RUTHFULLY YOURS

Strategic Stability Vs Arms Control Follies :Peter Huessey

Posted By Ruth King on February 17th, 2016

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/strategic-stability-vs-arms-control-follies?f=commentary

For much of the nuclear age, and certainly after the first arms control agreement between the US and the Soviet Union in 1972, America has sought to balance both arms control and deterrent imperatives by building both nuclear deterrent forces and later missile defenses that in combination make the use of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies less and less likely.

As Admiral Richard Mies, the former Commander of US Strategic Command has emphasized, the watchword of nuclear deterrence has been to prevent nuclear war from ever breaking out between the nuclear armed superpowers. Critical to that effort has been to enhance what is known as “strategic stability” which means in a crisis there is no pressure on an American President to use nuclear weapons.

The current geostrategic landscape, however, is fraught with grave concerns which have heightened nuclear dangers. Civilian and military leaders of the Russian Federation just since 2009 have in more than two dozen instances threatened the use of nuclear weapons against the United States and its allies. China has threatened the use of military force against its East Asia neighbors as well as the United States should its hegemonic moves in the South China Sea be challenged. In North Korea, a rogue regime may now have an arsenal of upwards of 20 nuclear weapons which it routinely threatens to use against the Republic of Korea and the United States. And in Iran, the mullahs seek nuclear weapons while publicly denying any such ambition even as they remain the world’s number one state sponsor of terror while holding the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East.

U.S. policy makers face challenges in modernizing our own nuclear deterrent, enhancing our missile defense capabilities, and working to establish non-proliferation norms where the spread of nuclear weapons is stopped. One challenge is from the far left, where the well-funded anti-nuclear community in the United States seeks to significantly degrade America’s strategic deterrent posture. This agenda involves (1) a push to unilaterally cut US nuclear forces by upwards of eighty percent; (2) curtail our missile defense deployments to levels incapable of credibly defending the U.S. and our allies; and (3) pursuing loose and unverifiable framework agreements to deal with Iranian and North Korean nuclear threats.

If adopted, such an agenda will in reality drive up nuclear dangers, make the use of nuclear weapons more likely and contribute to the spread of nuclear weapons.

Fortunately, there is strong opposition to the anti-nuke agenda. There is a current and relatively strong consensus in the U.S. Congress to continue to seek greater strategic stability and a more effective and credible deterrent including modernized nuclear weapons and missile defenses. However, the 2016 elections are approaching and issues including missile defense, arms control, nuclear deterrence and proliferation will be important areas of discussion. Only the right choice will ensure America’s future remains secure.

SEEKING STABILITY AND ARMS CONTROL

In the 33 and 70 years respectively of the modern missile defense and nuclear ages, there has been an understandable tension between the objectives of national security policy and arms control. But still for much of that period, national security professionals sought to improve America’s nuclear deterrent by enhancing strategic stability through both smart modernization decisions and stabilizing arms control. This meant for, example, moving to single warhead land based missiles, (making them less attractive as targets), as well as building a secure retaliatory, second strike capability by keeping our submarines at sea in continuous patrol.

Especially since 1983, when President Regan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, missile defense proponents have pushed for the deployment of complementary defenses of the United States that could intercept initial and limited ballistic missile launches in a crisis. This would give an American President greater options than simply either risking Armageddon with a nuclear retaliatory strike or doing nothing.

Today we are planning to soon have 44 such interceptors in Alaska and California, (we have 30 now), while seeking to possibly augment this with an East Coast deployment giving us a higher probability of intercepting an enemy’s nuclear armed missile. Sea or space based interceptors should also be on the agenda especially as we face potential EMP missile launches from the maritime regions around the continental United States.

But as the US and Russia both move to lower levels of deployed nuclear weapons, strategic stability becomes of even greater importance even as maintaining a robust force can become more and more difficult. Pressure to reduce warheads can help promote stability. But parallel pressures to reduce the platforms upon which the warheads are carried can lead to heightened instability.

