Updating the Nuclear Option: Louis Rene Beres
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/03/10/obama-needs-a-revitalized-nuclear-strategy
Facing a new Cold War with Putin’s Russia, President Obama needs to embrace a new nuclear weapons strategy.
Whether we like it or not, the United States faces the expanding prospect of a new Cold War. To be sure, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but the successor superpower regime in Moscow is not making things any easier for us. Even during the current crisis in the Ukraine, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted upon going ahead with test-firing a Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile (referred to by NATO as the SS-25 Sickle).
How shall we best respond to this ominously re-emergent threat? In order to fully maintain American security in such increasingly volatile circumstances, President Barack Obama will, among other things, need to garner the benefits of a newly-refined and potentially more robust national nuclear strategy. These benefits would not be insignificant. They would be indispensable.
On its face, this would seem to be a perfectly obvious and hence unremarkable observation. Nonetheless, from the moment that he first entered the White House, this president has made it clear that he opposes all nuclear weapons, at least in principle. Ignoring post-World War II history, when such weapons likely prevented a third world war between the two resultant superpowers, he steadfastly maintains that they are inherently corrosive and destabilizing. Indeed, for Obama, there still seemingly can be no more high-minded objective than creating “a world free of nuclear weapons.”
]
At the same time, in a difficult balancing act, he seems determined to be realistic. He plainly understands that global denuclearization remains an improbable goal. What the president does not seem to understand, however, is that any such goal would also be undesirable.
For some countries, nuclear weapons may be all that stand between continued survival and annihilation. Without nuclear weapons, Israel, a state smaller than Lake Michigan, and surrounded by more than 20 dedicated enemy states, would no longer be able to deter existential aggressors. Deprived of its nuclear weapons, even if they had until then remained ambiguous, or in the metaphoric basement, the Jewish state would quickly be stripped of any residually meaningful capacity for self-defense.
Now, facing a new Cold War, America, too, may be placing itself at existential risk. With a potentially deteriorating arsenal of nuclear weapons, the U.S. could sometime even find itself without a fully credible deterrent, here, against a variety of both present and future nuclear adversaries.
[Check out our editorial cartoons on President Obama.]
Immediately, President Obama’s openly-declared goal should cease being “a world free of nuclear weapons,” but rather a world wherein the lawful and capable threat of American nuclear retaliation would reliably prevent any belligerent enemy resort to weapons of mass destruction. In other words, America needs a more nuanced, sophisticated and thoroughly up-to-date strategic nuclear doctrine.
Immediately, we require a finely-codified and substantially more coherent plan for national security, a plan that could deal satisfactorily with various Jihadist adversaries, both state and substate, and simultaneously, with still-formidable national nuclear foes in Russia, North Korea and possibly even a post-coup Pakistan. To be sure, as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned again recently in Washington, still-unhindered Iranian nuclearization should remain our biggest immediate strategic concern. But we ought not thereby to assume that Russia’s steady modernization of its own nuclear forces is purely cosmetic, or in any way beside-the-point. President Putin remains the hands-on chief of a visibly resurgent nuclear superpower.
[Read: Why Putin, not Obama, is to blame for the escalation in Ukraine.]
In the past year, several tests involving Russian command/control systems, and all three components of the nuclear triad (land- and sea-launched long-range nuclear missiles and strategic bombers) were conducted under Putin’s personal direction. An RS-12M Topol missile was launched earlier from the Plesetsk site in northern Russia, and a submarine test-launched another long-range missile from the Sea of Okhotsk. Long-range Tu-95 and Tu-160 bombers fired guided missiles that hit their targets, on a testing range set up in the northwestern Komi region of Russia.
Putin may be needlessly worried about Russia’s possible nuclear adversaries, especially the United States, but he still has very real and credible concerns about Washington’s plan for installing anti-missile defenses in Europe. In any event, in all matters of strategic planning and nuclear deterrence, it is worth remembering that the only reality that is ever real in its tangible consequences, is perceived reality.
During the 1950s, the United States first began to institute various formal doctrines of nuclear deterrence. At that time, geopolitically, the world was a much simpler place. Then, global power distributions were tightly bipolar; then, our indisputable enemy was the Soviet Union.
[See a collection of political cartoons on President Obama’s drone policy.]
