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Introduction

Why Nuclear Weapons Still Matter

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.

—George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, 2007

As long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States will maintain safe, secure, and effective nuclear forces, including deployed and stockpiled nuclear weapons, highly capable nuclear delivery systems and command and control capabilities, and the physical infrastructure and the expert personnel needed to sustain them.

—U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, 2010

Isn’t Nuclear War Yesterday’s Problem?

The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on Christmas Day 1991. That evening, U.S. President George H. W. Bush addressed the American people and assured them that the long nuclear nightmare of the Cold War had finally come to an end. “For over 40 years,” Bush said, “the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. This struggle shaped the lives of all Americans. It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction.”

That confrontation, the president declared, “is now over.”¹

And so it was. For a brief period at the close of the twentieth century, it seemed as if the nuclear anxieties of the Cold War could finally be put aside. Both the United States and the new Russian Federation began to dismantle their nuclear weapons, target them away from each other, and to corral and secure what was left of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. Nuclear war receded into the recent past as yesterday’s worry, no longer relevant in a world released from the constant tension of the longstanding Soviet-American nuclear confrontation.

Prominent Cold Warriors in the United States and Europe, and even some in Russia, have since advocated deep reductions in nuclear arms. Many have supported the goal of reaching “global zero,” the complete eradication of nuclear weapons. In 2008, a bipartisan group that included former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Senator Sam Nunn, and former Secretary of Defense William Perry (sometimes collectively called the “Gang of Four”) issued a now-famous open letter in which they called for a world free of nuclear weapons.² For a time, this message of nuclear abolition resonated widely and attracted considerable attention among both policy elites and ordinary citizens, and a collection of senior officials and top military commanders from several countries soon joined these statesmen in rejecting the foundations of the strategic doctrines they helped to create. In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama formally committed the United States to the objective of the complete eradication of nuclear arms in a speech in Prague, a goal he reaffirmed in an official review of U.S. nuclear policies in 2010.

But the moment passed quickly. In May 2011, Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn hosted a meeting in London later described by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans as “featuring a worldwide cast of some 30 former foreign and defense ministers, generals, and ambassadors who share their concern and commitment” to nuclear disarmament. None of these officials, however, were still in their former positions of power. “Our average age was over 65,” Evans noted ruefully, and the limits of their effectiveness were neatly described at the conference by former British Defense Minister Des Browne: “People who used to be something really want to tackle this issue. The trouble is that those who are something don’t.”³ As President Obama began his second term in office, his administration retained and reaffirmed previous Cold War concepts, strategies and forces. Today, more than 20,000 nuclear weapons remain around the world, with some 5,000 of those operational and ready for war, and many arms control advocates are concerned that the window for further reductions, at least for some time to come, has closed.⁴

Despite this slowing momentum, the U.S. and its allies deserve credit for at least trying to reduce their dependence on nuclear arms. (Great Britain has seriously considered the question of whether it needs a nuclear deterrent at all.)⁵ Other nations, however, are trying to reach their own nuclear moment. North Korea, with a tiny arsenal (and a new leader assuming power in 2012 while still so young he would not have been allowed to be a member of the U.S. Senate) has made explicit nuclear threats against its neighbors and the United States. In late 2012, North Korea finally succeeded in testing a three-stage missile—the precursor to an intercontinental-range attack capability—by launching a satellite into space.⁶ A few months later, the North Korean regime issued a cascade of nuclear threats that were extreme even by Pyongyang’s typically extreme level of rhetoric, provoking an ongoing crisis with the United States and South Korea whose outcome is still uncertain.⁷ Meanwhile, Iran’s mullahs remain unswerving in their determination to join the nuclear club, and even backward Myanmar has been caught toying with nuclear weapons technology.⁸

Russia and China are long-standing members of the nuclear club, and strategic nuclear weapons remain central to their respective defense strategies, in part to compensate for the limited reach and power of their conventional forces. The Chinese appear to have made a decision, at least for the near future, to sustain a small but increasingly modern nuclear force.⁹ The Russians, however, remain stubbornly committed to their insistence on the right to maintain a large and varied nuclear arsenal—and to use it if necessary. Senior Russian military officers bluntly admit that this position is driven not only by a firm belief in traditional nuclear deterrence, but by the hope that nuclear weapons can compensate for the poor overall state of the Russian military. “The nuclear status of Russia,” according to the commander of Russia’s nuclear forces, “will remain in the foreseeable future, until scientific and technical progress or a change in the nature of international relations eliminates the deterring role of nuclear weapons.”¹⁰