In short, putting too many of our nuclear eggs in too few baskets is not a wise strategy.

For example, Senator Markey and Senator Sanders have proposed putting all our warheads on as few as six submarines rather than on what we are now planning to deploy which would consist of 12 submarines, 450 land-based missiles (and their associated 45 launch control centers) and 60 bombers. This provides the United States with over 500 discrete targets which any adversary must know would have to be seriously degraded even destroyed to prevent the United States from being able to retaliate with a devastatingly effective response.

But with only six submarines, with two at sea and the remaining four submarines either in transit or in port, an enemy could take out just six targets and eliminate the US as a nuclear power rather than having to try and eliminate the full Triad of forces we are now planning to keep of over 500 targets. What possible purpose is served by making it nearly 100 times easier to attack the United States in the future than compared to today?

This is not a new problem. Strategic stability more than anything else meant to American nuclear planners that in a crisis, no nuclear armed power would seriously consider using nuclear weapons against the United States for fear the retaliatory consequences would be devastating. For sure maintaining such a nuclear deterrent force was and is expensive. But strategic stability goals seek to avoid any use of  nuclear weapons against the United States precisely because such weapons pose an existential threat to our country and thus the cost is deemed worthwhile.

There is no room for being “cheap” but “wrong”.

Such an “insurance” policy should be without question the highest security priority of the country.

THE HISTORIC SEARCH FOR STRATEGIC STABILITY

During the massive Soviet build-up of nuclear weapons during the 1972-80 period, there was heightened US and allied concern that the Soviets could execute such a pre-emptive massive nuclear strike on the United States which might eliminate a considerable amount of America’s nuclear capability making an effective US retaliatory strike impossible. This was during a period when Soviet strategic nuclear warhead levels were climbing toward an eventual peak of 13,000, prior to the START I reductions agreement initiated by President Reagan.

Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird testified to Congress in 1969 that in his view the Soviets “were going for a first strike capability and there is no doubt about it”. He based this on two developments: the Soviet missiles, the SS-9’s, were much more accurate than we had previously believed and the Soviets were also developing multiple warheads to go on their ICBMs. These  combined technologies alarmed Secretary of Defense Laird, but after his 1969 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Chairman William J. Fulbright (D-AR) angrily claimed the defense secretary was simply exaggerating the Soviet threat and trying to panic the American people.

But Laird’s concerns were not alarmist. Other American policy makers including some very accomplished Democrats also feared the Soviets military improvements. They reconstituted the Committee on the Present Danger in 1976 to bring such threats to the attention of the American people.

The Soviets themselves, in material eventually discovered in the Kremlin archives after the collapse of the USSR, discussed how they believed the “correlation of forces” especially in terms of nuclear weaponry had swung the balance of power to the Soviet’s advantage by the end of the decade 1970-79. Moscow thus believed this military advantage could then be used to expand the USSR empire while simultaneously undermining US security.

Governor Ronald Reagan, campaigning for the Presidency at the time, described this US military and geostrategic disadvantage as a dangerous “window of vulnerability”. To his critics, this window of vulnerability, (the theoretical ability of the Soviets to wipe out a very high percent of our nuclear forces, especially our land based missiles, which at the time were the only force capable of taking out hardened Soviet military and nuclear assets) was of no real concern.

The anti-nuclear crowd of the day saw in the Soviet nuclear modernization surge more a reaction to a US arms build-up than a campaign by Moscow to seek military advantage. This situation was often described as “Apes on a Treadmill”-unthinking militaries simply building up in tandem their nuclear forces. Still others saw the concern over Soviet military growth as little more than scare stories (“Peddlers of Crisis” was how one popular book at the time was titled) pushed by those seeking to justify greater U.S. defense spending.

