NUCLEAR QUESTIONS-NUCLEAR ANSWERS: PETER HUESSEY
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/nuclear-questions-nuclear-answers
The next administration will face a number of important nuclear policy decisions. On May 13, I invited Franklin Miller, a Principal in the Scowcroft Group, and a former top White House defense official, to discuss these matters before an audience of Congressional staff, senior administration defense and security officials, top staff from defense and security public policy organizations, defense media, defense industry officials and a number of allied embassy colleagues. It was interestingly the 1400th seminar I have hosted on the Hill since 1983 on key defense and national security matters.
Franklin Miller in his prepared remarks extensively addressed the nature of the current debate on future nuclear modernization and whether the US force was obsolete, unaffordable, destabilizing or an obstacle to further arms control. Those remarks were posted recently by Family Security Matters.
However, what has not yet been published is the extensive discussion after his formal remarks. Here, Franklin Miller reviewed five important issues at some length. They were: first, what kind of nuclear posture review should the next administration undertake; second, should the United States consider adopting was in known as a minimal deterrent strategy; third, is nuclear deterrence simply a strategy of what is commonly referred to as “mutual assured destruction”; fourth, should the US switch to a policy of reliance upon tactical nuclear weapons; and fifth, what is the proper role of nuclear deterrence.
Here is an edited transcript of that discussion.
Question: If there was going to be a Nuclear Posture Review in the future, what would you like to see accomplished?
MR. MILLER: If there’s a Nuclear Posture Review, and I’ve testified to this in front of the Senate, I think it should be very, very different from the ones that we’ve had in the past. I don’t believe in a congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review. The most successful Nuclear Posture Review that was ever held was held between 1989 and 1991 in the Defense Department, and it resulted — it didn’t go in with this intention, but it resulted in a much improved war plan and a 65 percent cut in our deployed weapons requirements.
When you have all the publicity and hoopla surrounding a Nuclear Posture Review, you create expectations that things have to change. In fact, if you go back and look historically, even though some administrations back in the ‘60s — you know, we went from “strategic sufficiency” to “essential equivalence” and all that — suggested that our policy changed each time a new administration came in, it didn’t happen. U.S. nuclear policy has been remarkably consistent. There’s been some play on the margins with regard to which programs to have in it, but the policy has been consistent. And it’s important that we demonstrate consistency and not raise expectations for change, unless of course radical change would be called for.
But I think the Nuclear Posture Review, such as it is, ought to be conducted within the Pentagon by civilian and military officials. It ought to be briefed to the secretary of Defense and the secretary ought to take any recommendations coming from that to the president, vice president, the national security adviser, you can bring in the secretary of State. And then, and only then, once we’ve established what our nuclear deterrent requirements are, then you bring in the NSC and the State Department to talk about arms control.
I think that Nuclear Posture Reviews that start with the State Department and the NSC staff present, and whose primary objective is nonproliferation or arms reductions, start in exactly the wrong direction. The nuclear posture of the United States is supposed to ensure, to our best capability to understand it, what our nuclear deterrent posture is, and then we move on from there. So if I were advising anybody, I would say do it quietly, do it quickly, get it out of the way, brief it, and if there’s something there to roll out, roll it out; and if there isn’t, don’t.
The ‘89′ to ‘91 experience was dramatic. The only time it was rolled out was when George H. W. Bush said something in his State of the Union message in 1992 when he said, “We’re going to propose to Gorbachev that we eliminate all land-based MIRVs.” That review produced the biggest single cut in our weapons requirements, and it was a deterrence-based review.
Question: Do you think that minimum deterrence and extended deterrence are mutually exclusive concepts, and if so to what extent?
MR. MILLER: Yes I do, I do. Look, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go back to the other question. If we’re going to get out of NATO because it’s a useless, obsolete, freeloading organization, and the Japanese and South Korean governments are going to have their own nuclear weapons, we don’t have to worry about minimum deterrence. But if you don’t like that world, you have to have extended deterrence.
