Nuclear Weapons and Strategy The Evolution of American Policy (Contemporary Security Studies)

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND STRATEGY

Thought to have been marginalized by the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons have returned to the center of U.S. security concerns. As North Korea has removed the veil of uncertainty by public acknowledgment of its nuclear weapons and Iran is thought to seek a nuclear weapons capability, fears that rogue states and non-state actors might acquire and use nuclear weapons are a new reality. This volume places the latest developments related to nuclear weapons, deterrence and proliferation within the context of evolving U.S. security policy. After summarizing the most important milestones in the development of U.S. nuclear strategy, it considers present and future security dilemmas related to nuclear weapons such as the complications posed for stable deterrence by the information age, nuclear proliferation and technological innovations. Subsequent chapters offer a complete analysis of contemporary issues such as missile defenses and nuclear proliferation. As nonproliferation, missile defenses or preemptive war strategies cannot guarantee nuclear containment and the potential for a nuclear arms race in Asia among the already nuclear anointed and the nuclear aspiring states creates the possibility of destabilizing an entire region, the author warns that U.S. and Soviet experience in the Cold War is not necessarily a normative one and should not encourage complacency on the part of policy makers. This book will constitute an essential reading for students of international relations, proliferation and security studies as well as for policy makers and military strategists. Stephen J. Cimbala is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State University. He has written extensively in the fields of security studies, nuclear arms control and war termination and is one of the foremost American experts on national security and intelligence. Alongside Sam Sarkesian and John Allen Williams he is co-author of one of the leading texts in the field and has worked for a number of U.S. government agencies.

CONTEMPORARY SECURITY STUDIES

NATO'S SECRET ARMY Operation Gladio and terrorism in Western Europe Daniel Ganser THE US, NATO AND MILITARY BURDEN-SHARING Peter Kent Forster and Stephen J. Cimbala RUSSIAN GOVERNANCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Geo-strategy, geopolitics and new governance Irina Isakova THE FOREIGN OFFICE AND FINLAND 1938–1940 Diplomatic sideshow Craig Gerrard RETHINKING THE NATURE OF WAR Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Angstrom (eds) PERCEPTION AND REALITY IN THE MODERN YUGOSLAV CONFLICT Myth, falsehood and deceit 1991–1995 Brendan O’Shea THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PEACEBUILDING IN POST-DAYTON BOSNIA Tim Donais THE DISTRACTED EAGLE The rift between America and Old Europe Peter H. Merkl

THE IRAQ WAR European perspectives on politics, strategy, and operations Jan Hallenberg and Håkan Karlsson (eds) STRATEGIC CONTEST Weapons proliferation and war in the Greater Middle East Richard L. Russell PROPAGANDA, THE PRESS AND CONFLICT The Gulf War and Kosovo David R. Willcox MISSILE DEFENCE International, regional and national implications Bertel Heurlin and Sten Rynning (eds) GLOBALISING JUSTICE FOR MASS ATROCITIES A revolution in accountability Chandra Lekha Sriram ETHNIC CONFLICT AND TERRORISM The origins and dynamics of civil wars Joseph L. Soeters GLOBALISATION AND THE FUTURE OF TERRORISM Patterns and predictions Brynjar Lia NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND STRATEGY U.S. nuclear policy for the twenty-first century Stephen J. Cimbala

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND STRATEGY U.S. nuclear policy for the twenty-f irst century

Stephen J. Cimbala

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2005 Stephen J. Cimbala This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library

“To purchase your own copy of this or an collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data ISBN 0-415-70199-6 (Print Edition)

CONTENTS

List of illustrations Acknowledgments

viii xi

Introduction

1

1

Technology and deterrence in the new world order

9

2

Can missile defenses overturn deterrence?

30

3

Conventionalizing U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear forces

44

4

Nuclear proliferation and causal explanation: who’s right, and what’s at stake

58

Nuclear proliferation in Asia: beyond control?

76

Conclusion

93

5

Notes Bibliography Index

105 114 120

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 2.1 2.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8

Russian Ballistic Triad 2,200: surviving RVs (re-entry vehicles) versus defenses Surviving-penetrating warheads versus U.S.–Russian defenses/2,200 deployed Total strategic weapons Surviving and retaliating warheads Maximum retaliation: generated alert, launch on warning Assured retaliation: day-to-day alert, ride out attack Generation stability: ride-out-attack scenario Generation stability: launch-on-warning scenario Prompt launch stability: day-to-day alert scenario Prompt launch stability: generated alert scenario

40 41 83 84 84 85 88 88 89 89

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

WMD characteristics Varieties of information driven warfare Possibly asymmetrical challenges to deterrence Aspects of knowledge innovation A transformative force structure U.S. nuclear posture options, Cold War era U.S. space control missions Russian strategic nuclear forces U.S. strategic nuclear forces Surviving and retaliating nuclear weapons – forces 2,200 Surviving and retaliating nuclear weapons – forces 1,700 Schematic combinations of alert status, launch doctrines Surviving and retaliating warheads – Russian forces