Other critics pointed out-correctly-that the Soviet nuclear arms buildup was consistent with both the 1972 SALT I and 1979 SALT II “arms control” agreements between the US and the Soviet Union (which instead of reducing nuclear weapons simply codified pathways of growth). The first was negotiated by the Nixon administration and to which the Senate consented in 1972. The second was a product of the Ford and Carter administrations but which was ultimately withdrawn in 1979 prior to Senate consent due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although never adopted “officially”, the US largely remained within the SALT II parameters. The real problem was not that Soviet nuclear arms building violated the SALT treaties (which iit did in some  important respects). The real problem was the treaties allowed a massive Soviet build-up that threatened strategic stability.

But the message from the anti-nuke enthusiasts was clear: there was nothing with which to be concerned by the Soviet nuclear build-up.

Plus ca change!

Without necessarily going into a complete history of this period of the Cold War, the decade of the 1970’s saw the march of Soviet power to where 18 countries fell to communism, additional other nations were threatened with communist guerillas, and our allies in Iran were replaced in with what R. James Woolsey, our former Director of National Intelligence, in retrospect has described as “genocidal maniacs”.

Nothing to worry about, indeed!

In just 1979 alone, Saddam Hussein started a ten year war with Iran; the Soviets invaded Afghanistan; the Mullahs led by the Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran; and El Salvador was on the brink of collapsing under the brutal attacks by the Soviet armed and funded Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.

The concerns of Secretary Laird, of the Committee on the Present Danger and Governor Ronald Reagan were borne out by events. Fortunately, between October 1979 and October 1982, Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, Pope John Paul II in the Vatican, Ronald Reagan in the United States, and Helmut Kohl in Germany, were elected and worked together to reverse the adverse trends. And within another decade they were the victors in the Cold War. As the Ambassador to the United States from a key Baltic country said to me at a Capitol Hill breakfast June 11, 2015, “Our country, in fact all of Europe, owes Ronald Reagan our lives and our liberty”.

ENGENDERING STRATEGIC NUCLEAR INSECURITY

With the end of the Cold War in December 1991, it was assumed that the “end of history” had arrived and the military competition between the former USSR and United States would disappear for good. The global nuclear balance could be better managed it was assumed, with START II, signed by the United States and Russia in 1992, cutting strategic nuclear weapons in half to 3000 deployed weapons.

But the START II treaty was turned down in 2000 by the Russian Duma as the Kremlin insisted that as a condition of agreement all United States missile defense work had to remain in the laboratory. This was problematical because just as the Soviet threat ostensibly went away, the North Korea nuclear threat emerged as the International Atomic Energy Administration and both the Bush 41 and Clinton administration’s concluded North Korea was diverting nuclear material for eventual bomb making. Missile defense, as President Reagan had foreseen in 1983, was critically needed to protect the security of the United States, not only from rogue regimes but also to complicate any first strike notions being held by China and Russia, for example.

As the Russian nuclear threat remained and the emerging North Korean threat grew, the United States inexplicably went on what USAF Maj Gen Garret Harencak has described as a dual extended procurement and intellectual holiday from thinking seriously about nuclear deterrence. We delayed replacing our nuclear Triad even though prudence dictated that we work toward the modernization of the deterrent which was needed every 30 years. And we largely stopped thinking about what nuclear policy we needed for the post Cold War era.

The Bush 43 administration tried moving the debate forward with efforts to build a better relationship with Russia. The Moscow treaty of 2001 cut deployed nuclear weapons on each side to between 1700-2200, a significant nearly 70% cut from the START I level of 6000, declaring “New global challenges and threats require the building of a qualitatively new foundation for strategic relations between the Parties”. This was subsequently followed by U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty in 2002 to allow America to defend its territory and that of its allies from  missile strikes, especially those that might come from rogue states such as North Korea and Iran.

A sharply more aggressive Russia came to see the US as more a strategic rival and threat later in the decade, as it became a top armory for Syria and Iran while committing serial aggression against Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Russia also escalated its rhetorical attacks on American missile defense deployments as well as initiating a massive military nuclear build-up.