The Indians and the Pakistanis, locked in their own regional nuclear arms race, continue to rely on nuclear weapons as the core of their national defenses. Israeli nuclear strategy is likely predicated on similar concerns about national survival, although the size of the Israeli arsenal remains unknown and unacknowledged. The Israeli nuclear program has long been one of the world’s worst-kept secrets, as part of a careful game meant to induce uncertainty and caution in Israel’s enemies (and to avoid international inspection and pressure for disarmament).

The United States, for its part, has for more than forty years maintained a public commitment to nuclear disarmament in one form or another, while simultaneously asserting the right to possess and use nuclear weapons in any number of scenarios. The end of the Cold War allowed the Americans and the Russians to slash their nuclear inventories, but these were reductions from unimaginably huge levels. From a high of over 30,000 weapons in the late 1960s, the United States as of 2013 has more than 4,000 warheads, and many more in storage awaiting destruction. Fewer than 2,000 are deployed, a number that will drop to 1,550 in coming years as the result of “New START,” ratified by the U.S. Senate in the last days of 2010 and the Russian parliament shortly thereafter. Despite this step forward, thousands of nuclear arms, representing many millions of tons of destructive power, will remain in place on both sides. As U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said during the ratification debate, he was willing to vote for the treaty because it left America with “enough nuclear warheads to blow anyone to kingdom come.”¹¹

While we will return to New START in later chapters, it is worth noting that the difficulties and anxieties surrounding the treaty’s ratification were themselves testimony to the centrality of nuclear weapons to U.S. security thinking. The debate was mired in partisan politics, to be sure, but treaty opponents issued bitter warnings that even modest nuclear reductions would endanger U.S. national security—at a time when the United States is all but supreme as a military power and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the dominant alliance from Anchorage to Istanbul and beyond.¹² There is no denying that strategic nuclear weapons are today the only means capable of ending the American system of government and the United States itself in minutes; as the Pentagon’s advisory body, the Defense Science Board, noted in 2008, “no threat can put the nation’s existence at risk as quickly and as chillingly as nuclear weapons.”¹³

Nonetheless, achieving a small additional reduction should not have proved so contentious, especially after the major, and sometimes unilateral, U.S. arms reductions of the early 1990s. It is clear that most U.S. political leaders and many in the other established nuclear nations see significant possibilities for nuclear reductions and lowering the danger of nuclear conflict. It is just as evident, however, that the Americans and others continue, as a matter of national policy, to invest an immense amount of faith in nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, rogue states and would-be great powers pursue nuclear programs as shortcuts to what they hope will be more security and greater prestige.

Why is it so difficult for the major powers, and the United States in particular, to break the nuclear addiction, and what role should nuclear weapons play in America’s national security? These are the central questions of this book.

Nuclear Doctrine and American Security Strategy

Nuclear weapons are different from other instruments of war. Not only is their power beyond imagination, but also they are still the first and only weapons capable of eradicating human civilization. Historical analogies fail us, because none exist.

Every country that possesses nuclear weapons has had to wrestle with questions about the political and military utility of their arsenal—in effect, about what nuclear weapons mean. The answers to these questions are expressed in each nation’s overarching beliefs and assumptions about nuclear arms and their purpose, which in turn guide nuclear strategy, planning, and forces. This collection of informal beliefs and formal policies constitute nuclear doctrine, a word that appropriately suggests an almost theological set of assumptions about why nuclear weapons exist and how they should be used. (This is not “doctrine” as the U.S. military often uses the term, which only describes particular guidance for combat and weaponry of various types.) These concepts, at least in theory, provide the foundation for building strategy, in which large-scale military assets such as nuclear weapons are employed to achieve the goals of national policy.

