are admittedly conjectural and suggestive. For example, who knows exactly how survivable a Pakistani aircraft might be against a preemptive Indian nuclear missile attack, or vice versa? But some assumptions have to be made for analytical purposes, and doubtful readers are invited to improve upon the results summarized in Chart 4.2.

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Implications Although China’s projected intercontinental range nuclear forces are small compared to those of Russia and the United States, they, and Chinese nuclear forces of shorter ranges, are not negligible. Against New START or similar US and Russian deployment levels, China should be able to guarantee assured retaliation or some other more ambitious alternative compared to minimum deterrence with respect to the United States or Russia. On the other hand, China has neither the need nor the apparent interest in an unrestrained nuclear arms race. China’s military modernizations will emphasize quality as much or more than quantity. Especially important are improvements in China’s long range, mobile land-based missile and ballistic missile submarine forces, relative to their survivability against surprise attack. Mobile land-based missiles, as seen from the Chinese perspective, increase force survivability and reduce the incentive to launch on warning or preempt, thereby reinforcing deterrence and crisis stability. On the other hand, some Pentagon appraisals apparently take a more pessimistic view of China’s mobile land-based missiles, seeing those missiles as a possible indicator of departure from China’s declaratory “no first use” doctrine and toward a doctrine of nuclear war fighting.37 Since Russia deploys its own mobile strategic land-based missiles, it is hardly in a position to contest China’s modernization in this respect. What is unique about China is the existence of many miles of tunnels in which missiles of various ranges can be stored, moved from one location to another, and perhaps launched. How these subterranean adjuncts to other forces would play into future scenarios is a subject for another arms debate. As one expert commentator has noted, China may, consistent with its traditions and unique strategic culture, depart from precedents set by the United States and Russia: In particular, in parallel to gradually building up and improving the characteristics of its strategic, intermediate-range, and tactical ballistic missiles (the last two types can carry both nuclear and conventional warheads), a portion of its missile and nuclear arsenal may be stockpiled in underground tunnels. This would be a unique development in a global nuclear arms race that has now lasted for almost seventy years.38

This study is about deterrence and arms control, and not about actually having to fight a nuclear war. So the question for China remains: are the

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incremental gains from a more aggressive nuclear force modernization, compared to a slower pace, worth the costs, not only in yuan, but also in the possible reactions of the United States and Russia? A more aggressive nuclear modernization by China might provoke a response from Russia or the United States to offset the effects of China’s nuclear rise. Russia and the United States would not have identical perspectives on this issue, so identical responses would be unlikely. Russia declares its new strategic partnership with China to offset the post-Ukraine malaise between Russia and NATO and for longer term economic benefits. But Russia also has a lengthy contiguous border with China and much of its state territory is within range of Chinese weapons that are less than intercontinental in range. For its part, the United States declares that it is not trying to contain China with its “pivot” to Asia, but nobody in Asia believes this and some welcome it (Japan, Taiwan). Meanwhile, good economic relations are important for both the US and Chinese economies: prolonged or profound military confrontation between Beijing and Washington would not only shake up their own stock markets, but markets globally. Thus the Chinese, Russian and American motivations for nuclear force modernization, as well as for arms control, are complex, overlapping and embedded in the foreign policy objectives as well as the domestic politics of each state. For example, renewed conflict between Russia and the West has increased China’s influence in a multipolar world. Thus China’s nuclear modernization program is part of its assertion of a higher profile in global affairs: a stronger military card to play alongside its growing economic strength. On the other hand, China’s nuclear and other military modernizations also have a practical side: in deterring, or coercing if necessary, the United States, India and Russia.39

4.4   Conclusion China clearly aspires to challenge the United States for global economic leadership and political influence, and part of that challenge will also be China’s growing conventional and nuclear military capability. Chinese military modernization and economic capacity create the potential for it to deploy within this decade or soon after a “more than minimum” nuclear deterrent sufficient to guarantee unacceptable retaliation against any attack, especially if China’s less than intercontinental range forces are taken into account. China’s missiles and aircraft of various ranges can inflict damage on Russian state territory and on US-related targets in Asia,

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including US allies and bases. Nevertheless, an open-ended Chinese nuclear modernization in search of nuclear-strategic parity or superiority compared to the United States and Russia is improbable and, from their perspective, pointless. Chinese nuclear modernization is not necessarily incompatible with their engagement with Russia and the United States on strategic nuclear arms control.40 But the “terms of endearment” for China to engage with Washington and Moscow on nuclear arms limitation will be complicated by China’s regional military priorities in Asia, by US extended deterrence commitments to regional allies, and by China’s nuanced strategic thinking, including its ability to exploit information and electronic warfare as well as military uses of space (and space denial to adversaries).41 Chinese use of A2/AD strategies in opposition to US AirSea battle creates a potential issue of escalation control for the two states to resolve, preferably in negotiations and military exchanges as opposed to improvisation under the duress of a crisis. Finally, China’s hitherto opacity about the status of its nuclear forces must be slowly influenced toward a greater openness and fuller disclosure of its holdings and deployments.42 As Stephen Blank has noted: It is long since necessary that China is included in any arms control negotiations. It is a major nuclear power, rightly insists upon being treated as a great global power and is steadily building up its capabilities to threaten both Russia and the United States. For both Moscow and Washington it makes no strategic sense to allow China to continue to have a free hand to build up an unverified and unverifiable nuclear capability under such circumstances. And from the U.S. point of view, it is equally senseless to allow China to escape the consequences of its ever more overt hostility to U.S. interests, allies, and values. Allowing this state of affairs to continue without any attempt to reverse it represents an act of considerable strategic malfeasance.43

It is easy to accept this argument in principle, but as has been discussed previously, roping China into the arms control rodeo is perhaps a bridge too far—at least, a long-term aspiration instead of an immediate mandate, given China’s comparative inexperience in strategic nuclear arms control, its suspicions about intrusive international monitoring or verification, and its relative opacity about deployed and potential nuclear capabilities. Meanwhile, China is on a course to improve its military-strategic cooperation with Russia, including joint long-range military aviation ­ patrols with nuclear capable bombers.44

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Finally, what are the implications of the preceding findings and arguments for US and NATO interests in maintaining strategic stability in Europe, or elsewhere outside of Asia? China’s military modernization, according to our arguments above, is not necessarily destabilizing even to balances of power in Asia, let alone in its impacts beyond Asia and the Pacific rim. China’s nuclear modernization is compatible with more than one kind of grand strategy: either defensive realism or offensive realism. Defensive realism is based on a selective expansion of interests and capabilities, connected to a strict definition of vital national interests. Offensive realism offers a more ambitious definition of vital interests and a greater willingness to assert and support those interests with military power for coercion or war. Regardless China’s choice of grand strategy, one cannot imagine a world in which nuclear-strategic stability crumbles in Asia without also posing threats to the vital interests of the United States and Europe, in and outside of Asia.

Notes 1. The White House, National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington, D.C. The White House, December 2017, p. 25, https:// w w w. w h i t e h o u s e . g o v / w p - c o n t e n t / u p l o a d s / 2 0 1 7 / 1 2 / N S S Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf 2. James Dobbins, Howard J. Shatz, and Ali Wyne, Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue: Different Challenges, Different Responses (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, October 2018), www.rand.org 3. Dr. Mark Schneider, “Nuclear Weapons in Chinese Military Strategy,” National Institute for Public Policy, Information Series, Issue No. 441, May 3, 2019, www.nipp.org. See also: George Lewis and Frank von Hippel, “Improving U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense Policy,” Arms Control Association, May 2018, https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-05/features/improving-us-ballistic-missile-defense-policy 4. Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Assuring Assured Retaliation: China’s Nuclear Posture and U.S.-China Strategic Stability,” International Security, no. 2 (Fall 2015), pp.  7–50, doi:https://doi.org/10.1162/ ISEC_a_00215 5. China’s analysis of the United States’ emphasis on great power competition receives thoughtful consideration in Lyle J. Goldstein, “China Is Learning from Russian Military Interactions with the United States,” The National Interest, May 9, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #80 – May 10, 2019, [email protected]

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6. Lt. Gen. Robert P.  Ashley, Jr., Director Defense Intelligence Agency, Russian and Chinese Nuclear Modernization Trends, Remarks as prepared for delivery, Hudson Institute, May 29, 2019, https://www.dia.mil/ News/Speeches-and-Testimonies/Article-View/Article/1859890/russian-and-chinese-nuclear-modernization-trends/. See also: Hans M. Kristensen, “New Missile Silo and DF-41 Launchers Seen in Chinese Nuclear Missile Training Area,” Federation of American Scientists, September 3, 2019, https://fas.org/blogs/security/ 7. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2018 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, May 16, 2018, ii, https:// media.defense.gov/2018/Aug/16/2001955282/-1/-1/1/2018CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT.PDF 8. James R.  Howe, Chinese Strategic Nuclear Force Posture: Current and Future, draft briefing, Vision Centric, Inc., March 27, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Hans M.  Kristensen and Robert S.  Norris, “Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2018,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 4 (2018), pp.  289–295, https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2018.1486620; David E.  Sanger and William J.  Broad, “China Making Some Missiles More Powerful,” New York Times, May 16, 2015, http://www.nytimes. com/2015/05/17/world/asia/china-making-some-missiles-more-powerful.html, downloaded May 18, 2015; NY Times editorial board, “China Buys Into Multiple Warheads,” New York Times, May 20, 2015, http:// www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/opinion/china-buys-into-multiplewarheads.html, downloaded May 20, 2015. 9. Jeremy Page, “Deep Threat: China’s Submarines add Nuclear-Strike Capability, Altering Strategic Balance,” Wall Street Journal, Oct. 27, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/articles/chinas-submarine-fleet-adds-nuclearstrike-capability-altering-strategic-balance-undersea-1414164738, downloaded Oct. 27, 2014. 10. Sam J. Tangredi, “Anti-Access Strategies in the Pacific: The United States and China,” Parameters, 49 (1–2), Spring-Summer 2019, pp. 5–20, citation p. 6. 11. Sanger and Broad, “China Making Some Missiles More Powerful.” 12. Alexei Arbatov, “Engaging China in Nuclear Arms Control,” Carnegie Moscow Center, October 9, 2014, http://carnegie.ru/2014/10/09/ engaging-china-in-nuclear-arms-control.html, downloaded October 13, 2014. 13. For an analysis of China’s long-term objectives, see: Graham Allison, “What Xi Jinping Wants,” The Atlantic, May, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2017/05/what-china-wants/528561/, downloaded May 31, 2017. See also: Allison, “America second: Yes, and China’s lead is

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only growing,” Boston Globe, May 22, 2017, https://www.bostonglobe. com/opinion/2017/05/21/america-second-yes-and-china-lead-onlygrowing/7G6szOUkTobxmuhgDtLD7M/story.html and Captain Bernard D. Cole, U.S. Navy (Retired), “Island Chains and Naval Classics,” Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, November, 2014, pp. 68–73, www.usni.org 14. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2018, ii. 15. David Lai, “The Agony of Learning: The PLA’s Transformation in Military Affairs,” Ch. 9  in Roy Kamphausen, David Lai and Travis Tanner, eds., Learning by Doing: The PLA Trains at Home and Abroad (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S.  Army War College, November 2012), pp. 337–384, citation p. 369. 16. Hans M.  Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Chinese Nuclear Forces: 2019,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 4 (2019), pp. 171–178, DOI: https:// doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1628511, p.  172. According to Kristensen and Korda, the PLA Rocket Force will be responsible for all strategic missiles, including those on PLAN (People’s Liberation Army– Navy) submarines. (Ibid.) 17. Michael S. Chase, “Second Artillery in the Hu Jintao Era: Doctrine and Capabilities,” Ch. 8  in Roy Kamphausen, David Lai and Travis Tanner, eds., Assessing the People’s Liberation Army in the Hu Jintao Era (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, April 2014), pp. 301–353, esp. p. 309. 18. See Dr. Mark B. Schneider, Testimony before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on “Developments in China’s Cyber and Nuclear Capabilities,” March 26, 2012, http://www.uscc.gov/ sites/default/files/3.26.12schneider.pdf 19. U.S.  Defense Intelligence Agency, Challenges to Security in Space (Washington, D.C.: Defense Intelligence Agency, January 2019), p. 14. 20. David E. Sanger, “U.S. and China Seek Arms Deal for Cyberspace,” New York Times, September 19, 2015, http://www.nytimes. com/2015/09/20/world/asia/us-and-china-seek-arms-deal-for-cyberspace.html, downloaded September 21, 2015. 21. See Timothy L.  Thomas, Three Faces of the Cyber Dragon: Cyber Peace Activist, Spook, Attacker (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Foreign Military Studies Office, 2012), esp. Ch. 2, “China and Information Deterrence,” pp. 39–66. Chase, “Second Artillery in the Hu Jintao Era,” p. 331 notes specifically that Second Artillery has benefited from the expansion and improvement in C4ISR capabilities. 22. Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New World Politics (New York: Henry Holt and Co./Times Books, 2012), p. 206.

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23. For a discussion of this, see Lai, “The Agony of Learning: The PLA’s Transformation of Military Affairs,” pp. 364–365. 24. Robert O.  Work, “China’s Competitive Strategy: An Interview with Robert O. Work,” October 10, 2018, in Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 1 (Spring 2019), pp. 2–11, citation p. 3. 25. Chris C. Demchak, “China: Determined to dominate cyberspace and AI,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 3 (2019), pp. 99–104, citation p. 102, https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1604857 26. Expert assessment of this concept appears in: Jan Van Tol, with Mark Gunzinger, Andrew Krepinevich, and Jim Thomas, AirSea Battle: A Point-­ of-­Departure Operational Concept (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2010), http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2010/05/airsea-battle-concept/, downloaded December 5, 2014. 27. Kang Seung-woo, “NK could play nuclear option,” August 12, 2014, http://m.koreatimes.co.kr/phone/news/views.jsp?req_newsidx=162687, downloaded August 12, 2014. 28. New types of land-based, INF-range U.S. missiles could include a land-­ based Tomahawk cruise missile with a range of 1000 kilometers and a new type of ballistic missile with a range of 2800 to 3800 kilometers. For expert analysis, see: Dr. Wu Riqiang, “China’s calculus after the INF Treaty,” East Asia Forum, May 8, 2019, https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2019/05/08/ chinas-calculus-after-the-inf-treaty/ 29. See Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 30. Steve Lambakis, “Thinking About Space Deterrence and China,” National Institute for Public Policy, Information Series, Issue No. 443, July 9, 2019, p. 4, [email protected] 31. Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). 32. Chase, “Second Artillery in the Hu Jintao Era,” p. 340. 33. For some illustrative scenarios, see George H.  Quester, Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 24–52. 34. David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon, “Iran Nuclear Deal Is Reached With World Powers,” New York Times, July 14, 2015, http://www. nytimes.com/2015/07/15/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-deal-isreached-with-world-powers.html, downloaded July 14, 2015. See also: Lawrence Korb and Katherine Blakely, “This deal puts the nuclear genie back in the bottle,” in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Expert Commentary, July 15, 2015, http://thebulletin.org/experts-assess-iran-agreement-20158507, downloaded July 16, 2015; and David E.  Sanger, “Obama’s Leap of Faith on Iran,” New York Times, July 14, 2015, http://

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www.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-dealus.html, downloaded July 15, 2015. 35. For example, see Hans M.  Kristensen, Robert S.  Norris and Matthew G.  McKinzie, Chinese Nuclear Forces and U.S.  Nuclear War Planning (Washington, D.C.: Federation of American Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council, November 2006) and Schneider, Testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on “Developments in China’s Cyber and Nuclear Capabilities.” For U.S. and Russian forces, see: Jon B. Wolfsthal, Jeffrey Lewis and Marc Quint, The Trillion Dollar Triad: U.S.  Strategic Modernization Over the Next Thirty Years (Monterey, Calif.: James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, January 2014); Schneider, “The State of Russia’s Strategic Forces;” Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, US Nuclear Forces 2014, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 1 (2014), pp. 85–93; bos.sagepub.com, downloaded September 17, 2014; Hans M. Kristensen, Trimming Nuclear Excess: Options for Further Reductions of U.S. and Russian Nuclear Forces, Special Report No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: Federation of American Scientists, December 2012), www.FAS.org, downloaded January 23, 2013; Arms Control Association, “U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces Under New START,” http:// www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/USStratNukeForceNewSTART, downloaded July 18, 2011; Arms Control Association, “Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces Under New START, http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/ RussiaStratNukeForceNewSTART, downloaded July 18, 2011; Joseph Cirincione, “Strategic Turn: New U.S. and Russian Views on Nuclear Weapons,” New America Foundation, June 29, 2011, http://newamerica. net/publications/policy/strategic_turn and Pavel Podvig, “New START Treaty in numbers,” from his blog, Russian strategic nuclear forces, April 9, 2010, http://russianforces.org/blog/2010/03/new_start_treaty_in_ numbers.shtml 36. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Dr. James Scouras for use of his Arriving Weapons Sensitivity Model (AWSM@) in this analysis for making computations and drawing graphs. Dr. Scouras is not responsible for any of the analysis for argument in this study. 37. Kristensen, Norris and McKinzie, Chinese Nuclear Forces and U.S.  War Planning, p. 50. 38. Arbatov, “Engaging China in Nuclear Arms Control.” See also: Office of the Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to Congress, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2014 (Washington, D.C. U.S. Department of Defense, 2014 and 2013), p. 29, http://www. defense.gov/pubs/2014_DoD_China_Report.pdf, downloaded December 8, 2014. 39. Arbatov, “Engaging China in Nuclear Arms Control.”

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40. On the other hand, nuclear arms control engagement with China should not be used as an excuse to postpone or derail extension of the New START treaty. See Jon Wolfsthal, “A US-Russia-China Arms Treaty? Extend New START First,” Defense One, May 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #76  – May 6, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Lawrence J. Korb, “A path toward renewing arms control,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 18, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/07/ a-path-toward-renewing-arms-control/ 41. For expert commentary on Trump administration proposals to include China in strategic arms reduction talks with the United States and Russia, see: Daryl Kimball, “New START Must be Extended, With or Without China,” The National Interest, May 27, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List  – #88 – May 28, 2019, [email protected] 42. Problems in multilateralization of strategic nuclear arms control are noted in Andrey Kortunov, “Is There Life After Arms Control Death?” Valdai Discussion Club, June 14, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #99 – June 24, 2019, [email protected] 43. Stephen Blank, “Arms Control and Russia’s Global Strategy After the INF Treaty,” RealClearDefense, June 19, 2019, https://www.realcleardefense. com/articles/2019/06/19/arms_control_and_russias_global_strategy_ after_the_inf_treaty_114513.html. See also: Richard Weitz, “Nuclear Arms Control: Dying But Not Dead,” Valdai Discussion Club, August 14, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #128  – August 14, 2019, [email protected] 44. Vassily Kashin, “Joint Russian-Chinese Air Patrol Signifies New Level of Cooperation,” Carnegie Moscow Center, July 30, 2019, https://carnegie. ru/commentary/79587; and Michael Kofman, “Russia-China Bomber Patrol Shows Stronger Alignment Between the Two,” Russia Matters, July 26, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #119 – July 29, 2019, [email protected]. See also: J.  Berkshire Miller and Benoit Hardy-­ Chartrand, “Russia and China’s Strategic Marriage of Convenience,” The National Interest, August 27, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #138 – August 29, 2019, [email protected]

CHAPTER 5

Nuclear Arms Race in Asia: Challenges and Containment

5.1   Introduction Observers of nuclear matters in Asia could be forgiven in 2017 and 2018 for having caught a severe case of vertigo. North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests in 2017 marked a growing crisis on the Korean peninsula and a continuing deterioration in relations between Washington and Pyongyang.1 But, in the spring of 2018, North and South Korea reached out to one another to discuss a formal end to the Korean war and the possible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.2 In addition, US President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un scheduled an unprecedented heads of state summit in Singapore for June 12, 2018, despite back and forth diplomatic maneuvering that left media and experts dizzy.3 This summit was followed by two more in which the heads of state engaged in personal diplomacy in 2018 and 2019, and in the US case, with paper chases between Trump and his own national security bureaucracy. The wide swing between the threat intensive environment of 2017 and the whoosh of warm air in 2018 and 2019 was also part of a larger picture: the post-Cold War decentralization and redistribution of nuclear threats and potential arms races, from the bipolar global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to the rising numbers of regional actors with nuclear aspirations or nuclear arsenals. Among geostrategic regions or military theaters of operation of interest to the United States, the Asia-Pacific region (including parts of the greater Middle East with strategic significance for Asia) presents the most © The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_5

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­ angerous possibility of spreading nuclear weapons and nuclear capable d delivery systems. This study considers the present and prospective threat environment relative to nuclear weapons spread in Asia. For this purpose, we establish a matrix of eight current and future possible nuclear weapons states prominent in Asia, assign notional long-range nuclear forces to each, and estimate hypothetical outcomes of conflicts. These findings also have implications for adherents of balances of power or balances of terror as underpinnings for nuclear stability: some of them far from obvious even to experts.

5.2   Actors and Strategies The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union have moved the principal zone of political uncertainty, and the interest in WMD and missiles, eastward, across the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific basin.4 Major states in Asia, and in the Middle East within the range of long-range missiles based in Asia, see nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles as potential trumps. The appeal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems for these states is at least threefold.5 First, they enable “denial of access” strategies against foreign powers who might want to interfere in regional issues (read: the US and NATO). US military success in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003 only reinforced the appeal of access denial based on WMD for aspiring regional hegemons or nervous dictators. Second, nuclear weapons might permit some states to deter others who lack countermeasures in the form of survivable retaliatory forces. Israel’s nuclear weapons, not officially acknowledged but widely known, have appealed to Tel Aviv as a deterrent against provocative behavior by Arab neighbors and as a possible “Samson” option on the cusp of military defeat leading to regime change. Third, nuclear weapons permit states to maintain high-end deterrence against any outbreak of major war and to cover military power projection even against states or alliances with superior conventional forces. Russia is the most obvious example of this syndrome. Without its large nuclear arsenal, Russia would be more hesitant to assert its claims for special interests in former Soviet territory, including its opposition to US missile defense systems deployed in Eastern Europe, as well as its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and subsequent destabilization of eastern Ukraine.6 North Korea is another example of a state whose putative capabilities for deterrence or for coercion were at least temporarily enhanced by its deployment of nuclear weapons together with medium and longer range ballistic missiles.

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Cold War experience mistakenly suggested to some that nuclear weapons were self-deterring or nearly so. The United States and the Soviet Union, after going through steep learning curves about crisis management and nuclear operations in the 1950s and 1960s, developed “rules of the road” for strategic interaction. These rules included Hot Lines for direct communication between heads of state; use controls over weapons dispersed to the military; “fail safe” and other standard operating procedures for nuclear forces to reduce the risk of accidental or inadvertent nuclear use; separation of the early warning and response functions into different bureaucratic compartments (e.g., North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and Strategic Air Command (SAC)); and, most important, direct involvement of the political levels of the Department of Defense in defining the objectives for nuclear war plans. Although with different structures and policy controls, the Soviets also took measures to ensure against military usurpation of political decision-making or accidental nuclear war. These and other measures of nuclear control were intended to accomplish two apparently contradictory, but necessary, objectives. Leaders wanted to prevent the unauthorized or accidental firing of nuclear weapons; but, equally, they also wanted to ensure the prompt responsiveness of nuclear forces, if called upon to retaliate by duly authorized commands.7 Ensuring prompt responsiveness under attack meant, for US planners and policy makers, that the capability to retaliate would survive even the largest nuclear surprise attack. Only the US President could legally authorize the use of nuclear weapons, but the President might be killed or otherwise unavailable within the 15 minutes or so between missile launches from Soviet Central Asia and their arrival in North Dakota or Montana. Therefore, the chain of command had to be distributed or dispersed among variously located and redundant backups, in order to provide for surviving leaders who were both authorized and enabled to launch retaliatory strikes. The United States solved this problem by creating parallel structures for delegation of authority and devolution of command: the political line of succession under the Presidential Succession Act, and the military chain of command from the President to the Secretary of Defense, and then to various functional and regional unified and specified military commanders. Will the Asian nuclear powers of the twenty-first century have similar political and institutional controls over military operations in time of crisis or conventional war with the possibility of nuclear escalation? We know distressingly little about the command and control systems for nuclear

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weapons among existing, and possible future, post-Cold War proliferators. For the duration of the Cold War and most of the post-Cold War, until very recently, North Korea was an opaque target for intelligence collection and net assessment. Iran, although located in the Middle East, has potential geostrategic reach into Asia with its expanding ballistic missile program. Iran’s future nuclear weapons could presumably be held under the political control of its supreme religious council and/or its government— with its military, intelligence and other security organs mostly controlled by the former.8 Both Iran and Pakistan could be torn by political rivalries within their security and defense establishments that cut across bureaucratic lines of authority and responsibility. Conflict between Islamic fundamentalists and political reformers in both states could raise uncertainties about the crisis management of nuclear force and might leave commanders with de facto authority to fire or withhold weapons. Unstable command and control over nuclear forces could be joined at the hip to nationalist or religious hostility in Asia. During the Cold War, the Americans and Soviets competed on the basis of political ideology: communism versus capitalism. Both of these ideologies were rooted in Western philosophy and history and neither, with the exception of lunatic fringes on both sides, anticipated an inevitable final day of judgment between the two systems. Despite significant differences in military-­ strategic doctrine, the United States and the Soviet Union established an ongoing process of nuclear arms control that helped to stabilize their political relationship and to avoid conflicts based on misinformation and mistaken assumptions about one another’s intentions. In a sense, more than four decades of “nuclear learning” occurred as between the two nuclear superpowers that lasted to the very end of the Cold War and even beyond the demise of the USSR.9 In Asia, the next decade or two may witness the combination of absolute weapons in the hands of leaders with apocalyptic motivations or regionally hegemonic objectives. To be clear: it is not asserted here that the leaders of nuclear powers in Asia will be less “rational” than their European counterparts. Rationality is a loaded, and a subjective, term: in politics, it implies a logical or logically intended connection between political ends and means.10 Leaders in Asia will have political objectives that differ from those of the Cold War Americans and Soviets: not illogical in their own terms, but less road tested against accidental, inadvertent or deliberate escalation to nuclear war under the stress of political crisis and ambiguous intelligence.

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Military strategy is the realm of logical paradox and oxymoronic truths. Strategies and policies intended as defensive can, in this paradoxical world, appear provocative and offensive to other states. For example, leaders in Asia might misconstrue or apply mistakenly the strategy of preemption. Preemption is not an offensive strategy but a defensive one. It is motivated by the expectation that the opponent has already launched an attack or is about to. Preemption is dangerous on account of its “defensiveness”: leaders misperceive that they are already under attack based on deficient and misleading indicators of warning, or on mistaken assumptions about enemy intentions and capabilities.11 Another possible path to war based on twenty-first-century military realities is the deliberate use, or threatened use, of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. We noted already that this use might occur as part of “anti-access” or “area denial” strategies in Asia. Hostile powers could employ the threat of nuclear first use against American allies or forward deploying US forces in order to deter American intervention in the region, against their interests. This is an obvious stratagem for China to use in case it decides to forcibly disarm Taiwan or otherwise create a military fait accompli in the Western Pacific contrary to US interests.12 China would not need to use nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction in order to accomplish a number of its possible objectives in the region, absent US military intervention. The challenge for China would be to deter or defeat US military intervention in favor of Taiwan or another threatened interest. More accurate ballistic missiles of various ranges, improved air defenses and C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and expertise in cyberwar could augment Chinese access denial capabilities—with or without nuclear weapons.13 In addition, the combination of nuclear and cyber capabilities in a US-China confrontation could create a scenario of escalation from conventional war into a nuclear crisis. As Andrew Futter has noted: This is a particular concern given the fact that China is thought to share some parts of its C2 system for both nuclear and conventional forces. This risk is, in turn, likely to have implications for China’s ‘No First Use’ nuclear posture, particularly when cyber is combined with US ballistic missile defence plans and conventional global strike capabilities.14

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Nor is this all—some Chinese policy and strategy discussions suggest a potential for seamless transition from conventional to nuclear war, once an enemy has attacked China’s vital interests. China’s expectation is that the most important regional wars of the future will be conventional conflicts under the shadow of nuclear deterrence. Therefore China may adhere to a notion of “double deterrence” based on the combined or sequential use of conventional and nuclear missile brigades, with nuclear weapons as “a backstop to support conventional operations”.15 North Korea, whose small nuclear arsenal might also play an “access denial” role, is the best current example of an otherwise strategically insignificant state whose nukes have placed it in a pivotal position for regional stability. Without an agreement to verifiably dismantle its declared nuclear weapons capability, North Korea threatens serial production of nuclear weapons for access denial to the Americans, for political intimidation of South Korea and Japan, and for possible sale to third parties, including terrorists. The United States and South Korea could defeat North Korea in a war if it came to that, but such a war on any scale would be devastating for South Korean civilians. Therefore, Seoul prefers détente and an open door for eventual unification of the two Koreas, as opposed to coercive diplomatic or military pressure against Pyongyang. It may turn out that North Korea eventually abandons its apparent commitment to membership in the ranks of nuclear powers, although the 2017 nuclear saber rattling of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un was disconcerting in this respect. It is also too early to tell whether the P-5 plus one (the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany) agreement with Iran in 2015 to freeze its nuclear ambitions short of weaponization will have transitory or enduring effects. If these two cases slip the leash of nonproliferation, others are almost certain to follow, and the geostrategic logic of political rivalry in Asia and in the Middle East will be tightly bound up with a high probability of WMD, including nuclear, use. The United States and allied diplomacy with regard to actual and potential nuclear states in Asia will have to combine carrots with sticks in order to induce, or dissuade, a repeat performance of July and August 1914 but on a grander scale.16 A worst case scenario is not inevitable; there is no deterministic relationship between more weapons and a greater likelihood of bad decisions.17

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5.3   What to Do About North Korea: Denuking and What Else? US objectives include the denuclearization of North Korea, the deterrence of armed attack on South Korea or Japan, and the construction of a durable, deterrence-stable and crisis shock resistant security architecture for the Asia-Pacific region. This implies a regional security architecture in which the control of nuclear weapons spread is important, as is the diplomatic management of relations among the existing nuclear weapons states in Asia to ensure against deliberate or accidental-inadvertent nuclear first use.18 The denuclearization of North Korea cannot be accomplished in a single bilateral negotiation, nor as a fait accompli growing out of a militarily imposed solution.19 The negotiations that may result in the denuclearization of North Korea will, of necessity, involve other regional US partners and allies: including South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. This format will require consultation and collaboration among the five parties negotiating with Pyongyang as to their immediate, intermediate and longer range objectives. Denuclearization of North Korea will require the five negotiating partners to agree measures for continuing reassurance and stable deterrence. Reassurance starts with what North Korea wants most: a permanent end to the Korean war in the form of a peace treaty signed by the relevant powers (North and South Korea, the United States and China) and supported by the other negotiating partners (Russia and Japan) as well as the UN Security Council. The treaty should provide explicit acknowledgment of North Korea as a state member of the international community and renounce efforts at imposed regime change by outside powers. Absent such an agreement, North Korea has little or no incentive to provide concessions on military or other matters as a result of diplomatic negotiations. Denuclearization may be defined differently by North Korea compared to its five interlocutors in the six party framework (as above). For the United States, officials have stated the venerable formula of CVID (comprehensive, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement) of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and supporting infrastructure. It must be realized how ambitious this aim is. Without nuclear weapons or at least the capacity to promptly manufacture and deploy nuclear weapons, North Korea is a much less important international actor. Its leader Kim Jong-un vaulted himself into global prominence in 2017 precisely by a staccato of nuclear and missile

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tests and by explicit threats of nuclear attack against the United States and its regional allies. In addition, it is thought by military experts that, although the North Korean conventional military forces are large in size, they are inferior to those of South Korea in technology and in other ways. In any war between the two Koreas without the use of nuclear weapons, South Korea (presumably supported by the United States) would prevail. Therefore, the first step in any multilateral negotiation with North Korea is to agree the five partners on a gradualist strategy for DPRK denuclearization. The increments of a gradualist strategy might be as follows: (1) North Korea agrees to a moratorium on all nuclear and missile testing; (2) North Korea agrees to a road map for its future production of fissile materials, with limitations on the amounts of enriched uranium and weapons grade plutonium, as verified by international inspectors; (3) North Korea agrees to limitations on the numbers and ranges of its ballistic missiles; (4) North and South Korea agree to ongoing bilateral military to military professional exchanges, including shared observers at military exercises; (5) North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the United States agree on cooperative threat reduction measures in the Asia-­ Pacific theater to reduce the likelihood of any outbreak of conventional war or resort to nuclear coercion. These measures could include steps to avoid accidental or inadvertent naval engagements, air collisions, provocative military exercises, and-or declarations of hubristic no fly zones or expanded air identification zones. In addition to the conclusion of a peace treaty ending the Korean war (as above), parallel or reciprocal moves by the Five could be as follows: (1 reduction in the frequency and intensity of US-South Korean military exercises (but not their elimination—President Trump’s proferred concession on this point during the June 2018 summit with Kim Jong-un was unwise); (2) economic assistance to North Korea for food aid and infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, transportation, electrification, and environmental needs; for example, in the case of transportation, China and Russia agree to finance a “Silk Road–Korean extension” high speed rail and superhighway to carry Russian and Chinese exports through North Korea to South Korea (and Korean exports in reverse); (3) an aggressive program of cultural exchanges between the two Koreas and between North Korea and free market countries, including performances by theater groups and other artists as well as lecture series, student exchanges, research collaboration between academics, and an open door for investment partnerships; (4) admission of North Korea to the international banking system without

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restriction along with eligibility for development loans from IMF or other international financiers; along with this, encourage US and other free market economy states to establish business schools in North Korea (Wharton Pyongyang); (5) South and North Korea agree to talks on the possibility of reunification or, failing that, demilitarization of the Korean peninsula (to the extent of large-scale reductions in the capabilities of their offensive conventional military forces, including long-range air, artillery and missiles), supported by agreed transparency measures, possibly including regional or UN observers. Regardless the particular schedule for implementation of these or other measures, it will also be necessary to address specifically the wider problem of nuclear weapons spread in Asia. An Asian Nonproliferation and Nuclear Threat Reduction Council (ANNTRC) should be established among states in the region, supported by the UN and including NWS and NNWS that are shareholders or stakeholders in Asian-Pacific regional stability (shareholders live in the neighborhood or deploy significant military forces there—stakeholders are others whose economies or security are directly affected by Asian-Pacific stability or lack thereof). The Asian Nonproliferation and Nuclear Threat Reduction Council would be a forum for the discussion of issues and concerns about nuclear weapons spread and, as well, a possible template for constructive conflict avoidance, resolution or containment (in the case of dangerous incidents or outbreaks of regional war with the potential for nuclear escalation). Ultimately this council might be broadened in its mandate to include non-nuclear related security and stability issues: an Organization for Security and Cooperation in Asia (OSCA) modeled along the lines of the present OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe). A final consideration with respect to the achievement of US objectives in North Korea, including pacific settlement of the Korean war and denuclearization, is “preparation of the battlefield” with respect to the home front. The Trump administration must take care to involve not only the military-technical community of weapons specialists and brass hats, but also the larger spectrum of “attentive publics” that follow national security and defense policy. These include, for better or worse, the media and the US Congress. The media provide the lenses through which the public perceives the virtues or deficiencies of public policy. But networks and other news ­outlets, including pervasive bloggers and Websites, have their own institutional interests and political biases. As never before, the burden is on the

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citizen to separate the wheat from the chaff of “fake news” and disinformation. But too many people are dependent on social networks or rely on sources that provide “confirmation bias” for already established views. In the prevailing media environment, this creates the temptation for politicians to oversimplify complicated issues, substituting partisan volleys of blaming and shaming for informing the people. As for Congress, its dysfunctionality needs no advertising here. In recent decades, Congress has excelled at doing two things: conducting investigations, and buck passing. Relative to national defense and security policy, Congress must be informed in order to provide the necessary financial and other supports for the armed forces and for US diplomacy. But Congress is not well constructed to manage the details of policy implementation: that should be left to the relevant cabinet departments and their chains of command. Unfortunately, Congress likes getting down into weeds of policy implementation (investigations again!) and can get details horribly wrong (viz. Facebook hearings with repeated questions from members of Congress to “Mr. Zuckerman” or “Mr. Zuckerberger”). On the other hand, when Congress is in a mood to be responsible and has effective leadership on national security issues (think: Henry Jackson, or Sam Nunn), it can provide indispensable support for US policy that sustains favorable domestic public opinion and impresses foreign leaders with American national resolve. In short: bringing Congress, the media and the public along with respect to initiatives on the Korean peninsula is very important, however productive of frustration and insomnia. As Professor Colin Gray has well explained, strategy is the bridge that connects policy objectives with military operational art and tactics.20 Policy results from politics, that is, from the outcomes of domestic politics, whether in a democracy or a dictatorship. In the US case, domestic politics are challenging for Presidents who want to sustain a protracted foreign policy initiative, including military interventions. The Trump administration will have no choice but to navigate carefully this minefield of domestic obstacles in order to sustain a set of favorable outcomes in dealing with North Korea and other Asian powers. The next section provides some operational definitions for variables and models one possible, although not necessarily inevitable, Asian nuclear arms race if proliferation is not contained.