With the new American administration taking office in 2009, the goal of going to zero nuclear weapons was initially emphasized. But with no prospect of going to zero, the administration accepted a more modest goal of a reduction of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to the 1550 level, about a 30% reduction from the 2001 Moscow treaty numbers coupled with a new verification regime.

But part of the deal was also an agreement to simultaneously modernize America’s nuclear deterrent across the board. Many of the elements of this effort were begun during the previous administration but the 2010 deal actually put down a credible future roadmap for nuclear modernization. The dual track of reducing our nuclear forces while replacing them with more modern and stabilizing forces could accurately be called a “build-down”, a phrase used some 30 years earlier to describe a similar effort during the Reagan administration. We “build” a more stabilizing nuclear force even as we draw “down” the numbers.

The cost of this modernization effort is now $24 billion a year (4% of the defense budget) and will peak over the next decade at between 5-6% of the defense budget or $30-34 billion a year and then decline thereafter. This compares to a spending level approaching $70 billion annually during the height of the Cold War.

This political consensus to go forward on nuclear modernization is a rare condition in Washington but of real value because it can result in a significant strategic achievement—implementing the much needed modernization of our nuclear deterrent for upwards of three to four decades.

Part of the consensus is also support for improving continental United States missile defenses, as well as the work planned to improve missile defenses in NATO and Europe and the western Pacific.

But the anti-nuclear crowd does not share in this consensus. They like the “down” of arms control but not the “build” of modernization. One amendment offered but not taken up to the Senate defense bill this month would unilaterally eliminate for at least the next decade any new strategic aircraft or bomber, any new land based missile, and any air launch cruise missile. It would also cut nearly in half our planned submarine procurement from twelve to eight as well as curtailing considerable related warhead work. In short, it would virtually end the required modernization of the nuclear deterrent of the United States and instead “rust to obsolescence” America’s nuclear capability.

If such proposals were adopted, the quest for greater strategic stability, for example, which animated much of US strategic nuclear policy throughout the Cold War and beyond, would fall by the wayside. Given the troubling developments across the globe, it would appear counter-intuitive for the United States to retreat across the board in modernizing our nuclear deterrent and missile defense capabilities. But the anti-nuclear crowd is animated by an ideology of “cutting is better” and “more cutting” is better still rather than what is the most stabilizing deterrent strategy to pursue.

NUCLEAR PAPER TIGERS?

This ideology requires some clever rhetorical acrobatics. On the nuclear side of the equation, for example, the Russian and Chinese massive nuclear buildups-greater in some areas in combination than anything each country did during the height of the Cold War— are routinely described as only a modest reaction to an unnecessarily large currently planned U.S. nuclear build-up thought of as “emblematic of the Cold War”.

On September 24, 2014 for example, Kyle Mizoram of Japan Security Watch, declared without reservation that China even after “decades of expensive rearmament, is a paper dragon”, a claim echoed by Arms Control Wonk Jeffrey Lewis in his “Paper Tigers” book describing China as seeking a “declining role for nuclear weapons”. Although Lewis also subscribes simultaneously to the theory that China would justifiably threaten to use nuclear weapons against the United States if we came to defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression.

For years indeed the anti-nuclear crowd assumed that China’s nuclear arsenal was very small, with low-end estimates between 80-300 warheads with no more than 60 nuclear warheads on missiles capable of reaching the United States. Unfortunately, this assumed “minimal deterrent” capability remained of little concern through many administrations.

However, in 2013-14 former DOD official Philip Karber discovered 3000 miles of tunnels linked with dedicated rail lines in China, solely as an underground deployment area for Chinese nuclear armed missiles. Through further investigation with Karber, I determined the Chinese 2nd Artillery Corps alone spent at least $50 billion to build the tunnel network. But to build such an elaborate network simply to protect launchers for only sixty warheads-at nearly $1 billion for each warhead? Does that make any sense?