Once the objects of intense study and detailed analysis, nuclear doctrine and strategy have eroded into disarray both among civilian thinkers and government nuclear strategists, whose numbers are dwindling. The U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, noted in 2010 that the experts who once worked through these problems are now largely gone: “We have not worked very hard to find [their] replacements. We don’t have anybody in our military that does that anymore. It’s as if we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Soviet Union collapsed and said to ourselves, ‘Well, I guess we don’t need to worry about that anymore.’ We were dead wrong.”¹⁴ The careful analysis and comparison of nuclear arsenals has become, in arms control thinker Michael Krepon’s words, “the province of an aging, shrinking demographic.”¹⁵ Even in senior American military educational institutions such as the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College or the U.S. Naval War College, the study of nuclear strategy fell by the wayside almost before the first stones of the Berlin Wall were cleared away.

As a result, Cold War–era precepts about nuclear weapons have continued to dominate national security policy and nuclear strategies by default. The doctrines of the Cold War continue to lock the United States, Russia, and others into outdated thinking about nuclear weapons, especially the tenacious, unshakeable belief that nuclear force is integral to the national security of any major power. This was a reflexive article of truth for most leaders during the Cold War, as well as for the generation of thinkers and policymakers whose formative experiences were forged in the tense later years of the Soviet-American struggle.

Former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, for example, decades later recalled the incredulity of the British prime minister when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev broached the topic of eliminating the world’s nuclear weapons during their 1986 summit in Iceland:

When I came back to Washington from Reykjavik I was more or less summoned to the British ambassador’s residence. And Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher “hand-bagged” me. That is, you know, she carried that little stiff handbag, and she whacked me. She said, “George, how can you sit there and allow the president to agree to a world free of nuclear weapons?” I said, “But Margaret, he’s the president.” She said, “Yes, but you’re supposed to be the one holding his feet on the ground.” “But Margaret, I agreed with him,” I said.

Her reaction was typical. I think people were enamored of the idea of deterrence through nuclear weapons…. The idea of a world free of nuclear weapons would not have gone down well in Washington and among our allies in 1986…. I don’t think the world was ready for it.¹⁶

The world, apparently, is still not ready for it. Assumptions about the utility of nuclear force and the strength of nuclear deterrence continue to echo through the entire security architecture of the nuclear-armed nations.

In the United States, the stubborn adherence to the idea that nuclear weapons have broad political as well as military utility is a construct that continues to have a powerful effect on choices about weapons, the formulation of strategies, and the daily conduct of U.S. diplomacy, especially with NATO and the Russian Federation. In the early 1990s, U.S. Air Force General George Butler found himself taken aback by the breadth and staying power of these beliefs when he called for phasing out the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the wake of the Soviet collapse. He was “dismayed,” he later wrote, “that even among more serious commentators, the lessons of 50 years at the nuclear brink can still be so grievously misread; that the assertions and assumptions underpinning an era of desperate threats and risks prevail unchallenged; that a handful of nations cling to the impossible notion that the power of nuclear weapons is so immense their use can be threatened with impunity, yet their proliferation contained.”¹⁷

In 1999, almost a decade after the end of the Cold War, a group of scholars at the Brookings Institution noted that U.S. thinking about the role of nuclear arms continued to adhere to the belief that the “targeting and declaratory doctrines developed during the [Cold War], which emphasize early and large attacks against nuclear forces and permit the first use of nuclear weapons [are] valuable in deterring threats to U.S. interests.”¹⁸ Ten years after the Brookings report, a joint working group of scientists and policy analysts found that “U.S. nuclear strategy and policy continued to lack a coherent and compelling rationale.”¹⁹ And when the Obama administration released its own review of nuclear doctrine in 2010, critics almost immediately derided it as little more than a continuation of tradition rather than anything substantively new.²⁰

Of course, it could be argued with some justice that American thinking about nuclear weapons was never all that clear-headed in the first place. To be sure, U.S. planners and their Soviet counterparts worked hard on these issues. They came up with elaborate, highly detailed scenarios for various kinds of nuclear conflict, all of which were predicated on optimistic assumptions about how nuclear conflicts could be fought, controlled, and terminated despite the vast damage and widespread chaos that would characterize even a modest nuclear exchange.