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5.4   Proliferation in Asia The Cast of Characters In this section, a model of eight existing and potential nuclear weapons states in Asia, between now and 2025–2030, is posited for heuristic purposes. It is not a point prediction, but a device for generating hypotheses and insights. The states in question include the acknowledged and de facto nuclear weapons states with strong military presence in Asia: the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea. In addition, nuclear weapons have also spread to the following nuclear-­threatened or nuclear-aspiring states in Asia: Japan and South Korea. These assumptions might be falsified in the future: more, or fewer, states in Asia might acquire nuclear weapons in the next 15 years or so. However, for ascertaining the effects of interactions among Asian powers with respect to nuclear deterrence, these selections appear to be substantively appropriate. Measuring the relationship between nuclear capabilities and their contribution to deterrence involves several steps, carried out in the next section. Hypothetical nuclear forces are posited for these eight possible nuclear armed states in 2025–2030 and are subjected to force exchange modeling in order to see how well they would be expected to perform under various conditions. From these findings, some hypotheses and generalizations about stability in a future multipolar nuclear Asia can be inferred. Forces and Outcomes For purposes of analysis, a notional force mix of land-based missiles, sea-­ based missiles and bomber delivered weapons is assigned to each of the eight states. Over-specification and excessive detail for each arsenal would be mistaken, for several reasons. First, the precise weapons systems deployed by each power in the years ahead will be determined by their future threat perceptions, economic and technological capabilities, and political ideologies and affinities. In addition, for states with intra-regional rivalries, landbased missiles and bombers with short or medium ranges suffice to deliver “strategic” blows as well as the longer range intermediate and intercontinental launchers. Third, not every state may prefer a “triad” of land- and sea-based missiles and bombers, but we have assigned each state in the analysis a “triad” of sorts in order to “level the playing field” of force sur-

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vivability. For these and other reasons, our notional forces are broad gauged composites and not point predictions about detailed capabilities. Chart 5.1 summarizes the sizes of the operationally deployed strategic (i.e., capable of strategic or decisive effect) weapons for each state. The sizes of their total forces and their mixes of launchers vary with our estimates of their future capabilities and strategic settings. For example: states with large national territory (Russia, China) can deploy land-based missiles more survivably than states with less territory (Japan). And states with advanced technology can deploy with more confidence a fleet of ballistic missile submarines than states with a less developed research and development capability. In the second step of the analysis, each of the notional prewar forces in Chart 5.1 is subjected to counterforce first strikes from state or states “X” (unknown). The surviving and retaliating forces left to each state after absorbing a first strike are calculated using standard methodology for estimating how many land-based missiles (ICBMs or missiles of shorter range), submarine-launched missiles (SLBMs), or bomber delivered ­ weapons remain. Although we do not know the exact identity of future attackers 900 800

Total Strategic Weapons

700 600 500 400 300 200 100 0

Russian Japanese PRC Forces Forces Forces ICBM 772 0 250 SLBM 512 96 96 AIR 636 100 180

DPRK Forces 50 24 88

ROK Forces 25 24 88

Indian Pakistan U.S. Forces Forces Forces 150 140 800 64 64 480 180 160 640

Chart 5.1  Asian nuclear arms race: total strategic weapons

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against any one or more of these states, analysts can estimate with reasonable confidence (based on historical studies and knowledge of weapons and command-control system performances) the probable percentages of surviving weapons systems in each case. The methodology used here is extrapolated from road tested force exchange models used in other studies.21 As might be expected, the larger forces have more total survivable and retaliating warheads, compared to the smaller prewar forces. However, not all weapons systems survive equally. Much depends on each state’s mix of launch platforms and, as well, the conditions under which retaliatory launch takes place. Four possible conditions are examined in the charts: (1) forces are on generated alert and launched on warning; (2) forces are on generated alert, but are launched only after riding out an attack: (3) forces are on day-to-day or normal peacetime alert, but are launched on warning of attack; and, (4) forces are on day-to-day alert and ride out the attack. Also in Chart 5.2, the numbers of surviving and retaliating weapons for each state are summarized under each of the four conditions listed immediately above. 1800

Arriving Retaliatory Weapons

1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0

Russian Japanese PRC DPRK Forces Forces Forces Forces

ROK Indian Pakistan U.S. Forces Forces Forces Forces

GEN, LOW

1573

151

434

129

104

305

294

1575

GEN, ROA

1018

151

231

88

86

195

213

927

DAY, LOW

973

52

277

58

24

132

136

798

DAY, ROA

418

52

75

18

4

17

18

111

Chart 5.2  Asian nuclear arms race: surviving and retaliating warheads

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Preliminary Findings and Indications Several conclusions follow from the preceding analysis. First, strategies matter. States can guarantee larger numbers of surviving and retaliating warheads against plausible first strikes by alerting more forces sooner or by launching “on warning”. However, these operational predilections may be destabilizing from the perspective of secure crisis management. On the other hand, military planners will press for alerted and rapidly launched forces as an alternative to losing their deterrents. For example: although, apart from the United States, Russia is and will probably remain as the largest fish in the Asian nuclear pond, its long range air forces are at risk under any conditions of day to day alert. So, too, are those of its partners and rivals in Asia. Second, force structures also matter. Sea-based missiles are more survivable than land-based missiles. Where states can afford to build, deploy and control a ballistic missile submarine force, it improves survivability and reduces their dependency on hair trigger alert or launch postures. An alternative to Fleet ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) forces for smaller or less developed economies is cruise missiles. Cruise missiles can be based at sea on surface ships or on submarines, on aircraft or on land. They are “slow fliers” compared to ballistic missile “fast fliers” and highly survivable because of their flexible deployments and small signatures. Deployed in sufficient numbers and on diverse platforms, cruise missiles could preclude first strike vulnerability for even the smallest nuclear states. And cruise missiles are highly accurate. Third, nuclear war is unlikely to occur by means of a surprise attack “out of the blue” absent prior political confrontation. Therefore, states’ forces will, in most instances of nuclear crisis management, already be highly alerted. The most probable decision among operational postures as listed above will be that between riding out the attack and retaliating or launching on warning of attack. The results summarized in Chart 5.2 show that all states suffer a considerable penalty by waiting to ride out the attack as opposed to launching on warning of attack. However, the same charts also show that, even after riding out an attack on generated alert, each state retains numerous surviving and retaliating weapons. So, in the most likely “real world” situation of riding out an attack (with alerted forces), the smaller as well as the larger nuclear powers can guarantee unprecedented societal damage to any rational attacker. However, states with relatively large survivable arsenals, compared to states with smaller forces, have additional flexibility and resilience that may, under certain circumstances, be important for deterrence or post-conflict termination.

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Fourth, the quality of national military command and control systems matters a great deal in maintaining nuclear stability with eight, or fewer, nuclear powers in Asia. Command and control systems must provide for negative control against accidents or usurpation of authority, and for secure positive control to guarantee at least minimum or assured retaliation. Nuclear command and control systems are based on the soft power of knowledge intensive technologies instead of the hard power of metal and mass. Disorganized or rigid command-control systems may push decision-­makers into unnecessary reliance on simplified options and fast triggers. Political accountability, especially during a nuclear crisis, matters just as much. Whose fingers are on the button in, for example, North Korea, or Pakistan? Who is in charge? Who has the authority and control to start a war—or to end one? The answers to these questions may determine the prospects for peace in Asia.

5.5   Conclusions The situation in North Korea is obviously nuclear Asia’s most immediate flash point. Post-summit negotiations between the DPRK and the United States, among others, must clarify the following issues. First, does North Korea really desire integration into the international state system as a legitimate actor whose promissory notes can be turned into real guarantees for peace and security? Second, how much nuclear transparency and denuclearization is North Korea prepared to accept, and what kinds of side payments and trade-offs will the DPRK expect in return? Third, what does China want or expect to get out of North Korea’s nuclear negotiations, and how do China’s expectations and strategies influence US bargaining positions and options? Beyond the issue of pacific settlement and denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, the possibility of regional arms races in Asia and elsewhere increases the significance of the nuclear paradox in American defense planning. From one perspective, US nuclear modernization is required, not only to deter nuclear attack or blackmail against the United States, but also to prevent coercion or war against its regional non-nuclear allies. Withdrawal of the American nuclear umbrella and the extended deterrence provided by superior US nuclear forces could increase the risk of war in strategic Asia.22 On the other hand, the United States must also pursue with Russia (and perhaps others) nuclear arms limitation and reduction agreements: otherwise, the spread of nuclear weapons to new state and possibly non-state actors will be encouraged.

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Juggling the requirements for credible deterrence in Asia with the equally clear imperative for nonproliferation will be sufficiently challenging for policy makers and theorists. Neither a balance of power model nor a balance of terror model can predict with assurance whether nuclear Asia will be stable or unstable. Even if fewer than eight states in Asia become nuclear weapons states, the problems of crisis management and escalation control, growing out of clashes between conventional armed forces, become harder to manage. Cold War Europe offered favorable terrain for the exercise of Schelling’s “manipulation of risk” or brinkmanship as between nuclear armed state actors: post-Cold War Asia is, comparatively speaking, terra incognita.23

Notes 1. See: Michael Morrell, “North Korea may already be able to launch a nuclear attack on the U.S.,” Washington Post, September 6, 2017, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/north-korea-may-already-be-ableto-launch-a-nuclear-attack-on-the-us/2017/09/06/ce375080-932511e7-8754-d478688d23b4_story.htm; Elisabeth Eaves, “North Korean nuclear test shows steady advance: interview with Siegfried Hecker,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 7, 2017, http://thebulletin. org/north-korean-nuclear-test-shows-steady-advance-interview-siegfriedhecker11091; Graham Allison, “The North Korean Threat Beyond ICBMs,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/ international/archive/2017/08/north-korea-nuclear-kim-obamachina/538194/; and Angela Dewan, Taehoon Lee and Eli Watkins, “Mattis Warns of ‘massive military response’ to NK nuclear threat,” CNN, September 3, 2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/03/politics/ trump-north-korea-nuclear/index.html 2. James Griffiths, “North and South Korea vow to end the Korean War in historic accord,” CNN, April 27,2018, https://www.cnn. com/2018/04/27/asia/korean-summit-intl/index.html 3. For example: Mark Landler and Eileen Sullivan, “Trump Pulls Out of North Korea Summit Meeting with Kim Jong-un,” New York Times, May 24, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/world/asia/northkorea-trump-summit.html. In less than a week, however, the United States and North Korea indicated renewed interest in holding the summit, which took place June 12, 2018. See Mark Landler, “The Trump-Kim Summit Was Unprecedented, But the Statement Was Vague,” New York Times, June 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/world/asia/ north-korea-summit.html; and Mark Landler, “Trump and Kim See New

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Chapter for Nations After Summit,” New York Times, June 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/world/asia/trump-kim-summitmeeting.html 4. Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New World Politics. (New York: Henry Holt and Co./Times Books, 2012). See also: Bracken, Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), esp. pp. 95–124. 5. Schools of thought on nuclear proliferation are categorized and summarized in Henry D. Sokolski, Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute and U.S.  Army War College Press, January 2016), esp. pp. 4–29. For case studies of states that have chosen to forego nuclear weapons, see: Richard D. Burns and Philip E. Coyle III, The Challenges of Nuclear Non-Proliferation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), pp. 161–189. See also: William C. Potter, “The Diffusion of Nuclear Weapons,” in Emily O.  Goldman and Leslie C. Eliason, eds., The Diffusion of Military Technology and Ideas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 146–178. 6. See, for example, Alexey Timofeychev, “Is NATO’s antimissile defense system in Europe a threat to Russia?”, Russia Beyond the Headlines, www. rbth.ru, May 16, 2016, in Johnson’s Russia List 2016  – #87  – May 16, 2016, [email protected], and “US Missile Defense in Eastern Europe: How Russia Will Respond,” Sputnik, May 16, 2016, in Johnson’s Russia List 2016  – #87  – May 16, 2016, [email protected]; and, “U.S.  Activates Romanian Missile Defense Site, Angering Russia,” Reuters, May 12, 2016, in Johnson’s Russia List 2016  – #85  – May 12, 2016, [email protected] 7. Peter Douglas Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 12, refers to this as the “always/never problem”. 8. The nuclear agreement of July 2015 between Iran and the P-5+1 member states (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) slows the pace of Iran’s nuclear program and delays its weaponization, but it does not preclude the possibility of eventual weaponization. See: Dalia Dassa Kaye, Lynn E. Davis, Alireza Nader, Jeffrey Martini and Larry Hanauer, RAND Experts Q&A on the Iran Nuclear Deal, One Year Later (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, July 14, 2016), http:// www.rand.org/blog/2016/07/rand-experts-qa-on-the-iran-nucleardeal-one-year-later.html, downloaded July 15, 2016. See also: David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon, “Iran Nuclear Deal Is Reached With World Powers,” New York Times, July 14, 2015, http://www.nytimes. com/2015/07/15/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-deal-is-reachedwith-world-powers.html, downloaded July 14, 2015. For the text of the

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Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Vienna, Austria: July 14, 2015), see European Union, European External Action Service, Homepage, http:// eeas.europa.eu/index_en.htm, downloaded July 15, 2015. 9. Raymond L.  Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994), esp. pp. 503–541 and pp. 751–778. 10. Rationality in this sense refers to actors’ expected-utility maximization, assuming no value judgment about their preferences. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 29–33. 11. As Colin S. Gray has noted, “To preempt is to launch an attack against an attack that one has incontrovertible evidence is either actually underway or has been ordered. In such a context, the only policy and strategy question is, “Do we try to strike first in order to try to lessen the blow, or do we receive the blow and strike back?” See Gray, The Implications of Preemptive and Preventive War Doctrines: A Reconsideration (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studied Institute, U.S. Army War College, July 2007), p. 9. Preemption and preventive war can also be understood as part of a family of anticipatory self-­ defense strategies. See Karl P.  Mueller, et  al., Striking First: Preemptive and Preventive Attack in U.S. National Security Policy (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2006), pp. 6–10 and passim. 12. Evolving Chinese nuclear strategy and its implications for US policy are traced in Brad Roberts, The Case for U.S.  Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016), pp. 141–175. 13. Scenarios for conventional war between the United States and China are considered in David C.  Gompert, Astrid Stuth Cevallos, and Cristina L.  Garafola, War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2016, www.rand.org. On China’s development of A2/AD, see: Christopher P. Twomey, “What’s in a Name: Building Anti-Access/Area Denial Capabilities without Anti-Access/Area Denial Doctrine,” Ch. 4  in Roy Kampenhausen, David Lai, and Travis Tanner, eds., Assessing the People’s Liberation Army in the Hu Jintao Era (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S.  Army War College Press, April 2014), pp. 129–170. See also, for expert assessment: Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S.  AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia,” International Security, no. 1 (Summer, 2016), pp. 7–48, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC.a.20049 14. Andrew Futter, Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons: New Questions for Command and Control, Security and Strategy (London: Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) for Defence and Security Studies, 2016), p. 30. 15. Roberts, The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, p. 168.

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16. For parallels, see David Ignatius, “History shows us how calamitous the North Korea crisis could become,” Washington Post, September 5, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/historyshows-us-how-calamitous-the-north-korea-crisis-could-become/ 2017/09/05/a7263d38-9282-11e7-89fa-bb822a46da5b_story.html 17. For arguments on both sides of the issue whether nuclear weapons spread will increase the probability of nuclear war, see Scott D.  Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). See also: Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 18. What follows draws upon my contribution to: George Popp, editor, How the US Can Work with Its Partners to Contest DPRK Operations, A Virtual Think Tank (ViTTa) Report, Produced in support of the Strategic Multilayer Assessment Office (SMA) Office (Joint Staff, J39), August 2018. Also useful on this topic is: Anastasia Barannikova, “What Russia thinks about North Korea’s nuclear weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 24, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/04/what-russiathinks-about-north-koreas-nuclear-weapons/ 19. Levite, Ariel (Eli) and George Perkovich, “Three Ways to Break the Stalemate with North Korea,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, July 11, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/07/11/ three-ways-to-break-stalemate-with-north-korea-pub-79496. See also: William J.  Broad and David E.  Sanger, “North Korea Nuclear Disarmament Could Take 15 Years, Expert Warns,” New York Times, May 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/us/politics/northkorea-nuclear-disarmament-could-take-15-years-expert-warns.html 20. Colin S. Gray, The Future of Strategy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), esp. pp. 23–42. 21. The author gratefully acknowledges Dr. James Scouras for use of his AWSM@ model for making calculations and drawing charts. He is not responsible for modifications or applications in this study. For additional information, see Stephen J. Cimbala and James Scouras, A New Nuclear Century: Strategic Stability and Arms Control (New York: Praeger Publishers, 2002), pp. 25–73. 22. Roberts, The Case for U.S.  Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century, pp. 197–213. 23. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2008 edition), esp. pp. 99–105.

CHAPTER 6

The Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review and Presidential Nuclear Prerogative

6.1   Introduction This chapter considers two faces of the relationship between the US President and nuclear weapons. First, the President, as commander-in-­ chief of the armed forces, and as head of the executive branch of government, is responsible for setting the basic parameters of US national security and defense policy. This includes the establishment of policies for the development, management, control, and, if necessary, use of nuclear forces. Second, with regard to the decision for nuclear first strike or retaliation, the President, and only the President, can authorize the use of nuclear weapons, unless the President has been killed or otherwise incapacitated. In that case, an order of succession spelled out in the 25th amendment to the US Constitution provides for political authority, alongside surviving elements of the US military chain of command. The following discussion considers these two aspects of Presidential nuclear responsibility, for the establishment of broad policy guidelines, and for having the “finger on the button” (actually a briefcase), with reference to the Donald J. Trump administration. First, we analyze the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review with respect to its guidance about nuclear force development and its other policy implications. Second, we consider whether the Trump administration might be more prone to nuclear preemption or improvisation compared to its nuclear-age predecessors, and if so, what remedies might be available.

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6.2   The Trump Nuclear Posture Review President Donald J. Trump’s Nuclear Posture Review is especially important because of its timing and contents.1 Together with the administration’s national security strategy and other documents related to defense and security policy, the Nuclear Posture Review offers both continuity and change with respect to the Obama administration’s policy statements and guidelines. The following discussion focuses on some of the Trump administration’s proposed changes in nuclear policy and force structure planning and their implications for US national security and arms control. First, the Trump administration plans to deploy new lower-yield warheads, including weapons for use on Trident II D-5 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The expectation is that this would provide additional targeting options for the most survivable arm of the strategic nuclear triad. New warheads for Trident missiles might be a low as one to two kilotons (kt), as opposed to 100 kt or more, allowing for more discrimination in target selection and less collateral damage in case of actual use. Second, a new nuclear-capable sea-launched cruise missile (SLCM) would be developed and deployed. Nuclear armed SLCMs were previously deployed by the United States until 2011 when the program was cancelled. The assumption is that the nuclear SLCM would provide additional non-strategic nuclear response capability that is rapidly deployable in theater conflicts in Europe or Asia. These capabilities would contribute to US nuclear reassurance of allies who might otherwise be more vulnerable to nuclear blackmail. Sea-launched nuclear missiles could also support arms control: they would be neither first strike vulnerable nor suitable for preemptive attacks. The possible deployment of nuclear SLCMs could also be used as bargaining chips as against Russian departure from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and resulting deployment of additional non-strategic nuclear weapons in European Russia.2 On the other hand, expert analysts have warned that new sea-based nuclear weapons can have drawbacks with respect to deterrence and arms race stability. According to Lawrence J. Korb: Because the United States already has a sub-launched conventional cruise missile, adding a nuclear cruise missile to the inventory means the Russians would have to assume any (submarine-launched) cruise missile is in fact a nuclear weapon. And finally, producing new small-­ yield nuclear weapons could provoke an arms race in that realm – even

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though the United States already possesses 1000 low-yield nuclear weapons, including the B-61 bomb and an air-launched cruise missile that can deliver yields between 0.3 to 170 kilotons.3

Third, the Trump administration foresees an increased probability for a nuclear response to a strategic non-nuclear attack: for example, cyberattacks that might cause large numbers of US or allied casualties; widespread destruction of critical infrastructure, including electric power grids, communications and digital control systems; and, especially, cyberattacks against components of the nuclear command, control, and communications (C3) and early warning systems. Of course, this assumes that the problem of attribution of the source for any such cyberattack could be solved with sufficient clarity—no small challenge.4 Fourth, Trump nuclear planning guidance assumes that a wider spectrum of nuclear capabilities is necessary to improve deterrence of Russia and China. Russia and China are also identified in national security documents as US peer competitors and as systemic disrupters that constitute the main threats to international stability and future American security. This recognition in the NPR and other documents of a return to great power rivalry as the fulcrum of military-strategic activity, including deterrence, explicitly embraces political realism as the preferred model for interpreting international politics. Administration planners are especially concerned about Russian and Chinese temptations to “escalate for de-escalation”: to engage in limited nuclear first use in order to prevent defeat in a conventional war, in the expectation that the other side would back down. This line of thinking follows the arguments of some expert analysts that effective deterrence now requires greater attention to threats posed by diverse adversaries and contexts, including the possible exploitation of limited nuclear threats and-or nuclear coercion by great powers and rogue states.5 The Nuclear Posture Review addresses the concern that a larger spectrum of nuclear weapons could make decision-makers more prone to engage in nuclear first use, as follows: To be clear, this is not intended to, nor does it enable, “nuclear war-­ fighting.” Expanding flexible U.S. nuclear options now, to include lowyield options, is important for the preservation of credible deterrence against regional aggression. It will raise the nuclear threshold and help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible ­advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely.6

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On the other hand, whether the availability of a wider range of nuclear yields will increase the likelihood of escalation control is dependent not so much on military-technical factors as on political ones. It is unpredictable before the fact whether the “deterree” on the receiving end of an intentionally limited nuclear attack will interpret these strikes as deliberately controlled bargaining measures or as preludes to a more ambitious symphony of destruction. Fifth, there is little apparent emphasis on the importance of nuclear arms control, including extension of the New START strategic nuclear arms reduction treaty (signed in 2010 and expiring in 2021 unless extended to 2026 by mutual agreement). Trump’s position on New START extension is unclear. Also with respect to nuclear arms control, the United States and Russia are possibly on a path of permanent departure from one of the most important arms limitation agreements of the previous century: the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty that has prevented for decades the development and deployment of US and Soviet or Russian ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles within the ranges of 500–5500 kilometers. Some Russians now regard this treaty as obsolete and argue that INF has increased Russia’s vulnerability to neighboring states with growing inventories of ballistic missiles. As well, Russia views NATO enlargement and US missile defense deployments in Europe as provocative to its security and requiring a larger menu of usable nuclear weapons and launchers deployed in Europe. On the other hand, the United States and NATO regard Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of eastern Ukraine, together with Russia’s frequent reminders of its nuclear capabilities with respect to perceived threats from the United States and NATO, as provocative and destabilizing of European security and therefore requiring enhanced NATO preparedness across the spectrum of deterrence. Sixth, there is not much apparent interest in the topic of nonproliferation, with the exception of North Korea and Iran. Trump wants to scuttle the Iran deal or revise it, which puts the United States at potential odds with the other members of the P-5 plus Germany who are co-signatories to the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Program of Action).7 Supporters of the Iran nuclear deal feel that abrogation of the agreement would actually increase the risk of Iran eventually becoming a nuclear weapons state. Critics of the Iran nuclear deal argue that it merely slows down Iran’s march to the bomb and allows Iran to move closer to the status of a virtual

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nuclear weapons state, meanwhile expanding its inventory of long-range missiles with reach across the Middle East and into Europe. Seventh, the nuclear modernization plan to support the Trump policy review accepts the Obama modernization plan committing an estimated $1.2 trillion over 30 years, plus new weapons proposed by Trump.8 The Trump NPR modernization will maintain all three legs of the current strategic nuclear “triad” of intercontinental land-based missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and bombers. The NPR notes that eliminating any leg of the triad would “greatly ease adversary attack planning” and “allow an adversary to concentrate resources and attention on defeating the remaining two legs”.9 Ohio class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) will eventually be replaced by Columbia class SSBNs, maintaining at least 12 SSBNs available throughout the transition. The US ICBM force of Minuteman III missiles will be replaced beginning in 2029 by the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD), including the modernization of some 450 launch facilities supporting a deployed ICBM force of 400 missiles.10 The administration also plans to deploy a next-­ generation strategic bomber (the B-21 Raider) that will eventually replace elements of the conventional and nuclear-capable bomber force, beginning in the mid-2020s. Currently the bomber leg of the triad consists of 46 nuclear-capable B-52H and 20 nuclear-capable B-2A strategic bombers.11 Critics have questioned whether a new strategic bomber and a replacement for the ALCM (air-launched cruise missile) called the Long-­ Range Stand-Off (LRSO) cruise missile are both necessary, and whether a new land-based missile is needed to replace Minuteman III or, instead, Minuteman can be refurbished at lower cost.12 Eighth, ignored, or virtually so, is the accelerating risk of war due to accident or miscalculation, especially in Asia but also in Europe as between Russia and NATO.13 Too many US and Russian nuclear missiles remain on hair trigger alert, according to some expert analysts: others dismiss this as a serious problem. Cold War history shows that in times of peace or crisis leaders may misperceive warning information or misinterpret the behavior of their counterparts. Future warning and command-control systems may invite attack on themselves unless they are protected against prompt cyberattacks or lurking malware inserted prior to the eruption of a crisis. Ninth, a separate document addresses Trump administration plans for missile defenses.14 Nevertheless, the status of missile defense within the larger compass of US policy on nuclear modernization, arms reductions and nonproliferation requires further specification. Currently US missile

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defenses provide some protection of the American homeland against limited strikes or light attacks, but more sophisticated attacks, such as those posed by Russia or China, would arguably defeat the ground-based midcourse defense (GMD) system based in Alaska and California. More favorable expectations are held for theater missile defenses deployed in Europe as part of the EPAA (European Phased Adaptive Approach) and in Asia, based on Aegis technology and deployable on land or at sea. Russia regards US-NATO missile defenses deployed in Eastern Europe as destabilizing to its nuclear deterrent and as potential launchers for NATO missile strikes against Russia. US officials and expert analysts doubt that European-based missile defenses pose any serious threat to Russian strategic nuclear second-­ strike capability. Russian President Vladimir Putin has since 2007 used US and NATO European-based missile defenses as talking points in his case for Western encirclement of Russia and its “near abroad”. Notwithstanding these political developments, technical performance of missile defenses may improve relative to offenses, with future injections of smart technology: including “left of launch” cyberattacks against missile launch controls, or smarter and stealthier loitering drones with air to ground missiles for boost phase defense. Tenth, and more abstract. A case can be made for the arrival of Cognitive Deterrence as an umbrella term to refer to present and future challenges to nuclear stability and security. To some extent deterrence has always been about psychology and mind games, as the works of noted theorists such as Robert Jervis and Thomas Schelling have explained.15 On the other hand, at the level of applied science and military-strategic planning, many past issues of deterrence were argued about in terms of hardware: numbers and kinds of launchers, warheads, re-entry vehicles, and the physics or engineering of their performance parameters. Future deterrence discussions must also take into account the priority of software and network security. The scope of such discussions will include the potential for flawed or degraded networks and nuclear C3 systems to fail the required crisis management, intra-war deterrence or conflict termination “stress tests”.16 “Deterrence” old style is a difficult term to apply in cyberspace, and cyberspace itself is not holding still.17 Formerly cyberspace was conceived as just another domain for which military leaders had to plan for deterrence and defense. But cyberspace has the potential to evolve into the master narrative of military-strategic behavior by default: the history of military-technical revolutions in the United States is rich with illustrations of techno-fixation triumphing over strategy. The nexus among policy,

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strategy and military operations (ends, ways and means) is vulnerable to disruption at both ends of the “strategy bridge” as Colin Gray has described it.18 Plans for nuclear deterrence and arms control must fit within a policy-strategy-operations continuum that recognizes the uniqueness of nuclear danger and the need for strategic discipline in deterrence and arms control practice.

6.3   Restraining Presidential Power: Nuclear First Strike and North Korea James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) under President Barack Obama, expressed concern during an interview on national television August 23, 2017, about President Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button. Clapper noted that he questioned Trump’s ability and “fitness” to hold the presidency and said he worried about the president’s access to the nuclear codes. According to Clapper: “If, in a fit of pique, he decides to do something about Kim Jong Un, there’s very little to stop him”.19 With respect to the US nuclear deterrent, Clapper added: “The whole system is built to ensure rapid response if necessary. So there’s very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary”.20 Although not the first to question Trump’s fitness for office, Clapper’s experience in high-level intelligence and national security positions attracted special notice to his comments. Former Director Clapper was not offering a medical diagnosis from a distance, or so I assume. He was calling attention to the structure of the US decision-making process with respect to authorizing the use of nuclear weapons. In addition, the rapidly deteriorating situation with respect to North Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) tests on July 4 and 28, 2017, and the DPRK’s repeated threats to attack the American homeland, or other targets on US national territory, created for the first time since the Cold War an expectation of imminent nuclear danger. According to press reports, top Trump administration national security decision-makers, including the President and his then national security advisor Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, discussed the option of preventive war against North Korea if diplomacy fails and nuclear risks increase. Gen. McMaster in an August 2017 television interview asked rhetorically: “Are we preparing for a preventive war?” and defined the term as “a war that would prevent North Korea from threatening the United States with a

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nuclear weapon?”21 Answering his own question, McMaster added: “The president’s been very clear about it. He said he’s not going to tolerate North Korea being able to threaten the United States”.22 (President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un have since participated in several exercises in head of state summitry, decreasing President Trump’s immediate fears of any nuclear attack from North Korea, but this off-and­on summitry has failed to produce a viable agreement on North Korean denuclearization, and North Korea has continued ballistic missile testing in violation of UN resolutions. The context for the remarks about preventive war may have included an element of deliberate stagecraft or bluffing on the part of US officials. Nor is it necessarily specified in these discussions that a preventive strike would include nuclear weapons, as opposed to an attack with conventional weapons only. At first blush, it might be thought that an American first strike using nuclear weapons against North Korea would be repugnant to policy makers and to the American public. But much would depend upon the specifics of the scenario. If, for example, North Korea had already attacked an American ally like Japan or South Korea with nuclear weapons, a US nuclear first strike against North Korea could be explained as a retaliatory attack following North Korean nuclear aggression. One academic study of US public opinion about the use of nuclear weapons reportedly found that the American public is “unlikely to serve as a serious constraint on any president who might consider using nuclear weapons in the crucible of war”.23 Preemption or Prevention? Lost in some of the discussion is the significance of the distinction between “preemptive” war and “preventive” attacks. Preemption is a first strike in the last resort. It is based on convincing intelligence that an enemy attack is either imminent or in progress. In contrast, a preventive war is undertaken in advance of any immediate threat, but in the expectation that, sooner or later, an attack is bound to materialize because of the evident hostility and capability of another state. Nuclear preemption is thus a strategically defensive move, whereas nuclear preventive war is an offensive one.24 Another difference is that presumably the decision for nuclear preemption would have to be made in a short time and under considerable duress by a state leadership. For example, nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missiles could be expected to reach their intended targets within

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approximately 30 minutes (from Russia to the United States or vice versa). Submarine-launched ballistic missiles and sea-launched cruise missiles, depending upon their launch points, could arrive at their intended targets in half the time required for ICBM flight to target. If the United States chose to retaliate before US weapons or the US nuclear command and control system were significantly degraded by an attack, then the requirements for identifying, assessing, communicating, deciding and launching would leave the US President with fewer than 10 minutes to absorb information, review options and make a decision.25 Presidential launch orders do not require concurrence from either the military or Congress, and neither Congress nor the military can overrule such an order.26 In contrast to a decision for preemption or retaliation, a decision for preventive war would be discussed and debated over a longer period of time and perhaps within a wider circle of participants. A nuclear preventive strike in the absence of any imminent attack would require the United States to walk away from its historical traditions and, as well, aspects of international law to which the United States is committed. In general, the United States recognizes three kinds of situations in which the use of military force against or within another state is permitted. First, the United Nations Security Council may authorize the use of force, under its mandate to deal with threats to the peace and for peace enforcement. Second, the United States may be under attack or imminent threat of attack (against either itself or allies. Third, the use of force by the United States within another state may take place with the consent of that state (e.g., in counterterror or counterinsurgency operations on behalf of the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan). None of these three categories fits a nuclear first strike justified as a preventive war.27 Apart from its legal implications, an American nuclear first strike would provide an historical turning point against the previously held taboo against nuclear first use. The durability of nuclear deterrence as a guarantor of peace would be called into question. Russia’s military doctrine that accepts the use of low-yield theater nuclear weapons under certain conditions, in order to “de-escalate” a conventional war that is otherwise going unfavorably for Russia, would receive a booster shot.28 And the collateral effects of a US nuclear attack on North Korea could be felt by neighboring countries, including US allies as well as Russia and China. It is difficult to imagine that Chinese-American relations would ever be the same ­thereafter. A Chinese nuclear military buildup would almost certainly follow, together

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with a more assertive military posture overall in the South China Sea and other regions of potential conflict. Most important of all, with respect to a US nuclear preventive strike, would be the humanitarian consequences in North Korea and elsewhere in the region. Nuclear weapons even used in “surgical” attacks create unprecedented societal destruction along with their intended military effects.29 Thus, in the aftermath of nuclear strikes against North Korea, surviving populations in the DPRK will attempt to migrate across the borders with China, Russia and South Korea. China has already anticipated that this will happen in the case of a large-scale conventional war, notwithstanding a nuclear one. China can be expected to deploy significant military forces across its border into North Korea in order to forestall these and other side effects of any war on the Korean peninsula. Another question about a US nuclear first strike against North Korea is what its objectives would be. It would hardly be worth taking such a dramatic step unless confidence was high that North Korea’s regime and nuclear infrastructure, including weapons, launchers and command-­ control systems, could be destroyed, and its conventional military strength seriously weakened. Otherwise North Korea could strike back with a nuclear attack on a US ally or a massive conventional attack on South Korea. So let’s suppose that the preventive nuclear attack is “successful” in that the regime crumbles, its nuclear weapons complex is effectively destroyed, and its massive army has lost a considerable amount of its personnel, equipment and fighting power. This scenario would leave undetermined the question of who governs in North Korea. Competing factions could joust for control of remaining military assets. The international community would almost certainly need to put together what the US military calls an operation for “post-conflict stability and reconstruction”. This would, of necessity, have to involve interested parties in the region, including South Korea, Russia and China. An immediate political issue would be whether North Korea would be reconstituted as a separate country or absorbed into a reunified Korea dominated by the Republic of Korea (South Korea) (ROK). China would probably want to maintain North Korea as a separate buffer state between China and South Korea. On the other hand, the United States might favor unification under terms that made the former North Korea a regional component of an all-­Korean republic.