Karber then showed me the associated 2nd Artillery launch facilities to the tunnels and the Chinese ICBMs aimed not at American cities–what a minimal nuclear strategy would imply– but at US ICBM fields in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. This would be indicative of a much more traditional counterforce or damage limitation nuclear strategy, requiring a significantly larger number of warheads and certainly not the “minimum” deterrent capability long assumed to reflect Chinese strategy.

The available evidence according to China experts is that PRC warhead levels capable of either being launched intercontinental distances or on U.S. soil, are probably climbing to at least the 500-800 level in the future as Rick Fisher, Gordon Chang and Ed Timperlake recently discussed at a Capitol Hill seminar I hosted in May. This is significant. If the PRC warhead levels are approaching such numbers, would not any further reduction of the US arsenal from the current level of 1550 to no more than 1000, as the anti-nuclear crowd is pushing, make China and Russia both peer nuclear competitors? And in light of the request by China last year to undertake with the Russians joint nuclear exercises simulating nuclear attacks against the United States, should not further reductions in the US nuclear deterrent be put on hold?

What about the larger Russian arsenal? Here a favorite anti-nuclear tactic is to point out that Russia can build to the 2010 New Start treaty levels-which we agreed to-so what possibly could be the problem? This of course conveniently ignores that Russia also has somewhere on the order of 5000 additional tactical nuclear weapons unregulated by any arms control agreement, (compared to a US tactical nuclear arsenal of roughly 500). And it ignores some analysts concern that Russian mobile, mirved land based missiles carried by trains are not restricted–perhaps inadvertently– under the New Start 2010 treaty. And it ignores that Russia actually built up to the new START warhead levels while the US built down.

Even worse, these same anti-nuclear advocates while bad-mouthing the Russian and Chinese nuclear challenge want to simultaneously reduce America’s future nuclear deterrent to only a handful of submarines at sea and in port. This would effectively reduce the number of targets the Russians or Chinese would have to worry about to around a handful-as low as 6 submarines representing 2 on patrol, 2 in transit and 2 in port.  This effectively reduces our nuclear assets to 6 discrete targets. With 1800 warheads in its strategic arsenal, Russia would enjoy a 300 to 1 ratio of their warheads to our nuclear deterrent assets, compared to 3.6 to 1 today and 13 to 1 during the height of the Cold War. Added to a notional future Chinese warhead arsenal of 500 warheads, that ratio would climb to nearly 400 to 1. As former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft once wrote, such an imbalance is akin to putting a big bulls-eye on our nuclear deterrent emblazoned with the words “Come Get Me!”

COME GET ME!

This is not a non-serious problem. Former Secretary of the Navy and Senate Armed Services Committee chairman John Warner told me years ago that his most worrisome danger as Secretary of the Navy was if one of our nuclear armed submarines-known as “Boomers”-did not come home.

Given that if our submarines at sea eventually become vulnerable to attack, they could be taken out surreptitiously by conventionally armed attack submarines without Washington knowing the origin of such attacks. And with just submarines in our nuclear arsenal upon which to rely, the heightened sense of insecurity such attacks would engender in Washington is a recipe for great crisis instability.

That is why there has been a multi-decade push by the United States to maintain a Triad of nuclear forces that underscores a stable policy of guaranteeing a secure, second strike retaliatory capability. This deterrent insurance policy eliminates any need for the United States to contemplate ever adopting a “launch on warning” policy.

How ironic then that the global zero advocates of a markedly smaller nuclear force would create the very conditions that might compel the United States to adopt a prompt launch policy. Ironic because while simultaneously calling for such a small force, the anti-nuclear zealots are also arguing that current U.S. policy even with a much more robust nuclear deterrent force actually requires a “launch on warning” strategy. Ironic even as the U.S. spends tens of billions to maintain a secure second-strike retaliatory force of nuclear weapons precisely to avoid having to adopt such a strategy.