Extended deterrence means that you have to do two things. You have to have sufficient forces and capabilities and plans to convince potential adversaries that attacking our allies is a very bad thing to do and that they will end up on the wrong end of history should they do so. And, you have to have sufficient forces, plans, capabilities and transparency — transparency with our allies, so that they have confidence that we are in fact there to protect them.
You cannot do that with a minimum deterrent force. There are academic volumes this high on minimum deterrence, but at the end of the day it turns out to be reduced to city busting. I’m not comfortable with city busting. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good deterrent because it gets into the whole notion — I’m sorry, I’m going to carry this question a lot further than you asked.
Deterrence is about getting into the mind of the potential enemy and saying, “No, don’t do that because bad things will happen to you. Things will happen worse than what you have calculated you’re willing to accept.”
Traditionally, traditionally, autocratic leaders have valued above all their ability to stay in power, and the armed forces and security forces that keep them in power, and the military, economic potential that sustains their forces. Everybody in this room understands that our value system says we value our people. It has never been clear, when you get down to brass tack confrontations with some of the potential enemies we have, that they view the world the same way we do. So you’ve got to be thinking about more than minimum deterrence, because I don’t think minimum deterrence works except in our university environments. I just don’t think it’s a sound policy.
Question: Mr. Miller, you spoke of Russia and China. What’s your viewpoint on how well deterrence is working towards other nuclear powers? What’s also your standpoint on the aspect of mutual assured destruction? Is that a viable construct or has that gone by the wayside?
MR. MILLER: With respect to the deterrence of other nuclear powers, I think the other nuclear power that we have to worry about is North Korea. The question is, do we have sufficient combined nuclear and conventional capability to prevent Kim Jong-un from attacking our South Korean or Japanese allies? I think we do. But we need to consider — we need to make a mental leap from saying North Korea is a bad actor which has violated its NPT commitments and we’re going to bring them back into compliance with the NPT; to saying, excuse me, North Korea is a nuclear-armed state and we’re going to have to deal with that. They’re not going back, they’re not going back.
So we have to try as best we can, as in any deterrent situation, to understand what motivates Kim Jong-un and his government, what his vital assets are, and how we convey to him that attacking our Japanese or South Korean allies will cause the end of his regime. I think that’s a daunting problem. I think it’s a daunting problem with respect to Russia and China, too, because in the ‘90s and ‘00s we systematically dismantled our capability to understand Russia. The intelligence community’s Russian analysis branches were cut by huge percentages, double digit percentages.
So I think we need to spend a whole lot more time studying Kim Jon-un. And I would hope, and I don’t know, that there is some channel whereby we can send him messages that are unambiguous that say, “just don’t do that, just don’t do that.”
On the other point — I mean, I love you guys, you’re giving me lots of softballs. Mutual assured destruction was never a strategy. Our academic community has so much to be ashamed of in promoting the idea that once upon a time it was either nuclear war fighting or assured destruction. It was counterforce or counter-value, which was never the case except from ‘47 to ‘50. We’ve always targeted military forces and industrial assets.
Assured destruction was a McNamara rule of thumb that was used to cap U.S. nuclear forces. It had what, about 30 percent of the population and 50 percent of the industrial capacity, or some figure like that, right? When the Russians had the capability to do the same thing to us, we then had mutual assured destruction. But it was a description of a situation, not a strategy.
The strategy was always, from 1961 on, flexible response, to give the president a variety of options to deal with unpredictable situations to prevent nuclear aggression and nuclear attack. Much of those dealt with, as I was saying earlier, the elements of state power. Our British friends used to call it the elements of Soviet state power, which is a pretty good description of what you look at when you’re trying to deter a leadership calculating should we attack the United States or not. So thank you for that MAD was never a strategy. It’s popularly thought of as a strategy, but it’s a description of a situation. It pertains today. If you want to describe the situation, could we and the Russian Federation destroy each other? Absolutely. That’s why we have to find ways out of that, to convince Putin that if he crosses the line and attacks one of our allies, the consequences are unpredictable and could lead to a mutual assured destruction situation.
No one is going to go into a war thinking that they’re going to come out on the wrong side of mutual assured destruction. They go into a war thinking they can win a quick and easy victory at small cost. And we need to get inside the heads of those people who are planning military operations against us or our allies: in states, not terrorists, in states, and suggest that those calculations will always come out wrong.
