The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in the 21st Century

Brad Roberts

• Publisher: Stanford Security Studies
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804797153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a counter to the conventional wisdom that the United States can and should do more to reduce both the role of nuclear weapons in its security strategies and the number of weapons in its arsenal. The case against nuclear weapons has been made on many grounds—including historical, political, and moral. But, Brad Roberts argues, it has not so far been informed by the experience of the United States since the Cold War in trying to adapt deterrence to a changed world, and to create the conditions that would allow further significant changes to U.S. nuclear policy and posture.

Drawing on the author's experience in the making and implementation of U.S. policy in the Obama administration, this book examines that real world experience and finds important lessons for the disarmament enterprise. Central conclusions of the work are that other nuclear-armed states are not prepared to join the United States in making reductions, and that unilateral steps by the United States to disarm further would be harmful to its interests and those of its allies. The book ultimately argues in favor of patience and persistence in the implementation of a balanced approach to nuclear strategy that encompasses political efforts to reduce nuclear dangers along with military efforts to deter them.

1

The Evolution of U.S. Nuclear Policy and Posture since the End of the Cold War

TO UNDERSTAND THE CURRENT MOMENT IN U.S. NUCLEAR policy and debate, some historical perspective is useful. U.S. nuclear policy used to be at the center of the U.S. national security debate; as it has become marginalized over the last three decades, it has become increasingly difficult to see the elements of continuity and change in U.S. policy and to understand the lessons of past experience for current and future policy.

This chapter begins with a summary of the nuclear inheritance from the Cold War in terms of the policy and posture in place in 1990. It then reviews the evolution of policy and posture with each subsequent presidential administration. This review includes also developments in the nongovernmental expert community that influenced U.S. policy. Following on this chronological overview, the chapter then identifies elements of change and continuity in U.S. nuclear policy and posture over the last twenty-five years. The chapter then pivots to the twenty-five years ahead. It sets out some critical decisions that must be made about the future of U.S. nuclear posture. This analysis highlights the weakness of the intellectual and political foundations on which such decisions will be made.

The Cold War Inheritance

With the collapse of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991, one chapter in U.S. nuclear history ended and another began. At that time, U.S. nuclear policy and posture reflected the long-standing bipolar standoff and decades of technically driven arms competition with the Soviet Union.

Following the modernization of the U.S. nuclear posture in the 1980s, the U.S. nuclear arsenal contained approximately 21,000 weapons in late 1991. The triad of strategic nuclear delivery systems (submarine-launched ballistic missiles [SLBMs], land-based intercontinental-range ballistic missiles [ICBMs], and strategic bombers) was completing a cycle of modernization, along with the associated warheads. U.S. nuclear weapons were also deployed in both Europe and East Asia. This large force was supported by a modern command and control system ensuring presidential control of nuclear operations even under nuclear attack. The overall size and structure of U.S. nuclear forces were a function of the requirements of deterrence of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, with any other contingency deemed a lesser-included problem. The standing force was supported by a robust research, development, and production capacity for both warheads and delivery systems.

In 1990, the United States and Soviet Union were actively pursuing arms control across a broad front, following the thaw in their political relations. The Treaty on Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) was being implemented, having been agreed in December 1987, leading to the elimination of such weapons from the arsenals of both the Soviet Union and United States. The treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) was concluded in November 1990 to reorient military forces away from the Cold War standoff. The first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) was in negotiation and would ultimately be signed in July 1991.