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Decision-Making and Constitutional Process Many scenarios are possible in the aftermath of a preventive strike against North Korea with nuclear weapons. Another relevant issue has to do with the character of American constitutional practice and the policy-making process. How would the US military chain of command react to a Presidential order to launch a preventive, as opposed to a preemptive, nuclear attack on North Korea? The Commander-in-Chief power assigned to the President implies that the President has the right, if not the duty, to authorize a preemptive nuclear (or conventional) military attack in the presence of a validated attack in progress or imminent. Within that context, a Presidential authorization for a nuclear first strike, in the presence of an enemy nuclear attack or in the expectation of an immediate enemy strike, would be a defensive measure under the immediate circumstances. If the enemy attack had already been launched, then the US strike would actually be a second strike in retaliation—even if none of the attacker’s weapons had yet exploded on or over American soil. In the case of a preventive, as opposed to a preemptive, nuclear attack, domestic policy making and Constitutional issues become more uncertain. A Presidential demand for a nuclear first strike against North Korea, absent evidence of a North Korean attack in progress or under immediate preparation, could fall into a situation of suspended animation. US military leaders are not automatons. At the highest levels of the US officer corps, leaders are the products of an education that emphasizes not only military-­ strategic competency, but also an awareness of the subtle interplay between war and politics. In addition, officers also understand that some orders may be illegal, or unethical, or both. The President can authorize a preventive nuclear strike, but the authorization must be implemented through a chain of command that provides for the enablement of nuclear retaliatory forces and that has physical custody of the forces. US nuclear forces must, as Peter Douglas Feaver has noted, resolve the “always-never” problem: forces must always be ready to respond to duly authorized commands, but never responsive to accidental or unauthorized stimuli for launch.30 One can anticipate several kinds of resistance to an anticipated or actual Presidential decision for preventive nuclear attack. First, both civilian and military participants in the discussion about preventive nuclear options could be tempted to leak this information to members of Congress, to the media or to other sources. In the age of Twitter and other social media, blowback could be nearly

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i­nstantaneous and sweep the nuclear option from the menu of choice. Second, as a result of these leaks, a firestorm of public and elite opinion would persuade the White House that even a “successful” military attack would create a political black hole for its future. Third, officers within the military chain of command could resign in protest or, more unlikely but not impossible, resist any order to enable a nuclear preventive strike. Not all resistance may be obvious. Military bureaucracies, like other bureaucracies, have ingenious approaches for circumventing orders that are unacceptable or unwelcome. While time would not permit such “slow rolling” of a Presidential decision under conditions of actual or imminent attack, the longer time period available for consideration of a preventive war would permit strategies of passive or active bureaucratic resistance to gain traction. In cases of Presidential orders for nuclear first strike or other White House demands that seem unreasonable under the circumstances, the perspectives of civilian leaders will be as important as those of military officers. In an extreme case, a majority of the President’s cabinet and the Vice President may invoke the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution. If they transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”, the Vice President immediately assumes the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.31 The President may dispute this in writing to the same officials, and resume his or her office, unless the Vice President and a majority of the cabinet re-transmit their declaration of Presidential disability within four days. Thereafter, Congress decides the issue. Invoking the disability provisions of the US Constitution is an extreme step, to be sure. But a preventive nuclear attack by the United States against another nation would be even more unprecedented. Therefore, the 25th Amendment stands as another possible obstacle to an order for nuclear first strike that fails to find resonance within the body politic or its leadership. Neither the 25th Amendment nor any of the factors discussed earlier is a foolproof firewall against flawed Presidential decisions. But some decisions are more flawed than others: the framers of the Constitution wisely built a framework of divided power and institutional checks and balances that has proved its worth under extreme political circumstances in the past, and will do so, if necessary, in the future.

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6.4   Conclusion Trump administration nuclear policy guidance is more evolutionary than revolutionary with respect to nuclear force structure, modernization and policy planning: notwithstanding the propensity of the President for improvisation and surprise, including of his own bureaucracy! Arms control is a major exception. President Trump expressed repeated desires to get along with Russia, but “Russiagate” investigations and US sanctions against Russia, together with some contentious foreign policy matters as between Washington and Moscow, have left the status of arms control in limbo. The collapse of the INF treaty now seems certain, and extension of the New START treaty from 2021 until 2026, previously considered as a “no brainer”, is also in doubt. The demise of INF and New START would open the possibility of a new and more intensive Russian-American nuclear arms race, absent the constraints of monitoring and verification provided by prior negotiated agreements. As for the Presidential prerogative and nuclear use, the US nuclear command and control system provides for prompt and credible performance of assigned missions under duly constituted political authority. Faced with an imminent threat of nuclear attack or an attack in progress, US preemption or retaliation (depending on timing) would be appropriate and largely uncontested. Some expert analysts think that technical improvements in the speed and stealth of future offensive nuclear forces, including hypersonic weapons and stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, may make obsolete the existing US NC3 (nuclear command, control and communications) systems, requiring deployment of an NC3 system based on artificial intelligence.32 Implementation of an automated NC3 system would raise additional legal and political issues beyond our discussion here—but this plan would presumably apply to cases of nuclear preemption or retaliation, not preventive strikes.33 On the other hand, a Presidential demand for a nuclear first strike in order to prevent a possible—but uncertain—future attack would be more controversial, within the circle of decision-makers as well as beyond it. If Presidential insistence on a nuclear first strike was also marked by indications of Presidential disability, passive resistance in the military chain of command might be accompanied by political efforts to remove the President from office. This eventuality is unlikely, given the checks and balances in the US policy-making process, the carefully designed Constitutional restraints on executive power, and the professionalism of the US military leadership even in crises.

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Notes 1. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Defense, February 2018). For analysis and commentary, see: Lawrence J. Korb, “Why Congress should refuse to fund the NPR’s new nuclear weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 7, 2018, https://thebulletin.org/commentary/why-congress-should-refusefund-npr%E2%80%99s-new-nuclear-weapons11493; David E.  Sanger and William J. Broad, “To Counter Russia, U.S. Signals Nuclear Arms Are Back in a Big Way,” New York Times, February 5, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List – #25 – February 5, 2018, [email protected]; Hans M. Kristensen, “The Nuclear Posture Review and the U.S. nuclear arsenal,: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 2, 2018, https://thebulletin.org/commentary/ nuclear-posture-review-and-us-nuclear-arsenal11484; Hans Ruhle, “The New US Nuclear Posture Review: Return to Realism,” National Institute for Public Policy, Issue No. 427, February 7, 2018, InformationSeries@nipp. org; Sanger and Broad, “Pentagon Suggests Countering Devastating Cyberattacks with Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, January 16, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/pentagon-nuclearreview-cyberattack-trump.html; Michael R.  Gordon, “U.S.  Plans New Nuclear Weapons: Pentagon weighs ‘low-yield’ warhead and sea-based cruise missile, igniting debate over strategy,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List #11, January 16, 2018, davidjohnson@ starpower.net; and Richard Burt and John Wolfsthal, “America and Russia May Find Themselves in a Nuclear Arms Race Once Again: Despite the Trump administration’s decision to treat it as an afterthought, arms control is not dead,” The National Interest, January 17, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List #13, January 18, 2018, [email protected] 2. Low-yield SLBM warheads and a modern nuclear-armed SLCM are discussed in Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, Executive Summary, p. 8. On the possibility of using nuclear SLCMs as a bargaining chip, see “Mattis: Proposed U.S. Cruise Missile A Bargaining Chip With Russia,” RFE/RL, February 6, 2018, https://www.rferl. org/a/russia-mattis-cruise-missile-bargaining-chip/2902394 3. Korb, “Why Congress should refuse to fund the NPR’s new nuclear weapons.” 4. Expert commentary on this aspect of the NPR includes Ruhle, “The New U.S. Nuclear Posture Review: Return to Realism,” p. 2. Challenges to US defense and other vital networks and IT capabilities are examined in the final report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Resilient Military Systems, Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, January 2013), http://www.dtic. mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a569975.pdf

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5. See Dr. Keith B.  Payne, “Nuclear Deterrence in a New Age,” National Institute for Public Policy, Information Series No. 426, December 13, 2017, [email protected]. Other experts warn that nuclear weapons have been used with greater success in support of deterrence, compared to lesser effectiveness in support of coercion or coercive diplomacy. See Todd S.  Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 6. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, Executive Summary, p. 8. 7. For the text of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Vienna, Austria: July 14, 2015), see European Union, European External Action Service, Homepage, http://eeas.europa.eu/index_en.htm, downloaded July 15, 2015. See also: Lawrence Korb and Katherine Blakely, “This deal puts the nuclear genie back in the bottle,” in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Expert Commentary, July 15, 2015, http://thebulletin.org/experts-assess-iranagreement-20158507, downloaded July 16, 2015. 8. Jon B. Wolfsthal, Jeffrey Lewis and Marc Quint, The Trillion Dollar Nuclear Triad: US Strategic Nuclear Modernization Over the Next Thirty Years (Monterey, Calif.: James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, January 2014), http://cns.miis.edu/opapers/pdfs/140107_trillion_dollar_nuclear_triad.pdf. An expert appraisal of the U.S. nuclear command, control and communications system (NC3) argues that the NC3 system should have more support in nuclear modernization funding, relative to increases in development and procurement of weapons. See: Bruce G. Blair, “Loose cannons: The president and US nuclear posture,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 1 (2020), pp. 14–26, https://doi.org/10.1080 /00963402.2019.1701279 9. Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review, Executive Summary, p. 6. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. For example, see Darius E. Watson, “Rethinking the US Nuclear Triad,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 4 (Winter 2017), pp. 134–150. Cost projections for alternative US nuclear force structures are discussed in U.S. Congressional Budget Office, Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2017–2046 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Budget Office, October 2017), esp. pp. 15–20. 13. On this issue, see: Jeffrey Edmonds, ““How America Could Accidentally Push Russia into a Nuclear War,” The National Interest, February 6, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List – #27 – February 7, 2018, davidjohnson@starpower. net; and Ernest J.  Moniz, “Ernest J.  Moniz Addresses Global Nuclear Risks,” January 11, 2018, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/ernest-jmoniz-addresses-global-nuclear-risks, downloaded January 17, 2018.

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14. Office of the Secretary of Defense. 2019 Missile Defense Review. Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 2019, Executive Summary, https://www. defense.gov/Portals/1/Interactive/2018/11-2019-Missile-DefenseReview/The%202019%20MDR_Executive%20Summary.pdf 15. See, for example: Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Thomas C.  Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 16. See Andrew Futter, “The double-edged sword: US nuclear command and control modernization,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 29, 2016, http://thebulletin.org/double-edged-sword-us-nuclear-command-andcontrol-modernization.html; and Futter, Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons: New Questions for Command and Control, Security and Strategy (London: Royal United Service Institute for Defence and Security Studies, RUSI Occasional Paper, July 2016). 17. Pertinent discussion appears in: P.W.  Singer and Allan Friedman, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), and in Martin C.  Libicki, Crisis and Escalation in Cyberspace (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2012). 18. Colin S. Gray, The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 24–43. 19. Rachel Chason, “James Clapper questions Trump’s fitness, worries about his access to nuclear codes,” Washington Post, August 23, 2017, https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/23/ james-clapper-questions-trumps-fitness-worries-about-his-access-tonuclear-codes/?utm_term=.096a78ade9d5 20. Ibid. 21. David E. Sanger, “Talk of ‘Preventive War” Rises in White House over North Korea,” New York Times, August 20, 2017, https://www. nytimes.com/2017/08/20/world/asia/north-korea-war-trump.html, downloaded August 25, 2017. 22. Ibid. 23. Fred Kaplan, “The Real Nuclear Option: Americans are disturbingly unbothered by the idea of striking first with nuclear weapons,” slate.com, August 14, 2017, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/ war_stories/2017/08/sagan_and_valentino_study_shows_americans_ would_likely_support_nuclear_first.html,downloaded August 16, 2017. 24. For an elaboration of this and other points about preemption and prevention, see Karl P.  Mueller, Jasen J.  Castillo, Forrest E.  Morgan, Negeen Pegahi and Brian Rosen, Striking First: Preemptive and Preventive Attack in U.S. National Security Policy (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2006).

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25. Amy F.  Woolf, “Defense Primer: Command and Control of Nuclear Forces,” Congressional Research Service, December 11, 2018, https:// crsreports.congress.gov 26. Ibid., also for details on how the President selects among nuclear response options and authenticates his identification. 27. James A.  Winnefeld, Jr., “Former Commander: Here’s What Happens When the President Orders a Nuclear Strike,” Fortune, August 11, 2017, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/former-commanderheres-what-happens-when-president-orders-nuclear-strike 28. See Nikolai N.  Sokov, “Why Russia calls a limited nuclear strike “de-­ escalation,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 13, 2014, http://thebulletin.org/why-russia-calls-limited-nuclear-strike-de-escalation Russia’s nuclear “escalation for de-escalation” will be supported by pre-nuclear deterrence for escalation dominance in the form of long-range, precision-­ strike conventional weapons. See: Roger N. McDermott and Tor Bukkvoll, Russia in the Precision-Strike regime  – military theory, procurement and operational impact (Oslo: Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), FFI-RAPPORT 17/00979, August 1, 2017), https://www.ffi.no/ no/Rapporter/17-00979.pdf 29. As an example, see Jerome M. Hauer, “US cities not medically prepared for a nuclear detonation,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 4 (2017), pp. 215–219, https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.20171338003 30. Peter Douglas Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 12–21. 31. XXV Amendment, Presidential Disability and Succession, https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendments/. Downloaded August 28, 2017. 32. Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin, “America Needs a “Dead Hand,” War on the Rocks, August 16, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/019/08/ america-needs-a-dead-hand/ 33. Matt Field, “Strangelove redux: US experts propose having AI control nuclear weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 30, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/strangelove-redux-us-expertspropose-having-ai-control-nuclear-weapons/

CHAPTER 7

Limiting Nuclear War: Mission Impossible, Inadvisable or Unavoidable?

7.1   Introduction If the concept of nuclear deterrence could be relied upon to prevent an outbreak of nuclear war, what about the possibility of limiting or controlling a nuclear war? Could there be such a thing as intrawar deterrence, or escalation control, after nuclear weapons had been fired? Cold War studies of the problem of limiting or ending a nuclear war were as energetic as they were disappointing.1 The large nuclear arsenals of the Americans and Soviets, the drift of US and Soviet military thinking, and the policy related anxieties of other skeptics, all precluded closure on this question before the Cold War ended. The emphasis of Cold War and even some later thinking was on “deterrence only” and the management of conflict after deterrence failed received comparatively shorter shrift. In some respects, the problem of how to control or end a nuclear war was almost taboo: the very discussion was suspect for relaxing the standards for preventing war. The current and foreseeable political and technical environments relevant to starting and stopping a nuclear war are markedly different from the Cold War context. For unlike the hypothetical Armageddon between the Americans and Soviets that never occurred in the last century, smaller but highly destructive nuclear wars may take place in this century. Some of these conflicts have the potential to spread into a wider war, for example, as between India and Pakistan, or North Korea and the United States, that could engulf other nuclear powers in the Asia-Pacific region.2 In addition, although the likelihood of any deliberate nuclear attack by the United © The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_7

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States or NATO against Russia, or vice versa, is obviously small, the possibility of inadvertent nuclear war or escalation into nuclear first use in Europe is not excluded—including in Russia’s declaratory military doctrine and in NATO contingency planning.3 The preceding point is timely because non-nuclear weapons are becoming more capable of threatening dual-use command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I) assets that also support nuclear deterrence, crisis management and war fighting capabilities. The US Nuclear Posture Review of 2018 specifically warns potential adversaries that the United States would consider using nuclear weapons in cases of non-nuclear strategic attacks on American or allied nuclear forces, command-control or warning and attack assessment systems.4

7.2   Deterrence: How Reliable? The first use of a nuclear weapon by one state against another since 1945 will create a tectonic shift in the expectations of policy makers and military planners worldwide. The nuclear taboo that supposedly held back the hands of crisis bound policy makers during the Cold War and for the remainder of the twentieth century would have been shattered. Left in its place will be uncertainty and the plausible expectation that a first use may be followed by retaliation and further escalation. Of course, a nuclear power could choose to attack or coerce a non-nuclear state. Such a one-­sided attack could bring condemnation from the international community and responses from allies of the victim: including those with nuclear weapons. We all assume that the probability of a nuclear war is related, in some unquantifiable but definable way, to the numbers of states with nuclear weapons and to the friendliness or animosity in their relations. Unfortunately for peace in the twenty-first century, the roster of states with nuclear arsenals is increasing. North Korea’s official acknowledgment of its nuclear weapons capability has been followed by off-and-on international efforts among the gang of five in Asia (the United States, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea) to negotiate a freeze or a reversal of the DPRK’s military nuclear program. These efforts proved frustrating in the extreme for the interlocutors with North Korea, and uncertainty about North Korea’s intentions was increased by the death of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il in January, 2012 and his succession by his son, Kim Jong-un. Compared to his father, the younger Kim was a political and personal blank slate. Kim Jong-un soon consolidated his hold on power and continued the North Korean tradition of periodic threats against South Korea

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and the United States. In addition, he upped the tempo of tests and the frequency of nuclear and missile threats against the United States and its allies. North Korea’s serial nuclear and missile tests in 2017 seemingly pointed toward a clear intention to develop and deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States and carrying nuclear weapons. North Korea’s apparently successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on July 4, 2017 caused international consternation and presented the Donald Trump administration with a potentially imminent nuclear crisis. Kim Jong-un’s taste for nuclear and ballistic missile brinkmanship was apparently insatiable.5 The question was whether he could or would actually go further: into nuclear first use. US political and military options for dealing with North Korea were all encumbered with risk and uncertainty.6 Three summit meetings between Kim Jong-un and President Donald Trump involved interesting atmospherics and door-openers for further and more detailed negotiations, but they left the status of North Korea’s nuclear program unaffected. US expectations of completely disarming North Korean nuclear weapons capabilities ran ahead of any apparent willingness on the part of the DPRK to do so. A more reasonable objective would be a “freeze” or a set of restrictions on North Korea’s nuclear and missile development and testing, together with Pyongyang’s agreement not to engage in nuclear technology transfer. In return, the DPRK could be offered a formal peace treaty officially ending the Korean war and legal recognition of its regime by the United States (a de facto guaranty against regime change absent any North Korean military attack on the United States or its allies).7 It also appeared that a reboot of something like the six-party framework (United States, North and South Korea, Japan, China and Russia) would be needed in order to impart diplomatic credibility to future nuclear negotiations. In addition to North Korea’s entry into the club of nuclear weapons states, Iran was suspected of having a strong intent to weaponize its nuclear fuel cycle. Negotiations between the P-5 permanent members of the UN Security Council (the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China) plus Germany with Iran sought to create an ongoing diplomatic engagement, supported by pressure on Iran from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for additional transparency about its nuclear aspirations and infrastructure. Part of the problem for the P-5 plus one ­negotiators with Iran was to determine exactly with “whom” or what domestic factions they were negotiating: it appeared that alternative hard and soft views within Iran’s political and military elites, including its

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Revolutionary Guards Corps and religious leadership, created a shifting kaleidoscope of Iranian intentions and negotiating positions. The “final” diplomatic chapter involved showdown negotiations between Iran and the P-5 plus Germany in 2014 and 2015, with a July 14, 2015 endgame, in which Iran agreed to limitations on its ability to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium (including stockpile reductions) in return for lifting of US and other economic sanctions.8 What remained a matter of argument among experts was whether Iran’s alleged aspirations for nuclear weapons could be contained, or even reversed, and whether the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement of 2015 allowed sufficient transparency for effective international monitoring and verification of Iran’s actual compliance, or lack thereof.9 The JCPOA quickly found itself on life support. The Donald Trump administration, opposed to the Iranian nuclear deal in principle, abrogated US commitments to the treaty in 2018 and renewed sanctions against Iran (and imposed secondary sanctions against other states trading with Iran) with uncertain consequences for the agreement itself and for arms control in general. In response, Iran indicated its own intentions in May, 2019 to break the restrictions of the nuclear deal.10 Expert analyst Paul Pillar offers the following appraisal: The Trump administration’s assault on the Iran nuclear agreement (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) has been one of its most concentrated and direct efforts to demolish arms control. Several of the factors that underlie other facets of the administration’s foreign policy have driven this assault. One is the urge to destroy a major accomplishment of Trump’s predecessor. Another is the inclination to do the bidding of Iran’s regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and especially Israel, no matter the effects on regional stability or U.S. interests.11

Whether one agrees with Pillar’s assessment or not, it is a fair question whether the Trump administration’s decision to coerce Iran with sticks alone, as opposed to carrots and sticks, was prudently in the US interest. The contrast between Trump’s approach to North Korea, including three summits between him and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and Iran was stark. In addition to withdrawing US support from the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration also re-imposed economic sanctions against Iran and threatened secondary sanctions against other states trading with Iran, including signatories to the JCPOA. Predictably, tensions

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rose in the Persian Gulf and the likelihood of military confrontation increased. President Trump first authorized and then, at the last minute, held back on military strikes against Iran in late June, 2019, in response to an Iranian shootdown of an American drone aircraft (Global Hawk). Amid rising political tensions, the US walkout from the JCPOA increased the difficulty of obtaining allied support on other nonproliferation issues and seemed to narrow American options toward Tehran to either of two unpromising outcomes: military escalation in the Middle East; or, even worse, an Iranian march away from JCPOA restrictions and toward nuclear weaponization.12 The problem of containing proliferation among “rogue” or other state actors was actually a two part one. The first part was what to do with additional states having become nuclear capable. The second aspect was the valid concern that rogue nuclear powers might pass nuclear technology or know-how to non-state actors, including terrorists. It was known, for example, that al-Qaeda even before 9/11 had attempted to acquire nuclear weapons grade material. The United States and other countries with large coastlines and national territories were vulnerable to various attacks by weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons. Optimists about the probable consequence of further nuclear weapons spread among states might argue, as some have done, that deterrence would still work in the future as it presumably had done during the Cold War. The optimism was very much based on after-the-fact hindsight that we survived the Cold War without accidentally or deliberately setting off a US-Soviet nuclear exchange leading to a global catastrophe. Persons living through the Cold War and its various crises, especially the Cuban missile crisis, had a somewhat less deterministic view about the success of deterrence. Even if Cold War deterrence was as overdetermined as optimists supposed, deterring terrorists and other non-state actors from nuclear adventurism was another task altogether. We will leave the problem of deterring non-state actors for another study: assuming for the moment that “deterrence” as a robust concept applies at all to the problem of preventing terrorist attacks.13 The objective of deterring rogue or other states is sufficiently challenging for Western planners and policy makers. Some government officials and others ­concerned about the behavior of rogue actors have concluded that they are, in all likelihood, beyond the grasp of rational deterrence strategies. At

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least, rogues might not be amenable to military persuasion by the US or Western model of rational deterrence. The US model of deterrence rationality emphasizes the calculation of costs and benefits attached to various alternative courses of action. Decision-makers choose the alternative with the smallest anticipated cost and the largest potential benefit: relative to other available alternatives. Deterrence theory is thus one aspect of public choice theory, and as such, it works only within a limited frame of reference or “bounded rationality”. Within this framework, adversaries are assumed to have accurate information about one another’s goals, alternatives and positive or negative weights assigned to various options. The vulnerabilities of this model of analysis, applied to the real world of nuclear crisis management, are serious and potentially deadly.14 It is not so much that deterrence theory is more deficient in the abstract, compared to other possible approaches to conflict management. The challenge lies in applying the abstract logic to a myriad of concrete situations. The specific circumstances of a crisis are important in understanding how it tumbled into a war. Once deterrence has failed (presumably) and war has broken out, the course of battle influences the options remaining for policy makers and commanders who wish to stop the war sooner, instead of later. Discrepant expectations and misperceptions on the part of states in conflict, with regard to the “rules of the road” for escalation, may result in unexpected, and undesired, outcomes. As Michael Kofman has noted, with respect to Russian expectations and assumptions about contemporary strategy: Russian operational concepts are geared toward shaping the environment during a threatening period of war, and achieving success in a contest of systems during the initial period of war. There is little notion in Russian military thought of a conventional-only war with NATO, or that beyond a decisive initial period of war, there are likely to be other sustained phases, i.e. one side will be proven successful in the early weeks of the contest. From the outset, Moscow is resolved to the prospect of employing non-strategic nuclear weapons should it find itself on the losing side of the war.15

It is a mistake to suppose that an outbreak of war is necessarily the result of deterrence failure. An adversary may be bent on attack come what may. Thus the motives and mind sets of possible enemies are as important

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as their capabilities for determining whether, and when, they might attack. History is full of wars begun under assumptions about enemy intentions and capabilities that were later proved, by the test of battle, to have been fallacious. Attackers have not infrequently begun wars against states with greater military capabilities. Often the attackers in question doubted the resolve of the defenders. In other instances, states misperceived one another’s intentions relative to war because they failed to comprehend essential aspects of the other side’s strategic culture, military planning priorities, or “art of war”. Wars undertaken by leaders who get one or more of these things wrong are sometimes referred to as “accidental” or “inadvertent” (usually by political scientists who favor these concepts, less often by historians who are more skeptical). Deterrence during the Cold War, at least in US academic discourse and public policy analysis, was in constant danger of overstretch. For some analysts and policy makers it became a talisman that substituted for hard data or serious thought. Deterrence was also sometimes substituted for policy instead of for military strategy (separate problems, but related). The “domino theory” by which US military escalation of its commitment to the war in Vietnam was justified is one example of deterrence (and its twin, credibility) having been stretched across the conceptual and geographical fault lines that separated war in Europe from war in Asia. It would be premature to declare that aspiring nuclear powers including “rogue” states are “beyond deterrence” in the sense of existential deterrence. But deterrence will certainly operate differently in the twenty-­ first century compared to the Cold War. One reason for this is related to nuclear proliferation. Nuclear weapons were the hallmarks of great powers that were, during the Cold War, mostly content with the geopolitical status quo. Future nuclear aspiring or nuclear-capable states, on the other hand, may be revisionists with regard to their international policy objectives. In fact, the very term “rogue” or “state of concern” implies as much: the rogue is only roguish from the standpoint of those who favor the existing system and its parameters. Those who wish to overturn the system might regard rogues as heroes. In the eighteenth century, American and French revolutionaries were rogues against the established order: now their successor states are part of it. Another question raised about deterrence is whether it can apply to heads of state, military leaders or terrorists whose motives are apocalyptic or otherwise non-rational. Of course, this begs the question: what is a rational motive?16 We will not get into this matter judgmentally. Suffice it

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to say that one state’s rationality may be another’s irrationality, but the distinction is not a clinical one. Individuals who are clinically suspect may nevertheless make clear decisions on behalf of their states in troubled times: indeed, many have done so. Rationality has to do with the logic of means-ends connections: is the state acting in a way that maximizes its likelihood of success, or minimizes its probability of failure, in the event? In a crisis between two nuclear powers, the difficulty rises because the decision logics or “rationalities” of the two sides are interdependent. Each has a sequence of moves that may be more, or less, logical, in reaction to the move of the other. This interdependency of moves and motives is what makes nuclear or other crises so hard to manage.17 Imagine a two-­ dimensional chess game with the players blindfolded, and with each side permitted a finite number of mistakes (say, two wrong moves) before the players and the board are blown to smithereens. The example is not fatuous: US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev played something like this during the Cuban missile crisis.

7.3   Escalation Control: Principles As related to the problem of ending a nuclear war, theories of escalation control have several key propositions on offer: all are controversial, but none is self-evidently impossible. First, even nuclear war, however destructive, would involve political goals: at least, at the outset. Second, states and leaders can be expected to recognize certain rules of the road about fighting and ending wars, despite cultural and national differences. Third, although time pressures and the military planning process impose constraints upon escalation control for war termination, success is not precluded in practice.18 Paul Bracken has argued, with reference to defensible Cold War views of this matter: The assumption of robustness with respect to time pressures and planning rigidities is supported by the certainty that in a nuclear crisis each nation’s top leader would be at the helm, overriding bureaucratic obstacles of delay and omission.19

The idea of ending a nuclear war already in progress implies that deterrence can be applied to the problem of limiting a war as well as preventing it. A nuclear war is a failure of deterrence that has already happened. Worse, however, would be for the various parties to the conflict to con-

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tinue firing until their arsenals had been exhausted or all major cities destroyed. Getting combatants to the bargaining table after the shock of nuclear combat would not be easy. Unless the war had been started by mistake, say an accidental launch or a rogue commander, important issues of state would be in dispute. In addition, the anger of survivors at the consequences of nuclear attacks on their society would be difficulty for governments to manage. Survivors’ demands for retaliation and revenge might overwhelm policy makers’ efforts to arrange cease fires or surrenders. The termination of a nuclear war, as in any war, has both military-­ tactical and politico-strategic aspects.20 The tactical situation on the battlefield is obviously important. After the early nuclear attacks have taken place, each side may have surviving forces. The surviving forces are bargaining assets that can be used in negotiating a cease fire or peace agreement. Even a few surviving forces on either side can threaten to inflict a great deal of societal destruction on the other, and its leaders might prefer to negotiate instead of continue fighting. However, in the chaos attendant to nuclear war, even a “small” regional war by Cold War standards, leaders and their military advisors might not have reliable information about the status of the enemy’s forces and command-control systems. Command-control systems present an anomaly to planners who might want to leave the door open for intrawar deterrence and nuclear war termination. On one hand, in traditional military thinking based on experience in conventional war fighting, attacking command-control and communications systems makes perfect sense. It is an efficient way to destroy the opponent’s military cohesion and coordination. Attacks on the enemy’s brain and central nervous system, as were carried out during Operation Desert Storm, are important “force multipliers” that can be used to win a war in good time and save both friendly and enemy casualties. But in a nuclear war, the destruction of enemy political or military command and control systems would almost certainly exacerbate the problem of ending the war, and at two levels. At the tactical level, the destruction of military control systems would cut the nuclear retaliatory forces and their commanders into separate pieces. Each piece would be programmed to continue firing and fighting unless otherwise directed to stand down. However, the stand down orders might never reach the relevant field ­commanders having custody of nuclear weapons nor those authorized to fire them (who might be the same people, but not necessarily). Thus, “outliers” in the nuclear military chain of command might not hear, or want to hear, cease fire orders.21

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Destruction of the main political center of the opponent might paralyze its civilian leadership and make it impossible for the president or prime minister, or other surviving cabinet officials, to gain secure and reliable control over the armed forces.22 Consider, for example, an Iranian attack on Israel, or a Pakistani strike against India, that “succeeded” in decapitating the heart of the enemy’s political leadership. Effective control over the armed forces of the attacked states would almost certainly pass directly to the military and other security organs. The surviving political leadership in Tel Aviv and in India would at least temporarily be the prisoners of fast moving events and asserted military imperatives. It would take considerable time, and at least the appearance of an interim cease fire, before anything like “normal” relationships between politicians and the armed forces were re-established. Assessment of the viability of command-control systems under the stress of nuclear or other WMD attacks is made difficult by the scarcity of reliable information in the public record. It might be supposed, for example, that each state or government has official, written arrangements for delegation of political office and for devolution of military command during crisis and war. But this assumption could be mistaken for nuclear aspiring or new nuclear states. Even if written protocols exist, they may not be adhered to, or correspond to reality once the shooting starts. In addition, the delegation of political authority and the devolution of military command-­control may differ in important ways. Another uncertainty with respect to nuclear crisis or wartime command-control systems is how they might be impacted by strategic or operational cyberwar. For example, cyberattacks preceding or accompanying kinetic attacks might make it more difficult to control military operations and to assess enemy intentions accurately, thereby confounding negotiation for war termination.23 We do know something about the US systems for political delegation and military devolution of command. The American Presidential Succession Act and various other legislative enactments, as well as Constitutional requirements, clarify both non-emergency and emergency procedures for answering the question “Who is in charge?” if the President is killed or disabled. The military chain of command, although it begins with the Presidential center, is not identical to the political one. The ­wartime devolution of military command proceeds from the President, to the Secretary of Defense, and then to the regional or functional Combatant Commanders (through the Joint Chiefs of Staff). This system ensures that, even if the political decision center is paralyzed by a surprise attack,

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the military commands authorized to retaliate can do so in a timely manner. These command and control arrangements were worked out over many years of Cold War trial and error. They were, and are, intended to provide a solution for the oxymoronic requirement that forces “never” be fired without appropriate authorization but “always” respond promptly when authorized missions are required.24 In the early years of the nuclear age, US policy makers and military leaders struggled to define a rule set for the control of nuclear weapons in peacetime and for the management of nuclear forces during crisis and war. As is well-known, the Truman administration initially assigned custody over atomic weapons to a civilian agency. The weapons could only be released to the military by Presidential order. As this became impracticable in the missile age, systems were required for dispersing weapons to the military while maintaining them in secure storage and proof against accidental or unauthorized use. In addition, land-based, sea-based and air-­ launched weapons required platform-specific protocols: aircraft could surge to “fail safe” points and wait for confirming orders before proceeding to attack. Missiles, on the other hand, were not subject to recall: their launch was an irrevocable decision for war.

