Nuclear Deterrence And Global Security In Transition

David Goldfischer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367011383
• eBook ISBN: 9780429715358
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book contains papers presented at a conference held at the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation in 1991. The papers reflect the spectrum of thought in the expert community that is likely to frame the policy debate over the future of nuclear deterrence..

Part One
Nuclear Policy for the 21st Century: United States and Soviet Perspectives

1
The Current Debate: An Introduction

David Goldfischer and Thomas W. Graham

The end of the Cold War has brought to the surface fundamental disagreement among Western and Soviet experts over the appropriate future role of nuclear weapons. Should U.S.-Soviet strategic arms control stop at START I levels of approximately 9,000 warheads or should it move to reconfigured forces consisting of approximately 3,000 warheads? Are even these large reductions too cautious given reduced East-West tensions, making possible adoption of a finite deterrent posture of a few hundred nuclear weapons? Will the emergence of conventional counterforce capabilities undermine strategic stability even if strategic weapons are reduced substantially? Does expansion or even maintenance of existing nuclear forces by medium nuclear powers like France, China and the U.K. inhibit future progress toward U.S.-Soviet arms control? Or is fundamental change in medium power nuclear forces, doctrine, and arms control negotiating postures necessary if the 21st Century is to witness international nuclear stability? Will continued diffusion of nuclear, chemical and missile technology and the new uncertainty of multipolarity stimulate further proliferation? Could the end of the Cold War actually increase the chance nuclear weapons will be used, possibly in the Third World? Finally, in a more cooperative U.S.-Soviet relationship, can cooperatively deployed defenses provide greater stability?

The chapters in this volume—written by internationally recognized experts from the United States, Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom—address these key questions. Originally presented at an international conference held at the University of California's Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) on February 21-23, 1991 in La Jolla, California, the papers have been edited to take into account developments through the summer of 1991, The conference brought together present and past government officials, academic specialists, military officers, nuclear scientists, journalists, and experts from the non-governmental community who between them have decades of experience with nuclear weapons issues.¹ The range of opinion expressed during presentation and discussion of these papers reflects the spectrum of thought in the expert community that is likely to frame the policy debate over the future of nuclear deterrence throughout the 1990s.

Even as questions concerning nuclear weapons have moved lower on the national agenda, these issues have taken on increased importance. Unlike the abstract debates over nuclear strategy of the last three decades, where fundamental change in nuclear forces was precluded by a frozen geopolitical environment, the 1990s may witness significant change in nuclear postures and strategy in several countries. The range of nuclear forces that could be deployed in the early 21st century has never been larger. Whether significant change takes place depends on reaching a consensus over the myriad of conceptual, technical, and military issues discussed in this book.

In addition, the end of the Cold War has increased, not decreased, the importance of expert debate over nuclear issues. Elite influence over nuclear deterrence policies has increased as nuclear issues become less public in Western countries as the threat of nuclear war recedes from the headlines. At the same time, American intellectual hegemony and U.S. diplomatic ability to unilaterally influence the direction of other nations' nuclear policies are declining. Thus, the type of genuine cross-national discussion which took place at this conference will be essential to map a secure future if international nuclear peace is to be maintained.

Early efforts to address the nuclear weapons problem as a common global danger were quickly overtaken by the U.S. decision to rely on nuclear threats for containment and a Soviet commitment to match the capabilities of its chief adversary. Potentially, the end of the Cold War has removed a fundamental barrier to far-reaching cooperation on the nuclear danger. Given expert consensus that the Soviet-led military threat to Western Europe has disappeared for the foreseeable future, the principal original factor which drove the U.S. nuclear buildup has lost relevance. More generally, internal reform and geopolitical retrenchment in the U.S.S.R. have meant that Soviet nuclear doctrines and force structures have outlasted the context in which they evolved.

Yet the waning of the U.S.-Soviet conflict hardly signifies a return to the situation at the beginning of the atomic age. Aside from the existence of tens of thousands of deployed nuclear weapons, nuclear policies have become deeply institutionalized in the form of domestic bureaucratic and budgetary arrangements, ongoing research and development programs, alliance relationships, and habitual modes of thought within the national security establishments of several countries. Accurately or not, the nuclear balance of terror had been widely credited with preserving the "long peace" following the second world war.² As a result, policy makers have shown little inclination toward a rapid reappraisal of the most important remaining fixture of the postwar era, nuclear weapons.