14 16 22 23 28 31 34 42 43 49 49 53 54

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Surviving and retaliating warheads – U.S. forces Assumptions of major realist theories Nuclear proliferation: status Iran’s nuclear capable missiles (as of January, 2004) Nuclear proliferation: academic and policy perspectives

ix

55 59 63 68 71

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge Dr James Scouras and Dr James Tritten for considerable insights into this topic and for permission to make use of analytical models and data originally developed by them. Neither bears any responsibility for my adaptation or application of their work here. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge Penn State Delaware County Campus for administrative support for this study and Charele Raport for staff assistance. This book is dedicated to my wife Betsy and to my sons Chris and David with all my love. I also gratefully acknowledge David M. Glantz, editor, the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, for permission to make use of some materials previously published there.

INTRODUCTION

Nuclear weapons, despite their unprecedented destructiveness, proved to be politically stabilizing forces during the years of Cold War from 1947 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the twenty-first century nuclear weapons will be primarily destabilizing forces. This book explains the reasoning behind both assertions. The argument about the destabilizing potential of nuclear weapons is not entirely new. The dangers offered by the actual and potential spread of nuclear weapons are apparent to some informed observers. Similar dangers existed in the Cold War and will continue to do so as long as states and non-state actors have built-in grievances against the existing order, or against one another. What makes the twenty-first century different from the first nuclear age is that there is far too much complacency among politicians, military planners and analysts worldwide that the nuclear genie can remain bottled up. Political leaders and military planners during the Cold War were justifiably afraid of, and therefore cautious about, handling and deploying nuclear weapons and nuclear-capable delivery systems (missiles and bombers). Newer generations of leaders and planners are not as frightened by nuclear weapons as they should be, and some politicians and generals see these weapons as keys to the kingdom of great power status and international respect. In addition, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (or WMD, including nuclear, chemical, biological and radiological weapons) appeal to some heads of state and terrorists as possible checkmates to deter U.S. military intervention into their neighborhoods or to use in reprisal for U.S. attacks on their regimes and networks. As the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, optimists assumed that a post-nuclear era had arrived in warfare. Nuclear weapons had defined great power status in the Cold War years as an accident of history and technology. History left the United States and the Soviet Union standing after World War II, with other prewar powers reduced to mini-power status after 1945. The head start obtained by the United States and Soviet Union in atomic and then thermonuclear weapons, together with the immense size and capabilities of their non-nuclear armed forces for most of the Cold War, made America and Russia into “superpowers” with uniquely global reach. Other states would define their security interests in relation to those put forward by Washington and Moscow. Postwar

INTRODUCTION

politics and technology had combined to make the possession of large and diverse nuclear arsenals the sine qua non of membership in the international power élite. In the post-Cold War world, on the other hand, one superpower was gone and the other was now leading the way into a new world order based on the spread of democracy and market economics. In military affairs, the information revolution was assumed to have overturned the era of mass destruction in favor of precision warfare. The military information revolution, driven by advances in technologies for “C4ISR” (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) and precision guided munitions (PGMs) would enable an entirely new template for high technology, non-nuclear warfare. The United States had demonstrated against Iraq in 1991 its preeminence in a new paradigm of information-based warfare, and it continued to do so, through the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the destruction of the regime of Saddam Hussein. By the time that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of September 11, 2001 (hereafter 9/11) drove other security issues onto the back pages, nuclear weapons seemed more than ever to be surviving relics of a bygone age. President George W. Bush even allowed in 2002 that he was more than willing to reach a tacit understanding with the new post-Soviet Russia on making drastic reductions in their existing strategic nuclear arsenals. Although Bush later gave way to Russia’s preference for a formal treaty to this effect, the U.S. willingness to move forward with arms reductions outside of the elaborate rain dance that had characterized Cold War arms negotiations implied to some a message of nuclear marginality for the twenty-first century. The optimism about nuclear marginality in the face of a post-nuclear military era was premature, if not entirely wrong. What was wrong with this prognosis was not only the continued existence of nuclear weapons and of the knowledge of how to make them: that alone might consign them to the status of military museums along with old airplanes and ships. The prognosis of post-Cold War nuclear marginality was also in error because the nuclear revolution and the information revolution did not take place sequentially and as completely separated events. The information revolution, especially as it impacted upon military affairs, followed the end of World War II in two very different phases. A first phase, from the late 1940s until the second half of the 1970s or early 1980s, was marked by an esoteric transformation of production from its industrial base into a hybrid of familiar smokestack technology and emerging smarter systems. Nuclear weapons grew up with this first and more esoteric phase of the information revolution. The development of the American nuclear arsenal was paced by innovations in providing for the safety and security of nuclear weapons and for the command and control of nuclear forces in peacetime and, if necessary, under conditions of imminent threat of war or war itself. The coexistence of nuclear weapons and this first phase of the information revolution proved to be critical for the preservation of nuclear crisis stability and for the eventual emergence of various arms control regimes. Crisis stability and arms control required early information revolution technology for reconnaissance and surveillance, for 2