These efforts consumed immense human and material resources, but never produced useful answers. As Lawrence Freedman noted in a landmark study of nuclear strategy written in the early 1980s: “The question of what happens if deterrence fails is vital for the intellectual cohesion and credibility of nuclear strategy…. No operational nuclear strategy has yet to be devised that does not carry an enormous risk of degenerating into a bloody contest of resolve or a furious exchange of devastating and crippling blows against the political and economic centers of the industrialized world.”²¹ If U.S. nuclear strategy seemed complicated and fantastic during the Cold War, in part it was because there was an opposing Soviet superpower whose own nuclear doctrine was clearly defined and no less intricate. Soviet planning provided a constant spur to thinking, creative or otherwise, about American nuclear forces and what purpose they were supposed to serve.

Today, all that is left of the Soviet nuclear superpower is a faded Russian successor that can barely contend with problems on its own borders. Russia’s nuclear forces, while still a notional danger, lack the ideological and imperial purposes that made the Soviet arsenal such a deadly threat. With the Soviet Union gone, the United States is left with a massive nuclear complex that was designed to fight, and if possible survive, a global nuclear war with a similarly armed superpower. Deprived of its original logic, U.S. doctrine has since lost whatever internal coherence it might have had, and cannot provide guidance for answers to nuclear threats that are evolving and changing. Reforming U.S. nuclear doctrine is the key not only to the reform of U.S. national security policy, but also to the continued reduction of nuclear arsenals and the prevention of the wider spread of nuclear weaponry.

A less alarmist view might be to ask why there should be any serious concern about nuclear doctrine in the United States or in any other of the major powers. The United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China have already adopted clear views on the role of nuclear weapons, with all-out nuclear war among them deterred by the promise of assured destruction, and smaller strikes by regional proliferators deterred by the considerable nuclear muscle of the bigger nations. Whether by accident or design, the outcome is the same: steep reductions in the world’s arsenals have obviated the complicated nuclear warfighting scenarios of the past.

Where the smaller nuclear powers are concerned, presumably they will replicate the successful Soviet-American experience. (“Success” in this sense is measured by more than a half century in which there was no use of nuclear weapons.) Why not assume that the Indians and the Pakistanis, and perhaps the Israelis and the Iranians, will be deterred by the thought of even a small nuclear war? These relative newcomers to the nuclear game may well be developing strategies for regional conflict and thinking through the implications of localized exchanges of nuclear weapons, but that does not mean that they are willing to risk war with each other any more than the superpowers were.

Moreover, with the twin boons of the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization, the Russians, Americans, Chinese, and almost everyone else should now rest assured that they are safer in a less ideologically charged, more transparent, and more interconnected world. The arcane intricacies of brinkmanship have been displaced by attempts to get to, or stay at, lower numbers of nuclear weapons, and maybe even achieve the grail of “zero” in a more tranquil future. Scholar John Mueller, for one, has dismissed the idea that nuclear arms were ever all that important; in 1988 he predicted that the “nuclear arms competition may eventually come under control not so much out of conscious design as out of atrophy born of boredom.”²² In the years since the end of the Cold War, he has continued to maintain that the fixation on nuclear threats is misguided and wasteful.²³

Unfortunately, the real world stubbornly refuses to conform to such optimistic expectations. Even if we accept the arguable proposition that something like the classical model of nuclear deterrence will operate among the established nuclear powers and prevent all-out nuclear war, simply to leave it at that is to seize upon the least likely threat and declare the nuclear issue solved. Scholar Paul Bracken has for many years pointed out that the stability of deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union will be no guide to the future, a warning he issued again in late 2012: “Back in the Cold War, it’s my view that there was never a time when either side seriously considered a calculated strike on the other. All of them had plans—and you could find colonels and one-star generals who thought about these things—but at the top of the government, both sides backed down. That’s not going to be true in the case of North Korea. It’s not going to be true in South Asia with Pakistan and India, nor is it going to be true in the Middle East.”²⁴ In other words, to say that traditional notions of deterrence, or even the much-debated nuclear “taboo”—if one actually exists—will likely govern great power relations is not to say very much, and may not be all that accurate.²⁵ Even analysts who continue to insist on the utility of nuclear deterrent threats accept that the outcome of the Cold War may have had more to do with luck than design.²⁶