Notwithstanding the end of the Cold War, technological innovation continues to challenge aspirations to establish a durable arms control framework. Steady progress in target acquisition capabilities and weapons accuracy—highlighted by the Gulf War—raises new concerns over the future vulnerability of deterrent forces to both nuclear and conventional attack. Moreover, the maturation of technologies growing out of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) helped sustain challenges to what has long been regarded by arms controllers as a critical dimension of stability in the nuclear balance: the absence of militarily significant defenses against ballistic missiles.

Yet the fact that we have entered a period of transformation in the global security environment does not necessarily justify a wholesale reconceptualization of what constitutes progress in reducing the nuclear danger. Moreover, aspirations for bold departures cannot ignore the extent to which initial euphoria over the Gorbachev revolution has yielded to deep uncertainty over the Soviet future. In the absence of evidence that U.S. and Soviet leaders are prepared for radical changes in nuclear policies, the most viable current approach agreed upon by experts is to pursue the traditional arms control agenda long associated with periods of U.S.-Soviet detente.

Three American contributors to Part I of this volume take as a starting point both the continuation of a fundamentally bipolar nuclear world for at least the next twenty years, and a belief that the waning of the Cold War represents an opportunity for progress within the traditional framework of U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms control. But this mainstream perspective by no means reflects a consensus within the expert community attentive to nuclear issues. The critique, offered in papers written by one American and two Soviet contributors and supported during conference discussion by eminent participants such as Robert McNamara and Herbert York, characterized an incrementalist approach to nuclear arms control as inadequate to the demands of the post-Cold War era.

A New Consensus

At least initially, the basic outline of an expanded post-Cold War arms control agenda seemed clear. Since their inception in 1982, the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) were implicitly premised on an improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations. Beyond that, subsequent negotiations would progressively implement stability principles long advocated by the mainstream arms control community influential in the U.S. and increasingly important in the Soviet Union.³

Today, after two decades in which arms control supporters struggled against military establishments to curtail offensive threats to stability, it was hardly surprising to see stability emerge as an important negotiating objective. What is surprising is that both the U.S. and the Soviet governments have formally agreed to the goal of enhancing strategic stability as the primary objective for the START II negotiations. The U.S.-U.S.S.R. Joint Statement, which outlined the purpose of START II, agreed that negotiations after START I would:

seek to reduce their strategic offensive arms in a way consistent with enhancing strategic stability. In the new negotiations, the two sides agree to place emphasis on removing incentives for a nuclear first strike, on reducing the concentration of warheads on strategic delivery vehicles, and on giving priority to highly survivable systems.⁴

All the chapters in Part Ireflect a now dominant consensus among arms control specialists that efforts to achieve counterforce damage limitation are infeasible and needlessly provocative.⁵ Indeed, the most decisive change in the post-Cold War U.S. strategic debate is the virtual disappearance of appeals for a potent nuclear warfighting strategy—based on expanding counterforce capabilities and a full-scale strategic defense. Considerable differences remain, however, regarding the extent to which the size and structure of forces, as well as targeting policies, must be altered to reflect any repudiation of efforts to achieve unilateral advantages.

Incremental Approaches

The mainstream U.S. arms control community has always resisted efforts to hold strategic arms control hostage to momentary fluctuations in the U.S.-Soviet political relationship. At the same time, it shared the prevailing American Cold War view of the Soviet Union as a formidable adversary whose nuclear and conventional strength and geopolitical aspirations demanded a robust, credible nuclear deterrent. While the end to the Cold War is seen as providing an opportunity to move forward with unprecedented force reductions and measures to enhance stability, the arms control mainstream (now broadened to include past skeptics of negotiated limits)⁶ regards a qualitative transformation of nuclear policy as precluded by cont...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE Nuclear Policy for the 21st Century: United States and Soviet Perspectives
• 7 Blurring the Line: The Merging of Nuclear and Conventional Strategic Systems and Its Implications for Strategy, Politics and Arms Control
• PART TWO Deterrence and Arms Control in a Multipolar Nuclear World
• About the Contributors and Conference Participants
• List of Acronyms
• About the IGCC