Arms for Uncertainty

Nuclear Weapons in US and Russian Security Policy

Stephen J. Cimbala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472409850
• eBook ISBN: 9781317178507
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nuclear weapons are here to stay. They have survived into the twenty-first century as instruments of influence for the US, Russia, and other major military powers. But, unlike the Cold War era, future nuclear forces will be developed and deployed within a digital-driven world of enhanced conventional weapons. As such, established nuclear powers will have smaller numbers of nuclear weapons for the purpose of deterrence working in parallel with smarter conventional weapons and elite military personnel. The challenge is to agree proportional reductions in nuclear inventories or abstinence requiring an effective nonproliferation regime to contain aspiring or threshold nuclear weapons states. This is the most comprehensive view of nuclear weapons policy and strategy currently available. The author's division of the nuclear issue into the three ages is a never seen before analytical construct. With President Obama reelected, the reduction and even elimination of nuclear weapons will now rise to the top of the agenda once more. Moreover, given the likelihood of reductions in US defense spending, the subject of the triad, which is covered in Chapter One, will no doubt be an important subject of debate, as will the issue of missile defense, covered in Chapter 10. This book provides an excellent analysis of the spread of nuclear weapons in Asia and the Middle East and the potential dangers of a North Korean or Iranian breakout, subjects that dominate current policy debates.

Chapter 1
Nuclear Deterrence in a New Context

Introduction

Twenty-first century nuclear arms control and deterrence will take place in a technology context that privileges the smaller, the faster and the more agile over the larger, the slower and the less adaptive. At the high end of conventional deterrence and war fighting capabilities are included long-range, conventional precision strike; advanced C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance); network-centric warfare; and the forward movement, at uncertain paces, of defense-related nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.1 Meanwhile, nuclear weapons remain in the arsenals of leading powers and in the aspirational tool kits of putative regional hegemons, potentially disruptive rogue state, or terrorists. This present and emerging context for nuclear arms control and deterrence leads into politico-military conundrums and paradoxes. First, cyberwar and nuclear deterrence may emerge as overlapping jurisdictions, bringing new complexity into the fabric of US and other military-strategic planning.2 Second, antimissile and anti-air defenses based partly on new technologies may finally challenge the hitherto supreme status of offensive nuclear launchers. Third, conventional weapons for long range, precision strike may compete with nuclear weapons for pride of place in attacking certain targets previously thought vulnerable only to nuclear strikes.3 Instead of the venerable Cold War era “triad” of intercontinental land and sea based missiles and bombers, or the post-Cold-War triad of nuclear and conventional offensive forces, defenses and supporting infrastructure, a new “quadrilateral” of conventional long-range precision strike, minimum nuclear deterrence, anti-air and antimissile defenses, and space-cyber strategy (offensive and defensive) might merit further descriptive attention from strategic thinkers and policy makers. Regardless of contextual multiplicity, or indeterminacy, political leaders and military commanders must face the challenges posed by the threat or use of force, including nuclear weapons, in prospective world orders. As Therese Delpech has warned:

Deterrence is a very difficult undertaking. There is good reason to think that it is more difficult now than ever before—at the very time when nuclear deterrence, pushed aside in the policy arena by space, cyberspace, and terrorism, suffers from intellectual and policy neglect.4

Cyber and Info Wars: Concepts Aplenty

Academic and professional literature and the US government already offer a rich menu of definitions for important cyber-related concepts, including cyberspace and cyberpower.5 The US Department of Defense’s first formal cyber strategy anticipated that some attacks on US information systems would meet traditional definitions of war, perhaps justifying retaliatory responses that were either cyber, or kinetic, or both.6 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.7 Information warfare can include both cyberwar and netwar.8 Martin C. Libicki notes that cyber warfare could be one form of “non-obvious warfare” in which the identities of the warring sides and perhaps even the existence of conflict might be deliberately obscured.9

The related 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.10 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. On the other hand, systems are vulnerable only to the extent that they have flaws unknown to the defenders that can actually be exploited by attackers.11 In addition, the impact of any cyber strike is relative to the time needed to recover the attacked system—of which neither attacker nor defender would have preattack knowledge.12 For these and other reasons, 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 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.13

Airpower theorist 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.”14 In addition, US dominance, or falling behind, in cyberspace has repercussions for US success or failure in aerospace and other domains of conflict.15 In harmony with this, French air force strategist Denis Mercier notes that future airpower will require improved interoperability and network integration among disparate effectors, systems and platforms.16 Lambeth’s and Mercier’s efforts to conceptualize cyberpower or cyberwar in a larger strategic context are supported by Colin S. Gray, who cautions against both mystification and simplification of the problem of cyber strategy:

Moreover, cyber is only one among many ways in which we collect, store, and transmit information. As if that were not contextual caveat enough, it is important to recognize that there is a great deal more to conflict and actual warfare than information, no matter what the tools for gathering and transmitting data may be. From the beginning of time, armies have clashed in relative ignorance. This is not to demean the value of information, but it is to remind ourselves that information, even knowledge (or its absence), is not a wholly reliable key to strategic success or failure.17

Attacking in the Cyber Realm

Experts foresee that some kinds of cyberwar will be parts of many future military conflicts.18 But the term “cyberwar” 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.19 The purpose of information and infrastructure operations (I20) would not be mass destruction (although destructive secondary effects are possible) but both mass and/or precision disruption.20 According to Robert A. Miller, Daniel T. Kuehl and Irving 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.”21 This concept lends itself to candidate consideration for a deterrent mission based on the credible threat of conventional or nuclear response. One must always remember, however, that the unique prompt lethality of nuclear weapons creates a separate grammar for the conduct of nuclear war even if such a war remains within the boundaries of strategic logic. As Colin Gray has warned:

Cyberpower is not usefully to be compared with nuclear weapons; analyses that suggest or imply catastrophic perils from hostile cyber action are thoroughly unconvincing. Cyber is an important enabler, a team player, in joint operations. As a constructed environment, cyberspace(s) is very much what we choose to make it.22

Under the assumption of future Russian and US strategic nuclear forces limited to 1000 or so deployed offensive weapons with operational performance parameters comparable to present systems, each side would reasonably 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.23

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. 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 for nuclear retaliatory forces 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. However, even during the Cold War, “assured destruction” represented a mistaken view of leaders’ actual decision matrices (John F. Kennedy’s 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.”) During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, for example, the US ExComm advisory group to President Kennedy was most anxious to avoid a war, regardless of the putative prewar US nuclear superiority in the numbers of deployed and second-strike-survivable strategic nuclear weapons.

A third objection to an I2O-oriented second-strike capability as the basis for US–Russian nuclear deterr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword by Colin S. Gray
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Nuclear Deterrence in a New Context
• 2 Possible Nuclear Worlds
• 3 Getting Rid of Nuclear Weapons
• 4 Controlling Nuclear Crises in Digital Times
• 5 Minimum Deterrence: The Fewer, the Better?
• 6 Nuclear-Strategic Asia: Stability or Chaos?
• 7 Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons and “First Use”
• 8 Denuking North Korea
• 9 Ending a Nuclear War
• 10 Missile Defenses and NATO–Russian Security
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography and Further Reading
• Index