Russian and U.S. nuclear inventories have been reduced since the late 1980s. But all of the nuclear-armed powers retain a single-minded focus on nuclear deterrence, and they continue to modernize their arsenals. Worse, fears of rogue nuclear programs and nuclear terrorism have fueled confusion and overreaction in Washington and elsewhere. As arms control analyst Hans Kristensen wrote in 2007, “it is as if the uncertainty and unpredictability of the post-Cold War world have clouded strategic deterrence thinking and caused planners to incorporate all capabilities, just to be safe, into every potential scenario.”²⁷

These nuclear war plans, while smaller and less complicated than in the past, remain confused and convoluted. For example, U.S. and Russian war games since the Cold War have envisioned firing very small numbers of strategic nuclear missiles, as though this would contain or settle a major conflict among Russia, the United States, or China. A Russian war game in 1999 assumed a bizarre NATO attempt to grab the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in the Baltic, and concluded with Russian nuclear strikes—two in Western Europe, two in North America itself—that led not to retaliation, but to the “aggressor” desisting from its designs on Russian real estate.²⁸ A decade later, another Russian exercise simulated a nuclear response against Poland, likely as a show of displeasure over U.S. missile defense plans in Europe.²⁹

The Americans have generally been more sensible, but not by much. In late 2006, the U.S. military ran an exercise called “Vigilant Shield,” in which a conflict with “Nemazee,” “Ruebek,” and “Churya” (that is, North Korea, Russia, and China) somehow led to a nuclear attack on the Pentagon and a government bunker in Maryland. Miraculously, only 6,000 people were killed when these hypothetical nuclear weapons detonated within sight of the White House and the Washington Mall, but the Americans finally prevailed with just a handful of U.S. strategic nuclear launches against targets in Eurasia. No reason was given for the attack on the U.S. capital region or why it was not followed by more strikes, although the likely reason is that a larger attack, requiring a larger response, would have complicated the tidy assumptions of the game designers.³⁰ All of this prompted journalist and Pentagon critic William Arkin to note that two of the core assumptions in the game were obviously that “nuclear warfare can break out for no particular reason at any particular time,” and that “small nuclear weapons, while bad, don’t really kill that many people.”³¹

Removing nuclear weapons from their pride of place will require a fundamental change in the way Americans and others think about their security. Efforts to change the Cold War nuclear paradigm will encounter significant political, ideological, and bureaucratic obstacles, because reducing the importance of nuclear weapons will involve remaking American security strategy as a whole.

A major obstacle to this kind of reform is that the relatively nonviolent outcome of the Cold War has had a lasting effect on thinking about war and peace well past the fall of the Soviet Union. As the saying goes, “nothing succeeds like success,” and policymakers and their bureaucracies understandably tend to want to stay with what they think worked and thus repeat their previous successes. They therefore defend long-standing concepts and programs that over time become almost impossible to challenge. As defense scholars Janne Nolan and James Holmes pointed out in an autopsy of repeated failures to change U.S. nuclear strategies, “career officials are capable of mounting a devastating defense against initiatives put forth by political appointees…. As a country, [the United States] has never had a real debate about how much deterrence is enough.”³² The strategic rationales of the Cold War are more difficult to defend today, but reams of papers, slides, and studies protect the nuclear bureaucracy like an intellectual Maginot Line.

This intellectual stagnation is especially unfortunate now that the moral dimension of nuclear use is more complicated than ever. The mutual Soviet-American stranglehold, in which nuclear deterrence and retaliation were coupled to national survival itself, obviated much of the discussion about the morality of nuclear weapons. Even during the worst periods of tension with the USSR, however, Western leaders and their advisors wondered about the moral acceptability of inflicting massive and indiscriminate casualties on an enemy once all is lost, and whether an existential threat was worth an equally existential response. Today, large-scale nuclear war is highly unlikely, and nuclear use against a smaller power will therefore be a discretionary option rather than a desperate necessity. Without a threat to American civilization itself, nuclear weapons are now more an instrument of choice rather than necessity, and this has led many men and women who were once the chief advocates of nuclear deterrence to argue for abandoning outdated concepts of nuclear combat and dismantling the weapons that serve them.