Question: You raised some excellent opposition about the Nuclear Posture Review and the NSC. I was wondering if it’s because in that community they see a wider range of threats, whereas in the Pentagon they’re more focused on the big powers. Specifically, I’d like to know why you think that that process is not working, although maybe I missed why you made that distinction.
MR. MILLER: Again, I think a Nuclear Posture Review is designed to determine what our deterrent requirements are, and that means what do we need to deter potential enemies? Once you’ve determined that, there are other aspects to our broader nuclear policy which include, can we engage in new arms reduction regimes? And again, I think the answer to that is, no, not until the Russians get back into compliance. Or does it affect nonproliferation, and how does our nonproliferation policy work?
Putting nonproliferation as the ingoing goal of a Nuclear Posture Review skews the process. Saying that “you guys in DOD can look at our deterrent requirements but whatever your answers it has to come out at 500 weapons lower than where we are today,” skews the process. And I think that the link between our nuclear posture and potential proliferation is a false one.
Now having brought the wrath of the State Department and the NSC upon my head, and the arms control community, I’ll bring the nonproliferation community in. The linkage between U.S. nuclear forces and proliferation has never been established. It’s easy rhetoric. In fact, if you go back and look historically at levels of U.S. nuclear forces, which have gone down, and British nuclear forces, which have gone down, and French nuclear forces, which have gone down, and even Russian strategic forces, not their tactical one, which have gone down, and you graft that over about 20 to 30 years, and you look at Chinese weapons and Indian weapons and Pakistani weapons and North Korean weapons, there is no linkage. There is no linkage.
Countries don’t proliferate because — I mean, they’re not going to spend blood and treasure and risk international opprobrium just because we have a nuclear weapon and they have to have one. These people are, in fact, rational actors. It’s insulting to suggest that they’re doing this just to ape us. They do that because they believe, whether I agree with it or not, that they have legitimate deterrent requirements. I suspect Kim Jong-un wants to continue his nuclear weapons program to prevent us from thinking about conventional attacks in response to things he does, and to be the regional hegemon to the degree that his Chinese masters allow him to do that.
The same thing would go for an Iranian nuclear program, to forestall U.S. conventional operations against Iran. But that’s not because of the size of our arsenal. We could go to zero, tomorrow, and North Korea would still have nuclear weapons.
Again, those who say our conventional capabilities are all we need, don’t understand that those in fact, if you go through a series of convoluted steps, help cause states which feel threatened, rightly or wrongly, to have their own nuclear arsenals. So again, a Nuclear Posture Review should look at what we need to defend ourselves and our allies. That means not only numbers, but it means how do you design the force? Smaller, lower, is not always better.
All of you can design a force of 1,000 U.S. weapons that is more vulnerable to Russian pre-emption than the current force. Pre-emption is a bad thing. Making yourself a target is a bad thing. So there’s a whole question about how you go lower, if you go lower, and when go lower, that needs to be taken into account.
Not pitching for my boss, but if you go back to April of 2012, I think it’s late in the month, Brent Scowcroft and Henry Kissinger have an op-ed in the Washington Post that sort of gives eight steps that you need to consider before going any lower. I highly recommend that to you.
Yes, sir, colonel?
Question: Do you believe that the need for modernization of both our strategic nuclear weapons and our conventional forces make it a time to maybe switch our nuclear strategy from reliance on the strategic triad to more tactical nuclear weapons?
MR. MILLER: No, no, absolutely not, no. The triad is the foundation of everything we do around the world, particularly as we butt heads against Moscow and Beijing. It’s the foundation. Without a strategic triad the credibility of our conventional forces would be dramatically undercut. At a March hearing in front of the full House Armed Services Committee the three service chiefs, particularly General Milley and Admiral Richardson, made that point. I hope that your chief to be strongly endorses the nuclear triad.
