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Chapter 2

Nuclear Weapons After the Cold War: Promise and Failure

Over time, as arsenals multiplied on both sides and the rhetoric of mutual annihilation grew more heated, we were forced to think about the unthinkable, justify the unjustifiable, rationalize the irrational. Ultimately, we contrived a new and desperate theology to ease our moral anguish, and we called it deterrence.

—General George Butler, U.S. Air Force, 1997

We have been unable so far to do better than just sort of go on intellectual autopilot.

—General Butler, a year later

The Power of Inertia

The end of the Cold War was supposed to mean many things: the spread of democracy, the reunification of Europe, an economic “peace dividend,” and maybe, with the competition between individual freedom and collectivist repression resolved, even the end of intellectual history. Most important, it was supposed to represent a final release from the nuclear nightmare. Today, some of that promise has been realized. Europe is whole, and the world goes about its business largely free from the fear of global nuclear war. And yet, the weapons and strategies of the Cold War remain: Americans who were young children when the Berlin Wall fell still crew the silos, submarines, and bombers that were all built for service in a previous century. The Soviet Union is gone, but like a ceremonial guard the U.S. nuclear deterrent continues to stand at attention over its remains.

Some of this “nuclear inertia” can be traced to the unexpected speed with which the Cold War ended.¹ Although in retrospect that conflict and the nuclear arms race it spawned might seem to be a long historical process, the Cold War was shorter than the life span of a single human being. The relationship between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics went first from suspicion and hostility after World War I into an alliance of necessity during World War II, and then to existential confrontation and the final Soviet collapse of the late 1980s, all in the space of some seventy years.

And then it was all over in a matter of days. Many Western experts, until the very end, clung to the belief that a Soviet collapse was literally impossible—that what was happening could not be happening—and it was remarkable that U.S. and NATO policymakers were not caught more flatfooted than they were. (The advice they were getting didn’t help: the late Stephen Meyer of MIT even went so far as to tell the Senate Foreign Relations committee that “hints of military coups [in the USSR] are pure flights of fancy” in testimony he gave on June 6, 1991, just nine weeks before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s ouster in the Soviet coup.)² Even had Washington and its allies been better prepared for the Soviet implosion, however, there was no way for either side to plan for so sudden a peace, and the entire Soviet and American order of nuclear battle remained frozen in place despite the end of the political hostilities between East and West.

The Americans in the early 1990s were reticent about packing away their nuclear weapons. Their caution was understandable: a moment of “peace” does not mean an eternity of “stability,” and precipitous moves toward rapid nuclear disarmament immediately after the fall of the USSR would have been irresponsible. Russia’s leaders, for their part, had more pressing matters on their minds; in the first years after the Soviet collapse, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his advisors could not immediately tackle the immense job of securing and consolidating the old Soviet nuclear arsenal in the new Russian Federation mostly because they had their hands full trying to consolidate the new Russian Federation itself. In any case, political leaders cannot sweep away institutions, beliefs, buildings, and bombs overnight, no matter how revolutionary the circumstances. Dismantling the machinery of nuclear war is not a matter of simply turning off the lights and handing in the codes and keys. The disintegration of the Soviet Union opened a world of possibilities—and created more than a few headaches—for disarmament, but any serious reconsideration of the purpose and structure of the U.S. deterrent in the wake of the Cold War’s end necessarily demanded patience, creativity, and time.

Major reforms of the U.S. nuclear deterrent might have been too much to expect in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, but in the ensuing two decades since the Cold War’s end, Western governments have consistently shown a genuine desire to reduce both their nuclear and conventional arsenals. Prominent defense and foreign policy intellectuals, including former Cold Warriors in the United States and Europe (and even some in Russia), have called not only for reductions, but for the complete abolition of nuclear arms. Other thinkers and leaders, if less sure about reaching “zero,” have nonetheless likewise argued for deemphasizing the importance of nuclear arms.

The way forward, then, would seem to be a straightforward matter of simplifying U.S. nuclear doctrine and reconfiguring the strategic nuclear force to correspond to a more limited post–Cold War mission. Unfortunately, nothing is ever that simple, but since 1994 each of three successive U.S. presidential administrations of both parties has embarked on a major review of American nuclear policy.

Each of these reviews produced limited and disappointing results. In the end, they all reflected an unwillingness to part with the weapons and strategies of the Cold War. Some of this resistance to changing the U.S. nuclear deterrent reflected the sincere belief on the part of many people in the government, the military, and the American electorate that nuclear weapons kept the peace, and perhaps even saved the world, for more than a half century. Ultimately, however, the reviews of nuclear strategy conducted by successive U.S. administrations have been monuments less to the Western victory in the Cold War and more to the sheer power of political and bureaucratic inertia.

Reviewing the Nuclear Reviews

Few nations study their own defense policies as often and as openly as the United States. In the wake of major reforms in U.S. defense policy enacted by the Congress in the mid-1980s, both the executive and legislative branches of the United States government have commissioned repeated studies and reports meant to examine and to explain the various facets of U.S. national security. These documents have included the National Security Strategy of the United States, the National Military Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, the Quadrennial Defense Review, the various reviews conducted by each armed service, and the overarching study of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its purpose, the Nuclear Posture Review.³

In a world free of bureaucratic friction, all of these documents would agree with each other. Taken together, they should provide a relatively complete picture of U.S. national defense: they should explain how the United States views the international security environment, identify areas of particular concern or emphasis, and describe how the United States plans to arm itself in the future. In the real world, however, these reports often miss their required date of submission, end up out of phase with each other, and represent a spectrum of diverse and occasionally conflicting inputs from throughout the government. To be fair, the staffs that create them actually overlap in many cases, and the apparent lack of coordination is sometimes less than it seems, but it is nonetheless difficult to piece together an overall picture of U.S. security policy from these many documents.

The National Military Strategy, for example, is a classified report from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs to the secretary of defense. In theory, it should follow the guidelines of the National Security Strategy, which has been required as an annual submission from the president to Congress since 1986. But the 2011 National Military Strategy was the first in seven years, and coordinating anything with the National Security Strategy would be impossible in any case since presidents almost never submit them on time. In more than twenty-five years, only Bill Clinton met the requirement for an annual submission, although it is arguable whether the National Security Strategies of the 1990s actually said anything or whether anyone read them.⁴ George W. Bush submitted two reports during the entire eight years of his presidency, and Barack Obama likewise submitted only one during his first term. While quantity is not quality, “annual” does not mean “every four years,” either.