The Nukes We Need
Preserving the American Deterrent
Article Summary and Author Biography
The Obama administration is right that the United States can safely cut some of its nuclear arsenal, but it must retain the right capabilities. Otherwise, the United States' adversaries might conclude -- perhaps correctly -- that Washington's nuclear strategy rests largely on a bluff.
KEIR A. LIEBER is Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. DARYL G. PRESS is Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Coordinator of the War and Peace Studies Program at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on nuclear proliferation.
Response
Does the United States need to update its nuclear arsenal so that it can destroy an enemy's nuclear weapons? Or should Washington instead work to eliminate nuclear weapons altogether? Keir Lieber and Daryl Press take on their critics.
Postscript
Even as the Obama administration talks about a world free of nuclear weapons, it has proposed a major campaign to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Despite what critics say, this effort is vital, since maintaining a credible deterrent requires possessing weapons that a president might actually use.
Snapshot
The view that nuclear weapons are merely political instruments -- suitable for sending signals, but not waging wars -- is now so common in the United States that it is hard to find anyone who disagrees. Yet that comforting assumption is not shared by leaders everywhere. North Korea, for example, does not test nuclear weapons to send messages, but to make sure that its ultimate deterrent will work. It would be tragic if the United States let misguided Kremlinology distract from the real challenges ahead.
The success of nuclear deterrence may turn out to be its own undoing. Nuclear weapons helped keep the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War, preventing the bitter dispute from engulfing the continent in another catastrophic conflict. But after nearly 65 years without a major war or a nuclear attack, many prominent statesmen, scholars, and analysts have begun to take deterrence for granted. They are now calling for a major drawdown of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and a new commitment to pursue a world without these weapons.
Unfortunately, deterrence in the twenty-first century may be far more difficult for the United States than it was in the past, and having the right mix of nuclear capabilities to deal with the new challenges will be crucial. The United States leads a global network of alliances, a position that commits Washington to protecting countries all over the world. Many of its potential adversaries have acquired, or appear to be seeking, nuclear weapons. Unless the world's major disputes are resolved -- for example, on the Korean Peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and around the Persian Gulf -- or the U.S. military pulls back from these regions, the United States will sooner or later find itself embroiled in conventional wars with nuclear-armed adversaries.
Preventing escalation in those circumstances will be far more difficult than peacetime deterrence during the Cold War. In a conventional war, U.S. adversaries would have powerful incentives to brandish or use nuclear weapons because their lives, their families, and the survival of their regimes would be at stake. Therefore, as the United States considers the future of its nuclear arsenal, it should judge its force not against the relatively easy mission of peacetime deterrence but against the demanding mission of deterring escalation during a conventional conflict, when U.S. enemies are fighting for their lives...
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