Shorter range weapons, which are principally designed — not principally, exclusively — designed to help us and extended deterrence, contribute to the overall effectiveness of our deterrent and give the president and the allies more options, but they don’t substitute for the strategic weapons. Quite honestly, we have enough problems with our NATO allies now, than to open the idea of trying to deploy some new kind of theater capability. I mean, of all the neuralgic problems NATO has suffered through over decades, nuclear modernization has always been the most neuralgic. I mean, you need a whole jar of Bayer aspirin every day. So no, I would not do that.
MS. SUSAN KEATING: If the administration put you in charge tomorrow over national defense and the policy for nuclear weapons, is it even possible to turn the train around at this point? If so, how hard would it be?
MR. MILLER: Oh yeah, actually it’s real easy. It’s real easy. First of all, the president and secretary of State need to start picking up the kind of language that Secretary of Defense Carter is using so effectively. We need to talk about how unacceptable it is in the 21st century for Vladimir Putin to sound like Nikita Khrushchev. We need to say that. We need to say that publicly. One, stop talking like it’s the 1960s.
Two, we need to say, Mr. Putin, do not think of limited nuclear war because it will end up in an unimaginable situation and Russia could be lost. So stop talking about escalate to de-escalate at the lower levels of his senior staff. Stop threatening Norway and Denmark and Sweden and Ukraine and other countries with nuclear weapons. Knock it off. That stuff belongs to the past. We’re supposed to be smarter than that.
And three, we need to put our dollars and our energy behind our modernization programs to make that kind of declaratory policy credible. The modernization programs are there. Thank God for the Navy. And thank God for the SSBN-X program. I wish the Air Force would put the energy behind LRSO and GBSD to do that.
Then there’s other little stuff — it’s not little, but it’s details. I made fun of details earlier, but it’s the procurement process. Somebody correct me — and I know times are a little more complicated — we went from the idea of a Polaris SSBN to putting on in the water on its first deterrent patrol in five years.
MR. Huessy: Three and one-half years.
MR. MILER: Three years? Okay. Minuteman, U-2 was one year from concept initiation to first flight. We can’t do that today. So we spill it out and we do working groups and spend lots of money and milestones and all the rest. So we’ve got to fix the procurement process, but Senator McCain and Mr. Thornberry will figure that one out.
MR. HUESSY: Parenthetically, Franklin, the first B-1B RDT&E was in fiscal year 1979.
MR. MILLER: Right. Well then there was the Carter administration hiatus.
Question: In the context of enabling conventional forces, and I’m thinking also about the new emerging threats, the gray zone threats such as conventional drones, how should we understand the spectrum of threats and the role of nuclear deterrence?
MR. MILLER: That’s a great question, thank you. It centers me. I’ve been talking about nuclear deterrence, but the questioner makes a terribly important point.
Nuclear weapons are not now, never have been, never will be, an all-purpose deterrent. They can’t be. It’s not credible to say that we’re going to respond to little green men with nuclear weapons. It ain’t going to happen. No one is going to believe it.
We need a full spectrum of capabilities, and clearly in areas where the Russians have shown enormously skillful capabilities in the area of both information operations, little green men and all the rest, we need strong conventional forces. We need strong special operations capabilities. We need the ability to go after ISIS and hunt and kill ISIS.
But in the backdrop, when we talk about state-to-state relations with nuclear-armed powers, the nuclear deterrent serves to prevent people from going to war with one another. That’s the huge value of the nuclear deterrent.
People get tired of me saying this, but the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 established the modern nation-state. In the 300 years that followed, from 1649 to 1945, the great powers of Europe go to war with each other on average five to seven times a century. That counts the Napoleonic Wars as one war and the Wars of Italian Independence as one war.
And then in 1945 everything stops. The United States and Russia move in as the surrogates for the great powers of Europe and there’s no war. There are some tense times, but in those tense times it becomes clear that conventional war between the great nuclear-armed powers is too dangerous to contemplate.
That is the value of the nuclear weapon. You need capabilities at lower levels to deal with other threats for which the nuclear threat is not credible. But at the end of the day, don’t kid yourself, when you’re dealing with the Russians or the Chinese, the nuclear forces in the background provide the essential foundation — I think those were the words that Admiral Richardson used — essential foundation of our national defense.
MR. HUESSY: You did beautifully.
MR. MILLER: Thank you.
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