CYBER HACKER BLOFELD

But the irony does not end here. A completely bizarre rationale being used by the anti-nuclear crowd for eliminating large swaths of the US nuclear deterrent is the new idea that cyber attackers could “fake” a massive missile attack on the United States which our early warning systems could not distinguish from the “real” thing.

This in turn would push the President, it is argued, into a “prompt launch” or “launch on warning” response for fear of losing those land based missiles and submarines vulnerable to attack by an enemy first strike. This then leads to recommendations that our missiles be “turned off” or “de-alerted” or eliminated all together so they cannot be launched “by accident”.

In a speech to the Ploughshares Fund in early June, the former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Cartwright, again reiterated his call for both “dealerting” all our missiles and eliminating completely our land based missile force because of this feared spoofing of our nuclear command and control.

According to the current Vice Commander of the US Strategic Command, General James Kowalski, such an idea as “de-alerting” is highly “dangerous”. The General told a Capitol Hill audience June 16 that there is also no means to verify “de-alerting”, and that a push to “re-alert” in a crisis could look like a “preparation to launch”. This would actually make the strategic balance highly unstable and even increase the risk that nuclear weapons would be used in a crisis.

The facts are clear: the U.S. has no launch on warning policy as claimed by Cartwright and other global zero advocates, and has had no such policy for many decades.  Our 450 land based missiles, 12 submarines of which roughly 5 are always on patrol deep into the oceans and our 60 nuclear bombers are postured in such a way that no adversary can eliminate but a fraction of their capability in a “first strike”, leaving the US with an assured massive retaliatory capability.

This eliminates the necessity for any Presidential to use nuclear weapons early in a crisis or conflict since there is no need to “prompt launch”. The fears of “launch on warning” are groundless as it is not adopted US strategic policy.  That is precisely why the United States has invested so much in securing a second, strike, retaliatory capability.

As for our warning systems such as the Defense Support Program satellites being spoofed by internet hackers, as the global zero advocates now claim, the “hackers” would also have to somehow invent “fake” plumes of rockets igniting all across Russia or China, the most realistic signs of launched nuclear armed missiles. Otherwise, our sensors would show right away no such missile launches had occurred. Furthermore, as our early warning system uses encrypted satellite systems which connect directly to the warnings centers, the “internet” is nowhere in the process. No internet, no hackers.

One news report of the Cartwright remarks also warned that since our “missiles are connected to the internet” they are thus in danger of being launched inadvertently. This is pure poppycock. In fact, the only way the ICBM launch control centers can communicate with the missile silos is through pressurized hardened cable networks buried in the ground in the 1960’s to transmit encrypted information. While they are connected between the missiles and launch control centers they are not connected to the internet. The unglamorous truth is there simply is no “hacker” problem.

This idea of “an internet hacker initiated nuclear war” has a certain Bond-like quality to it. I am sure Hollywood would find some way to make such a movie of an Ernst Stavro Blofeld-type character initiating a cyber-based nuclear war between the US and Russia or China and anti-nuke enthusiasts such as George Soros would fund it. But in the real world such foolish fantasies should remain in the fiction section of your neighborhood movie store or a video game sold to 9 year olds. Such bizarre ideas have no place in the serious world of US national security policy.

SECURING STRATEGIC STABILITY

As we enter the 8th decade of the nuclear era, the search to maintain and improve strategic stability remains the watchword of our nuclear sentinels. The deterrent balance is designed never to require the use of nuclear weapons even as the security challenges we face change. Gimmickry has no place in nuclear deterrence strategy, especially recklessly reducing our force structure to such low levels as to invite attack.

And more importantly, analysts of nuclear deterrence should do their homework and fully understand the American strategy is not to recklessly use nuclear weapons based on “warnings of attack” but to have such a secure force that all the incentives are that our nuclear armed adversaries stand down in a crisis and nuclear weapons never be used.

Nuclear strategy should  result in lowering nuclear dangers, not inadvertently expanding them as the anti-nuclear follies analyzed here would do.

Comments are closed.