The deterrence strategy then in place was based on formal presidential guidance provided early in the Reagan administration. That guidance stipulated that:

The most fundamental national security objective is to deter direct attack—particularly nuclear attack—on the United States and its Allies. Should nuclear attack nonetheless occur, the United States and its allies must prevail. . . . Stated otherwise, we must be prepared to wage war successfully.¹

This strategy informed the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) for the employment of U.S. nuclear weapons (which is possible only under the personal authority of the president). That plan’s primary purpose was deterrence of attack. If deterrence were to fail and the Soviets to conduct attacks on the United States or its allies, the United States would have sought to use nuclear weapons in ways it hoped would restore deterrence. U.S. attacks would have been conducted not to annihilate the entirety of Soviet society but to put at risk those military, economic, and political assets most valued by Soviet leadership.²

The injunction in the strategy to be prepared to “prevail” was hotly contested outside government and anathema to many in the West because it seemed to imply that nuclear wars could be won. It seemed oddly dissonant, coming from a president who also argued publicly that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”³ In a statement explaining this strategy a few years later, one of its principal architects, Leon Sloss, argued as follows: “While it was difficult to foresee anyone winning such a conflict, it seemed far preferable to set a national goal of ‘prevailing’ rather than, say, ‘losing.’”⁴ Bernard Brodie made a similar point earlier in the Cold War: “So long as there is a finite chance of war, we have to be interested in outcomes, and although all outcomes would be bad, some would be much worse than others.”⁵

Notably, this guidance followed debate about how the new capabilities being developed and deployed would create the conditions for success in war. Critics argued that the United States lacked a theory of victory to guide its investments and ensure that deterrence would be strengthened. In the words of Colin Gray in 1979,

Our real problem . . . is that the United States (and NATO-Europe) lacks a theory of victory in war (or satisfactory war termination). If, basically, one has no war aims (one has no image of enforced and favorable war termination, or of how the balance of power may be structured in a post-war world), on what grounds does one select a strategic nuclear employment policy, and how does one know how to choose an appropriate strategic posture?⁶

By this definition, a theory of victory is a set of concepts for how to force termination of a war in a manner favorable to one’s objectives and to achieve an acceptable post-war balance of power. The preceding Sloss statement would imply that the United States had a narrowly conceived theory of victory. Whether the Soviets had a theory of victory for nuclear war remains in debate.⁷

In the Cold War, the development of U.S. nuclear policy and posture was supported by substantial long-term investment in the associated intellectual infrastructure, with financial resources flowing from the Defense Nuclear Agency and other parts of the nuclear establishment for analytic work on deterrence. The development and implementation of policy was enabled by strong capacities inside government. The president, for example, could turn to his Arms Control and Disarmament Agency for analysis and advice, while the secretary of defense had an assistant reporting directly to him on the technical aspects of nuclear forces. In the legislative branch, the Senate Arms Control Observers Group ensured informed congressional engagement with the executive branch on nuclear treaty issues.

The George H. W. Bush Administration

The George H. W. Bush administration moved quickly to seize the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War to remake the U.S. nuclear posture and strategy. It made some basic changes to U.S. nuclear deterrence strategy, such as eliminating all targets in the former Warsaw Pact from the U.S. plan.⁸ It also tried to shift the focus of leaders in both Washington and Moscow from mutual deterrence to cooperative threat reduction. A primary reason for doing so was concern for the safety and security of nuclear weapons and materials of the former Soviet Union and the possibility that they might fall into the hands of proliferators or terrorists.

To advance this agenda, the Bush administration relied heavily on unilateral pledges to limit and reduce nuclear weapons made on a reciprocal basis with Moscow. Called the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, such pledges were politically but not legally binding. On September 27, 1991, President Bush announced multiple decisions to remake the U.S. nuclear posture: (1) to stand down from alert all U.S. strategic bombers, (2) to stand down from alert all ICBMs scheduled for deactivation under START, (3) to terminate development of mobile ICBMs, (4) to cancel the replacement program for a modern short-range attack missile for bombers, (5) to consolidate command of all strategic forces under a single commander, (6) to withdraw to the United States all ground-launched short-range weapons deployed overseas and to destroy them along with existing U.S. stockpiles of these weapons, and (7) to cease deployment of tactical nuclear weapons on surface ships, attack submarines, and land-based naval aircraft during “normal circumstances.”⁹