7.4   Escalation Control: New Challenges The details of US and Soviet Cold War force operations, including command and control, are important not only as historical artifacts, but also as possible “lessons learned” for future military planners and policy makers. Enough has been presented to make the point that only over considerable time, and as a result of much trial and error on the part of operators and analysts, were these systems established as reliable against usurpers or accidents and as responsive to authorized commands. The “lessons learned” by the Americans and post-Cold War Russians in this regard have not necessarily been passed along to future generations of nuclear-capable states. The extent to which some existing nuclear powers, to say nothing of future ones, accept the idea of deterrence based on second strike capability, as opposed to preemption, is unclear. Nor are the relationships among the highest levels of political and military command, with regard to the alerting of forces in crisis or the employment of forces in war, altogether clear for states such as Pakistan and North Korea. The manner in which custody of nuclear weapons along with the authority to fire them

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has been delegated to field commanders in India, Pakistan, Israel or North Korea is a closely guarded secret. Once nuclear weapons had been fired in anger in South or Northeast Asia or in the Middle East, would political leaders be able to maintain continuing control over force employment, targeting and termination decisions? States with small inventories of weapons, especially if they were first strike vulnerable, might follow the logic of “use them or lose them” and expend rapidly their existing arsenals. On the other hand, even smaller states might want to maintain some forces in reserve in order to avoid nuclear blackmail in the post-attack phase of a war. A small residue of survivable forces, perhaps tactical missiles or nuclear-capable aircraft of limited range, could be the difference between an imposed surrender and a negotiated peace. In order for negotiations between an India and Pakistan, or Israel and a nuclear Iran, to take place after the nuclear threshold had been crossed, leaders in firm control of their nuclear forces would be prerequisite. Leaders would have to survive the early attacks, communicate with their nuclear forces and impose targeting restraints or even nuclear cease fires. These steps to expedite negotiation might not be possible. Rogue commanders once enabled to fire nuclear weapons, and having observed unprecedented destruction on their own country, could resist cease fires and become bent on revenge or holocaust. The delegation of nuclear release authority having been made from senior politicians and military commanders to force operators, retrenchment and “putting the genie back in the bottle” would call for wartime commanders to put professional obligations and the military chain of command ahead of personal agendas and motives. Some might and some might not. Nor is this problem one that has been entirely done away with among “mature” nuclear powers. Russia in the 1990s was an economic basket case. As its economy lagged, its conventional military forces became cash starved and operationally deprived of oxygen. Consequently, Russia became primarily dependent upon its nuclear weapons, especially its long-­ range weapons, for deterrence of major nuclear or conventional attacks on its state territory. Russia’s position in the 1990s was like NATO’s during the Cold War: presumed inferiority in conventional forces, and therefore an acknowledged reliance on nuclear weapons to cover more bets. In addition, Russia’s missile warning and control systems deteriorated, ­ including its satellite and ground-based radar networks, after the fall of the Soviet Union. Russia’s nuclear weapons complex and its nuclear scientific

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establishment were also casualties of its free falling economy. The United States established programs of military assistance to Russia in the 1990s in order to improve Russia’s handling of nuclear materials and weapons, including accurate accounting and safe storage and dismantlement. The previous sentence marks an ironic turn of events, compared to the Cold War. The US government is now a large “investor” in Russian nuclear safety and security. The concern in Washington is no longer the prospect of a deliberate Soviet nuclear attack, but of Russian loss of political or military control that leaves nuclear weapons and launchers in the hands of regional warlords. This subject is almost taboo in official diplomatic circles, but interestingly, the topic of Russian breakup or deconstruction into a plurality of regional entities is the subject of much speculation among Russians. Russian media and polling organizations frequently sample public opinion on this issue and about a third of Russians generally regard the possibility of a breakup of post-Soviet Russia as more than trivial. The question, in such an event, is whether the split would be a case of gradual and consensual political devolution, or whether it would be more like a nasty divorce or a civil war? The current administration of President Vladimir Putin has made clear its intent to resist any regionalization or other dismemberment of Russia. Putin’s firm opposition to Chechen terrorism and insurgency and Putin’s absolute “nyet” to the demand for political autonomy or independence for that troubled region have been consistent, and emphatic: there will be no departure from Russia by means of armed resistance. US policy is that Russia should, indeed, hold together, for a major breakup of Russia would destabilize the entire central Eurasian subcontinent with ripple effects to the west, east and south. An immediate concern about a fissiparous Russian polity would be the consequences for the command and control over its nuclear weapons and launch platforms. The United States and its allies have been there once before. In the immediate aftermath of the Soviet breakup, the post-Soviet states of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan were suddenly numbered among the world’s nuclear powers. The fates of their respective nuclear arsenals were up for grabs, and various heads of state in these countries sought to play the nuclear card for economic assistance or for the temporary prestige it might bring them. US policy was to establish Russia as the logical and legal successor state to the Soviet Union for the purpose of controlling nuclear weapons and forces. Otherwise, dispersal of nuclear weapons among post-Soviet states could lead to chaos, including the unauthorized distribution of

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nuclear weapons and weapons grade materials among terrorists. After considerable political wheeling and dealing in the early 1990s that involved the United States, Russia and the new trio of nuclear powers, agreement was reached for the forces of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan to be “returned” to Russia (standing in for the former Soviet Union) or dismantled. Russia’s nuclear weapons deployed for use on intercontinental missiles or long-range bombers are, according to Russian officials, under secure storage and control in peacetime. (Weapons grade or other nuclear materials, including vast stores of uranium and plutonium, are another matter. United States and other nonproliferation experts remain concerned about leakage from Russia’s nuclear weapons complex or other sources of nuclear or radiological materials. This is a separate, albeit important, subject).25 In the nearest approximation to a nuclear crisis during the 1990s, the launch of a Norwegian scientific rocket in January, 1995 was temporarily confused by Russian warning systems with a possible US missile launch from a ballistic missile submarine. Russian nuclear forces were alerted. Russian President Boris Yeltsin, together with his defense minister and chief of the general staff, used for the first time in the post-Cold War era their nuclear “footballs” or briefcases that accompany the head of state and his principal military advisors. Russian tracking of the missile trajectory eventually established that its path was headed out toward sea and away from Russian territory.26 It turned out that the “Black Brant” missile launch that temporarily alarmed the Russians had been the result of a diplomatic snafu. The Norwegian government had notified the Russian Foreign Ministry months in advance of the planned rocket launch and its purpose: gathering scientific data on aurora borealis. But the communication got lost in the Russian bureaucracy and never made it to the desks of the responsible officials in the Russian armed forces and defense ministry. The preceding resume of concerns about mature nuclear powers is not intended to single out Russia, but to caution against casual acceptance of the assumption that “rogues” or new nuclear states would be more likely to start a war, and less willing to end a war short of Armageddon, than long standing nuclear powers would be. Of course, the larger and more diverse arsenals of the major powers give them options for controlling conflict and for intrawar deterrence, compared to smaller powers. And even at lower levels of force size, the qualities of forces and their operational parameters are partial determinants of their ability to maintain political and military control during a nuclear war. That having been said: the decisions for prolonging or ending a war are very subjective ones, based on the motives and personalities of leaders and,

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as well, the moods of publics that have been subjected to attacks. An additional variable for any state engaged in a nuclear war will be the policy-­ making process in that state: how power and influence are distributed among office holders and politically influential persons. We have some ideas about how the process of national security decision-making would work in the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia: since these policies have been studied extensively by insiders and outsiders. But what power shifts would take place after war began in India, Pakistan, North Korea or Iran? North Korea is virtually opaque to foreign intelligence. Pakistan is a government under siege from jihadists whose influence extends into its military and intelligence organs. The regime in Tehran is torn between traditionalist ayatollahs with visceral hatred for the United States and Israel and modernizers who would prefer to focus on economic development and gradual social change. India is the world’s largest democracy and a remarkably stable one, but under the stress of a nuclear attack, the relationship between its military and its government might undergo drastic change, compared to its peacetime condition. Recall that one Indian Prime Minister during the Cold War was assassinated by several of her own official bodyguards. For that matter, what could we expect from an American President, in the aftermath of a nuclear attack on US soil by a rogue, or other, state? US history is not inspiring of confidence that cool heads would prevail and that government would seek to manage a conflict toward “victory” at the lowest possible level of destruction or to negotiate an agreed peace. US reaction to 9/11 was instructive: not only terrorists everywhere, but regimes that aided terrorists, were now placed into the cross hairs of American vengeance. Al-Qaeda deserves all the opprobrium it received, but the point here is a different one. Americans and their political leaders are not, by temperament and training, accustomed to dealing out military punishment in measured doses. The likely reaction to a nuclear attack even by terrorists on US soil would be an elite and public demand for a Carthaginian peace. This and the two preceding sections have discussed only some of the problems attendant to ending a nuclear war. We have not emphasized technical problems or military doctrine, but issues related to the nexus between politics and warfare, that is, strategy. In the next section, we will try to interrogate the issue of nuclear war termination by modeling some of the possibilities, using alternative future US and Russian forces for the development of insights and hypotheses.

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7.5   Modeling Nuclear War Termination Approach The dynamics of ending a nuclear war resist rigorous modeling for two reasons: (1), no two-sided nuclear war has ever been fought; (2), the complexity of nuclear operations, unrestrained by efforts to limit the war in duration and intensity, is sufficiently challenging for any researcher. Even more complicated would be the effort to fight and limit a nuclear war at the same time. Nevertheless, this is precisely what leaders would attempt to do, unless they had taken leave of their political and military senses. Fighting for honor or revenge, or even more apocalyptic motives, with nuclear weapons is a luxury that only stateless terrorists can afford. Leaders of governments have a responsibility to their states and societies. By whatever chain of events a nuclear war had got started, it would be imperative to shut it off as soon as political will could be exerted in that direction. The possibility that heads of state would not just throw up their hands and passively await Armageddon, once nuclear war had begun, was a controversial offering on the plates of policy makers and analysts during the Cold War. The major reason for resistance to the study of nuclear war termination was the massive size of American and Soviet arsenals. It was simply assumed that even a “small” nuclear exchange involving the two Cold War superpowers would leave their societies with unacceptable, and perhaps irreparable, damage. And, indeed, a nuclear war in which several thousand warheads exploded on the American or Russian heartlands, the result of so-called counterforce attacks, would have created a post-attack, prehistoric residue that only novelists could imagine. On the other hand, in the twenty-first century the possibility of limiting nuclear war to less than Armageddon is not only a hypothetical one. A regional nuclear war on the Korean peninsula or the Indian subcontinent would be a holocaust for the immediate victims, but it would not necessarily inflict catastrophic damage on the planet. In addition, the equation has changed considerably as between the Americans and Russians in the twenty-first century, compared to the Cold War condition of self-­ annihilating forces. Under the constraints of the New START agreement negotiated between the United States and Russia in 2010 and entering into force in February, 2011, the United States and Russia may each deploy a maxi-

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mum of 1550 warheads on no more than 700 deployed intercontinental missiles and long-range bombers.27 The two states reached these agreed levels of deployed long-range weapons by February, 2018. The New START agreement provides for inspections and verification by the two sides of their respective arsenals. Much to the frustration of Russia, New START includes no limitations on US or NATO missile defenses, including those proposed for future deployment in Europe. The United States and NATO European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) for European missile defenses entered its third phase in 2018. Russia has expressed concern that EPAA, plus US ground-based midcourse defenses (GMD) for defense of the continental United States against missile threats, could provide NATO with the means of nullifying Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent.28 With peacetime deployed forces of 1550 warheads or fewer, the US and Russia will not have the redundant forces of the Cold War (“overkill”) to compensate for poor decisions about strike planning, targeting, and other aspects of force management. With more than 10,000 warheads deployed on strategic launchers by each side during the early 1980s, for example, either the United States. or Russia could have: launched a highly destructive counterforce first strike against the other; retained a reserve force for follow-on, counter-city attacks; and withheld sufficient forces to deter a third party from intervening in the conflict (e.g., China, the UK or France). Restricted to the smaller forces of the New START regime or even more restrictive post-New START agreements, the United States and Russia must plan with more care for a post-attack world before committing themselves to strikes against one another. Consider the arithmetic. A US first strike against Russian counterforce targets (land-based missiles, submarine bases, bomber bases and associated military command-­control), or a Russian first strike against the United States of a similar nature, would require hundreds of fast flying warheads on ICBMs or SLBMs. The second striker would require a similar number of warheads to put at risk the unused portion of the first striker’s force. Both would be left with a residue that might be “essentially equivalent” to the remaining weapons of its opponent. But the “remaining” forces would offer fewer options for postattack coercion against one another, or against third parties, compared to the Cold War forces. To illustrate these points, we will generate hypothetical, but not unrealistic, Russian and US forces for the New START agreement and for a post-New START reductions treaty that capped each state’s numbers of

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deployed intercontinental nuclear weapons at 1000.29 Each country will be assigned variable force structures, in addition to the traditional strategic nuclear “triad” of land- and sea-based ballistic missiles and bombers, for comparative purposes. In this analysis, we compare the performances of the various forces in a simple attack model: each side absorbs a counterforce first strike. We calculate the surviving warheads for each force under four conditions of alertness and launch readiness: (1) generated alert, launch on warning; (2) generated alert, ride out the attack; (3) day to day alert, launch on warning; and (4) day to day alert, ride out the attack. For the United States, we generate the following alternative force structures: (1), a balanced triad of land-based, sea-based and air-delivered weapons; (2) a “dyad” of land- and sea-based forces only (no bombers); (3) a “dyad” of sea-based and bomber forces only (no ICBMs); (4) a force entirely based on sea-based weapons (SLBMs only). Russian forces in the analysis are: (1) a balanced triad; (2) a dyad without bombers; (3) a dyad without SLBMs; and (4) a force entirely based on ICBMs. Analysis The results of the analysis pursuant to the preceding model are summarized in Tables 7.1 and 7.2, for the case of Russian and American forces under a prewar deployment limit of 1550 weapons. Tables 7.1 and 7.2 show the numbers of surviving and retaliating warheads for each state under each force structure and retaliatory alertness-readiness posture. Tables 7.3 and 7.4 summarize information similar to that provided in Tables 7.1 and 7.2, but this time for the case of a 1000 prewar deployment limit on long-range weapons for each state. The findings suggested by the data in Tables 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 offer pertinent insights into the management of forces for intrawar deterrence Table 7.1  United States surviving and retaliating weapons: 1550 deployment limit

Gen, LOW Gen, ROA Day, LOW Day, ROA

Balanced triad

No ICBMs

No bombers

SLBMs only

1275 935 955 615

1201 1201 781 781

1248 965 940 657

1166 1166 781 781

Source: Author, based on Arriving Weapons Sensitivity Model (AWSM@) model developed by Dr. James Scouras. He is not responsible for its use here, nor for any arguments or analysis

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Table 7.2  Russia surviving and retaliating warheads: 1550 deployment limit

Gen, LOW Gen, ROA Day, LOW Day, ROA

Balanced triad

No bombers

No SLBMs

ICBMs only

1062 644 591 101

1240 591 825 124

1367 187 1311 131

1383 138 1383 138

Source: Author, based on AWSM@ model developed by Dr. James Scouras. He is not responsible for its use here, nor for any arguments or analysis

Table 7.3  United States surviving and retaliating warheads: 1000 deployment limit

Gen, LOW Gen, ROA Day, LOW Day, ROA

Balanced triad

No ICBMs

No bombers

SLBMs only

830 587 622 379

735 735 469 469

795 552 622 379

778 778 521 521

Source: Author, based on AWSM@ model developed by Dr. James Scouras. He is not responsible for its use here, nor for any arguments or analysis

Table 7.4  Russia surviving and retaliating warheads: 1000 deployment limit

Gen, LOW Gen, ROA Day, LOW Day, ROA

Balanced triad

No bombers

No SLBMs

ICBMs only

830 575 401 77

826 549 411 83

881 138 825 83

879 88 879 88

Source: Author, based on AWSM@ model developed by Dr. James Scouras. He is not responsible for its use here, nor for any arguments or analysis

and war termination, of the following kind. First, from the perspective of deterrence prior to the outbreak of war, any of these force structures can guarantee “unacceptable damage” or assured retaliation against the opponent’s society. Within the higher (1550) or lower (1000) deployment ceilings, each state remains in a nuclear hostage condition to the other. Second, while there are some advantages especially for Russia in higher alert levels and prompt launch doctrines, the marginal gain in military effectiveness is offset by the higher risk of dependency on “hair trigger” responses.

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Third, as the numbers of forces come down, the qualities of forces matter more. With the plurality of forces that the Cold War permitted, it seemed self-evident to American and Soviet planners that a triad of land-­ based, sea-based and bomber-delivered weapons was the most preferred force structure. A triad of launch platforms, compared to a dyad or monad, complicated the attack calculus for any first striker. But with smaller total forces, reduced to 1000 deployed warheads or so, every platform must be justified on the grounds of intrinsic cost effectiveness, such as its survivability and penetration capability per unit. In this regard, the high survivability of ballistic missile submarines compared to bombers and land-based missiles makes them more appealing as forces shrink. SSBNs can launch weapons other than ballistic missiles and can, if necessary, be used as first strike counterforce weapons. Fourth, from the standpoint of intrawar deterrence and conflict management, submarines and bombers are more flexible than ICBMs, especially silo-based ICBMs. Bombers can be recalled after launch, and submarines can escape detection from satellite or other surveillance. But even road mobile land-based missiles are a high risk for prompt destruction, given the reconnaissance and location technology available today to attackers. What can be seen, can be hit, and what can be hit, can be destroyed: even with conventional weapons. In fact, it might be possible for some ICBMs to be loaded with conventional instead of nuclear warheads for use in “prenuclear” first strikes, as demonstrative attacks that would threaten pieces of the other side’s deterrent without crossing the nuclear threshold or causing mass casualties. Fifth, although not measured in this model, the substitution of nuclear armed cruise missiles on board surface ships and submarines might be justified as a “fourth” arm of the nuclear-capable “quadrad”. In this model, some ICBMs would remain nuclear armed and others would carry conventional warheads. The nuclear warheads offloaded from ICBMs could be assigned to sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs) that would be relatively more mobile and survivable, compared to their land-based counterparts. Eventually, the United States might prefer to retire its land-based missile force entirely. The George W.  Bush administration opened the door to a more flexible construction of US strike forces with its concept of a “new triad” consisting of nuclear and non-nuclear long-range attack forces; antimissile defenses; and improved defense infrastructure for the support of nuclear and non-nuclear forces. The Obama administration has continued research and development into missile defenses and improved

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conventional offensive weapons, together with its emphases on preparation for, and defense against operational and strategic cyberwar. Some expert analysis suggests that future US and Russian long-range nuclear forces could be reduced along with increased deployments of antimissile defenses, passive defenses for offenses and increased emphasis on the removal of nuclear weapons from launchers reliant upon “hair trigger” responses.30

7.6   Conclusions The future international landscape, with respect to states and their possible uses of nuclear weapons, has changed considerably since the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union. Nuclear danger has become multipolar and has migrated outward from Europe into the potential hotspots of the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. Contemplation of the “awfulness” of nuclear war is certainly not to be expected of most politicians, apart from the now-ubiquitous fears of nuclear terrorism after 9/11. But states still have the responsibility for world order, and peace making does not stop after war has begun. Political leaders and military planners in nuclear armed and other leading states need to think through, before the fact of deterrence failure, what the “downstream” steps would be.31 Military machines should not be permitted to run on nuclear autopilot. The preceding illustrations do not constitute a prediction, but a template for considering some aspects of the problem of nuclear conflict ­termination. We have used American and Russian forces because we know something about how each state has operated its nuclear forces during peacetime and in crises—and because they have committed themselves to structural and operational arms control through the year 2021. Finally, the diversity of US and Russian launch platforms, even at lower levels of force size, holds implications for smaller nuclear power and for nuclear aspiring, but currently non-nuclear, states. Forces do not fire themselves. The management or prevention of nuclear proliferation is made harder by the uncertainty about relationships between politicians and their militaries in countries that are only notional democracies, or less democratic than that. How will arrangements for delegation of authority and nuclear enablement for deterrence or war fighting be handled in a future nuclear armed Iran or Egypt or, for that matter, in currently nuclear-capable North Korea and Pakistan? Opacity in these matters is not

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reassuring, and dictatorships have a way of appearing solid on the outside, but brittle on the inside, once a diplomatic crisis has begun to slide into a war. In addition, future deterrence and war termination strategies will have to take into account the possible conjunction of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear ones, with strategies for cyber conflict.

Notes 1. See, for example: Stephen J.  Cimbala, ed., Strategic War Termination (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986); Paul K.  Davis, “A New Analytic Technique for the Study of Deterrence, Escalation Control and War Termination,” in Stephen J.  Cimbala, ed., Artificial Intelligence and National Security (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1986), pp. 35–60; and George H.  Quester, “War Termination and Nuclear Targeting Strategy,” Ch. 14 in Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 285– 305. For a perspective on this issue at the end of the Cold War, see the essays in Stephen J.  Cimbala and Sidney R.  Waldman, eds., Controlling and Ending Conflict: Issues Before and After the Cold War (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1992). 2. According to some estimates, the consequences of a “limited” nuclear war, as between India and Pakistan, could lead to catastrophic global side effects. See: Ira Helfand, Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk? Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition (Washington, D.C.: Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Somerville, Mass.: International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, November 2013), www.psr.org and www.ippnw.org 3. George P. Shultz, William J. Perry and Sam Nunn, “The Threat of Nuclear War Is Still With Us: The U.S. must re-engage with Russia to ensure the ultimate weapon doesn’t spread and is never used,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 0 #61 – April 11, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Alexander Golts, “Presidents without brakes. The threat of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States is becoming increasingly real,” The Insider, July 9, 2019, https://theins.ru/opinions/165182; Mikhail Gorbachev, “The U.S. and Russia Must Stop the Race to Nuclear War,” Time.com, March 9, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #49 – March 14, 2019, [email protected]; James Stavridis, “Russia and NATO: Talking Their Way Out of Another Cold War,” Bloomberg, March 28, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #57 – March 28, 2018, [email protected]; Neil MacFarquhar and David E. Sanger, “Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at U.S. Vulnerabilities,” New York Times, March 1, 2018, https://nytimes.com/2018/03/01/world/europe/russia-putin-

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speech.html; Dave Majumdar, “Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Buildup Is Aimed at Beating U.S. Missile Defenses,” The National Interest, March 1, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018  – #40  – March 2, 2018; and Julian E.  Barnes, “NATO Moves Toward Readying More Troops to Confront Russian Threat,” Wall Street Journal, March 29, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #58 – March 30, 2018. 4. James M. Acton, “Escalation through Entanglement: How the Vulnerability of Command-and-Control Systems Raises the Risks of an Inadvertent Nuclear War,” International Security, No. 1, Summer 2018, pp. 56–99, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/08/08/escalation-throughentanglement-how-vulnerability-of-command-and-control-systems-raisesrisks-of-inadvertent-nuclear-war-pub-77028 5. On North Korean missile testing, see: Duyeon Kim and Melissa Hanham, “North Korean missiles: Size does not matter,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 15, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/05/north-koreanmissiles-size-does-not-matter/ 6. US options with respect to North Korea are thoughtfully explored in: Ariel (Eli) Levite and George Perkovich, “Three Ways to Break the Stalemate With North Korea,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, July 11, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/07/11/three-ways-to-break-stalemate-with-north-korea-pub-79496; David E.  Sanger, “What Can Trump Do About North Korea? His Options Are Few and Risky,” New York Times, July 4, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/04/us/politics/trumpnorth-korea-missile-icbm.html, downloaded July 6, 2017; and Mark Bowden, “How to Deal With North Korea,” The Atlantic, ­ July/August 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worstproblem-on-earth/528717/, downloaded June 30, 2017. 7. The option of US acceptance of a partial denuclearization by North Korea in return for limited sanctions relief was apparently discussed among Trump administration officials. See Michael Crowley and David E.  Sanger, “In New Talks, U.S. May Settle for a Nuclear Freeze by North Korea,” New York Times, June 30, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/30/ world/asia/trump-kim-north-korea-negotiations.html. A more detailed discussion of Korean endgames appears in the Epilogue. 8. David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon, “Iran Nuclear Deal Is Reached With World Powers,” New York Times, July 14, 2015, http://www. nytimes.com/2015/07/15/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-deal-isreached-with-world-powers.html, downloaded July 14, 2015. For the text of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Vienna, Austria: July 14, 2015), see European Union, European External Action Service, Homepage, http://eeas.europa.eu/index_en.htm, downloaded July 15, 2015. See also: Lawrence J. Korb and Max Andonov, “Iran is the New USSR: And

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that means the deal is a good thing,” Politico, July 16, 2015, http://www. politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/iran-deal-ussr-nuclear-120221. html, downloaded July 16, 2015; Lawrence Korb and Katherine Blakely, “This deal puts the nuclear genie back in the bottle,” in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Expert Commentary, July 15, 2015, http://thebulletin. org/experts-assess-iran-agreement-20158507, downloaded July 16, 2015; and David E. Sanger, “Obama’s Leap of Faith on Iran,” New York Times, July 14, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/world/ middleeast/iran-nuclear-deal-us.html, downloaded July 15, 2015. 9. On these points, see: Andrew Prosser, “Much Ado about Nothing? Status Ambitions and Iranian Nuclear Reversal,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 2 (Summer, 2017), pp.  26–81; and Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin, “Iran’s Nuclear Veil: How to increase transparency under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, February 1, 2017, http://www.wisconsinproject.org/iransnuclear-veil/, downloaded June 5, 2017. 10. Loveday Morris and Michael Birnbaum, “U.N. watchdog confirms Iran has breached nuclear deal stockpile limit,” Washington Post, July 1, 2019, https://www.google.com/search?q=un+watchdog+confirms+iran+has+b reached+nuclear+deal+stockpile+limit&sourceid=ie7&rls=com. microsoft:en-US:IE-Address&ie=&oe=. See also: Mark Dubowitz and Henry Sokolski, “No one in the sun- and gas-soaked Middle East needs nuclear power,” Washington Examiner, May 9, 2019, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/no-one-in-the-sun-and-gas-soaked-middleeast-needs-nuclear-power 11. Paul Pillar, “Trump’s Demolition of Arms Control,” The National Interest, May 1, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #74 – May 2, 2019, [email protected] 12. Important perspective is provided in John Mecklin, “U.S.-Iran standoff: almost too worrisome for words,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 17, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/us-iran-standoff-almosttoo-worrisome-for-words/ 13. For informative discussions of nuclear terrorism, see: Brian Michael Jenkins, Will Terrorists Go Nuclear? (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008), and Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Times Books—Henry Holt, 2004). For additional perspectives on nuclear terrorism, see: Morten Bremer Maerli, Annette Schaper and Frank Barnaby, “The Characteristics of Nuclear Terrorist Weapons,” pp. 209–222; Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier, “The Seven Myths of Nuclear Terrorism,” pp.  223–235, and John Mueller, “The Atomic Terrorist?,” pp.  236–254, all in James J.F.  Forest and Russell D.  Howard, eds., Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism, Second Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013).

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14. For pertinent critiques of deterrence theory as applied to post-Cold War issues, see Andrew Futter, The Politics of Nuclear Weapons (London: Sage Publications, 2015); Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (New York: Henry Holt  – Times Books, 2012); Adam B.  Lowther, ed., Deterrence: Rising Powers, Rogue Regimes, and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; Michael Krepon, Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Patrick M.  Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Keith B.  Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2001). 15. Michael Kofman, “Drivers of Russian Grand Strategy,” Russia Matters, April 23, 2019, https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/drivers-russiangrand-strategy. See also: David M.  Glantz, “The Red Army in 1941,” pp. 1–37 and Dr. Jacob Kipp, “Soviet War Planning, pp. 40–54 in Glantz, editor, The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front, 22 June–August 1941 (London: Frank Cass, 1993). 16. On the issue of rationality and deterrence, see Morgan, Deterrence Now, pp. 42–79. 17. The work of Thomas Schelling on this topic as applied to nuclear deterrence is seminal, as in his Arms and Influence (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1967). See also: Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Third Edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), esp. pp. 171–184. 18. Paul Bracken, “War Termination,” Ch. 6  in Ashton B.  Carter, John D. Steinbruner, and Charles A. Zraket, eds, Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 197–214. 19. Ibid., p. 201. 20. Bracken, “Delegation of Nuclear Command Authority,” Ch. 10 in Carter, Steinbruner and Zraket, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations, pp.  352– 372, esp. pp. 355ff., offers similar if slightly different distinctions between “provincial” and “political” control. Provincial control includes strategic and tactical control of the armed forces; political control deals with grand strategy, which is essentially policy. 21. Various aspects of this issue are discussed in Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1983), passim. 22. Perspectives on this and related problems appear in Albert Wohlstetter and Richard Brody, “Continuing Control as a Requirement for Deterring,” Ch. 5  in Carter, Steinbruner, and Zraket, eds, Managing Nuclear Operations, pp.  142–196. See also Bracken, “Delegation of Nuclear

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Command Authority,” p. 359. As Bracken observes, delegation of nuclear command authority by political leaders to others will not happen except in the most dire circumstances—which are exactly those in which a nuclear war will most likely take place (Ibid., p. 356). 23. Robert A. Miller, Daniel T. Kuehl and Irving Lachow, “Cyber War: Issues in Attack and Defense,” Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 61, 2nd quarter 2011, pp. 18–23, esp. p. 21 on escalation control of “I2Os” (information and infrastructure operations). See also: US Department of Defense, Department of Defense Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace (Washington, D.C.: U.S.  Department of Defense, July 2011), http://www.defense. gov/news/d20110714cyber.pdf, downloaded August 14, 2012, and The White House, International Strategy for Cyberspace: Prosperity, Security and Openness in a Networked World (Washington, D.C.: The White House, May 2011), http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/ international_strategy_for_cyberspace.pdf, downloaded August 14, 2012. For pertinent commentary on these documents and related issues, see Rosemary M.  Carter, Brent Frick and Roy C.  Undersander, “Offensive Cyber for the Joint Force Commander,” Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 66, 3rd quarter 2012, pp. 22–27. 24. This perspective is developed in Peter Douglas Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 12–28. See also, in the same ­volume, his comments on civilian control after the decision to use nuclear weapons, pp. 55–66. 25. See Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, One Point Safe (New York: Doubleday, 1997), for pertinent cases and arguments based on Russian post-Cold War experience in the 1990s. 26. Ibid., pp. 240–244. 27. Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (Washington, D.C.: U.S.  Department of State, April 8, 2010), http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/140035.pdf 28. See: “Eric Gomez, “Why Putin Is Obsessed with America’s Missile Defense,” The National Interest, March 3, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List – 2018 – #41 – March 5, 2018; Dave Majumdar, “Russia’s Nuclear Weapons Buildup Is Aimed at Beating U.S. Missile Defenses,” The National Interest, March 1, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #40 – March 2, 2018; and Neil MacFarquhar and David E.  Sanger, “Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at U.S. Vulnerabilities,” New York Times, March 1, 2018, https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/world/europe/russia-putin-speech. html. New Russian weapons purportedly intended for deployment to counter US missile defenses are described by Vladimir Putin, Presidential

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Address to the Federal Assembly, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/ news/56957, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #39 – March 1, 2018. Daniel Goure, “The Obama administration’s phased-adaptive architecture: technological, operational and political issues,” Defense and Security Analysis, no. 1 (March, 2012), pp. 17–35. See also: LTG Patrick J. O’Reilly, USA, Director, Missile Defense Agency, Ballistic Missile Defense Overview (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Missile Defense Agency, March 26, 2012), esp. pp. 7–8. See also: Unclassified Statement of Lt. Gen. Patrick J. O’Reilly, Director, Missile Defense Agency, before the House Armed Services Committee, Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, Regarding the Fiscal Year 2011 Missile Defense Programs (Washington, D.C.: House Armed Services Committee, US House of Representatives, April 15, 2010). 29. For expert estimates, see: Pavel Podvig, “New START Treaty in numbers,” from his blog, Russian strategic nuclear forces, April 9, 2010, http://russianforces.org/blog/2010/03/new_start_treaty_in_numbers.shtml; Arms Control Association, “U.S. Strategic Nuclear Forces Under New START,” http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/USStratNukeForceNewSTART, downloaded July 18, 2011; Arms Control Association, “Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces Under New START, http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/RussiaStratNukeForceNewSTART, downloaded July 18, 2011; Joseph Cirincione, “Strategic Turn: New U.S. and Russian Views on Nuclear Weapons,” New America Foundation, June 29, 2011, http://newamerica. net/publications/policy/strategic_turn 30. See, for example, Gen. (Ret.) James Cartwright, Chair, Global Zero U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission Report, Modernizing U.S. Nuclear Strategy, Force Structure and Posture, May, 2012, www.globalzero.org, downloaded May 18, 2012. 31. An excellent case is made for this point in George H.  Quester, Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 24–52 and 90–126.

CHAPTER 8

Cyber War and Nuclear Deterrence: A Manageable Partnership?

8.1   Introduction A twenty-first-century regime of nuclear arms reductions, as between the United States and Russia, or among a more inclusive group of nuclear weapons states, cannot proceed with clarity or effectiveness unless it takes into account a broader technology or policy context than hitherto. Reductions in offensive weapons and their missile or bomber delivery systems showcase nuclear arms control “old style”, products of the industrial age. Twenty-first-century nuclear deterrence is more complicated: it takes place in a technology context of information-based warfare and of emerging countermeasures to at least some kinds of ballistic missile attacks. Smarts is trumps, precision is admirable and disruption is preferable to destruction. Could an information and infrastructure-emphatic approach to targeting exploit cyber strategy and information technology in order to provide flexibility otherwise hard to come by in larger nuclear forces? I admit this excursion is exploratory and that no real “science” for the assessment of cyber and nuclear operations has been developed. Therefore, the discussion proceeds in two steps. First, common frames of reference are establishing for defining cyber or information war and for minimum deterrence.1 Second, an analysis is performed to show whether an I20 (information-­ infrastructure operations)-based strategic nuclear deterrent is even possible within current or foreseeable political and military constraints. The analysis also considers the implications of missile defenses for a post-New © The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_8

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START offensive nuclear reductions regime, whether targeted primarily against information and infrastructure or otherwise.

