Nuclear Exchange: Does Washington Really Have (or Want) Nuclear Primacy?
Article Summary
Could the U.S. government really destroy all of an adversary's nuclear weapons in a nuclear first strike? Does Washington want that ability? And what--if anything--should be done about it?
The Department of Defense's declassified History of the Strategic Arms Competition, 1945-1972 concludes: "[U.S.] thinking about strategic defensive operations quickly narrowed to thinking primarily about means of safeguarding the deterrent forces in case of an enemy first-strike. ... Though the United States and the Soviet Union both came to conceive of strategic forces as having the function of war prevention, their views concerning these forces continued to be different, the U.S. emphasizing manifestation of capability for inflicting unacceptable damage on an adversary's homeland, and the Soviets emphasizing manifestation of capability for fighting a war." Many other declassified policy statements by senior officials across the decades support this conclusion and refute Lieber and Press' thesis. For example, the Nixon administration's 1974 top-secret (now declassified) National Security Decision Memorandum 242, the Strategic Air Command's top-secret (now declassified) December 1979 memo "Current US Strategic Targeting Doctrine," and President Jimmy Carter's top-secret (now partially declassified) Presidential Directive 59 all used classic deterrence language and rejected a first-strike policy. Defense Secretary Harold Brown concurred with this position, writing in the Department of Defense Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1980 that "in the interests of stability, we avoid the capability of eliminating the other side's deterrent, insofar as we might be able to do so. In short, we must be quite willing -- as we have been for some time -- to accept the principle of mutual deterrence, and design our defense posture in light of that principle."
Indeed, beginning in the mid-1960s, the United States virtually abandoned substantial defensive capabilities that would have been essential to any "war-winning" policy, including a national civil defense program and active defenses to protect against a large-scale strategic-bomber and missile attack. There is no indication that Washington plans to begin funding such measures. The White House's 2002 unclassified National Security Presidential Directive 23 presents missile defense only in terms of defending against limited missile threats from rogue states, and the United States' current limited deployment of a missile defense system fully reflects this orientation. In addition, the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, as described publicly by then Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, not only rejected a first-strike policy but also explicitly excluded Russia as an immediate threat in determining the appropriate size for the operationally deployed nuclear force. Accordingly, the Bush administration has committed to reducing the number of operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads by almost two-thirds and has just completed retiring, without replacement, the Peacekeeper ICBMs.
Lieber and Press' Cold War-style modeling can reveal nothing meaningful absent an accurate discussion of the policy context, which they do not provide. They cherry-pick and misstate information about U.S. force developments -- such as their false claim about the Minuteman guidance upgrade -- to fit the policy they have so miscast, while ignoring or dismissing U.S. force reductions and glaring deficiencies that do not fit their characterization. Their message plays well to the most regressive and militaristic Russian audiences. As former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar has observed, empowering that particular audience at this time represents a real concern in Russia. Lieber and Press plead that they are just the messengers. But their message is a gross distortion of U.S. policy, and that distortion is destabilizing U.S.-Russian relations.
KEITH PAYNE is President of the National Institute for Public Policy and Head of the Graduate Department of Defense and Strategic Studies at Missouri State University. He was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 2002 to 2003.
Open to Question
Pavel Podvig
In arguing that the United States has achieved nuclear primacy and thereby made mutual assured destruction obsolete, Lieber and Press rely on some questionable assumptions about the status of Russia's strategic forces.
To make their case that the Russian strategic nuclear arsenal "has sharply deteriorated," Lieber and Press quote statistics showing that Russia today has "39 percent fewer long-range bombers, 58 percent fewer ICBMs, and 80 percent fewer SSBNs [ballistic-missile-launching submarines] than the Soviet Union fielded during its last days." These numbers are generally correct, but a similarly one-sided examination of U.S. forces would have painted a similarly dire portrait; after all, the U.S. nuclear arsenal today has 66 percent fewer strategic bombers, 50 percent fewer ICBMs, and more than 50 percent fewer ballistic missile submarines than it possessed during the Cold War.
Lieber and Press claim that Russia's strategic bombers "rarely conduct training exercises," implying that Russia's military is neglecting strategic aviation. Yet Russia's strategic air forces participated in four major exercises in 2005 alone. Similarly, Lieber and Press refer to a number of failures during launches of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) in 2004 to illustrate the decline of the Russian navy. But they do not mention the much larger number of successful launches or the Bulava SLBM development program, which has been quite successful so far.