In the end, only the United States, with its fortunate geopolitical advantages, its unique position of international leadership, and its huge qualitative edge in nuclear matters (to say nothing of other technologies) can meaningfully lead any kind of change in global norms about the purpose and meaning of nuclear arms. This will require difficult and politically unpopular choices, material sacrifice, steadfast diplomacy, and the courage to assert America’s confidence in its ability to lead and protect the international order without nuclear threats. But the creation of a post-nuclear age will not happen without a fundamental rejection both of beliefs about nuclear weapons and ideas about what constitutes “national security” in the twenty-first century.

Overview

Concepts about nuclear weapons, rather than the weapons themselves, are central to the problem of security in a nuclear world. Consequently, this book is about the current state of U.S. nuclear doctrine and strategy, the effects of American thinking about nuclear weapons on international security, and the various ways that the United States might reduce the overall threat of nuclear weapons to the international community. This book is not about nuclear technology, nor is it meant to present a comprehensive history of the Cold War or the nuclear arms race. Those books and articles have already been written over the past three decades, as seminal contributions by Robert Jervis, Lawrence Freedman, John Newhouse, and others, and they are works to which this one owes a clear intellectual debt.

Instead, this study is aimed at reducing the centrality of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy in the twenty-first century. Of course, it is impossible to understand the current nuclear situation without understanding the intellectual and physical legacy of the Cold War. The U.S. missiles that stand on alert at this moment were designed and built in the 1960s, and were the result of a series of strategic debates and decisions that now seem like ancient history to students and specialists alike. We live in a world that was shaped by the Cold War, and engaging current policies about nuclear weapons means unavoidably engaging the thought and work that laid their foundations decades ago. Accordingly, the next chapter of this book will present an overview of U.S. nuclear strategy from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War.

Chapter 2 recounts the disarray and confusion that settled over U.S. nuclear doctrine after the Soviet collapse. Three times since the Cold War, the United States has tried to engage in a full review of its nuclear doctrine. Each time, these efforts failed to move U.S. nuclear thinking beyond formulations that represented an amalgam of outdated intellectual constructs and stubborn rationalizations for existing weapons systems. These missed opportunities repeatedly produced cautious documents that served, in the main, to reaffirm the status quo and defend the right to use nuclear weapons.

Eastern and Western planners alike were obsessed by an arms race that was dominated by numbers and capabilities, and so they routinely contemplated thousands of nuclear strikes during a world war. Whether even the most courageous or iron-willed leaders would have been able to make some sort of sense out of a situation that would likely have degenerated into uncontrollable global chaos within minutes was a question uneasily subordinated to the all-encompassing task of deterrence. With the Cold War gone, however, so is the need to arm for protracted nuclear war, and Chapter 3 argues for reforming U.S. nuclear doctrine around the concept of “minimum deterrence,” the notion that even the largest nuclear powers can be deterred by the threat of only a very few strategic nuclear strikes.

Minimum deterrence is increasingly growing into official policy in the major nuclear powers, and is already the foundation of nuclear defense in Britain, France, and the People’s Republic of China. Still, a U.S. doctrine of minimum deterrence needs to be given greater coherence and more explicit recognition if it is to enhance the international stability required both for further nuclear reductions and a lasting nuclear peace. The United States remains the leader of the wealthiest and most powerful military alliance in human history, and neither the United States nor NATO faces any severe nuclear danger. While Russia has the ability to destroy the United States and its European allies, and China could inflict grievous damage to Eurasia and North America, there is no threat remotely like that posed by the former Soviet Union in the twenty-first century, nor is one likely to emerge over even the longest horizon, and there is no reason to continue to act, speak, and spend as if there were.

If nightmares are measured not by their intensity but by their likelihood, then the most terrifying scenario is a nuclear crisis with a small nation. After the Soviet implosion, the United States found itself a superpower able to destroy the Earth itself but paralyzed in the face of lesser threats. Chapter 4 will examine this problem of small nuclear powers, a far more complicated dilemma than it might appear—and more than U.S. policymakers have been willing to admit.