8.2   Cyber Wars and Information Operations: Perspectives Academic and professional literature and the US government already offer a rich menu of definitions for important cyber related concepts, including cyberspace and cyberpower.2 The White House released a national cyber strategy in September, 2018 that was followed by a Department of Defense cyber strategy focused on five lines of effort: (1) building a more lethal force; (2) competing and deterring in cyberspace; (3) strengthening alliances and building new partnerships; (4) reforming the Department as necessary to carry out cyber missions; and (5) cultivating talented people.3 The Department of Defense began building its Cyber Mission Force (CMF) in 2012. The force consists of 133 teams that are organized to meet DOD’s three cyber missions: (1) the Cyber National Mission Force teams defend the nation by observing enemy activity, blocking attacks and maneuvering in space to defeat them; (2) the Cyber Combat Mission Force teams defend DOD information networks, protect priority missions and prepare cyber forces for combat; (3) Cyber Support Teams provide planning and analytical support to the National Mission and Combat Mission teams.4 The Cyber Mission Force is organizationally a component of US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), established in 2009 and elevated to a unified combatant command in May, 2018. USCYBERCOM is commanded by a four-star general who also serves as the director of the National Security Agency (NSA). The military service components that support USCYBERCOM include the Army Cyber Command, Air Forces Cyber Command, Navy Fleet Cyber Command and Marine Corps Forces Cyberspace Command.5 The US National Security Agency moved in 2019 to form a cybersecurity directorate as part of an effort to more closely align the agency’s offensive and defensive operations.6 In addition, cyberspace operations can and do overlap with electronic warfare (EW). Some organizations within DOD have incorporated former EW functions within new cyberspace directorates (such as “cyberspace electromagnetic activities”), but this pattern is not consistent across the services.7 Cyberattacks might usefully be included among “gray zone” activities of states that fall between routine statecraft and open and direct warfare.8

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Information warfare can be defined as activities by a state or non-state actor to exploit the content or processing of information to its advantage in time of peace, crisis or war and to deny potential or actual foes the ability to exploit the same means against itself. This is an expansive, and permissive, definition, although it has an inescapable bias toward military- and security-related issues. Information warfare can include both cyberwar and netwar. Cyberwar, according to John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, is a comprehensive, information-based approach to battle, normally discussed in terms of high-intensity or mid-intensity conflicts.9 Netwar is defined by the same authors as a comprehensive, information-based approach to societal conflict. Cyberwar is more the province of states and conventional wars; netwar, more characteristic of non-state actors and unconventional wars.10 US and Russian concepts of information warfare date from the Cold War years, although post-Cold War cyber, communications and electronics technologies have obviously required updating of operational concepts.11 China’s determination to develop an informationized military was partly based on its assessment of US success in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which demonstrated superiority in technologies for C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), precision strike and other attributes of advanced technology, information-based conventional warfare. Reportedly the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) intends to develop a networked C4ISR system as part of its application of “network centric warfare” (NCW) to the Chinese military.12 The very concept of “cyberdeterrence” involves degrees of uncertainty and complexity that require a leap of analytic faith beyond what we know, or think we know, about conventional or nuclear deterrence.13 Cyber attacks generally obscure the identity of the attackers, can be initiated from outside of or within the defender’s state territory, are frequently transmitted through third parties without their complicity or knowledge and can sometimes be repeated almost indefinitely by skilled attackers, even against agile defenders. In addition, the contrast between the principles of cyberdeterrence and nuclear deterrence encourages modesty in the transfer of principles from the latter to the former. As Martin Libicki summarizes: In the Cold War nuclear realm, attribution of attack was not a problem; the prospect of battle damage was clear; the 1,000th bomb could

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be as powerful as the first; counterforce was possible; there were no third parties to worry about; private firms were not expected to defend themselves; any hostile nuclear use crossed an acknowledged threshold; no higher levels of war existed; and both sides always had a lot to lose.14

Airpower theorist and military analyst Benjamin S.  Lambeth regards cyberspace as part of the third dimension of warfare that also includes air and space operations. Cyberspace, according to Lambeth, is the “principal domain” in which US air services “exercise their command, control, communications, and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capabilities that enable global mobility and rapid long-range strike”.15 In addition, US dominance, or falling behind, in cyberspace has repercussions for US success or failure in aerospace and other domains of conflict.16

8.3   Information and Infrastructure Operations As Robert A. Miller, Daniel T. Kuehl and Irving Lachow have explained, some kinds of cyber war will be parts of many future military conflicts.17 But the term “cyber war” may be misleading, since attacks on computers and networks are only one means of accomplishing the critical objective of neutralizing the enemy’s critical infrastructures. As they note: The true objective of such attacks will be to disrupt the adversary’s civil society and inhibit its military action as a means of achieving the conflict’s ultimate political objectives. So we are really talking about what could be called information and infrastructure war, or more precisely, information and infrastructure operations (I2Os), which we think is a more inclusive and therefore better term.18

The purpose of I2O operations would not be mass destruction (although destructive secondary effects are possible) but both mass and precision disruption. According to Miller, Kuehl and Lachow, the purpose of an information and infrastructure operation would be to “disrupt, confuse, demoralize, distract, and ultimately diminish the capability of the other side”.19 This concept lends itself to candidate consideration for a nuclear responsive deterrent mission. Under the assumption of Russian and US strategic nuclear forces limited to 1000 or so deployed weapons with operational performance parameters comparable to present systems, each side would reasonably

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expect to retain some hundreds of second strike survivable and retaliating weapons. Allocating these weapons to targets requires parsimonious retailing of weapons against targets (unlike the wholesale overkill of the High Cold War). Fighting a counterforce war against the other side’s remaining nuclear forces would rapidly deplete a force already challenged to maintain any capacity for escalation control and war termination, or for continued postwar nuclear power status. Blowing up the cities of the other side is easily accomplished but not necessarily empowering of strategic aim or military object. It makes sense only as an option withheld for possible future use in order to deter the adversary from taking a similar step. Instead of Cold War style counterforce or countervalue targeting (the former futile, and the latter, gratuitously inhumane), US and Russian plans for retaliation might emphasize counter-information and infrastructure strikes. The cyber and industrial recuperative capabilities of a state, including electricity, transportation, refineries, depots and military supporting industries, together with partial disruption of warning, command-­ control-­communications and reconnaissance capabilities, could paralyze decision-making and limit military options. Although civilian casualties would be unavoidable from widespread I2O attacks, they would not be the object. Information-infrastructure targeting could threaten to inflict decisive paralysis on the opponent’s military information systems or civil infrastructure with minimal physical damage, provided an imaginative “cyber” component survived the other side’s attack. Instead of a second strike capability for mass destruction, an I2O-focused minimum deterrent would pose the credible threat of focused and mass disruption.20 One can imagine three objections to the preceding suggestions. First, increasing capabilities for I2O strikes might raise the appeal of preemption for a state. As opposed to riding out an attack and retaliating, a state might be so fearful of its cyber-vulnerability that it would prefer to wager on anticipatory attacks (preemptive or preventive) instead of responsive ones.21 This concern is not unreasonable, especially since the identity of a cyber attacker is easier to conceal than that of a kinetic first striker. A second objection to I2O targeting is that it might not be scary enough to dissuade determined attackers. Only assured destruction of the opposed regime or its society as a functioning entity would assuredly deter, in this view. I think this view is mistaken under today’s conditions, of post-Cold War skepticism about the value of nuclear weapons for deterrence, defense or swaggering, and that, even during the Cold War, “assured destruction” represented a mistaken view of leaders’ decision matrices (John F. Kennedy’s

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National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy had the last word on this, with his equation of ten nuclear weapons on ten cities as a “disaster beyond history)”. A third objection to an I2O-oriented second strike capability as the basis for US-Russian nuclear deterrence is that the conditions and expectations for terminating a cyberwar or a cyber component of a larger war are not well understood, compared to more conventional or pre-digital conflicts. One aspect of this inscrutability for cyber conflicts has already been noted: the identity of the first striker or “perpetrator” might be unknown and undetectable within the time available for deciding upon retaliatory options.22 Another aspect is that nuclear destruction might remove reliable means of communication between adversaries otherwise intending to negotiate for war termination, including power grids, satellite links and underground cables. This third objection also includes the possibility that obscured identities and mistaken perceptions by one or both sides could be exploited by third parties or additional troublemakers who took the opportunity to scavenge while vultures fought over their respective carcasses. A fourth issue is the possibility of nuclear escalation from a use of non-nuclear weapons, including cyber ones, that threaten the survival or performance of strategic nuclear forces, command-control systems or other systems on which nuclear deterrence and crisis management are dependent.23 The objections relevant to any war with a heavily cyber component suggest that a “nuclear” deterrent based on mainly on I2O retaliation should leave the door open for the inclusion of conventional long-range weapons (so-called PGS or precision global strike weapons) in the responsive repertoire. I am aware of Russia’s aversion to United States prompt global strike systems, based on the Russian military’s fear of US conventional deep strike capabilities in the European theater of operations and globally. Russia’s wariness on this score reverts to its analysis of the US air-ground campaign against Iraq in 1991, especially the 37-day air war. Russia’s post-­Cold War inferiority to NATO in conventional military capabilities, together with its allergy to NATO enlargement, creates for United States and NATOmistrusting Russians a picture of a conventional theater-­strategic NATO option for a twenty-first-century Barbarossa. Even short of war, NATO enlargement and conventional deep strike, supported by US global supremacy in C4ISR and prompt global strike systems, could deter Russia from using the threat of force against former Soviet states now inside, or aspiring to join, NATO.

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Granted Russia’s pessimism on this score, the United States should nevertheless equip itself with retaliatory options of global reach and using conventional weapons. ICBMs specifically dedicated for this mission, together with long-range aircraft, should be included in any future war plan that seeks to accomplish national objectives with minimum collateral damage. The airborne element might eventually include purpose-built UAVs or technologically enhanced space planes. Russia’s objection, that it might confuse the launch of a conventional PGS system with the firing of a US nuclear first strike, can be met by verifiable separation of PGS-capable and nuclear-tasked launch vehicles. As part of any US strategic retaliatory force, conventional PGS systems could deliver EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) weapons, microwaves or other devices to cripple the effectiveness of enemy computers, electronics and other cyber assets. Conventional PGS systems, in addition to their roles in any strategic retaliatory force, could be used preemptively against terrorist storage bunkers (including bunkers storing weapons of mass destruction). (Hypersonic weapons now in the research and development stage in various states, including the United States and Russia, are wild cards in this deck—depending on their actual speeds, survivability, armaments and abilities to evade air and missile defenses).24 Cyber weapons used prior to or during a nuclear attack or even during a nuclear crisis might qualify as conventional or unconventional, depending on taste. It would be a stretch to refer to them as nuclear or even as weapons of mass destruction (although, as already argued, not as weapons of mass disruption). The issue whether to incorporate cyber or information weapons into standing targeting plans involves complexities not addressed here. The most effective exploitation of cyber or information weapons depends on their flexibility and capacity for turning on a dime, relative to the opponent’s ability to complete his decision loop. On the other hand, one can imagine cyber weapons as part of preplanned attacks: viruses, Trojan horses, worms and other corrupters of the integrity of opponents’ software systems could be planted months or years in advance of expected conflicts. Ongoing cyber wars in peacetime, among states with advanced capabilities in order to test the resiliency of competitors’ safeguards, have become so routine that indignation is rare and reportage long ago lost any “gee whiz” overtones.25 For example, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the reported attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure by the “Stuxnet” worm, widely attributed to Israel and/or the United States, was the relatively low key manner with which the regime in Tehran

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reported the episode and downplayed its significance. Stuxnet raises the possibility of a growth industry for researchers in the use of cyber weapons for counter-proliferation, with the attendant difficulties of source identification and acknowledgment.

8.4   Analysis Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the abstract notion of basing a minimum US or Russian strategic nuclear deterrent on I2O targeting found resonance among defense planners in both states. Could it be implemented with forces at or below 1000 operationally deployed long-­ range nuclear weapons? The following analysis interrogates that issue in several stages. First, we analyze possible Russian and US New START-­ compliant forces, although smaller in size, for their ability to support stable deterrence based on assured retaliation.26 In this step, we also consider whether either the United States or Russia might be able to shift its mix of intercontinental or transoceanic launchers from the traditional “triad” of land-based, sea-based and bomber-delivered weapons. Second, we ask whether the deployment of antimissile defenses by either or both states would preclude the effectiveness of minimum deterrence, regardless the targeting emphasis of retaliatory forces on I2O or otherwise.27 Chart 8.1 summarizes the estimated numbers of surviving and retaliating second strike warheads for US and Russian intercontinental launchers, deployed on balanced triads and under a peacetime deployment limit of 1000 weapons. Chart 8.2 shows how the results might be affected if the United States deployed a dyad of forces without ICBMs under conditions otherwise similar to those in Chart 8.1. Chart 8.3, immediately following, displays the same outcomes for a US dyad deployment of sea-based missiles and ICBMs without bombers, under conditions otherwise similar to those in Chart 8.1. For each chart, the numbers of second strike surviving and retaliating warheads are tabulated under four conditions of alertness and launch doctrine: (1), generated alert, and launch on warning (Gen/ LOW); (2), generated alert, and riding out the attack (Gen/ROA); (3) day to day alert, and launch on warning (Day/LOW); and, (4), day to day alert and riding out the attack (Day/ROA). The results displayed in Charts 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 suggest that Russia and the United States could provide for stable deterrence based on assured second strike retaliation with numbers of deployed weapons significantly

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Rus Bal Triad 1000

446

372 342 298

Number of Warheads

285 228

223 171

Rus Rus Rus Rus Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO Series1

342

285

228

171

U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO 446

372

298

223

Chart 8.1  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus 1000 deployment limit: US triad

lower than those provided for in New START (or, conceivably, could not, if political relations soured and expectations of “reset” and rapprochement were replaced by expectations of a renewed nuclear arms race—politics rules!). In this illustration, under a deployment limit of 1000 weapons for each state, either a balanced triad of launchers, or a more selective dyad, provides for several hundreds of surviving and retaliating US weapons under every condition of alertness and launch doctrine. Although leaders in the United States and in Russia have presently ruled out any departure from triads of intercontinental launchers, future exigencies or attractive technologies might change this calculation.

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Rus Bal Triad 1000

532

444 355

342 Number of Warheads

285

Series1

266 228 171

Rus Gen/LOW

Rus Gen/RO

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

U.S. Gen/LOW

U.S. Gen/RO

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

342

285

228

171

532

444

355

266

Chart 8.2  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus 1000 deployment limit: US No ICBMs

Would missile defenses complement or conflict with the objective of minimum deterrence through reductions in offensive nuclear forces, including the option of increased emphasis on I2O targeting? In Charts 8.4, 8.5, and 8.6 the United States and Russian strategic nuclear forces under a maximum deployment limit of 1000 weapons for each side, as previously defined in Charts 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3 are measured against opposed antimissile and antiair defenses (combined) with a range of effectiveness against second strike offensive retaliators: Phase I BMD and antiair defenses successfully destroy or deflect at least 20 percent of the retaliating weapons; Phase II defenses destroy or deflect at least 40 percent; Phase III defenses destroy or deflect at least 60 percent and Phase IV, 80 percent. These cutoffs are arbitrary and make no attempt to deal with nuances of present or prospective intercept technologies, or the choices available to attackers for counter-

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Rus Bal Triad 1000

447

373 342

Number of Warheads Series1

298

285 228

224 171

Rus Gen/LOW

Rus Gen/RO

Rus Day/LOW

Rus Day/RO

U.S. Gen/LOW

U.S. Gen/RO

U.S. Day/LOW

U.S. Day/RO

342

285

228

171

447

373

298

224

Chart 8.3  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus 1000 deployment limit: US No Bombers

measures. For the sake of consistency, all retaliatory forces are operating under conditions of generated alert and riding out the attack. The results summarized in Charts 8.4, 8.5, and 8.6 offer mixed messages for US and Russian military planners and for students of nuclear arms control. On one hand, post-New START nuclear retaliatory forces even at minimum deterrent levels can provide for numbers of surviving and defense-penetrating warheads adequate to support a strategy of stable deterrence. On the other hand, as deployed defenses gradually improve, they make it harder to build flexibility into retaliatory targeting options. Deploying defenses that are “too” capable against US or Russian nuclear retaliatory forces could drive military planners into launch on warning doctrines, increased expenditures on offensive countermeasures to defenses, or additional deployments of offensive weapons.

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Rus Bal Triad 1000

298

Number of Warheads

228

223

171 149 114 74

57 Phase IV Phase III Phase II Phase I U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. Defenses Defenses Defenses Defenses Series1

57

114

171

228

Phase IV Phase III Phase II Phase I Russian Russian Russian Russian Defenses Defenses Defenses Defenses 74

149

223

298

Chart 8.4  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus defenses 1000 deployment limit: US triad

Even technically improved defenses relative to offenses leave open ended the strategic and political priorities that will determine future US and Russian defense modernization. The world’s two largest nuclear ­powers could, in more propitious political circumstances, enable an ambitious agenda that included not only post-START strategic nuclear arms reductions, but also other cooperative security measures, including: (1) reductions in, and more transparency about, US-NATO and Russian nonstrategic nuclear weapons (NSNW) deployed in Europe, including European Russia; (2) joint leadership in strengthening the nuclear nonproliferation regime, including a firm line against any additional nuclear weapons states and cooperation on resolving the status of North Korea’s nuclear program; (3) shared commitment as between NATO and Russia to develop a joint theater-strategic antimissile and air defense architecture

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Rus Bal Triad 1000 355

266

Number of Warheads

228 177

171 114 89 57 Phase IV Phase III Phase II Phase I U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. Defenses Defenses Defenses Defenses

Series1

57

114

171

228

Phase IV Phase III Phase II Phase I Russian Russian Russian Russian Defenses Defenses Defenses Defenses 89

177

266

355

Chart 8.5  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus defenses 1000 deployment limit: US No ICBMs

for Europe, whether fully integrated in its operations or disaggregated for some missions assigned uniquely to Russia and others to NATO. This multi-sided matrix of potential for United States and NATO-­ Russian military cooperation also had its evil twin: opportunities abound for misunderstanding and misperception, creating further distance between the security agendas of Washington-Brussels and Moscow and postponing the extension of European security community eastward to include Russia as a participant and not just as an observer.28 In this regard, Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and destabilization of eastern Ukraine, together with its interference in American elections and the collapse of the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty, have poisoned the atmosphere for nuclear-strategic détente. So, too, have Vladimir Putin’s statements promising new generations of offensive nuclear weapons, including hypersonic ones, allegedly capable of overcoming any US missile defenses deployed now or in the future.29

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Rus Bal Triad 1000 298

Number of Warheads

228

171 149 114 75

57 Phase IV Phase III Phase II Phase I U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. Defenses Defenses Defenses Defenses Series1

224

57

114

171

228

Phase IV Phase III Phase II Phase I Russian Russian Russian Russian Defenses Defenses Defenses Defenses 75

149

224

298

Chart 8.6  US-Russia surviving and retaliating warheads versus defenses 1000 deployment limit: US No Bombers

8.5   Conclusion “Cyber” or cyberspace represents a domain of its own, but also a context and a technologies that impact upon other potential domains for conflict (land, sea, air and space) and deterrence with respect to conventional and nuclear war.30 A post-New START nuclear deterrent based at least partly on information-infrastructure targeting is consistent with US arms control objectives of stable deterrence, cooperative security and nonproliferation. An information and infrastructure deterrent including both nuclear and conventional weapons is more complicated than one based solely on nuclear weapons. On the other hand, an I2O embedded nuclear response plan might be more credible than a purely counter-city strategy to which minimum deterrence might otherwise be driven—and an I2O strategy would arguably be more humane if deterrence failed. Integrating I2O operations into preplanned nuclear options is no small feat, but the possibility of cyber war during nuclear operations already exists.

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Russia’s demonstrated interest in the theory and practice of cyber war, together with Russia’s officially stated priority for nuclear force modernization, argues for Russian attentiveness to, if not unqualified endorsement of, an I2O-embedded nuclear deterrent.31

Notes 1. There is considerable overlap between cyber war and information operations, among other info-related constructs. Sensible discussions and applications appear in: Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay, “The Cyber Commitment Problem and the Destabilization of Nuclear Deterrence,” Ch. 9 in Herbert Lin and Amy Zegart, eds., Bytes, Bombs and Spies: The Strategic Dimensions of Offensive Cyber Operations (Washington, D.C. : Brookings Institution Press, 2018), pp. 195–234; Chris C.  Demchak, “China: Determined to dominate cyberspace and AI,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 3 (2019), pp. 99–104, https:// doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1604857; Andy Greenberg, “What Is Cyberwar? The Complete WIRED Guide,” https://www.wired.com/story/ cyberwar-guide/, downloaded September 5, 2019; Gabi Siboni and Hadas Klein, “Guidelines for the Management of Cyber Risks,” in Cyber, Intelligence, and Security, no. 2 (September, 2018), pp.  23–38; David E.  Sanger, The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age (New York: Crown Publishers, 2018); P.W.  Singer and Emerson T.  Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018); Nina Kollars and Jacquelyn Schneider, “Defending Forward: The 2018 Cyber Strategy Is Here,” War on the Rocks, September 20, 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/defending-forward-the-2018-cyber-strategy-ishere/; Martin C.  Libicki, “The Convergence of Information Warfare,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 1 (Spring 2017), pp. 49–65; Matthew Cohen, Chuck Freilich, and Gabi Siboni, “Four Big ‘Ds’ and a Little ‘r’: A New Model for Cyber Defense,” Cyber, Intelligence, and Security, no. 2 (June, 2017), pp. 21–36; and P.W. Singer and Allan Friedman, Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2. The relationship between cyber war and nuclear issues is considered in: Erik Gartzke and Jon R. Lindsay, “Thermonuclear cyberwar” Journal of Cybersecurity (2017), pp.  1–12, https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/ tyw017, and Andrew Futter, “The double-edged sword: US nuclear command and control modernization,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 29, 2016, http://thebulletin.org/double-edged-sword-us-nuclear-command-and-control-modernization.html. See also: Futter, Cyber Threats and Nuclear Weapons: New Questions for Command and Control, Security and Strategy (London: Royal United Service Institute for Defence and Security Studies, RUSI Occasional Paper, July 2016), www.rusi.org; and Futter, “War Games Redux? Cyberthreats, U.S.-Russian strategic stability, and new challenges for nuclear security and arms control,” European

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Security (December 2015), published online, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09662839.2015.1112276. Martin C.  Libicki, Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2009), argues that strategic cyberwar is unlikely to be decisive, although operational cyberware has an important niche role. 3. Catherine A.  Theohary, “Defense Primer: Cyberspace Operations,” Congressional Research Service, December 18, 2018, https://crsreports. congress.gov 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Dustin Volz, “NSA Forms Cybersecurity Directorate Under More Assertive U.S. Effort,” Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #117—July 25, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes, “Cyber Combat: Act of War,” Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 4052702304563104576355623135782718.html 7. Catherine A. Theohary and John R. Hoehn, “Convergence of Cyberspace Operations and Electronic Warfare,” Congressional Research Service, August 13, 2019, https://crsreports.congress.gov 8. Kathleen Hicks, “Russia in the Gray Zone,” Aspen Institute, July 19, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #13 – July 21, 2019, [email protected] 9. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds., “A New Epoch--and Spectrum--of Conflict,” in In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age, (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1997), pp. 1–22, and Arquilla, Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military (Chicago, Ill.: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), esp. Ch. 6–7. See also, on definitions and concepts of information warfare: Martin Libicki, What Is Information Warfare? (Washington: National Defense Univ., ACIS Paper 3, August 1995); Libicki, Defending Cyberspace and other Metaphors (Washington: National Defense Univ., Directorate of Advanced Concepts, Technologies and Information Strategies, February 1997); and David S.  Alberts, The Unintended Consequences of Information Age Technologies: Avoiding the Pitfalls, Seizing the Initiative (Washington: National Defense Univ., Institute for National Strategic Studies, Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology, April 1996). 10. Arquilla and Ronfeldt, “The Advent of Netwar,” in In Athena’s Camp, pp.  275–94, and P.W.  Singer and Emerson T.  Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). With regard to the tasks for US Cyber Command (established in 2009) and its implications for the national security decision-making pro-

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cess, see Wesley R.  Andrues, “What U.S.  Cyber Command Must Do,” Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 59 (4th Quarter 2010), pp. 115–120. 11. On Russian concepts of information and cyber war and related topics, see: US Defense Intelligence Agency, Russia  – Military Power: Building a Military to Support Great Power Aspirations (Washington, D.C.: Defense Intelligence Agency, 2017, www.dia.mil; Timothy L.  Thomas, Russia  – Military Strategy: Impacting 21st Century Reform and Geopolitics (Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas: Foreign Military Studies Office, 2015), esp. Ch. 6–7, 10; Thomas, Recasting the Red Star (Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas: Foreign Military Studies Office, 2011), esp. Ch. 6–7, 11; and Thomas, Kremlin Kontrol: Russia’s Political-Military Reality (Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas: Foreign Military Studies Office, 2017. 12. Kevin Pollpeter, “Towards an Integrative C4ISR System: Informationization and Joint Operations in the People’s Liberation Army,” Ch. 5  in Roy Kamphausen, David Lai and Andrew Scobell, eds., The PLA at Home and Abroad: Assessing the Operational Capabilities of China’s Military (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, June 2010), pp. 193–235. 13. Original and insightful discussion appears in Jeffrey R.  Cooper, New Approaches to Cyber-Deterrence: Initial Thoughts on a New Framework, SAIC, December 29, 2009, Prepared under contract number N65236– 08-D-6805, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Joint and Coalition Warfighter Support, Cyber, Information Operations and Strategic Studies Task Order, DWAM80950. 14. Libicki, Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar, p. xvi. See also Cooper, New Approaches to Cyber-Deterrence, pp. 2–4 and passim. 15. Benjamin S.  Lambeth, “Airpower, Spacepower, and Cyberpower,” Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 60, 1st quarter 2011, pp. 46–53, citation p. 50. 16. Ibid., p. 51. 17. Robert A. Miller, Daniel T. Kuehl, and Irving Lachow, “Cyber War: Issues in Attack and Defense,” Joint Force Quarterly, issue 61, 2nd quarter 2011, pp. 18–23. 18. Ibid., p. 19. 19. Ibid. 20. An alternative minimum deterrent proposal, based on infrastructure targeting and intended as a way station to nuclear zero, is outlined in Hans M. Kristensen, Robert S. Norris and Ivan Oelrich, From Counterforce to Minimal Deterrence: A New Nuclear Policy on the Path Toward Eliminating Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C.: Federation of American Scientists and Natural Resources Defense Council, April, 2009), esp. pp. 31–33. 21. According to expert analyst Paul K. Davis, in the modern era the United States should move away from the demand for instant nuclear response

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because it is unnecessary and dangerous. See Davis, “What Do We Want from the Nuclear Command and Control System?,” draft paper presented at NC3 and Global Security workshop, Stanford University, January 22–23, 2019, [email protected] 22. An example is noted in: Ernest J. Moniz and Sam Nunn, “The Return of Doomsday: The New Nuclear Arms Race  – and How Washington and Moscow Can Stop It,” Foreign Affairs, August 6, 2019, https//www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/Russian-federation/2019-08-06/return-­ doomsday, also in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #124  – August 7, 2019, [email protected] 23. James M. Acton, “Escalation through Entanglement: How the Vulnerability of Command-and-Control Systems Raises the Risks of an Inadvertent Nuclear War,” International Security, No. 1, Summer 2018, pp.  56–99, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/08/08/escalation-throughentanglement-how-vulnerability-of-command-and-control-systems-raisesrisks-of-inadvertent-nuclear-war-pub-77028 24. Reportedly, the US Air Force plans for an operational capability with its Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon by late 2020 and for a separate and more advanced capability six months later. See John A. Tirpak, “Roper: Hypersonics Capability Less Than Two Years Away,” Air Force Magazine, February 7, 2019, http://www.airforcemag.com/. Russian existing and planned capabilities in hypersonic weapons were touted in a presidential address by Vladimir Putin: see Putin, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, March 1, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #39 – March 1, 2018, [email protected], also http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957. See also: Neil MacFarquhar and David E.  Sanger, “Putin’s ‘Invincible’ Missile Is Aimed at U.S. Vulnerabilities,” New York Times, March 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/world/ europe/russia-putin-speech.html 25. For example, see: David E.  Sanger and Nicole Periroth, “U.S.  Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid,” New York Times, June 15, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html 26. Force structures are heuristic, not predictive of actual deployments. For expert assessments, see: Pavel Podvig, “New START Treaty in numbers,” from his blog, Russian strategic nuclear forces, April 9, 2010, http://russianforces.org/blog/2010/03/new_start_treaty_in_numbers.shtml., See also: U.S. Congressional Budget Office, Approaches for Managing the Costs of U.S.  Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2046 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Budget Office, October 2017), www.cbo.gov/publication/53211 27. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Dr. James J.  Tritten for use of a model originally developed by him for purposes of this study. Dr. Tritten is not responsible for any analysis or arguments here.

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28. For related expert commentary, see: Lawrence J. Korb, “Why it could (but shouldn’t) be the end of the arms control era,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 23, 2018, https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/why-itcould-but-shouldnt-be-the-end-of-the-arms-control-era.html; Theodore Postol, “Are Trump and Putin Opening Pandora’s Box?,” New York Times, February 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/opinion/ inf-treaty-missile-defense.html; and Frank Rose, “The end of an era? The INF Treaty, New START, and the future of strategic stability,” Brookings, February 12, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #21  – February 13, 2019, [email protected] 29. Andrew Osborn and Katya Golubkova, “Moscow ready to cut time for nuclear strike on U.S. if necessary: Putin,” Reuters, February 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #27 – February 21, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Andrey Kortunov, “The Domino Effect: America’s Withdrawal from the INF Treaty and its Ramifications,” Valdai Discussion Club, February 4, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #18 – February 4, 2019, [email protected] 30. A conceptual model for responding to cyberattacks that draws upon classical principles of military strategy is offered in Cohen, Freilich, and Siboni, “Four Big ‘Ds’ and a Little ‘r’: A New Model for Cyber Defense”. 31. On the role of nuclear weapons in Russian policy and military doctrine, see: Nikolai Sokov, “The New, 2010 Russian Military Doctrine: The Nuclear Angle,” Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, February 5, 2010, http://cns.miis.edu/stories/100205_russian_nuclear_doctrine.htm. See also: Text, “The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation,” www.Kremlin.ru, February 5, 2010, in Johnson’s Russia List 2010 – #35, February 19, 2010, davidjohnson@ starpower.net. On Russian approaches to information warfare, see: Hicks, “Russia in the Gray Zone;” Sanger, The Perfect Weapon, pp. 152–170 and passim.; Singer and Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media, pp. 106–117; US Defense Intelligence Agency. Russia – Military Power: Building a Military to Support Great Power Aspirations, pp.  37–41; Thomas, Russia – Military Strategy: Impacting twenty-first Century Reform and Geopolitics, pp.  253–299; Thomas, “Russian Information Warfare Theory: The Consequences of August 2008,” Ch. 4 in Stephen J. Blank and Richard Weitz, eds., The Russian Military Today and Tomorrow: Essays in Memory of Mary Fitzgerald (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, July 2010), and Thomas, “Russia’s Asymmetrical Approach to Information Warfare,” Ch. 5 in Stephen J. Cimbala, ed., The Russian Military Into the Twenty-first Century (London: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 97–121.

CHAPTER 9

Theory and Nuclear Proliferation in the Twenty-First Century: The Limits of Realism

9.1   Introduction Will the spread of nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century threaten international peace and world order, or will proliferation be contained, and the risk of nuclear war controlled, with as much success as in the preceding century? The optimistic arguments, relatively more acceptant of nuclear weapons spread, have been based at least partly on realist international systems theory (RIST) and rational deterrence theory (RDT). Against these arguments favorable to proliferation, skeptics have contended that nuclear proliferation is more to be feared than welcomed. The proliferation pessimists base some of their stronger arguments on organizational theory as it applies to nuclear crisis management, and on the technical and procedural constraints related to the operation of nuclear forces.1 Of course, in any academic and policy debates, there are schools-within-­ schools and nuances within subplots.2 But the important fault line is that between those who are convinced that nuclear weapons spread is compatible, more or less, with international stability, and those who are equally concerned that nuclear proliferation raises the risks of inadvertent war or deliberate nuclear attack. This chapter considers the assumptions made about RIST and RDT in this debate and asks whether these assumptions are robust with regard to the issue of nuclear proliferation. If the assumptions about RIST and rational deterrence theory are not as convincing as hitherto assumed, the character of the debate between the proliferation-­ acceptant and the proliferation-resistant schools may need rethinking. © The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_9

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9.2   Realism and International Politics Some theorists and policy makers now predict that the slow spread of nuclear weapons can be made compatible with future international peace and stability by mixing the same ingredients: realism and deterrence.3 The argument that the post-Cold War world may be compatible with a hitherto unknown, and unacceptable, degree of nuclear weapons spread rests on some basic theoretical postulates about international relations. These basic assumptions are derived from the “realist” or neorealist school of international political thought.4 We are interested in the realist–derived assumptions that are specifically related to nuclear proliferation. Realist principles have considerable explanatory power and predictive utility at a very high level of abstraction: thus their appeal to some scholars. Realism also has an inherent pessimism about some aspects of international relations: thus its road tested user friendliness for worldly heads of state and military planners.5 A summary of the major tenets of some of the more important schools of modern realist political theory appears in the following table (Table 9.1). Proponents of international realism confronted nuclear technology with mixed reactions. The nuclear revolution separated the accomplishment of military denial from the infliction of military punishment. The meaning of this for strategists was that military victory, defined prior to the nuclear age as the ability to prevail over opposed forces in battle, now Table 9.1  Assumptions of major realist theories

Principal cause of state competition for power Amount of power that states want

Human nature realism Defensive realism

Offensive realism

Inherent lust for power on the part of states or governments, based in human nature

Structure of the international system, especially system polarity and its impact on alliance formation States seek to maximize power relative to other states; regional or global hegemony is states’ ultimate goal

Structure of the international system, especially system polarity and its impact on alliance formation States seek to States emphasize maximize power preservation of the relative to other states; existing balance of regional or global power and favorable hegemony is states’ incremental adjustment ultimate goal of the status quo

Source: Adapted from John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 22. Mearsheimer is not responsible for changes made by the author, or for its use here

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was permissible only well below the level of total war. And less than total wars were risky as never before. Nuclear realists admit that these profound changes have taken place in the relationship between force and policy. They argue, however, that the new relationship between force and policy strengthens rather than weakens some perennial principles of international relations theory. Power is still king, but the king is now latent power in the form of risk manipulation and threat of war, instead of power actually displayed on the battlefield. Peace is now guaranteed by threat of war unacceptable in its social consequences, instead of being dependent upon the defender’s credible threat to defeat the attacker’s armed forces in battle.