At that time, American national strategy was founded upon a policy of “massive retaliation.” Later, especially during the Kennedy years, this narrowly-circumscribed stance was modified by something called “flexible response.”
Today, a much more complex strategic landscape reveals multiple, interpenetrating, and sometimes synergistic axes of conflict. There are now almost four times as many countries as existed back in 1945. In this expressly multipolar world, Russia is once again a justifiably major American security concern. In the 2010 New START treaty, Russia and the United States did manage to establish lower numerical ceilings in nuclear weapons testing, but, correspondingly, little was accomplished to effectively reduce each side’s reciprocally deep fears of the other.
Understandably, perhaps, Putin continues to insist upon a standard and time-honored idea of nuclear deterrence, one in which any unilateral expansion of active defenses would allegedly jeopardize the longstanding and necessary balance of power. This core idea is based firmly on the classical notion of safety through mutual vulnerability. On its face, it is not an idea that is easy to dismiss.
[See a collection of political cartoons on Iran.]
But President Obama will need to be precise in his nuclear policy prescriptions. To shape an authentically improved U.S, strategic doctrine, he will need to reconsider critically fundamental decisions on nuclear targeting. Among other things, any such reconsideration would have to examine certain basic differences between the targeting of enemy civilians and cities (“countervalue” targeting), and the targeting of enemy military assets and infrastructures (“counterforce” targeting).
Originally, the essence of “massive retaliation,” and its corollary, mutual assured destruction, or MAD, had been countervalue targeting. Presently, in those relatively promising scenarios where enemy rationality might still be reliably assumed, effective U.S. deterrence could once again require recognizable policies of counter city targeting. In those unprecedented circumstances where we might need to face nonrational and nuclear state adversaries, however, gainful deterrence calculations could prove markedly more difficult.
In general, America’s strategic doctrine will also have to address certain still-impending options for American preemption, known correctly in law as “anticipatory self-defense,” as well as more systematic methods for distinguishing adversaries (state and sub-state) according to whether they are rational, irrational or “mad.” Among these three discrete adversarial designations, there exist certain consequential and more or less discernible differences. This refined U.S. strategic doctrine will also need to measure and configure certain vital components of nuclear deterrence, active defense, cyberdefense and cyberwarfare.
[See a collection of political cartoons on the Middle East.]
There are myriad legal issues here. As codified in Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution (the “Supremacy Clause”), and by several decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court (especially, The Paquete Habana, 1900), international law is always part of the law of the United States. America, therefore, will have to examine such intersecting elements of doctrine within the wider and more subtly layered strata of pertinent treaties, customs and rules.
Such a jurisprudential examination will need to include authoritative criteria for identifying and justifying “anticipatory self-defense,” and for undertaking nonproliferation regime enforcement.
Within the Department of Defense, and the larger U.S. defense community, a protracted lack of emphasis on nuclear strategy and tactics may already have left our military unprepared for certain uniquely threatening scenarios. To suitably confront this unsustainable deficiency, one generated, in part, by our continuing application of mistaken strategies to unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the president needs to commission a special and largely re-imagined Nuclear Posture Review.
[See a collection of political cartoons on defense spending.]
This hard-nosed and dialectical assessment should emphasize, inter alia, new program designs for advanced nuclear weapons; further modernization of needed nuclear infrastructures and warheads; and more consciously precise calibrations of American nuclear strategy and tactics to different levels and sites of notable enemy threat. In this connection, we will also need to decipher both the short and long-term implications of China’s hugely ambitious program of military modernization.
These days, a new Cold War cannot simply be ruled out. On the contrary, and for a variety of determinable reasons, such revitalized bipolar animosity is now likely. To best prepare for such a structurally adversarial relationship with Mr. Putin’s Russia, the U.S. should move quickly to refine and articulate its strategic nuclear doctrine.
Louis René Beres, Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue University, is the author of many core books and articles on nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including several very early works on nuclear terrorism. Educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), his writings have appeared in Special Warfare and Parameters, publications of the U.S. Department of Defense, and also in more than fifty major academic journals. Most recently, these pieces have been published in the Harvard National Security Journal; the Brown Journal of World Affairs; the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Herzliya Conference Policy Papers (Israel); and Oxford University Press. In Israel, Professor Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (2003). He is a frequent contributor to U.S. News & World Report.
Comments are closed.