The United States has long relied on the policy of “ambiguity,” in which Washington has intentionally left unclear how it might respond to a chemical or biological attack, or perhaps to the use only of a single nuclear weapon, by a small nation. This lack of clarity leaves the door open for nuclear use, but without forcing the Americans to make threats that could come back to haunt them if those threats have to be fulfilled. Meanwhile, rogue regimes and their leaders are ostensibly deterred by their uncertainty about the consequences of their actions. But is any threat to use nuclear weapons against small states in crowded regions either credible or morally defensible? It is one thing to contemplate a strike on the Soviet Union during World War III in a desperate bid for survival; it is another entirely to contemplate the massive, and perhaps grossly disproportionate, dislocation and havoc that would be created by engaging in nuclear strikes in small, densely populated areas such as East Asia or the Middle East.

Simple promises of nuclear retaliation against small aggressors are too facile. In a large-scale exchange with a peer, the need for action is immediate and the later consequences are a distant consideration in the heat of a fight for national survival. Smaller nations, however, cannot threaten the U.S. system of government or the American state, and the decision to use nuclear weapons, except in dire cases of preemption of additional nuclear strikes, will turn heavily on the proportionality and cost of the consequences. Chapter 5 will consider the costs of nuclear responses and the alternative of conventional retaliation. If nuclear proliferation is to be stopped, the United States and its allies—and, one might argue, the Russians as well—are going to have to devote more thought to how rogues and their clients can be deterred or their arsenals destroyed without resorting to nuclear force.

The final chapter will consider the price of the proposals for nuclear peace put forward in this study. These costs, both financial and political, will be considerable, but not insurmountable. The most wrenching questions, however, will not be over dollars and weapons, but diplomacy, sacrifice, and self-image. Will the American people and their representatives be willing to become more pacifist and more warlike at the same time? On the one hand, ending the nuclear addiction means not only divesting the United States of large numbers of nuclear weapons, but ending almost seventy years of reliance on the absolute power of nuclear arms. On the other hand, it means that the United States must be ready to make good on real threats of military force—and accept the casualties it will produce among our own soldiers—against countries and groups that refuse to overcome their nuclear obsessions.

False Choices

Since the collapse of the USSR, questions over the future of nuclear weapons and their role in U.S. national security have been plagued by false choices. Nuclear pacifism or nuclear aggression? Missile defenses, or surrender to nuclear blackmail? Abolition of nuclear weapons, or uncontrolled proliferation? We no longer face the choice of “Red or dead”; indeed, even during the Cold War this was an artificial dichotomy in a world where the main question was, or should have been, how to avoid a nuclear war, no matter how it originated.³³ But that does not mean the years of difficult choices are now over.

The underlying questions about nuclear force have remained much the same since 1945. What is the actual political role of nuclear weapons? Do they have any military utility? Can a moral allowance be made for the use of weapons that can kill thousands, even millions, and eradicate entire cities in an instant? During the Cold War, the danger of Armageddon competed with the question of national survival. The deterrent threat of mass killing did not represent the moral high ground or the nobler heritages of either Russian or American civilization. But as horrible as it was, nuclear deterrence was the unavoidable result of the intense struggle that emerged from the ruins of World War II.

Today, the world is less dangerous, but that reality has had little effect on thinking about the role of nuclear weapons in the national security policies of the United States and other nations. Global nuclear war, which seemed so possible only a quarter century ago, is now so remote a possibility that it seems almost pointless to try to imagine how it could occur. And yet, the former superpowers still plan for it. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder and former Defense Department official Jan Lodal noted in 2008 that the United States “still has a nuclear force posture that, even with fewer nuclear weapons, retains all of the essential characteristics it had during the Cold War.”³⁴ As of 2011, New START now limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 warheads, nested on each side in a Cold War triad of land-based missiles, bomber aircraft, and submarine-launched weapons. Counting weapons in storage, this number represents more than a two-thirds decline in the stockpile of nuclear devices since the height of the Cold War. Both sides, however, remain in their Cold War postures, and each retains enough nuclear capacity to destroy every major city in the Northern Hemisphere, and with them Western civilization itself.

The false binary choices of the Cold War should be behind us, but the systems and strategies of the Cold War remain. How did we come to this state of affairs? We explore the history of U.S. nuclear strategy and its enduring legacy in the next chapter.