9.3   Problems in Realist Theory The nuclear version of international realism has a number of intellectual and policy prescriptive weaknesses. First, systems theorists are not always as careful as they ought to be in crossing over from the abstract and hypothetical-­deductive logic of models into the prescriptive worlds of policy analysis and policy-making. Simply put: some prominent thinkers are too willing to follow their models over the cliff. Second, in some widely cited versions of realist international systems theory (RIST hereafter), formal causes are confused with efficient causes. The hypothesized intellectual “system” morphs into a high wire player on the world stage instead of a descriptive or explanatory tool for thinking. This bait and switch from intellectual construct to Leviathan credits “systems” with behavior actually attributable to actor perceptions, goals and capabilities. Bismarck, Metternich and Kissinger are no longer writing the play, but merely reading their lines. Independent or Dependent Variables? The first problem for some important RIST theorists is that, in crossing from the world of abstraction to the universe of actual policy-making, their assumptions introduce hidden biases. Assumptions that do no damage in the world of models (where all assumptions are equal, as all angels in heaven have wings) can be pathologically misguided when they leak into policy-derived explanations or predictions. For example, Kenneth Waltz explicitly compares the behaviors of states in an international system to the behavior of firms in a market. As the market forces firms into a common mode of rational decision-making in order to survive, so, too, does

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the international system, according to Waltz, dictate similar constraints upon the behavior of states. The analogy, however, is wrong. The international system does not dominate its leading state actors: leading states define the parameters of the system. The international system, unlike the theoretical free market, is sub-system dominant. The “system” or composite of interactions among units is the cross product of the separate behaviors of the units.6 International politics is a game of oligopoly, in which the few rule the many. Because this is so, there cannot be any “system” to which the leading oligopolists, unlike the remainder of the states, are subject against their wishes. The system is driven by the preferred ends and means of its leading members on issues that are perceived as vital interests to those states or as important, although not necessary vital.7 Realists, especially structural realists who emphasize the number of powers and their polarities as determinants of peace and war, assume that some “system” of interactions exists independently of the states that make it up. This is a useful heuristic for theorists, but a very mistaken view of the way in which policy is actually made in international affairs. Because realists insist upon reification of the system independently of the principal actors within the system, they miss the sub-systemic dominance built into the international order. Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolph Hitler, for example, saw the international order not as a system that would constrain their objectives and ambitions, but as a series of swinging doors, each awaiting a fateful, aggressive push. Attempts by RIST theorists to circumvent some explanatory problems create others. As Robert Jervis has noted, one can divide international systems theorists according to whether the “system” is treated as an independent variable, as a dependent variable, or as both.8 Waltz contends that the most important causes of international behavior reside in the structure of the international system, that is, in the number of powers and in their positions relative to one another.9 Jervis notes that Waltz’s structure omits some important variables and processes that are neither at the system or actor level: for example, technology and the degree and kind of international interdependence.10 Formal or Efficient Causes A second problem in RIST theories is the confusion or conflation of formal and efficient causes. System polarity is virtually identical with system structure in many RIST arguments. But this near-identity of polarity and

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structure is flawed. Polarity is more the result of past state and non-state actor behaviors than it is the cause of future behaviors. Cold War bipolarity was the result of World War II, of the presence and distribution of nuclear weapons, and of the fact that leaders perceived correctly the futility of starting World War III in Europe. Leaders’ perceptions of the balance of power are an intervening variable between polarity and outcomes such as stability, including peace or war. In other words, leaders’ perceptions, including their risk aversion or risk acceptance, are the efficient causes for international behavior: “systems” and polarity are formal causes.11 By analogy, the formal cause of divorces is marriage; the efficient cause, disagreement between married parties. The difference between efficient and formal causes is important for theories that purport to be empirically testable. Formal causes are proved by an abstract process that follows a deductive chain of reasoning. Efficient causes are demonstrated by observation of temporal sequences and behavioral effects. International systems theorists who emphasize the importance of structure have been more successful at proving formal than efficient causes. There is merit in doing so and Waltz and others who have argued from this perspective deserve credit for their rigor and for the insights derived from their perspective.12 The danger for international systems theorists lies in transferring inferences from the realm of deductive logic to the world of policy explanation and prediction. For example, Waltz argues both that: (1) because there were only two Cold War superpowers, each had to balance against the other at virtually any point; and (2) disputes among their allies could not drag the US and Soviets into war because they could satisfy their deterrence requirements through internal balancing, rather than alliance aggregation.13 The first argument is at least partly inconsistent with the second, and neither is confirmed by Cold War evidence. The United States and Soviets sometimes conceded important disputes to one another in order to avoid the possibility of inadvertent war or escalation, as in the US refusal to expand the ground war in Vietnam on account of expected Soviet and Chinese reactions. And allies sometimes did drag the superpowers into crisis and under credible threat of war, as the Israelis and Egyptians did in 1973. Despite these logical problems in RIST theory, it remains influential as time passes for two reasons. First, international relations and security studies are as subject as are other fields to bandwagoning effects. Prominent ideas gather new adherents in leading graduate schools, and the products

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of those graduate schools carry the ideas far and wide into the profession: like St. Paul’s missionary journeys in Asia Minor. Second, RIST does have major virtues. Unlike many social science theories applied to international politics and foreign policy, it is self-consciously aware of the importance of military history and of strategy. John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, previously cited, shows how the realist perspective can be used to interrogate history for pertinent lessons about policy—as do later works by Stephen M. Walt and Barry R. Posen.14 Because of this explicit interdependency between history and theory in realist approaches, realists emphasize the critical role played by grand strategy in a state’s effort to define and resolve its security dilemmas.15 These “positives” about RIST could outweigh its negatives in a world made up of only non-nuclear powers (before World War II) or of only two nuclear superpowers (the Cold War). But an emerging landscape of “n” nuclear armed state and non-state actors changes the context within which prior arguments worked. John Mearsheimer foresees three different realist orders in the near future: a “thin” international order and two “thick” bounded orders—one led by the United States and the other by China. Within this context: The emerging thin international order will be concerned mainly with overseeing arms control agreements and making the global economy work efficiently. It is also more likely to pay more serious attention than in the past to problems relating to climate change. In essence, the institutions that make up the international order will focus on facilitating interstate cooperation. The two bounded orders, in contrast, will be concerned principally with waging security competition against each other, although that will call for promoting cooperation among the members of each order. There will be significant economic and military competition between these two orders that will need to be managed, which is why they will be thick orders.16

If the preceding forecast is accurate, then a significant but precarious behavior space exists for nuclear arms control, albeit at the mercy of an emerging bipolar competition as between China and the United States, as well as the requirement for continued vigilance with respect to Russia. Even in this scenario, it remains the case that RIST works much more reliably in a world of conventional deterrence, where great powers can still fight major wars at an acceptable cost. Nuclear weapons change this calculation. One might save RIST in a world of nuclear plenty by arguing that

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nuclear deterrence replaces conventional war fighting as the major stabilizing dynamic. But this argument cannot fast forward easily from a bipolar nuclear world into a multipolar nuclear system for reasons that RIST theorists themselves have acknowledged: multipolar systems, especially those that are unbalanced, are more war prone than bipolar systems are.17

9.4   Rational Deterrence Theory and Its Limits Deterrence Rationality Rational deterrence theory as explained and argued by scholars and policy analysts during the Cold War was based on the relationship between the capabilities of states and their willingness to threaten or to use those capabilities under conditions of threat. In a crisis between two nuclear armed states, each will estimate the relative costs and benefits of striking first, on one hand, compared to the estimated costs and benefits of waiting to be attacked before retaliating. The logic of rational deterrence theory favors waiting, as opposed to attacking, so long as the defender has survivable second strike forces, adequate warning information, and post-attack command and control of its nuclear forces to ensure a prompt and unacceptable retaliation against the attacker. Under these conditions, in which the attacker can devise no war plan that provides for a first strike with impunity, the defender has the advantage and deterrence is assumed to withstand the stress of crisis. This model of nuclear deterrence rationality is not to be despised or dismissed casually. It offers important clues as to the development of nuclear force structures and to the posturing of nuclear delivery systems and command-control in times of crisis. For example, weapons and command-­control systems that are vulnerable to first strikes invite attack and are therefore assumed to be destabilizing. Survivable weapons and command systems, to the contrary, contribute to arms race and to crisis stability. But, despite the fact that RDT leads to useful inferences about force structure and operational habits that are contributory to stability, it falls short of providing sufficient insight into human and organizational behavior that might be more important in crisis management. In addition, rational deterrence theory is not necessarily what it seems, even in its own terms and based on its own interior logic. The first point, that RDT falls short of accounting for the causal relationships in large organizations and small groups that make the decisions

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for peace or war, has been emphasized by Scott D.  Sagan in studies of American and other nuclear crisis management. Sagan is especially informative on the proclivities of military organizations, including their organizational mind sets and standard operating procedures, that could complicate crisis management and contribute to an outbreak of inadvertent nuclear war or escalation. According to Sagan, among the possibly crisis-dysfunctional proclivities of military organizations is their preference for preemption or for preventive war: getting in the first blow, should war appear to be inevitable.18 This understandable propensity for seizing the initiative in the twilight between peace and war makes sense under many conditions of conventional warfare. But in a crisis between two nuclear armed states, the organizational proclivity for first strikes becomes more of a liability than an asset: preparations for a preemptive strike or preventive war might be noticed by the adversary and trigger its own preemption. Organizational proclivities or standard operating procedures that drive states toward a reciprocal fear of surprise attack thus conflict with the political objective of nuclear crisis management. Thus the case has been made for the limitations of rational deterrence theory in taking into account variables inside the black box of decision-­ making and organizational behavior. Even critics of RDT on this point concede, by implication, that once outside the black box, RDT still makes sense and its logic remains, by and large, compelling. This concession may be premature. Rational deterrence theory is built on a truncated view of rationality. It is a rationality of means, but not of ends.19 End-rationality would also ask about the implications for society, culture and polity, including humane values, of the various courses of action being plugged into RDT and systems theory. Does the willingness to engage in a nuclear war in order to “save” a society or validate a policy ever make sense? Perhaps it does, in a very scenario dependent manner. Deterrence theorists contend that socially unacceptable threats of nuclear retaliation are morally good because they “work” well enough, and they cite the Cold War as evidence in favor of their brief. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union fired a nuclear weapon against the other’s military forces or state territory despite 40-plus years of global rivalry and a number of serious political crises. Trafficking in nuclear fear may be a dirty business, but it works wonders because even politicians and generals overdosed on nationalism or testosterone cannot pretend that nuclear war is truly “winnable” or define “victory” at an acceptable cost.

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Historical Perspective The Cold War provides mixed evidence for the value of nuclear deterrence as a guaranty pact for peace. The absence of large scale war between the Soviet Union and the United States and their allied coalitions was overdetermined: by politics, technology, memories of World War II and the ability of both “superpowers” to get most of their objectives without war.20 Despite all these inhibiting factors, serious confrontations that could have led to an outbreak of war, including nuclear war, marked the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was only the most publicized and obvious. The peaceful end of the Cold War was an historical anomaly to which nuclear weapons and deterrence made a contribution, but only a partial one. The Cold War endgame was driven primarily by factors internal to the Soviet Union, especially by Gorbachev’s skill in dismantling the old Soviet power structures and his equally breathtaking inability to replace the old order with anything durable and legitimate.21 Gorbachev’s desire to hold the Soviet Union together, in competition with Boris Yeltsin’s eagerness to lead the march out from under the Soviet umbrella, created a state of uncertainty within Russia that gave breathing space for diplomatic, as opposed to military, endgames in Germany. It was a sub-system dominant endgame with a systemic overlay, not the reverse. The entire Cold War endgame rested on the willingness of both Soviet and western alliances to agree the peaceful reunification of Germany. As late as 1989, this still appeared as a political impossibility, resisted by hard liners in Russia and in Western Europe. Against the odds it happened, on account of the determination of three leaders: Germany’s Helmut Kohl; the United States’ George H.W. Bush; and the Soviets’ Mikhail Gorbachev. Systems logic would have dictated a more cautious approach as less threatening to stability, within the Soviet power structures and between the Germanies. The personalities of these leaders, and their willingness to be risk acceptant under extraordinarily fluid political conditions, made legitimate the re-polarization of the continent of Europe. Nuclear weapons and deterrence did play a supporting role here: military adventurism by hard liners East and West in these troubled but fruitful political times was harder to advocate or to undertake on account of the enormous American and Soviet nuclear arsenals hanging in the background. Therefore, the peaceful end to the Cold War requires that we acknowledge the significance of realist international systems theory and rational deterrence theory for explaining causal forces that contributed to this

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unexpected but welcome outcome. RIST and RDT were not irrelevant to explanation and prediction of policy outcomes during the Cold War, or in the complicated interactions among states that brought the Cold War to a conclusion without war. System structure and polarity did matter: the “long peace” between 1945 and 1991 cannot be explained without paying careful attention to the sizes of the larger billiard balls, the shape of the table and the movements back and forth across the table as the balls passed or collided with one another. But the initial velocity and direction for each ball was provided by an “actor” not a system, and some balls had enough force or unpredictability to restructure the game, at least temporarily. A bipolar system remained in place from the end of the Second World War until the end of the Soviet Union, but this bipolarity was highly conditional: for most of the Cold War, it was only a bipolarity of military power for mass destruction. As John Lewis Gaddis has noted: The Cold War was fought at different levels in dissimilar ways in multiple places over a very long time. Any attempt to reduce its history exclusively to the role of great forces, great powers, or great leaders would fail to do it justice. Any effort to capture it within a simple chronological narrative could only product mush.22

Cold War experience, inter. alia., shows how RIST and RDT offer valuable, but highly contingent, explanatory and predictive insights pertinent to world politics and foreign policy decision-making. RIST and RDT models share with other rational choice theories the attributes of parsimony and an explicitly defined connection between causal and dependent variables. But as explanations and predictions of behavior related to peace and war, they are containers only as good as the historical understanding that is poured into them. Consider, for example, the July crisis of 1914. From a systems theory perspective, it made little sense for the great powers to align themselves on two opposed sides of tightly cohesive and antagonistic blocs, as opposed to maintaining the flexibility of a five or six-sided balance of power system. It made even less sense for the leading states of these hostile alliances, especially Germany, France and Russia, to rely upon prompt mobilization and first strike offensives as a deterrent, when in fact they mainly served as provocations and as proximate causes for escalation. The “system” of great power relationships that created a tolerable and mutually beneficial stability, first forged by Bismarck in the 1880s, was deliberately put at risk by

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leaders who only poorly understood the implications of their preemption-­ dependent war plans and alliance commitments. There is no smugness in this critique. Political leaders in 1914 faced challenging circumstances in foreign and domestic policy. As Gordon Craig writes of Germany’s first chancellor in World War I, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg: As soon as hostilities commenced, he found himself in a situation in which nearly all the political parties, the business community, a high proportion of the university professoriate, the bulk of the middle class, and significant portions of the working class were desirous of the most ambitious kind of territorial expansion and were sure that the war would make this possible. Simultaneously, he had to deal with a military establishment that had greater freedom from political control and a higher degree of public veneration than any similar body in the world.23

The July crisis of 1914 also offers cautionary tales about the validity of rational deterrence theory. Leaders in July and August, 1914 should have been deterred for the reason that the military technology of the day favored defensive strategies and protracted war, which would exhaust the treasuries and manpower of the combatants. Therefore, the great powers having been so informed, they would forbear of arms. But leaders were undeterred by the prospect of a longer and more destructive war despite the evidence of costs exceeding benefits.24 Instead of confronting the evidence, they invented their own version of a future in which rapid mobilization and prompt offensives would expedite a short, decisive war.25 If war became protracted, perseverance in the form of offensives a l’outrance would eventually pay dividends. Additional compromise with rational decision-making was caused by the intelligence assessments with which the powers were provided. The intelligence appreciations of one another’s intentions and capabilities in the months preceding outbreak of war were, in the main, marked by misperceptions of enemy intentions, military capabilities, national resolve and security dilemmas as seen by the “other” side.26 It’s not a new discovery that history can confound optimistic predictions or rational models of choice. But July and August, 1914 are revolutionary, not evolutionary, challenges to RIST and RDT. Neither RIST nor RDT models would have predicted the preference of leaders to march to the tune of Mozart’s requiem in lieu of attempting to play the great game for a decade or two longer. Nor can one deduce the collapse of peace into war in July and August, 1914 from gross patterns in trade and technology.

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In modern terms, the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century were times of “complex interdependence” amid growing commercial interchange and scientific optimism among Europeans and throughout the Euro-Atlantic region. Hostility was not the result of intercultural disconnectedness or economic autarchy. Contrary to the expectations of Marx (a systems theorist par excellence), the edifice of pre-1914 Europe was not brought down by the objective forces of technology and intolerable social dysfunction. Instead, Europe dissolved itself by choice, and the choices were made in its chancelleries and planning cells by politicians and generals who viewed their obligations to the “system” in the same way that developers view shorelines.27 One can offer various objections against my arguments here: not all the powers were equally dependent on mobilization as tantamount to war; the powers were equally guilty of expecting a war that was both victorious and short;28 Britain attempted to maintain flexibility of alignment amid the obstinacy of other powers until Germany invaded Belgium; Austria-Hungary was a crumbling empire whose willingness to front for German ambitions was misperceived by both alliances as a military asset; and, finally, that widespread feelings of inevitable war among elites and masses in all the great powers created a besotted climate of anger and fear that propelled leaders into hasty decisions. When these and other disclaimers have been acknowledged and the wisdom of hindsight has been conceded, the collapse of deterrence into the brawl of August, 1914 offers little or no consolation for the proponents of RIST and RDT. Equally defiant of rational choice theory was the willingness of the powers to continue the war, long after the predictions of short war and decisive victory had been falsified, to the utter destruction of four empires and the economic devastation of all major combatants save the late-arriving United States. The adherence of warlords to dysfunctional plans guaranteeing only stalemate and exhaustion can be blamed entirely, and unfairly, on the generals themselves, as some have done: but what happened to diplomacy and political leadership at the very time that it was called upon to think in cost-benefit terms about strategy, that is, the bridge between policy objectives and military operations?29 As Colin S. Gray has noted: Because strategy can only be done through the agency of the tactical, it has to be entirely hostage to the consequences of tactical performances, friendly and unfriendly. Whether tactical performance advances strate-

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gic designs, both grand and lesser, should not be left to be resolved by fortuna, and it most certainly cannot be left to the professional or instinctive wishes of narrowly military soldiers.30

Of course, history does not repeat itself, at least not in detail, so comparisons of present and probable future international systems with the situation that obtained in August, 1914 must be aware of the differences as well as the similarities that apply.31 With the preceding caveat in mind, project, if you will, an imaginary future with a number of autocratic regimes in Asia or in the Middle East as misguided about collective security as were the European powers of 1914. Each state is armed with nuclear forces of variable survivability and its military is highly persuaded of the advantages of nuclear first strike. Mass publics are inflamed with nationalism and/or boosted in their enthusiasm for war by religious or ethnic hatred. The potential disputants array themselves into two or more hostile groups based on cultural or other fault lines and eventually persuade themselves of the inevitability of war. If this dismal but possible future is to be avoided, it is a necessary but insufficient requirement for leaders and military planners to be acquainted with systems logic or rational deterrence theory. The challenge for future leaders in the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia will be, not only to maintain a balance of military power, but also to develop the necessary decision-making skills in crisis management and escalation control.32

9.5   Conclusion RIST and RDT theories offer some important insights about international politics, and they have a justifiable center of gravity based on recognition of the importance of military history and strategy. But theorists and policy makers need to be careful in borrowing from RIST and RDT theories. RIST theory offers explanatory and predictive hypotheses that fit some worlds better than others. A world of many nuclear armed states has the potential to drive RIST theorists well beyond their culminating point of victory. On the other hand, a realist framework for description, explanation and prediction in international politics cannot be denied its applied success stories. As the Center for the National Interest has noted:

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The realist approach served as a bipartisan foundation for Washington’s approach to the world, providing a common framework for identifying threats and defending America’s interests abroad. Everyone from Harry Truman and Dean Acheson to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to George H.W. Bush and James Baker espoused a strategic realism that played a decisive role in ending the Cold War on American terms.33

Fair enough. But Cold War experience also taught that a successful realist approach to nuclear weapons recognized their uniquely dangerous and destructive characteristics. A rational strategy for the use of nuclear weapons for the purposes of deterrence was feasible. But nuclear weapons used in significant numbers precluded the traditional objective of combat: victory at an acceptable cost. Nor could nuclear deterrence and arms race stability be taken for granted. In the twentieth century, they required a combination of military preparedness, deterrence, containment, diplomacy, nuclear arms control and nuclear risk reduction. They still do.34 As Keith B. Payne has noted: The two truths that nuclear war must be prevented and that the global transformation needed for disarmament perpetually appears to be nowhere in sight mean that—at least for the contemporary period of resurgent nuclear threats to the West—a dowdy realist conclusion holds: deterrence combined with diplomacy is the least miserable option now available to prevent nuclear war.35

Two variables will help to determine whether RIST and RDT theory will remain compelling in a world of nuclear plenty: (1) whether the distribution of power among nuclear armed actors is relatively balanced or unbalanced and (2) whether the aims of nuclear states are status quo or revisionist in their attitude toward the existing distribution of international power and other values. RIST and RDT have a lot to say about the first set of variables but understate the importance of the second set. The relative military potential of state actors matters a great deal for the future of deterrence; so, too, do the aspirations and motivations of the future nuclear heads of state. In addition, leaders’ understandings of technology, and its implications for deterrence and for warfare, are decisive inputs into the equation of decision for war or for peace.36

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Notes 1. In addition to sources cited in later notes, an informative and topical discussion appears in Peter D.  Feaver, “Nuclear Command and Control in Crisis: Old Lessons from New History,” Ch. 7 in Henry D. Sokolski and Bruno Tertrais, eds., Nuclear Weapons Security Crises: What Does History Teach? (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute and US Army War College Press, July 2013), pp. 205–225. Feaver classifies participants in the proliferation debates as paleo-or neo-pessimists and paleo-or neo-optimists, with pertinent references for each school. 2. Additional expert discussion on these issues appears in: Henry D. Sokolski, Underestimated: Our Not So Peaceful Nuclear Future (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute and U.S.  Army War College Press, January 2016), esp. pp.  4–29; Richard D.  Burns and Philip E.  Coyle III, The Challenges of Nuclear Non-Proliferation (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015); and Matthew Kroenig, “The History of Proliferation Optimism: Does It Have a Future?” Ch. 3 in Henry Sokolski, ed., Moving Beyond Pretense: Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, June 2014), pp. 45–89. 3. Kenneth N.  Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979). See also, and more specifically on Waltz’s views of the relationship between nuclear weapons and stability: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Papers No. 171 (London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 1981); Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” American Political Science Review, No. 3 (September, 1990), pp.  731–745; and his chapters in Scott D.  Sagan and Kenneth N.  Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). Other arguments for a positive association between the spread of survivable nuclear forces and international stability appear in Martin Van Creveld, Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict (New York: The Free Press, 1993). 4. For a sorting of realist views on international politics, see John J.  Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W.  Norton, 2001), esp. pp.  14–22. See also Hans J.  Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). Paul R. Viotti and Mark V. Kauppi divide international political theories into realist, pluralist and globalist schools, a taxonomy similar to that offered by Kalevi J. Holsti. See Viotti and Kauppi, eds., International Relations Theory: Realism, Pluralism, Globalism (New York: Macmillan, 1993), esp. Ch. 1, pp. 61–227, and Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 328. See also Holsti’s comments on the roots

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of realism and neorealism, pp.  329–330. An excellent summary and critique of neorealist views is provided by Robert O. Keohane, “Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond,” in Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1983), and reprinted in Viotti and Kauppi, eds., International Relations Theory, pp. 186–227. 5. On the other hand, John Mearsheimer is correct to note that realism is inconsistent with much American public opinion and with a great deal of US public diplomacy because it is “at odds with the deep-seated sense of optimism and moralism that pervades much of American society. Liberalism, on the other hand, fits neatly with those values”. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p.  23. A superior assessment of US foreign policy failures and successes from a realist perspective is offered in: Stephen M.  Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S.  Primacy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2018). Jack Snyder contrasts realism, liberalism and idealism as rival theories of international relations in his essay, “One World: Rival Theories,” in Karen A. Mingst and Jack L. Snyder, eds., Essential Readings in World Politics, Fifth Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), pp. 2–10. 6. The term “system” has many uses in international politics and in political science. Structural-realist theories of international politics emphasize the causal importance of system structure: numbers and types of units in the system and the distribution of military and other capabilities among those units. Other variations of systems theory emphasize the interactions among components of the system, including the interdependence of the actors or units. For a concise discussion of systemic theories of international politics, see James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories of International Politics, Fourth Edition (New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 100–134. 7. Mearsheimer’s capstone defense of offensive realism, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, passim., provides ample evidence for this point. Vital interests, as used here, refer to interests over which states resist compromise and for which they are willing to go to war. See Donald M. Snow, National Security: Defense Policy in a Changed International Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 173–180. 8. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp.  92–93 and passim. 9. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 80. 10. Jervis, System Effects, p. 109. 11. For example, John Mueller argues that US and European Cold War leaders’ memories of the destruction caused by World War II would have created risk-averse perceptions of a possible World War III even without the

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existence of nuclear weapons. See Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 29–42. 12. See Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957), for an early and pioneering effort for its time. International systems theories are classified and critiqued in Jervis, System Effects, Ch. 3. 13. Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Daedalus v. 93 (Summer, 1964), pp.  881–909, and Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp.  170–171, cited in Jervis, System Effects, p. 118. 14. See Stephen M.  Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W.  W. Norton, 2005); Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy; and Barry R. Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2014). 15. For example, see: John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, “The Case for Offshore Balancing: A Superior U.S. Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, June 13, 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/1117543, downloaded August 11, 2016. The concept of grand strategy is concisely defined and explained in Posen, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S.  Grand Strategy, pp. 1–5 and passim. See also: B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (New York: Penguin Group—Meridian, 1967), Second Revised Edition, pp. 353–360. 16. John J.  Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” International Security, no. 4 (Spring, 2019), pp. 7–50, citation p. 44, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_000342 17. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 337 and passim. 18. In addition to Sagan’s works cited earlier, see Sagan, “The Perils of Proliferation in South Asia,” Ch. 9  in Michael R.  Chambers, ed., South Asia in 2020: Future Strategic Balances and Alliances (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, November 2002), pp. 191–227. 19. Perspectives on nuclear deterrence theory before and after the Cold War include: Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (New York: Henry Holt – Times Books, 2012); Adam B. Lowther, ed., Deterrence: Rising Powers, Rogue Regimes, and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2012; Michael Krepon, Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Patrick M.  Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, Third Edition, 2003);

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Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); Colin S. Gray, The Second Nuclear Age (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999; and Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). 20. Mueller, Atomic Obsession, pp. 40–42 and passim. 21. See, for example: Raymond L.  Garthoff, Soviet Leaders and Intelligence: Assessing the American Adversary during the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2015), pp. 74–94. 22. John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), xi. 23. Gordon A.  Craig, “The Political Leader as Strategist,” Ch. 17  in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 481–509, citation p. 482. 24. According to Michael Howard, military and political leaders in World War I “were neither blind to the likely consequences of their attacks nor ill-­ informed about the defensive powers of twentieth-century weapons. None of them expected that the war could be won without very heavy losses.” Michael Howard, “Men Against Fire: The Doctrine of the Offensive in 1914,” Ch. 18  in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 510–526, citation p. 510. 25. John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go To War (Eighth Edition) (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2001), pp. 1–23. 26. For abundant evidence, see Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 2013). 27. For example, see: Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth (London: Oswald Wolff 1958) esp. pp.  134–48 for text of Schlieffen’s “great memorandum” of Dec. 1905; L.C.F. Turner. “The Significance of the Schlieffen Plan”, Ch. 9 in Paul M. Kennedy (ed.) The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914 (London: Allen & Unwin 1979), pp. 199–221; Holger M. Herwig, “The Dynamics of Necessity: German Military Policy during the First World War”, Ch. 3  in Allan R.  Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, Vol. 1: The First World War (Boston: Unwin Hyman 1988) pp. 80–115; Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914, trans. from the German by Marian Jackson (New York: Norton 1975) esp. pp.  389–92; D.C.B.  Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (NY: St Martin’s Press, 1983); Sidney Bradshaw Fay, The Origins of the World War, Vol. II, 2nd ed., revised (New York: The Free Press, 1966), pp.  446–481; and William C.  Fuller Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia 1600–1914 (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

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28. Stephen M. Walt, “How to Start a War in 5 Easy Steps,” Foreign Policy, April 2, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/02/how-to-start-awar-in-5-easy-steps/ 29. For the notion of a strategy bridge, see Colin S. Gray, The Future of Strategy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015), esp. pp. 24–40. 30. Gray, The Future of Strategy, p. 40. 31. Graham Allison, “Just How Likely Is Another World War?” The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/just-howlikely-is-another-world-war/375320/, downloaded December 23, 2014. 32. See Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New World Politics, esp. Ch. 5–7. Also informative on this point is Adam B. Lowther, ed., Deterrence: Rising Powers, Rogue Regimes, and Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 33. Center for the National Interest, Editorial, “Standing Up For Realism,” The National Interest, May 3, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #76 – May 6, 2019, [email protected] 34. See Michael Krepon, Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). 35. Keith B.  Payne, “Realism, Idealism, Deterrence, and Disarmament,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 3, (Fall 2019), pp. 7–37, citation p. 30. 36. For a pertinent contemporary issue, see Martin C.  Libicki, Crisis and Escalation in Cyberspace (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2012).

CHAPTER 10

Toward Nuclear Minimalism? Minimum Deterrence and Its Alternatives

10.1   Introduction This chapter inquires whether the United States might be headed, be design or default, toward a posture of nuclear minimalism with respect to its national security policies and military strategies, especially those pertinent to US and NATO relations with Russia. By nuclear minimalism is meant a US policy stance that offers an alternative between nuclear abolition and nuclear plenty. Possible components of a minimalist nuclear posture might include reductions in offensive nuclear weapons, perhaps toward a standard of “minimum deterrence”, possibly combined with additional deployments of improved missile defenses and offensive long range conventional weapons (including cyber, at any range). For such a posture to be viable, it would have to offer both deterrence against nuclear attack or blackmail directed against the United States and its allies, as well as reassurance that the United States retained enough nuclear flexibility and resilience to meet additional, and possibly unforeseen, challenges. Additional complications arise from the possible interaction effects between US and NATO missile defenses and Russian countermeasures and from the possibility of deploying conventional warheads on types of launchers also tasked for strategic nuclear missions.1 Given the unprecedented destructiveness of nuclear weapons, experts and others have questioned “how much is enough” and argued that smaller arsenals for the United States and Russia could suffice for their nuclear deterrence requirements. On the other hand, the US government © The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_10

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during the Cold War and afterward, as well as a number of military and arms control experts, have argued for diverse and large sized US nuclear deterrence capabilities, in order to discourage enemy nuclear attack or blackmail against the United States or its allies.2 This chapter considers the arguments for “minimum deterrence” within the larger context of US policy options and military requirements for nuclear persuasion. We also analyze possible outcomes of smaller US and Russian strategic nuclear forces at minimum deterrence levels. The implications of these findings for a more or less nuclear-stable world will also be noted in later discussion.

10.2   Minimum Deterrence: The Larger Context The idea of minimum deterrence has caught fire among civilian and military policy analysts and other close students of nuclear arms control.3 Minimum deterrence might appeal as an acceptable alternative to the more utopian construct of nuclear abolition, endorsed in principle by former US President Barack Obama and a number of leading former policy makers and military commanders.4 Minimum deterrence might also be acceptable to military planners who want to maintain a viable US nuclear deterrent at an acceptable cost.5 In addition, experts on nuclear nonproliferation might favor minimum deterrence as a way station toward multilateral nuclear arms reductions and further measures of cooperative threat reduction, as among nuclear weapons states as well as nuclear-threshold or nuclear aspiring powers.6 However, discussion of minimum deterrence can bring participants into the land of mystery and confusion, unless the discussion is disciplined by political and military-strategic clarity. A nuclear deterrent force can be described as “minimum” or “maximum” depending upon the security dilemmas facing various states, including their expectations about probable opponents’ security objectives, military capabilities and decision-­making styles. Pakistan, Britain and Israel all are regarded as nuclear weapons states, but their perceived security dilemmas, expectations about deterrence requirements and decision-making patterns vary markedly. Minimum deterrence is not one remedy that fits all states, but a conceptual framework that could induce helpful expectations about deterrence stability and security cooperation, given favorable political winds. From the same perspective, the “adequacy” of a minimum or larger deterrent cannot be defined by numbers of weapons alone, but by the political and military-strategic context within which they might be used: for deterrence, or otherwise.

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Assumptions can go wild as deuces in discussions of nuclear deterrence, since we thankfully have no historical examples of a two-sided conflict with nuclear weapons. The following assumptions guide further discussion here.7 First, the primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attack or nuclear coercion. The avoidance of war by means of deterrence is the ultimate rationale for nuclear weapons. Second, deterrence is a subjective, not an objective, construct. Deterrence is in the eye of the state being deterred. The recipient of a deterrent threat, not the threatener, gets the final vote on whether deterrence has “worked”.8 Third, a failure of deterrence that results in the first nuclear attack of the twenty-first century will be an historical page turner and political “game changer” that reboots some prior assumptions about politics and military strategy. Reactions to the first nuclear weapon fired in anger since Nagasaki might be dominated by the feeling that the “nuclear taboo” had been irretrievably shattered. On the other hand, there is the opposite possibility that such an event might sober leaders and promote greater determination toward international arms control and denuclearization—in other words, leaders and publics might run away from religion or embrace it all the more fervently. A fourth assumption is that there is not necessarily any single number of deployed weapons that can guarantee a state that its deterrent is proof against intimidation or first strike destruction. Although the numbers of weapons deployed might matter in a political confrontation between nuclear armed states, the numbers are meaningful only within a larger context of decisions about the deployment of nuclear-capable launchers, the survivability of launchers and command-control systems, and extant protocols for dealing with nuclear warning and response. States are not automatons, and military forces are living social organisms as well as collections of weapons and procedures. There is no guaranty that any number of nuclear weapons deployed in any configuration will be supported in extremis by rational or sensible decision-making. Thus the study of civil-­ military relations in nuclear armed states becomes all the more important as more states seek or acquire nuclear forces, notwithstanding how undesirable the further spread of these weapons might be. A fifth assumption is that nuclear weapons deployments and deterrence based on nuclear forces do not take place in an historical or military-­ technical vacuum. We are in the information age: nuclear weapons were products of the industrial age and its emphasis on mass destruction as the

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acme of strategy and military art. The information age privileges precision-­ targeted, long range and stealthy conventional weapons and Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems that enable network centric warfare across a spectrum of non-nuclear conflicts. In this context, nuclear weapons might appear as atavistic troglodytes. On the other hand, nuclear weapons retain an appeal to states for reasons of deterrence, crisis management and escalation control. In this context, Matthew Kroenig has argued, with respect to US strategy: Moreover, and specific to this challenge, the United States must ensure that it has available rungs to reach for at each stage of the escalation ladder. If Washington would like to continue to pursue its crisis aims even after a limited nuclear strike from an enemy, then it must have some means of further increasing the risk of nuclear war without intentionally launching a full-scale nuclear exchange. This means that the United States needs a range of “flexible” nuclear options.9

It remains the case that, in the present century, although there is no such thing as a “nuclear strategy” per se, military strategists must take nuclear weapons into account.