On October 5, 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev announced reciprocal Russian steps. These included elimination of all nuclear artillery munitions, nuclear warheads for tactical missiles, and nuclear mines; removal of all tactical nuclear weapons from surface ships and multipurpose submarines; and separation of nuclear weapons from air defense missiles and storing or destroying them. These decisions were reaffirmed following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 by new Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin also went a step further. In response to a second round of U.S. nuclear weapons cutbacks focused on strategic forces, Yeltsin opted to eliminate one-third of Russia’s sea-based tactical nuclear weapons, half of its ground-to-air nuclear missile warheads, and half of its stockpile of airborne tactical nuclear weapons.¹⁰

On the arms control front, the Bush administration secured ratification and entry into force of the START treaty. Implementation proceeded over the decade, leading to reductions by 2001 in deployed U.S. strategic forces of approximately one-third. The Bush administration also negotiated and signed START II, which provided for an additional cut of roughly an additional one-third. The fate of this treaty proved more problematic (as discussed further in the following pages). The administration also helped to negotiate the Lisbon Protocol after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, an agreement among Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine ensuring that Russia assumed all Soviet nuclear treaty obligations.

At the same time, the Bush administration became concerned by the revelations about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq’s arsenal as it moved to expel Iraq from Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War of 1990 and 1991. A defense posture review led by Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney coined the term rogue state and began to shift the focus of military planners to the challenge of dealing with regional adversaries armed with WMD and potentially willing to employ them for purposes of regime survival.¹¹ This invited new questions about the reliability of deterrence, nuclear and otherwise, in meeting new, post–Cold War security challenges.

The Clinton Administration

The Clinton administration arrived in 1993 with a commitment to revamp national strategy in a comprehensive fashion to address the opportunities and challenges presented by the end of the Cold War. An early priority was the development of an updated National Security Strategy. The resulting “National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement” struck a positive note, emphasizing “unparalleled opportunities to make our nation safer and more prosperous.”¹² But it also highlighted the emergence of “more diverse” dangers in a changing world and characterized the proliferation of WMD as “a major challenge to our security” that could substantially complicate the effort to engage internationally and enlarge the community of democracies.¹³ The strategy also expressed a strong commitment to arms control and nonproliferation and other forms of political cooperation to address and reduce nuclear dangers.

Secretary of Defense Les Aspin came to the Pentagon at this time with a determination to lead a broad reform of defense strategy. For decades, U.S. military forces had been designed primarily for confrontation with an enemy roughly equal in power and influence (a “peer adversary”), now gone. Moreover, there was the wake-up call to a new set of problems provided by the war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Aspin’s first major initiative was a bottom-up review (BUR) of defense strategy and capabilities. This review gave a prominent place to a new defense counter-proliferation initiative (DCI)—an effort to ensure that U.S. forces would be capable of meeting the military challenges posed by the proliferation of WMD. Aspin was particularly motivated by the role reversal evident in the new security environment: in the past, he argued, the United States had used nuclear weapons to deter the use of force against its interests and allies by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact; looking to the present and future, he argued, the United States was at risk of becoming “the deteree” as regional challengers acquire WMD to thwart its power projection strategy.¹⁴

On conclusion of the BUR in autumn 1993, Aspin initiated a comprehensive review of the U.S. nuclear posture—what became the first Nuclear Posture Review (NPR).¹⁵ This was an internal review by the Department of Defense (DOD) of what to do with the inherited Cold War force structure in light of a radically changed security environment. The review set out a new approach to nuclear strategy, summarized as “lead but hedge.” The United States would take steps to lead in reducing nuclear dangers, threats, and risks after the Cold War. At the same time, the United States would ensure that it would be well prepared for the possibility of a sudden collapse of political reform in Russia and the reemergence in Moscow of a government hostile to the United States and the West. In his press briefing on the NPR results in September 1994, Aspin’s successor, William Perry, expressed his view that “the new posture . . . is no longer based on Mutual Assured Destruction, no longer based on MAD. We have coined a new word for our new posture which we called Mutual Assured Safety, or MAS.”¹⁶

The effort to “lead” focused primarily on working cooperatively with Russia to reduce Cold War–vintage arsenals and contain the risks of unsafeguarded materials and technologies. While i...