10.3   Alternative Nuclear Futures and Minimum Deterrence Given these assumptions, we proceed to discuss and analyze the concept of minimum deterrence within the context of present and foreseeable national security and nuclear arms control issues. Underlying all of the preceding discussion is the matter of choosing among paradigms for the interpretation of past and current security-­ related activity and, as well, for anticipation of probable futures, however hazardous the enterprise. One simply cannot get away from the problem of paradigms and futures because, for example, a US or other state policy of minimum nuclear deterrence makes more sense in some kinds of worlds than in others. Alternative nuclear worlds can be imagined that include: (1) freezing the number of nuclear weapons states at the present (mid-­ 2019) number, and possibly reversing North Korean nuclear weapons status, with unsuccessful terrorist efforts to acquire or to use nuclear weapons; (2) continued “slow rolling” nuclear proliferation among state actors, with unsuccessful terrorist efforts to acquire or to use nuclear weapons;

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(3) slow nuclear weapons spread among state actors, with successful acquisition of nuclear materials by at least one terrorist group, although no actual use of nuclear weapons; (4) slow spread of nuclear weapons among state actors, with successful acquisition of nuclear materials by at least one terrorist group which uses them for nuclear blackmail without actual detonations; (5) rapid spread of nuclear weapons among state actors, with successful acquisition of nuclear materials by at least one terrorist group which detonates an actual nuclear bomb in one city. Doubtless other possibilities can be imagined, but the point is clear. In nuclear worlds #1 and #2, as above, one can still hypothesize that minimum deterrence could be a soft sell among some, although not all, of the existing nuclear weapons states. Even in world #3, where nuclear weapons spread among states remains slow and terrorists have acquired but not used nuclear weapons for blackmail or attacks, a briefing for minimum deterrence might hold the attention of an expert audience. But in worlds #4 or #5, slow or fast proliferation among states and actual terrorist uses of nuclear materials and-or nuclear weapons for blackmail or murder, minimum deterrence will be a hard sell for active duty policy makers and military planners, whatever its appeal to theorists. Since political and military “futures” are indeterminate, policy makers have the opportunity to shape their environments toward constrained nuclear proliferation.10 Factors favoring constrained nuclear weapons spread might include: (1) the ethical and moral inhibitions on the part of many governments and military professionals against the possession or use of nuclear weapons for deterrence or for warfare; (2), the possibility that sensible or rational decision makers will find other and less destructive military means to accomplish their political objectives, including advanced conventional weapons, alliances for extended deterrence protection by existing nuclear powers, or modification of their political objectives for the purpose of war avoidance; and, (3) the inertial effect of a presumed “nuclear taboo” in existence since Nagasaki, and the related uncertainty of a new world following the first nuclear attack in the twenty-first century.11 There are, in symbolism as well as in substance, no such things as “small” nuclear wars or nuclear attacks.12 Of course, the contrasting forces that might favor additional nuclear weapons spread among state actors, with possible spillover into the hands of terrorists, are recognized by many experts. States see nuclear weapons as deterrents against nuclear coercion or attack from other states. Nuclear weapons are thought by some states to confer prestige and to provide a

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cost-effective entry into the ranks of major military powers. Other states might see nuclear weapons as a “last ditch upper of the ante” against a catastrophic defeat in a conventional war.13 Nuclear weapons are also used for diplomatic swaggering and posturing in order to buff the image of states whose military credibility might otherwise be suspected by onlookers and possible adversaries. Finally, nuclear weapons can serve a variety of domestic policy needs for states and regimes, including the appeasement of powerful military or nuclear industry groups and hawkish parliamentary factions. One critical indicator of which “world” we’re headed for is the fate of the existing nuclear nonproliferation regime. In this writer’s judgment, that regime of international institutions, procedures and consultations has performed admirably in the past and with more success than pessimists, including former US Presidents and prominent nuclear weapons scientists, had anticipated. In some ways it performed too well: leading to complacency in some quarters that nuclear weapons in the twenty-first century will continue to spread slowly, if at all. We agree with Kenneth Waltz’s argument (to a point) that the existence of survivable nuclear forces can induce caution on the part of otherwise attack prone or brinkmanship oriented political leaders and their military advisors.14 Cold War experience supports this argument. On the other hand, Scott Sagan is equally persuasive on the point that the character of regimes and domestic policy-­ making processes, as well as organizational aspects of military decision-­ making, count for a great deal in nuclear crisis management.15 The post-Cold War world may provide a plurality of regimes and political cultures that challenge the requirements for successful nuclear crisis management: especially the need for transitive expectations, clear communications and shared understandings about nuclear danger. Defining minimum deterrence for a plurality of worlds poses a potentially open ended research agenda. The present international system, or possible iterations of it during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, offers a sufficient number of uncertainties and unknowns to challenge theorists and planners. What might minimum nuclear deterrence mean in the present and near term, given the inexorable weight of precedent on policy makers and on their available options? How viable might any minimum deterrence regime be, even if agreed to by the leading nuclear weapons states or all of them? The following discussion attempts to clarify these issues with conceptual boundaries and empirical referents.

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10.4   Defining and Measuring Minimum Deterrence Defining Minimum Deterrence The meaning of “minimum” deterrence is not necessarily obvious without having addressed the question “compared to what?” Nuclear strategists would probably agree that minimum deterrence lies somewhere between assured destruction, as emphasized during Cold War discussions about nuclear strategy, and nuclear abolition. Exactly where is more debatable. At least four kinds of variables are in play in classifying nuclear strategies: (1) the political and military objectives for which forces are tasked; (2) the specifics of nuclear targeting plans, related to retaliatory objectives but not necessarily reflecting the actual intent of policy makers; (3) the numbers of weapons and launchers deployed and their assumed rates of survivability against first or later strikes; and, (4) the command-control systems and operational protocols of the state’s nuclear forces, including their dependency on high states of alert or prompt launch for survivability. During the high Cold War, this might have led to a spectrum of possible nuclear deterrent strategies as summarized below (Table 10.1). The preceding table cannot capture all the nuances or possible variations within, and among, these three kinds of strategies. In addition, states’ declaratory strategies are not always consistent with their operational policies.16 But the table illustrates some of the qualitative and quantitative points of similarity and difference among these kinds of generic nuclear strategies. For present purposes, minimum deterrence in today’s world implies a state arsenal with several hundred or fewer operationally deployed, intercontinental or transoceanic deployed nuclear weapons. Substrategic nuclear weapons, including tactical or operational weapons that are deployed on land, at sea or air delivered, have both political and military-operational contexts requiring separate discussion. There is certainly the possibility that, in any multilateral, constrained nuclear proliferation regime, some weapons of medium or intermediate range might have to be included as “strategic” based on their potential effects against likely regional adversaries. Measuring Minimum Deterrence Apart from the problem of defining minimum deterrence, there is, as noted earlier, the question whether a minimum deterrence regime is viable, in either of two senses: (1) as between the United States and Russia

Inflicting retaliatory strikes sufficient to impose “unacceptable” damage on any attacker, including its remaining forces, C3, industry and population Numbers of survivable weapons capable of attacking military, C3, industry and population targets and inflicting “unacceptable” damage— allows for flexible targeting but does not envision fighting a protracted nuclear war to a successful conclusion—requires numbers of deployed warheads in the thousands, fewer than required for counterforce-­ warfighting strategies Political and military C3 must be survivable for second strike retaliation and for post-attack negotiation for war termination—no forces on high alert required in peacetime but not precluded either

Assured destruction

Political and military C3 must be survivable for second strike retaliation—no forces on high alert in peacetime

Impose unacceptable damage to the attacker’s society and civilian population and-or national infrastructure, although with forces less than those required for assured destruction Numbers of survivable weapons sufficient to destroy major infrastructure and the sinews a modern national economy, while not necessarily emphasizing the destruction of urban-­industrial areas, but also not necessarily guaranteeing “city avoidance” —requires numbers of deployed warheads in the hundreds

Minimum deterrence

Source: Author. See also: Stephen M. Younger, The Bomb (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 74–106; Scott D. Sagan, Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989, esp. pp. 58–97; Desmond Ball, “The Development of the SIOP, 1960–1983,” Ch. 3 in Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 57–83; Jervis, The Illogic of American Nuclear Strategy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), esp. Ch. 3–4; Ball, “U.S. Strategic Forces: How Would They Be Used?,” in Steven E. Miller, ed., Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 215–244

Victory or “prevailing” in a protracted conflict by imposing escalation dominance on the opponent at any phase Numbers of Numbers of survivable weapons weapons-­ capable of attacking or holding at launchers risk military, C3, industry and required population targets, if necessary through phases of a protracted war—may also require antimissile defenses for protecting population and-or forces-requires numbers of deployed warheads in the thousands, well above the threshold for assured destruction Command-­ Political and military C3 must be control and not only survivable against initial alert-launch attacks but enduring through protocols various phases of a protracted conflict—some proportion of the force will be on hair trigger alert even in peacetime

Objectives and targeting

Counterforce-war fighting

Table 10.1  Attributes of generic nuclear deterrence strategies

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under a post-New START regime between now and eventual fulfillment of the reductions required by New START, or slightly beyond that time line; and, (2) as among the currently recognized nuclear weapons states either acknowledged or de facto. This latter membership includes the P-5 Permanent Members of the UN Security Council, plus India, Israel and Pakistan—with North Korea as a declared nuclear weapons state, but with multilateral efforts in progress to reverse North Korean nuclear proliferation. The charts that follow permit us to interrogate the deterrence and crisis stability of these two regimes: a bilateral US-Russian regime, and a multilateral, constrained nuclear proliferation regime that assumes eight nuclear weapons states, a reversal of North Korean nuclear proliferation, and a willingness by Iran to stop short of nuclear weapons status.17 Charts 10.1 and 10.2, below, summarize the deployments and outcomes characteristic of a US-Russian post-New START regime with a maximum number of 500 deployed long-range weapons for each state on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and long range bombers. Chart 10.1 shows the numbers Total Strategic Weapons 500 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 Balanced Triad

United States

No ICBMs

No Bombers

Balanced No No ICBMs Triad Bombers ICBM 115 0 115 SLBM 336 432 384 AIR 48 48 0

SLBMs Only SLBMs Only 0 480 0

Russia

Balanced No Triad Bombers

No SLBMs

ICBMs Only

Balanced No ICBMs No SLBMs Triad Bombers Only 248 238 408 483 192 256 0 0 51 0 76 0

Chart 10.1  US-Russia total strategic weapons: 500 deployment limit

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Arriving Retaliatory Weapons 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0

Russia

United States

Balanced No No SLBMs Triad ICBMs Bombers Only Balanced No No SLBMs Triad ICBMs Bombers Only GEN, LOW 411 385 415 389

Balanced No No Triad Bombers SLBMs

ICBMs Only

Balanced No No Triad Bombers SLBMs 416 422 423

ICBMs Only 435

GEN, ROA

318

385

321

389

311

308

253

192

DAY, LOW

286

234

312

260

254

256

367

435

DAY, ROA

193

234

219

260

133

122

197

192

Chart 10.2  US-Russia arriving retaliatory weapons: 500 deployment limit

of initially deployed weapons for each state, under each of four hypothetical force structures. For Russia, the force structures include: (1) a balanced triad of ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers; (2) a dyad of ICBMs and SLBMs with no bombers; (3) a dyad of ICBMs and bombers without SLBMs; and (4) a retaliatory force composed entirely of ICBMs. For the United States, the alternative force structures include: (1) a triad of ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers; (2) a dyad of SLBMs and bombers without ICBMs; (3) a dyad of ICBMs and SLBMs without bombers; and (4) a retaliatory force composed entirely of SLBMs. Although for purposes of New START the United States and Russia are committed to modernization and deployment of all three components of their existing strategic nuclear triads, future agreements, delayed modernizations, budgetary problems or other factors might cause either state to revisit this decision. Even if not, alternative forces create comparative templates to weigh against the baseline case of strategic triads. In Chart 10.2, the numbers of surviving and retaliating US and Russian second-strike strategic nuclear weapons are tabulated for each of the force postures listed above, under each of four possible operational conditions

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of alertness and launch protocols: (1) generated alert, and launch on warning; (2) generated alert, riding out the attack and retaliating; (3) day to day alert and launch on warning; and (4) day to day alert and riding out the attack. One might anticipate that, in general, the numbers of surviving and retaliating warheads would diminish as we proceed from option (1) through (4) above, but that progression is not necessarily automatic, depending on the specific circumstances of attack and response. The numbers summarized in Chart 10.2 provide two interesting results. First, for all US and Russian force structures in the analysis, and for all levels of alertness and launch doctrine except one (Russia, on day to day alert and riding out the attack), each state retains several hundred survivable and retaliating warheads after having absorbed a first strike. During any nuclear crisis, neither Russia nor the United States is likely to be in this relatively most “relaxed” posture. A second finding is that the redundancy and flexibility offered by a strategic nuclear triad for each state, whatever its other benefits, does not necessarily guarantee more surviving and retaliating weapons than does a well performing dyad of weapons. For example, on generated alert and riding out the attack (GEN-ROA), the US minimum deterrence triad is outperformed by a force without ICBMs, without bombers, and with only submarine-based missiles deployed. The differences are not statistically significant and the forces are entirely hypothetical, but they indicate that elbow room exists for future force restructuring of “mixes” in delivery systems. What about the viability of a constrained nuclear proliferation regime that includes current nuclear weapons states, with the exception of North Korea? In Chart 10.3, immediately below, we generate a hypothetical tiered regime in which the United States and Russia are limited to a maximum of 500 deployed weapons each; the United Kingdom, France and China to 300 each; and India, Israel and Pakistan, to 150 each Force mixes for each state are admittedly hypothetical, based on history and supposition. In Chart 10.4, immediately following, the numbers of second strike surviving weapons for each state are calculated against a first strike from a notional attacker. As noted earlier, precision is complicated in this case because of the many unknowns in estimating future force structures for states other than the United States and Russia, and because some states’ substrategic weapons could have “strategic” effects against regional enemies. Our profiles are therefore restricted to generic kinds of forces that might be deployed and their probable survivability rates against attacks from any direction.

400

Total Strategic Weapons

350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 Russian Forces

United States Forces

PRC Forces

Israeli Forces

ICBM

257

100

120

60

0

60

60

0

SLBM

192

336

64

32

288

48

32

240

AIR

51

64

116

58

0

42

58

60

UK Forces

Indian Pakistan French Forces Forces Forces

Chart 10.3  Constrained proliferation model total strategic weapons: 500 deployment limit 450

Arriving Retaliatory Weapons

400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 Russian Forces

United States Forces

PRC Forces

Israeli Forces

GEN, LOW

424

409

244

122

233

118

122

238

GEN, ROA

375

328

147

74

233

74

74

238

DAY, LOW

335

272

143

71

156

75

71

130

DAY, ROA

127

191

46

23

156

31

23

130

UK Forces

Indian Pakistan French Forces Forces Forces

Chart 10.4  Constrained proliferation model arriving retaliatory weapons: 500 deployment limit

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The findings in Chart 10.4 show that even smaller states’ forces, although more first strike vulnerable than those of larger nuclear powers, can provide for sufficient numbers of surviving and retaliating weapons under most circumstances of alertness and launch doctrines—with the exception of smaller states’ arsenals under the most vulnerable posture of “day to day alert, riding out the attack”. Unfortunately this state of affairs might encourage breakout or sneaking around arms limitations on the part of the smaller powers. However, in every other case of alertness and launch doctrines, even the smaller states’ arsenals can provide for sufficient numbers of surviving and retaliating weapons to create many tens of “disasters beyond history” (ten weapons on ten cities, according to former Kennedy national security advisor McGeorge Bundy). In addition to the numbers of weapons deployed and their alertness and launch protocols, each state’s mix of launch platforms (land based, sea based or airborne) is important in reassuring its leaders against fears of first strike vulnerability. Land-based ballistic missiles, unless deployed in very survivable basing modes such as mobile platforms, may invite preemptive attack on themselves, compared to bombers or submarine-launched missiles. The vulnerability of silo-based missiles may be increased by hypersonic weapons now under development by the United States, Russia and others. In addition, the option of deploying sea-launched or air-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs or ALCMs) instead of ballistic missiles might provide more survivable and crisis stable options for states with smaller numbers of deployed nuclear weapons. If the US-Russian minimum deterrence relationship can satisfy stability criteria within a maximum deployment limit of 500 weapons, can the same expectation be broadened and deepened to include eight states in our constrained proliferation model? The short answer is: it depends on politics! As in the case of a “reset” in US-Russian relations contributing to a more permissive climate for New START accomplishment, so, too would some resetting of political expectations among nuclear weapons states expedite achievement of a minimum deterrent regime. It is easy to dismiss the constrained proliferation model illustrated here as too optimistic, but it does not call for heroic political measures: other than a dose of political realism. Political realism cautions against a nuclear arms race undisciplined by any international control regime or great power “concert”. Agreement on a minimum deterrent standard for a fixed number of accepted nuclear weapons states, while drawing a firm line against others joining that club,

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appears as a controversial choice until the alternatives are considered. The most probable alternative is to rely on traditional patterns of power politics, supplemented by a nonproliferation regime of gradually diminishing status and by unilateral guarantees of extended deterrence, for the avoidance of both nuclear proliferation and nuclear war. So the minimum-­ deterrent-­ based “constrained proliferation model” (illustrative deployments as shown in Chart 10.3) is, in this context, hopeful, but far from utopian. Of course, since politics rules strategy, the appropriate briefings for minimum deterrence will be more difficult to give in some states than in others. Western observers once assumed that China followed a nuclear minimum deterrence policy, but more recent expert assessment regards China’s nuclear deterrence posture as one of assured destruction with the potential for something even more ambitious.18

10.5   Conclusion Minimum deterrence may be an idea whose time has arrived, at least for academic strategists and students of nuclear arms control.19 Its broad appeal to governments and their military establishments remains to be demonstrated. As between the United States and Russia, a minimum deterrence regime with a maximum number of 500 deployed long range weapons could certainly provide for adequate numbers of surviving and retaliating weapons to ensure deterrence and crisis stability. If political relations between the two states improve, the probability increases for an agreed minimum deterrence standard. US-Russian political frictions over Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia’s attempts to influence the American presidential elections of 2016, and other issues argues against optimism with respect to force reductions below the New START-agreed levels. Under current and near term conditions, even the extension of New START itself from 2021 until 2026 is an uncertainty. The political prerequisites for a minimum deterrence regime will include the retirement of Vladimir Putin from the Russian presidency and his replacement by a new regime with more modest security objectives.20 Generalizing minimum deterrence across eight instead of two states is more problematical. A great deal of diplomatic persuasion would have to accompany increased military to military consultation in order to obtain consensus in favor of any particular agreement. The illustration here is one possible path to a multilateral constrained proliferation regime, but neither this model nor others with the same object can overcome paranoia

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and nuclear fixation in states’ domestic politics. Iran and North Korea will be test cases for the current nuclear nonproliferation regime: not only because they add new counters on the nuclear chessboard, but also because they invite regional instability that could eventually topple the chessboard and the nuclear taboo with it. The plurality of nuclear ownerships may have more to do with future deterrence and crisis stability than the sizes of arsenals—with nukes, small numbers can create considerable menace, and without necessarily being fired.

Notes 1. Advanced conventional weapons include information and nonlethal weapons. See John Arquilla, Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008). 2. For example, see: Matthew Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and Keith B.  Payne, “Nuclear Deterrence in a New Era: Applying ‘Tailored Deterrence’,” Fairfax, Va., National Institute for Public Policy, Issue No. 431, May 21, 2018 www.nipp.org 3. For important arguments and pertinent citations in recent studies, see: James Wood Forsyth Jr., B.  Chance Saltzman and Gary Schaub Jr., “Minimum Deterrence and Its Critics,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, No. 4 (Winter, 2010), pp. 3–12; Forsyth, Saltzman and Schaub, “Remembrance of Things Past: The Enduring Value of Nuclear Weapons,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, No. 1 (Spring, 2010), pp. 74–89; and Stephen M. Walt, “All the nukes you can use,” foreignpolicy.com, May 24, 2010, http://walt. foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/05/24/all_the_nukes_that_you_can_use 4. See, for example: George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2008, p. A13. See also: Thomas C. Schelling, “A world without nuclear weapons?” Daedalus (Fall, 2009), no. 4, pp.  124–129; Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2007), esp. pp.  201–223; Lawrence Freedman, “Eliminators, Marginalists, and the Politics of Disarmament,” Ch. 4 in John Baylis and Robert O’Neill, eds., Alternative Nuclear Futures: The Role of Nuclear Weapons in the Post-Cold War World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 56–69; and Colin S. Gray, The Second Nuclear Age (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999), Ch. 4, esp. pp. 82–85. 5. Minimum deterrence has, in fact, a considerable pedigree, dating back to some of the earliest US debates on nuclear strategy and deterrence. “Minimum deterrent” strategies have variations and are sometimes referred to as “deterrence only” or “finite deterrence” strategies. See Herman

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Kahn, On Thermonuclear War, Second Edition (New York: The Free Press, 1969), pp. 7–13; and Kahn, On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios (New York: Frederick A.  Praeger, 1965), pp.  281–284. See also: John Baylis, “Nuclear Weapons, Prudence, and Morality: The Search for a ‘Third Way’,” Ch. 5  in Baylis and O’Neill, eds., Alternative Nuclear Futures, pp. 70–86 inclusive, esp. pp. 78–81. 6. For example, an expert assessment in 1999 concluded that nuclear abolition was impractical of realization, leaving open the question whether the United States could or should reduce its arsenal to hundreds of nuclear weapons any time in the next two or three decades. See: Center for Nonproliferation Research—National Defense University and Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, U.S. Nuclear Policy in the 21st Century: A Fresh Look at National Strategy and Requirements (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998), esp. pp. 3.15–3.18. 7. For assessments of deterrence before and after the Cold War, see: Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters; Andrew Futter, The Politics of Nuclear Weapons (London: Sage Publications, 2015); Paul Bracken, The Second Nuclear Age: Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (New York: Henry Holt – Times Books, 2012); Michael Krepon, Better Safe than Sorry: The Ironies of Living with the Bomb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009); Lawrence Freedman, Deterrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Patrick M. Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, Third Edition, 2003); Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); and Colin S. Gray, The Second Nuclear Age (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999). 8. On this point, see Morgan, Deterrence Now, p. 164. 9. Kroenig, The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy: Why Strategic Superiority Matters, p. 204. 10. See Stephen J. Blank, Russia and Arms Control: Are There Opportunities for the Obama Administration? (Carlisle, Pa.: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S.  Army War College, March 2009), for an contemporaneous assessment of possible areas of US-Russian cooperation and pertinent obstacles. Important trends in Russian security and defense policy are traced in Olga Oliker, Keith Crane, Lowell H. Schwartz, and Catherine Yusupov, Russian Foreign Policy: Sources and Implications (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2009), Ch. 5, esp. pp. 162–174. 11. Possible scenarios are examined in George H.  Quester, Nuclear First Strike: Consequences of a Broken Taboo (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). On the concept of a nuclear taboo, see Nina

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Tannenwald, The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons Since 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 327–360. 12. As Colin Gray has noted, a small nuclear war is an oxymoron. See Gray, The Second Nuclear Age, pp. 93–97. 13. I gratefully acknowledge Gregory Treverton for this felicitous phrase. He bears no responsibility for its use here. 14. Kenneth N. Waltz, “More May Be Better,” Ch. 1 in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), pp. 1–45. 15. Scott D.  Sagan, “More Will Be Worse,” Ch. 2  in Sagan and Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 47–91. See also on these points: Richard Ned Lebow, Nuclear Crisis Management: A Dangerous Illusion (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987). 16. On this point, see especially Desmond Ball, “The Development of the SIOP, 1960–1983,” Ch. 3 in Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson, eds., Strategic Nuclear Targeting (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 57–83; and Ball, “U.S. Strategic Forces: How Would They Be Used?,” in Steven E. Miller, ed., Strategy and Nuclear Deterrence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 215–244. 17. I am grateful to Dr. James Scouras for use of his AWSM@ model for making calculations and drawing graphs. He is not responsible for its use here, nor for any arguments or opinions in this study. For additional information on pertinent methodology, see Stephen J. Cimbala and James Scouras, A New Nuclear Century (Westport, Ct.: Praeger Publishers, 2002). 18. Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Assuring Assured Retaliation: China’s Nuclear Posture and U.S.-China Strategic Stability,” International Security, no. 2 (Fall, 2015), pp.  7–50, https://doi.org/10.1162/ ISEC_a_00215. See also: Dean Cheng, “Chinese Views on Deterrence,” Joint Force Quarterly, Issue 60, 1st quarter 2011, pp. 92–94. 19. Deterrence studies have not infrequently disappointed even some of their most important contributors. For example, according to Patrick Morgan, “Neither purveyors of rational deterrence nor their critics provide a reassuring theory for guiding policy. As a result, debates about deterrence strategy never get resolved”. Morgan, Deterrence Now, p. 167. 20. Pessimism about the climate for US-Russian nuclear arms control is underscored by experts. See: Steven Pifer, “With US-Russian arms control treaties on shaky ground, the future is worrying,” Brookings, April 25, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #72 – April 29, 2019, [email protected]; and, Paul R.  Pillar, “Trump’s Demolition of Arms Control,” The National Interest, May 1, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #74 – May 2, 2019, [email protected]

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion

Nuclear deterrence and arms control face challenges from many quarters, including those discussed in preceding chapters. This chapter summarizes our conclusions about these challenges and their implications. The nuclear deterrence system that contributed to stability among the leading nuclear weapons states during the Cold War, as well as the nuclear nonproliferation regime of rules and expectations that contained nuclear weapons spread, invites challenges and revisions as we move further into the present century.1 As Russian expert and Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center Dmitri Trenin has noted, with respect to the central concept of strategic stability: An updated definition of strategic stability needs to account for ways to bar military confrontation between any nuclear weapon states; successfully manage global competition among the United States, China, and Russia, and regional rivalries involving India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea; exercise unilateral and parallel restraint in deployments and doctrines; and include the use of communications, confidence-­ building measures, and other conflict-prevention mechanisms to bolster stability in the likely future absence of an arms control regime.2

First, the information age will change how we think about deterrence, but the velocity and direction of those changes are not entirely clear. In the abstract, cyber war and nuclear deterrence seem to be polar opposites.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5_11

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Nuclear war is the ultimate in mass destruction, whereas most cyber war does not have immediate physical effects (based on experience—although the future may be different). In addition, the problem of attribution means that the unambiguous identification of the source for an attack on computer software or networks is not always possible. On the other hand, any state that launches a nuclear attack against another state territory will be revealed as the culprit by the United States and by other intelligence sources. (Terrorist uses of a bomb are another matter and identification may be more challenging, although not impossible). A third difference between cyber war and nuclear deterrence is that the tools for cyberattack are widely available and comparatively inexpensive for state and non-state actors: including criminals, hackers, IT entrepreneurs, Internet buccaneers, and others. Almost anyone can play at Internet mischief, although how skillfully and for how long will vary as among players. A nuclear weapons capability, on the other hand, requires an industrial infrastructure, research and development expenses and telltale signatures of preparations for nuclear test launches and the fabrication of nuclear materials (enriched uranium and reprocessed plutonium). This impression that nuclear and cyber activities are polar opposites in some ways does not mean that their points of conjunction are insignificant. The use of information weapons before or during a nuclear crisis could complicate the efforts of heads of state to resolve the crisis without war.3 We know that cyberattacks have already been used against the nuclear infrastructure of at least one state (centrifuges in Iran) and against the missile launch control systems of another (North Korea). We also know that hackers assumed to be Russians have penetrated US industrial control systems, including those related to the national and regional power grids. An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack caused by one or more nuclear detonations could disrupt US electric power and telecommunications infrastructures, medical services and transportation on a regional or national basis. Despite warnings from federal agencies and technical experts, few American states have developed any EMP attack emergency response plan. In addition to these possible physical effects on infrastructure and communications, cyberattacks by one state can create confusion and polarization within another country. Russian interference in the US presidential election of 2016, according to US intelligence agencies, was designed not only to assist one candidate against another, but also to create additional political polarization and distrust within the wider community of American politicians, media and voters. Russian trolls on social media were accom-

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panied by hacks against the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, seeking to sow discord within the national Democratic Party and to influence its primary voters against the Democratic front-runner. Russia’s omnivorous information campaign included some tried and true former Soviet instruments of influence, now aided by modern technology: active measures; disinformation; reflexive control; strategic deception; and, of course, masking of the actual identities of digital dirigistes by imposter addresses and fake names. Even these information operations had some physical effects, if you count the efforts by trolls to create fake demonstrations by crowdsourcing in various US cities.4 If Russian hackers will go this far to influence an American election in peacetime, what efforts might be undertaken during a nuclear crisis or in advance of a Russian military move against the Baltics or other NATO member states? Expert military analyst Michael Kofman has suggested: Buttressed by a growing conventional and nuclear deterrent, Moscow is more confident in pursuing indirect competition via hacking, political warfare, and other forms of coercion against the United States, in the hope of imposing costs over time. This is both a form of retaliation for Western sanctions, and a more “medieval” approach to great power contests, leveraging the ability to reach in and directly affect political cohesion among Western states.5

Second, newer generations of weapons will require rethinking of some aspects of nuclear deterrence. Some of the more important among these newer weapons include: hypersonic or other hypervelocity weapons; artificial intelligence; robotics; and directed energy weapons. These are not entirely discrete technologies: for example, the relationship between artificial intelligence and robotics is already apparent in existing and planned applications to military and civilian life. Hypersonic weapons will enable prompt nuclear or conventional missile attacks over longer distances and within a shorter period of time, compared to current generations of ballistic and cruise missiles.6 Russian President Vladimir Putin sees hypersonic weapons as countermeasures to US missile defenses, although US missile defenses at present seem sufficiently challenged by existing Russian and other long range ballistic missiles.7 Initially, hypersonic ballistic and cruise missiles or torpedoes would be mixed with a majority of legacy systems. As the numbers of hypersonics increase and spread more widely among state actors, they could conceiv-

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ably make deterrence less, not more, secure. Fast flying offensive weapons in significant numbers would stress the launch detection, tracking and responsive capabilities of defenders. One result might be that states would put more of their retaliatory forces on high alert, even in peacetime. A more trigger-happy strategic nuclear environment could result, including more favorable views of preemption or other first strike options.8 In addition, faced with growing numbers of faster flying offensive weapons, states might begin a race to develop and deploy improved defenses against hypersonic ballistic and cruise missile attacks. Components of these next generation missile and aerospace defenses might be based in space: either command-control, reconnaissance and communications, or actual space to earth, or space to space, kinetic or laser weapons. Third, the militarization of space could create an additional layer of potential conflict on top of the terrestrial one.9 Rules of the road for space use would have to be worked out: for example, about how closely one state’s repair and replenishment satellites would be permitted to follow the satellites of another state before the first state’s satellites would be defined as “threatening” to the other state’s orbiters and to the functions they perform.10 If the preceding discussion makes it appear that President Donald Trump’s “Space Force” is on the way, that expectation may be premature. US military uses of space will be important but well short of Star Trek. Nevertheless, it would be a reasonable assumption that space and cyberspace are the new “commons” that will define military superiority in the twenty-first century: just as the sea and air did for the twentieth century. The 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US intelligence community notes: We assess that China and Russia are training and equipping their military space forces and fielding new antisatellite (ASAT) weapons to hold US and allied space services at risk, even as they push for international agreements on the nonweaponization of space.11

Of course, combat on land, at sea and in the air will still require armies, navies and air forces of one kind or another, but even in those domains of warfare, much will change. This brings us to other kinds of new applications and technologies that will impact on the arts of war and strategy, including nuclear strategy: artificial intelligence, robotics and directed energy weapons.

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Fourth, artificial intelligence (AI) will have impacts across the entire set of conflict domains (land, sea, air, space and cyberspace) and within the armed forces of states, including those of the United States.12 We have already seen the deployment and ubiquitous use of drones (UAVs) by governments and private companies or owners. Presumably, the lawful use of armed drones will be restricted to governments, but armed UAVs will also have appeal to terrorists, insurgents and other non-state actors. Military robots are already taking on missions for each of the US arms of service: including EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) in counterinsurgency and counterterror operations. More use of smarter robots can be expected as expert systems with enhanced decision-making capability emerge from the research and development bureaucracies of the government or from the dreams of private entrepreneurs. The US Navy plans to be flying autonomous strike aircraft from aircraft carriers beginning around 2022 (move over, Tom Cruise). As AI and robotic systems get within reach of truly autonomous performance (without a human in the loop) the delicate question of “man-machine interface will have reached a critical turning point”. Current US military leaders express commitment to the concept that a “person in the loop” will always be necessary for platforms used in war. However, this assumption presumes that events will take place at a pace consistent with human, as opposed to machine, decision-making. Current US protocols for deciding whether to retaliate after an assumed nuclear attack require redundant verification that an attack is actually in progress, consultation by the President with civilian and military members of his staff, and the dissemination of orders for nuclear retaliatory strikes to the combatant commanders. Suppose, however, that hypersonic cruise or ballistic missiles shorten the time available for US discussion and reaction. Instead of the currently assumed 20 minutes or so for ICBMs launched from Russian territory to reach their targets on US soil, the time from launch detection to detonation at the intended aim point might be five minutes or less. This leaves literally seconds of time for decision and consultation. This uncertainty, about the increasing speed and stealth of new and prospective nuclear missile delivery systems, has led some analysts to propose that the US nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) system should be automated. According to Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin:

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Time compression has placed America’s senior leadership in a situation where the existing NC3 system may not act rapidly enough. Thus, it may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position.13

The same problem of allowing adequate time for human deliberation and decision might also apply to directed energy weapons, especially if they were deployed in space and their beams traveled at the speed of light. If space-based weapons could destroy other space-based weapons or other undefended but critical satellites, the problem would be serious enough. If, in addition, space-based weapons could reliably attack targets on earth, then states will fear simultaneous attacks on their space and terrestrial assets and may decide that “preemptive automation” of prompt response was unavoidable, once reliable detection of attack was confirmed. Systems could be pre-programmed for preemption against presumed attackers under the following assumptions: that the other state had already decided upon an attack but not yet set that attack in motion; or, more narrowly, that an attack was actually in progress and had been confirmed by appropriate indicators. Therefore, a fifth conclusion and cautionary note for this study is that the challenges created by these new technologies for nuclear deterrence are not taking the human out of the decision-making process for peace and war. Even in the case of autonomous systems used for deterrence or for combat, humans will define the programming of these systems and their rules of engagement will be included in their software protocols. The human-machine interface is going to get a lot more complicated, and it will require oversight by warriors who are as well educated as philosophers are about the rights and wrongs of war and peace: including nuclear war and deterrence of same. One scientist, writing on the subject of “cognitive warfare” against the reciprocal trust on which open societies depend, warns as follows: We in the West see this as an S&T (science and technology) contest, while largely ignoring its socio-political implications. For the Chinese, AI is politics, politics, politics. Is there something about non-­Occidental cultural orientations that makes AI applicable to human affairs in ways

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not amenable to us? It’s an important strategic question. Positivism, by masking the salience of cultural orientation, is an exploitable weakness of our epistemic communities in need of addressing.14

Americans have the right to expect that their military decisions and actions for national defense and security, including war if necessary, are carried out for just causes and according to ethical standards. Our military leaders are habituated to the importance of honor as well as that of duty and country. Those civilian and military leaders who hold the power of command over nuclear forces can never relinquish the “last word” to a smart AI system, no matter how capable it might be. Therefore, the last word here is to avoid building systems and processes that are too dependent on making wise decisions without adequate time to do so. The preceding cautionary note is not only an academic argument or exercise. Fundamental threats to US national security and to a stable international order are at stake if the political process that supports US–Russian nuclear arms control is permitted to atrophy. Nuclear modernization and technology innovation undisciplined by enlightened political leadership, including sensitivity to the impacts of US or Russian nuclear developments and deployments on other states, could be self-defeating for both. As Andrey Kortunov, director of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), has noted, the “dead zone” of arms control neglect likely to follow the demise of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty carries attendant risks of growing conflict and the costs of a new arms race.15 In addition, Benjamin Zala has argued: While that outcome (a new nuclear arms race) is not yet inevitable, it is likely, and if it happens, the new nuclear arms race will be different and more dangerous than the one we remember. More nuclear-armed countries in total, and three competing great powers rather than two, will make the competition more complex. Meanwhile, new non-nuclear weapon technologies—such as ballistic missile defense, anti-satellite weapons, and precision-strike missile technology—will make nuclear deterrence relationships that were once somewhat stable less so.16

On the other hand, some argue that the dangers of the second nuclear age have been exaggerated, and that nostalgia for the Cold War is misplaced. Collective memories of the Cold War held by American and NATO European audiences are subconsciously distorted by its favorable endgame

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from 1989 through 1991. In fact, the Cold War was a dangerous, protracted struggle including a number of nuclear crises that were navigated by a combination of good luck and successful management.17 Thus far, according to some, the second nuclear age has been considerably less ­dangerous than the first: and, in addition, it is not clear how much deterrence has to do with either condition. According to Christopher J. Fettweis: Throughout the Cold War, the millions of words devoted to deterrence were all based on a series of assumptions that could never be tested. Foremost among them was the notion that the desire to attack was omnipresent or at least occasionally present between the superpowers. Without that desire, nothing would actually be deterred. In practice, it was impossible to determine when exactly states were deterred from attacking by guarantees of retaliation and when they were simply not contemplating aggression.18

It is certainly possible that deterrence as a concept is an intellectual placebo, Cheshire cat or place holder for lack of something better.19 The late Herman Kahn of Hudson Institute, whose vigorous briefings on nuclear strategy were legendary among those fortunate enough to experience them in person, always maintained that deterrence was a way station until more robust concepts and theories would follow.20 Nuclear deterrence theory has always been, in essence, an experiment in psychology applied to military-strategic settings: borrowing from operations research, game theory and economic rational decision theory. Perhaps the most important impact of deterrence studies was the development of a vocabulary that would expedite sharing of ideas among government officials, academics, policy analysts and even critics of nuclear strategy and arms control. These works may not have been high art, but neither were they graffiti.21 Will the military-strategic thinkers of the second nuclear age and the twenty-first century do better than their predecessors? We are not very far into the second nuclear age, so the historical verdict as to the robustness of present and future nuclear deterrence, in theory and practice, remains unpronounced.22 Political and military leaders will have to grapple with new technologies and new policy challenges and integrate them into frameworks for maintaining peace and security in a complex international order. Alexander Golts, an expert commentator on Russian military affairs, has warned:

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A big role here is played by subjective factors. A new generation of leaders has come to power in different countries who have no idea what is behind the word “war,” not to mention the nuclear war. Khrushchev and Brezhnev were not brilliant politicians. But behind them both had a terrible war. Both Kennedy and Bush Sr. went through the war and feared it. Now this fear has disappeared.23

Perhaps there is a smart AI system waiting in the wings that can repackage deterrence studies within a superordinate framework of ends, ways and means that will enable truly “strategic” thinking: including the possible wraparound of conventional and nuclear deterrence theories within a new synthesis of neocortical warfare or brain-based strategy.24 (The Appendix to this conclusion illustrates some original and strategic thinking by Dr. Paul K. Davis, Professor of Policy Analysis at RAND Corporation, about one aspect of nuclear policy: comparison and contrast between the Cold War and present day requirements for nuclear command, control and communications systems, with relevant questions for further study). As Professor Lyle J. Goldstein has noted, there is a great deal that can be learned about what works with respect to nuclear deterrence and arms control by studying America’s own Cold War experience.25 And, despite Russian-American disagreements about other issues, Presidents Trump and Putin (or their successors) might be open to a new approach to arms control that would be more about general principles of strategic stability, instead of counting warheads and missiles. As explained by Andrey Kortunov: That would be issues like militarization of space, and artificial intelligence, and other things that might destabilize the situation. It’s not about reduction of arms, but reduction of risk. We do believe that the U.S. needs arms control in some form; that there is a consensus that it strengthens national security, can be verified with Russia, and serves to promote stability.26

Expert opinion notwithstanding, in democratic systems policy makers and their advisors must take into account public opinion on national security issues. Unfortunately, it appears to be the case that American nuclear education has fallen short. As one study of public attitudes about conflict with North Korea has shown, there exists considerable misinformation about that and other nuclear related issues:

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The results also display how poorly informed the public is about nuclear weapons, missile defense, and North Korea. Scientists and social scientists are unlikely to be able to change the moral and strategic instincts in the hearts of the American public. But they can ­communicate the facts and, therefore, influence the calculations of an informed public.27

Finally, there is the question whether deterrence can be transcended by the abolition of nuclear weapons altogether.28 Nuclear abolition has a certain esthetic and moral appeal, but the term begs an operational definition. Does nuclear abolition mean the removal of deployed nuclear weapons to storage, or the destruction of nuclear weapons, delivery systems and nuclear infrastructure? Or will states insist on a “bomb in the basement” in the form of a large civil nuclear power industry that can rapidly enrich sufficient quantities of bomb grade uranium or plutonium to build weapons? Nuclear abolition would require a high level of political trust among states that remain suspicious of one another. The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) opened for signature in 2017 has many signatories: but, none of the existing nuclear weapons states have signed. The Treaty is intended to create a new international norm, calling on all states not to “develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons”. The Treaty also prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons on national territory and the provision of aid to state conducting prohibited activities. Opened for signature by the UN Secretary-General in September, 2017 it will enter into force after 50 states have ratified it (as seems likely).29 The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (so-called Ban Treaty) expressed the frustration of many non-nuclear weapons states as to the prior lack of progress in nuclear disarmament.30 Instead of the traditional step-by-step approach growing out of Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) conferences and favored by existing nuclear weapons states, supporters of TPNW favored a prompt doctrinal leap into rejection of nuclear weapons and deterrence doctrines altogether. Frustration with nonproliferation and arms control orthodoxy also prompted US government officials to put forward their own initiative in 2018 entitled “Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament” (CEND). This approach sought to focus more attention on the broader security conditions in the interna-

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tional system that created the context for nuclear disarmament, including nuclear build-ups among nuclear weapons states not party to the NPT, and broader challenges to deterrence and stability in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific.31 This degree of international support for anti-nuclear norms cannot be dismissed as diplomatic chitchat. Something meaningful is happening with respect to worldwide normative attitudes toward nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, nuclear weapons will exist so long as states feel threatened and regard nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent against imposed regime change, or worse. A legally anarchic international system makes states reliant on self-help for security. One writer compares the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons to the ill-fated Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 (otherwise the Treaty for the Renunciation of War) with the objective of creating a global norm against war as an instrument of state policy.32 On the other hand, abolishing war is a bigger reach than eliminating one category of weapons for war making. Another obstacle to nuclear abolition is that, in the short run, the principal beneficiary would be the United States. There is simply no equivalent to US globally deployed, advanced technology forces for large-scale conventional warfare, supported by an unprecedented network of overseas bases and by numerous allies and partners (admittedly, variable in their reliability, depending on circumstances).33 Even so (and this situation of conventional military superiority cannot be taken for granted in an uncertain future of aspiring peer competitors and changing technologies), then President Barack Obama’s call for nuclear abolition was in parallel with his policy prescription that, so long as nuclear weapons existed in the arsenals of other states, the United States must have a nuclear force second to none—for deterrence of attack, and to avoid nuclear blackmail against the United States or its allies. Obama was forced to face the need for peaceful coexistence between his nuclear aspirations and global nuclear realities. Thus, he supported the New START agreement and other aspects of nuclear arms control, as well as efforts toward nuclear nonproliferation and risk reduction. It’s an imperfect world, but not necessarily an unmanageable one.

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Appendix: Cold War and Present Requirements for US Nuclear C3 System Cold war requirements

Possible requirements for today Questions

Certainty of massive and immediate retaliation to soviet attack  Even after surprise first strike  Even with worst case assumptions about system survivability  Related need for hedges   Launch under attack (LUA)   Predelegation   Redundant targeting Ability to manage and execute nuclear employment options that may be:  Small and demonstrative  Limited but both demonstrative and lethal;  Full counterforce and/or countermilitary  As last resort, countervalue  With target withholds (e.g., Soviet command and control, cities)  Coercive power and NC3 capability to deescalate on favorable terms Escalation dominance (or, at least, equivalence)

As before but with less concern about surprise first strike and with more attention on plausible vulnerabilities to cyberattack than on worst case assumptions

As before but with much smaller arsenals and less emphasis on massive counterforce or countermilitary attacks As before and with more emphasis on de-escalation per se and on economic and political power to win battle of residual capability

No longer feasible, if it ever was after the 1960s

Zero tolerance for Even more important than mistakes (false warning of previously attack, mishandling of weapons, insubordination)

Why require extreme timeliness when disarming first strikes seem implausible? Why should LUA ever be required? Should predelegation be disallowed? Do reduced arsenals imply lower goals for retaliatory damage? Do smaller forces create incentives for countervalue responses? Isn’t prolonged full-scale nuclear war much less likely and viable, but prolonged limited nuclear war more plausible than before? Do smaller forces create incentives for countervalue responses?

Is anything lost if the US and NATO use “strategic” platforms for theater-level purposes? How can the quality and dedication of “human capital” in NC3 be improved even though the mission is less prestigious? (continued)

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(continued) Cold war requirements

Possible requirements for today Questions

Effective prolonged nuclear war fighting if deterrence fails

As before and perhaps more credible in modern world

Assure legitimate political control and decision processes  Continuity of government Maintain control by the presidency  Maintain communication  Continuity of government Superior quality of NC3 for strategic competitiveness

As strongly as before but with heightened concerns  Checks on presidential action Even more than before but presumably less difficult

What might “prolonged nuclear warfighting” plausibly be like given the more numerous nuclear states? What have we learned on this matter? What would be constitutional and appropriate? Should predelegation be disallowed? With what exceptions, if any?a

Source: Paul K. Davis, “What Do We Want from the Nuclear Command and Control System?” draft paper for presentation at NC3 and Global Security workshop at Stanford University, January 22–23, 2019. See also: Bruce G.  Blair, “Loose Cannons: The President and US nuclear posture,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 1 (2020), pp. 14–26, https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1701279 Note: NC2 Nuclear Command and Control, NC3 Nuclear Command, Control and Communications Updated by author

a

Notes 1. Rebecca Davis Gibbons, “The Future of the Nuclear Order,” Arms Control Today, April 2019, Arms Control Association, https://www.armscontrol.org 2. Dmitri Trenin, “Strategic Stability in the Changing World,” Carnegie Moscow Center, March 21, 2019, https://carnegie.ru/2019/03/21/ strategic-stability-in-changing-world-pub-78650. See also: Eugene Rumer, “The Primakov (Not Gerasimov) Doctrine in Action,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 5, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/06/05/primakov-not-gerasimov-doctrine-inaction-pub-79254 and Trenin, “It’s Time to Rethink Russia’s Foreign Policy Strategy,” Carnegie Moscow Center, April 25, 2019, https://carnegie.ru/commentary/78990 3. See, for example: Ernest J.  Moniz and Sam Nunn, “The Return of Doomsday: The New Nuclear Arms Race—and How Washington and Moscow Can Stop It,” Foreign Affairs, August 6, 2019, https://www. foreignaffairs.com/articles/Russian-federation/2019-08-06/returndoomsday, also in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #124  – August 7, 2019, [email protected]

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4. For an expansion on the problem of social media as a new domain for warfare, see P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking, LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). 5. Michael Kofman, “Drivers of Russian Grand Strategy,” Russia Matters, April 23, 2019, https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/drivers-russian-grand-strategy 6. The term hypersonic is something of a misnomer, since existing intercontinental ballistic missiles are designed to travel at hypersonic speeds of five or more times the speed of sound. Presumably newer generations of hypersonic weapons will include a qualitative leap beyond present capabilities: perhaps up to 20 times the speed of sound. For diverse perspectives, see: Patrick Tucker, “Nuclear Weapons Are Getting Less Predictable, and More Dangerous,” Defense One, May 16, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #84  – May 17, 2019, [email protected]; and Joshua Cho, “Hypersonic Missiles Aren’t Starting an Arms Race—Washington Is,” FAIR, July 12, 2019, https://fair.org/home/hypersonic-missiles-arentstarting-an-arms-race-washington-is/. For estimates of US Air Force progress in hypersonics, see: John A. Tirpak, “Walker: Hypersonic HAWC and TBG Neck-and-Neck to Fly by End of Year,” Air Force Magazine, May 1, 2019, http://airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/May%202019/ Walker-Hypersonic-HAWC-and-TBG-Neck-And-Neck-to-Fly-by-End-ofYear.aspx; and Tirpak, “Roper: Hypersonics Capability Less Than Two Years Away,” Air Force Magazine, February 7, 2019, http://www.airforcemag.com/Features/Pages/2019/Februar y%202019/RoperHypersonics-Capability-Less-Than-Two-Years-Away.aspx 7. Putin’s expectations for new superweapons, including hypersonics, may exceed technical or functional realities. See: Yulia Latynina, “Putin’s Fancy Weapons? Everything Old Is New Again,” New York Times, July 30, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #121 – July 31, 2019, [email protected] 8. Expert assessments of hypersonics and their potential include: Michael Kofman, “Beyond the Hype of Russia’s Hypersonic Weapons,” Moscow Times, January 15, 2020, in Johnson’s Russia List 2020 - #10 - January 16, 2020, [email protected]; and Andrew W. Reddie, “Hypersonic missiles: Why the new “arms race” is going nowhere fast,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 13, 2020, https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/ hypersonic-missiles-new-arms-race-going-nowhere-fast/. Russia’s declaratory interest in hypersonic weapons leaves unresolved some questions about possible targeting for those weapons along with other legacy weapons in the same arsenal. See: Dawn Stover, “What would Russia nuke?”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 4, 2019, https://thebulletin. org/2019/03/what-would-russia-nuke/ 9. US Defense Intelligence Agency. Challenges to Security in Space. Washington, D.C.: Defense Intelligence Agency, January 2019, www.dia. mil/Military-Power-Publications. See also on this topic: Lawrence J. Korb, “The focus of US military efforts in outer space should be … arms control,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 4 (2019), pp. 148–150, DOI:

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https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1628471; John Mecklin, “Why Star Wars should remain a cinematic fantasy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 4 (2019), pp. 135–136, https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/ why-should-remain-a-cinematic-fantasy/; James Clay Moltz, “The Changing Dynamics of Twenty-First-Century Space Power,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 1 (Spring 2019), pp.  66–94; Everett C.  Dolman, “Space Force Déjà Vu,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 2 (Summer 2019), pp.  16–21; Steve Lambakis, “Thinking About Space Deterrence and China,” National Institute for Public Policy, Information Series, Issue No. 443, July 9, 2019, [email protected]; and Adm. Dennis C. Blair (ret.), “Why the US must accelerate all elements of space-based nuclear deterrence,” Defense News, February 7, 2019, https://www.defensenews. com/opinion/commentary/2019/02/07/why-the-us-must-accelerateall-elements-of-space-based-nuclear-deterrence/ 10. Henry Sokolski, “Dealing Huge: A Trumpian Arms Control Agenda,” Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC), June 13, 2018, http:// npolicy.org/article.php?aid+1399&tid=30 offers significant insights on this topic. See also: Brian G.  Chow, “Two Ways to Ward Off Killer Spacecraft,” Defense One, July 30, 2019, https://www.defenseone.com/ ideas/2019/07/two-near-term-ways-ward-killer-spacecraft/158820/ 11. Daniel R.  Coats, Director of National Intelligence, Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, Statement for the Record, US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, (Washington, D.C.: Office of the DNI, January 29, 2019), p. 17. See also: Bart Hendrickx, “Russia’s Secret Satellite Builder,” The Space Review, May 6, 2019, http://www. thespacereview.com/article/3709/1 12. On artificial intelligence in support of cyber defense and the components of a DOD—AI strategy, see: Michael Sulmeyer and Kathryn Dura, “Beyond Killer Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Can Improve Resilience in Cyber Space,” War on the Rocks, September 6, 2018, https://warontherocks. com/2018/09/beyond-killer-robots-how-artificial-intelligence-can-improve-resilience-in-cyber-space/. See also: John R. Allen and Amir Husain, “The Next Space Race Is Artificial Intelligence: And the United States is Losing,” Foreign Policy, November 3, 2017, https://foreignpolicy. com/2017/11/03/the-next-space-race-is-artificial-intelligence-and-americais-losing-to-china/ 13. Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin, “America Needs a ‘Dead Hand’,” War on the Rocks, August 16, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/019/08/ america-needs-a-dead-hand/. See also: Matt Field, “Strangelove redux: US experts propose having AI control nuclear weapons,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, August 30, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/ strangelove-redux-us-experts-propose-having-ai-control-nuclear-weapons/

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14. Dr. Zac Rogers, “In the Cognitive War  – The Weapon is You!”, Mad Scientist Laboratory, July 1, 2019, https://madsciblog.tradoc.army. mil/158-in-the-cognitive-war-the-weapon-is-you/. See also: Chris C.  Demchak, “China: Determined to dominate cyberspace and AI,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 3 (2019), pp. 99–104, https://doi. org/10.1080/00963402.2019.1604857 15. Andrey Kortunov, “The World After the INF Treaty: How to Get Out of the Dead Zone,” Valdai Discussion Club, January 21, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #13, January 21, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Justin V.  Anderson and Amy J.  Nelson, “The INF Treaty: A Spectacular, Inflexible, Time-Bound Success,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, no. 2 (Summer, 2019), 90–122, for a critique of INF architecture and lessons for future arms control. See also, for a discussion of more hopeful possibilities amid present discouragements: Joe Cirincione, “A new, hopeful moment for US nuclear policy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 17, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/04/a-new-hopeful-momentfor-us-nuclear-policy/ 16. Benjamin Zala, “How the next nuclear arms race will be different from the last one,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 2, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/01/how-the-next-nuclear-arms-race-will-be-differentfrom-the-last-one/ 17. Stephen M.  Younger, The Bomb (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 45–68. 18. Christopher J. Fettweis, “Pessimism and Nostalgia in the Second Nuclear Age,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, No., 1 (Spring 2019), pp. 12–41, citation p.  31. See also: John Mueller, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 29–42. 19. Further complicating matters, the possibility of a religious or spiritual dimension to nuclear deterrence cannot be excluded. See Dmitry Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2019), p. 241 and passim. 20. Author, personal observation and experience. 21. For documentation, see prior citations in this study, especially Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Third Edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), esp. pp. 458–464. 22. For assessments, see: George P. Shultz, William J. Perry and Sam Nunn, “The Threat of Nuclear War Is Still With Us: The U.S. must re-engage with Russia to ensure the ultimate weapon doesn’t spread and is never used,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 0 #61  – April 11, 2019, [email protected]; Lawrence J.  Korb, ‘Why it could (but shouldn’t) be the end of the arms control era,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, October 23, 2018, https://thebulletin.

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org/2018/10/why-it-could-but-shouldnt-be-the-end-of-the-arms-control-era.html; Dmitry Stefanovich, “Is This the End of Nuclear Arms Control?,” Russian International Affairs Council, November 12, 2018, in Johnson’s Russia List 2018 – #198 – November 12, 2018, daviddjohnson@ starpower.net; Trenin, “Strategic Stability in the Changing World”; and Alexei Arbatov, “Nuclear Deterrence: A Guarantee or Threat to Strategic Stability?”, Carnegie Moscow Center, March 22, 2019, https://carnegie. ru/2019/03/22/nuclear-deterrence-guarantee-or-threat-to-strategicstability-pub-78663 23. Alexander Golts, “Presidents without brakes. The threat of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States is becoming increasingly real,” The Insider, July 9, 2019, https://theins.ru/opinions/165182 24. Brain-machine interfaces are of much interest to military (and other) researchers. See, for example: Joseph DeFranco and Dr. James Giordano, “Linking Brains to Machines, and Use of Neurotechnology to the Cultural and Ethical Perspectives of the Current Global Stage,” Mad Scientist Laboratory, August 8, 2019, https://madsciblog.tradoc.army.mil/168linking-brains-to-machines-and-use-of-neurotechnology-to-the-culturaland-ethical-perspectives-of-the-current-global-stage/. On strategic thinking, see: Colin S. Gray, Theory of Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 25. Lyle J.  Goldstein, “Trump Should Uphold Arms Control, Not Destroy It,” The National Interest, May 14, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #83 – May 15, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Tom Nichols, “Billions Dead: 5 Times Russia and America Nearly Started a Nuclear War: Some history that should never be forgotten,” The National Interest, April 1, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #55 – April 2, 2019, [email protected] 26. Kortunov, quoted in Fred Weir, “Russia looks for US to propose ‘bigger, better’ arms control,” Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 2019, https:// www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2019/0521/Russia-looks-for-USto-propose-bigger-better-arms control, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019  – #86 – May 22, 2019, [email protected]. See also: Kortunov, “Is There Life After Arms Control Death?” Valdai Discussion Club, June 14, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 – #99 – June 24, 2019, davidjohnson@ starpower.net 27. Alida R. Haworth, Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino, “What do Americans really think about conflict with North Korea? The answer is both reassuring and disturbing,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, no. 4 (June 24, 2019), pp. 179–186, citation, p. 184, https://doi.org/10.108 0./00963402.2019.1629576

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28. George P.  Shultz, William J.  Perry, Henry A.  Kissinger and Sam Nunn, “Toward a Nuclear-Free World,” Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2008, p. A13. See also: George P. Shultz, William J. Perry and Sam Nunn, “The Threat of Nuclear War Is Still With Us: The U.S. must re-engage with Russia to ensure the ultimate weapon doesn’t spread and is never used,” Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2019, in Johnson’s Russia List 2019 0 #61 – April 11, 2019, [email protected] 29. See: United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, Treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, https://www.un.org/disarmament/wmd/ nuclear/tpnw/, downloaded July 2, 2019. 30. The Ban Treaty also emphasized the importance of a humanitarian perspective in the disarmament debate and sought to reduce the legitimacy of nuclear weapons. See Tong Zhao, “An Inquiry Into the NPT and Nuclear Disarmament,” Carnegie-Tsinghua, Center for Global Policy, February 1, 2019, Testimony: UK House of Lords, https://carnegietsinghua. org/2019/02/12/inquir y-into-npt-and-nuclear-disarmamentpub-78574 31. For additional background and insights on this topic, see: Paul Meyer, “Creating an Environment for Nuclear Disarmament: Striding Forward or Stepping Back?”, Arms Control Today, April 2019, https://www.armscontrol.org/taxonomy/term/69 32. Matthew R. Costlow, “‘Another Pious Gesture’: The Kellogg-Briand Pact and its Lessons for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Disarmament,” National Institute for Public Policy, Information Series, Issue No. 442, June 25, 2019, [email protected] 33. Eliot A. Cohen, The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force (New York: Basic Books, 2016), esp. pp. 63–97.

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Index1

A Able Archer, xvi, 1–21 ABM Treaty, 4, 50 Acton, James N., 149n4, 172n23 Allison, Graham, 83n13, 85n31, 104n1, 150n13, 193n31 Antimissile defenses, 5, 26, 36, 52, 53, 57, 59, 146, 147, 162 Arbatov, Alexei, xv, 25, 41, 70 Arms control, xv, xvi, xx, 21, 25–41, 55, 59, 67, 70, 73, 76, 79–81, 110, 115, 121, 130, 147, 168, 180, 196, 197, 213, 219–222 Arquilla, John, 157 Ashley, Lt. Gen. Robert, 27, 45n17, 68 Asia nuclear arms race, xvii, 89–104 nuclear weapons, 57, 73, 76, 90, 95, 97, 99, 104 Assured destruction, xx, 29, 34, 159, 201, 208 Assured retaliation, 12, 34, 35, 38, 76, 79, 103, 145, 162

B Ballistic missile defense (BMD), xvi, 30, 50, 52–57, 59, 64n20, 164, 219 Blair, Bruce G., 23n34 Blank, Stephen J., 28, 81 Bomber forces, 2, 14, 23n33, 68, 113, 144 Bracken, Paul, 19, 72, 134, 151n21, 152n22 Burt, Richard, 47n33, 122n1 C C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), 31, 40, 59, 72, 84n21, 93, 157, 198 China deterrence strategy, 74 Japan, 53, 80, 95, 96, 100, 128, 129

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 S. J. Cimbala, The United States, Russia and Nuclear Peace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38088-5

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INDEX

China (cont.) North Korea, 53, 73, 96, 99, 103, 118 nuclear weapons, xvii, 68–75, 93 Cirincione, Joseph, 40 Coats, Daniel R., 227n11 Coercive diplomacy, xix, 56, 123n5 Cohen, Eliot A., 230n33 Cold War, xviii, 1, 9, 11, 18, 20, 21, 29, 34, 41, 52, 53, 63n17, 67, 73, 74, 90–92, 104, 113, 115, 127, 128, 131, 133–135, 137–139, 141–143, 146, 147, 157, 159, 179–184, 188, 191n19, 196, 200, 201, 213, 219–221, 224–225 Compellence, 71 Congressional Budget Office, U.S., 33, 46n23, 123n12 Constrained proliferation, 77, 78, 206–208 Crisis management misperceptions, 18 nuclear crisis management, xix, 13, 18, 73, 102, 132, 175, 182, 200 Cruise missiles, xvi, 28, 51, 56, 72, 73, 85n28, 102, 110, 112, 113, 121, 146, 215, 216 Cuban missile crisis, 19, 75, 131, 134, 183 Cunningham, Fiona S., 82n4, 211n18 Cyberwar (or cyber war) cyber attacks, 157 cyber weapons, 161, 162 nuclear and cyber, 93, 214

Deployment (nuclear weapons deployment), 197 Deterrence Cold War, 127, 128, 159, 183, 201, 213, 220 cyberwar, 160 military persuasion, 132 Deterrence failure, 132, 147 Deterrence theory (rational deterrence theory), 21, 132, 175, 181–188

D Davis, Paul K., 47n31, 148n1, 171n21, 221 Demchak, Chris C., 72

G Gaddis, John Lewis, 184 Garthoff, Raymond L., 21n6, 23n30, 23n31, 23n35, 106n9, 192n21

E East Germany, 11 Escalation control, 69, 71, 73–75, 81, 104, 112, 127, 134–141, 159, 187, 198 European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA) missile defenses, xvii, 52, 60, 114, 143 F Feaver, Peter D., 119, 189n1 First Nuclear Age, 53 First use, nuclear, xviii, 1, 18, 20, 27, 29, 31, 41, 52–53, 73, 74, 93, 95, 111, 117, 128, 129 Forsyth, James Wood, Jr., 47n32, 209n3 Fravel, M. Taylor, 82n4, 211n18 Freedman, Lawrence, 63n17, 151n14, 151n17, 191n19, 209n4, 210n7, 228n21 Friedman, Allan, 124n17, 169n1 Fuhrmann, Matthew, 123n5 Futter, Andrew, 65n27, 65n28, 93

 INDEX 

Gartzke, Erik, 169n2 Gates, Robert M., 5, 9 Germany, 9, 20, 94, 183–186 Goldstein, Lyle, 82n5, 221 Golts, Alexander, 220, 229n23 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 6, 12, 20, 183 Gordon, Michael R., 42n1, 42n4, 43n6, 44n9, 45n13, 85n34, 105n8, 122n1, 149n8 Gray, Colin S., 98, 106n11, 115, 186, 211n12 H Hicks, Kathleen, 170n8, 173n31 I Inadvertent nuclear war, xv, 128, 182 India, xviii, 53, 73, 77, 80, 99, 127, 136, 138, 141, 148n2, 205, 213 nuclear weapons, 73, 99, 213 Information warfare, xix, 72, 157 Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), xvii, 2, 6, 7, 13–15, 23n33, 32, 34, 36, 38, 50, 52, 68, 69, 100, 113, 115–117, 129, 143, 144, 146, 161, 162, 164, 167, 203–205, 217, 226n6 Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty (1987), 21 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 129 Iran, xviii, xix, 40, 76, 92, 94, 112, 129–131, 141, 147, 161, 203, 209, 214 Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA), 112, 130, 131 Israel, xix, 53, 76, 77, 90, 130, 136, 138, 141, 161, 196, 203, 205, 213

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J Japan China, 95, 96, 128, 129 North Korea, 95, 96, 116, 128, 129 Jervis, Robert, 114, 178 K KAL 007 (shootdown), 7, 8 Kennedy, John F., 75, 134, 159, 207, 221 Khrushchev, Nikita, 14, 75, 134, 221 Kimball, Daryl, 42n1, 87n41 Kipp, Jacob W., 61n2, 151n15 Kissinger, Henry, 177, 188 Kofman, Michael, 51, 132, 215 Kollars, Nina, 169n1 Korb, Lawrence J., 110 Kortunov, Andrei, 219, 221 Krepon, Michael, 63n17, 151n14, 191n19, 193n34, 210n7 Kristensen, Hans, 171n20 Kroenig, Matthew, 189n2, 198 L Land-based strategic missiles, see Intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) Lewis, George N., 61n2, 64n20, 82n3 Libicki, Martin C., 157 Lowther, Adam B., 217 M Mearsheimer, John J., 180, 190n5, 190n7 Middle East, xvii, xviii, 29, 30, 39, 53, 57, 73, 89, 90, 92, 94, 113, 131, 138, 147, 187 Military persuasion, 132

252 

INDEX

Minimum deterrence, xx, 36, 37, 79, 162, 164, 168, 195–209, 209n5 Missile warning, 138 Moniz, Ernest J., 41n1, 123n13, 172n22, 225n3 Morgan, Patrick M., 63n17, 151n14, 151n16, 191n19, 210n7, 210n8, 211n19 Mueller, John, 150n13, 190n11, 191n11, 228n18 Mutual deterrence, 4, 5, 52 N New START Treaty arms reductions, 67, 112 expiration, 26, 112 nuclear weapons deployments, 197 Nichols, Tom, 23n38, 43n4, 229n25 Nonproliferation, xx, 26, 39–41, 49, 76, 94, 104, 112, 113, 131, 140, 166, 168, 196, 200, 208, 209, 213, 222, 223 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT, 1968), 222, 223 Norris, Robert S., 171n20 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), xvi, xvii, 1–4, 8–13, 18–21, 21n8, 25, 30, 31, 49, 50, 52, 53, 57, 59, 60, 73, 80, 82, 90, 112–114, 128, 132, 138, 143, 160, 166, 167, 195, 215, 219 North Korea, xvii, xviii, 40, 53, 60, 73, 76, 89, 90, 92, 94–99, 103, 112, 115–120, 127–130, 137, 138, 141, 147, 166, 203, 205, 209, 213, 214, 221, 222 nuclear weapons, xvii, 40, 73, 91–92, 94, 95, 116, 119, 128, 129, 137, 203, 205, 222

Nuclear age, 12, 53, 109, 137, 176 Nuclear arms control, xv, xvi, xx, 21, 25–41, 49–60, 67–82, 92, 112, 155, 165, 180, 188, 196, 198, 208, 211n20, 219, 223 Nuclear arms race, xvii, 79, 89–104, 121, 163, 207, 219 Nuclear crisis management, xix, 13, 18, 73, 102, 132, 175, 182, 200 Nuclear danger, 20, 74, 115, 147, 200 Nuclear deterrence, xv, xix, 20, 30, 31, 41, 53, 67, 70, 71, 73, 94, 99, 115, 117, 127, 128, 155–169, 181, 183, 188, 195–198, 200, 202, 208, 213–215, 218–221 Nuclear preemption, 15, 109, 116, 121 Nuclear proliferation, 53, 57, 133, 147, 175–188, 198, 199, 201, 203, 205, 208 Nuclear war termination, 37, 134–136, 141–148, 159, 160 Nuclear weapons, xv, xvii–xx, 2, 4, 14, 20, 25–29, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 50, 52–55, 57, 59, 67–77, 90–97, 99, 103, 104, 109–112, 115–119, 127–133, 135, 137–140, 142, 144, 147, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167, 173n31, 175, 176, 179, 180, 182, 183, 188, 195–201, 204, 207, 213, 214, 219, 222, 223 Nunn, Sam, 98, 172n22 O Obama administration, xviii, 110, 146, 153n28 Operation “RYAN”, 1–3, 7, 9, 10, 22n25

 INDEX 

P Pakistan, xviii, 53, 73, 76, 77, 92, 99, 103, 127, 137, 138, 141, 147, 148n2, 196, 203, 205, 213 nuclear weapons, xviii, 73, 76, 77, 92, 99, 137, 203 Payne, Keith B., 63n17, 123n5, 151n14, 188, 192n19, 193n35, 209n2, 210n7 Perceptions management, 28 Perry, William J., 148n3, 209n4, 228n22, 230n28 Pershing II ballistic missiles, 3, 21n8 P-5 plus Germany, 112, 130 Pifer, Steven, 42n1, 45n15, 61n2, 211n20 Podvig, Pavel, 51, 62n11, 86n35, 153n29, 172n26 Postol, Theodore A., 42n1, 173n28 Proliferation, xix, 53, 57, 77, 78, 98–103, 131, 133, 147, 175–188, 189n1, 198, 199, 201, 203, 205–208 See also Nonproliferation Putin, Vladimir, xvi, xvii, 26, 29, 30, 49–52, 114, 139, 167, 208, 215, 221, 226n7 R Rational deterrence theory (RDT), 175, 181–188 Reagan administration, xvi, 4, 5 Realist international systems theory (RIST), 175, 177–181, 183–188 Roberts, Brad, 44n10, 52, 61n2, 65n33, 106n12 Russia INF treaty, xvi, 26, 30, 173n29 New START Treaty, 52, 86n35, 121, 153n29, 172n26

253

nuclear weapons deployments, 27, 28, 40, 90, 110 RYAN (nuclear surprise attack), 1–3, 9, 11, 19, 20, 91 S Sagan, Scott D., 107n17, 182, 189n3, 191n18, 200, 211n14, 211n15, 229n27 Saltzman, B. Chance, 47n32, 209n3 Sanger, David E., 44n8, 46n19, 62n4, 83n8, 85n34, 105n8, 107n19, 122n1, 124n21, 148n3, 149n6, 149n7, 149–150n8, 152n28, 169n1, 172n24, 172n25 Schaub, Gary, Jr., 47n32, 209n3 Schneider, Jacquelyn, 169n1 Schneider, Mark, 44n9, 82n3, 84n18, 86n35 Sea-based strategic missiles, see Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) Sechser, Todd S., 123n5 Second Nuclear Age, 29, 219, 220 Shultz, George P., 6, 148n3, 209n4, 228n22, 230n28 Siboni, Gabi, 169n1, 173n30 Singer, P.W., 124n17, 169n1, 170n10, 226n4 Sokolski, Henry D., 65n35, 105n5, 150n10, 189n1, 189n2, 227n10 Space-based missile defenses, 55 “Star Wars” missile defenses, 4 Stent, Angela E., 42n3, 63n17 Strategic defense initiative (SDI), 4, 5, 7, 22n10 Strategic Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), 2

254 

INDEX

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), xvii, 14, 32, 52, 55, 68, 69, 99, 100, 110, 113, 117, 122n2, 143, 144, 162, 203, 204 Sun Tzu, 72 T Termination, nuclear war, see Nuclear war termination Terrorism (nuclear), 147 Thomas, Timothy L., 84n21 Trenin, Dmitri, 213 U Ukraine, xvi, 25, 52, 73, 90, 112, 139, 140, 167 United Kingdom (UK), 77, 143 nuclear weapons, 77 United Nations (UN), xvii, 6, 97, 116 United States (US)

Able Archer military exercise, 8 New START treaty, 52 nuclear weapons deployments, xvii, xviii, 53, 73, 99, 109, 116, 128, 129, 137, 140, 147, 155, 204 W Walt, Stephen M., 180, 190n5 Waltz, Kenneth N., 177–179, 189n3, 200 “War scare” (Able Archer, 1983), 1–21 War termination, see Nuclear war termination Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), 56, 90, 93, 94, 131, 136, 148, 161 West Germany, 3 Wolf, Markus, East German spymaster, 10, 11, 20 Wolfsthal, Jon, 43n5, 43n8, 47n33, 86n35, 87n40, 122n1, 123n8