INTRODUCTION

verification and for simultaneous reassurance of policy makers that would expedite avoidance of accidental or inadvertent war. The second or exoteric phase of the information revolution, from the latter 1970s and early 1980s through the end of the twentieth century, caused a seismic shift in the way that conventional armies, fleets and air forces would thereafter train, organize, equip and fight. For example: the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) in the 1970s began this transition into new conceptual frameworks for warfare in an effort to compensate for NATO’s assumed inferiority in numbers versus any Soviet ground offensive in Europe. Military interest in new paradigms for warfare coincided with an explosion of knowledge-driven innovations in the private sector in desktop computers, software and portable communications. By the time of the Gulf war of 1991, the United States had already leapfrogged into a singular status compared to other militaries: it conducted the first successful war based on information principles, and with information technologies that were ripening and deepening even as the campaign against Iraq reached its conclusion. The remainder of the 1990s would see the culmination of concurrent developments in seeing and knowing the battlefield, in improved target acquisition, in the rapid transmission of data and graphics across complex networks in record time, and in the ability to hit precisely what you are aiming at, over longer distances and with reduced collateral damage. After NATO’s successful coercion of Serbia in Operation Allied Force in 1999 by means of airpower alone (with some assistance from local, non-NATO ground forces), the asserted superiority of low risk, high payoff conventional warfare based on information principles and information-driven technologies found few dissenters. But the same information revolution that enabled a new technical paradigm for conventional warfare had also put faxes, cell phones, e-mail and other accoutrements of modern communications and electronics into the hands of citizens worldwide, including their armed forces. Many learned quickly that they could no longer challenge the United States at the high end of information-based warfare. Therefore, they sought to develop “asymmetrical” strategies that would circumvent U.S. and allied NATO strength by attacking possible weaknesses. And one of these potential weaknesses might be American and allied European post-nuclear mind-sets that were loath to perceive nuclear, biological or chemical weapons as anything other than artifacts of Cold War or weapons of last resort. In this respect, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, bad as they were, might only have been a prelude or overture for worse to come.1 States unready or unwilling to engage in open military confrontation with the U.S. could assist non-state actors, including terrorists, by providing weapons of mass destruction to these killers while keeping the appearance of clean hands and international legality. The problem of nuclear proliferation in the twenty-first century is not only one of growing interest on the part of rogue states and terrorists seeking WMD for asymmetrical warfare. States not assigned by the United States into the “rogue” or “Axis of Evil” categories as imminently dangerous were nevertheless intending to join the nuclear club or recently had done so. India’s and Pakistan’s widely publicized arrival 3

INTRODUCTION

as declared nuclear powers in May, 1998 was greeted with dismay by Western audiences. But leaders and mass publics in India and Pakistan saw nuclear weapons as powerful symbols of modernity and military might that would dissuade their adversaries from attack. In addition to these newly declared nuclear states, Israel was widely acknowledged to have had a nuclear weapons capability for several decades. In addition to the five original nuclear powers that also coincided with the permanent members of the UN Security Council (the U.S., Britain, Russia, China and France), the bombs of Israel, India and Pakistan represented a non-trivial enlargement of the nuclear club. In addition, North Korea acknowledged (but later retracted) in October, 2002 that it had cheated on the Framework Agreement of 1994 intended to freeze its nuclear program. In January, 2003 the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) expelled UN weapons inspectors and indicated a possible commitment to undertake serial production of nuclear weapons either by uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing. Six party negotiations involving the two Koreas, the U.S., Russia, China and Japan were established in 2003 as a multilateral format for the containment of North Korean nuclear ambitions. International arms control regimes met with only partial success in the 1990s in expediting a favorable climate for non-proliferation. Although the U.S. won indefinite extension of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1995, the Clinton administration fell short of persuading the U.S. Congress to endorse the Comprehensive (CTB) Test Ban Treaty opened for signature in 1996. In addition, non-signatories to NPT like India could still argue that the nuclear great powers had mostly failed to deliver on their original NPT commitment to downsize their engorged arsenals of long range nuclear force. This complaint against the U.S. and other established nuclear powers was not without legal or logical merit, but it was unlikely to find strategic or political traction in the foreign offices of the acknowledged nuclear states. Nevertheless, the trend in the post-Cold War period has been for the Americans and Russians to reduce their inventories of deployed long range nuclear weapons. Under the START (strategic nuclear arms reduction talks) agreements and the Moscow Treaty of May, 2002 signed by Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, the U.S. and Russia have pledged to reduce their operationally deployed strategic nuclear forces to 1,700–2,200 for each side. Essentially this establishes an announced minimum deterrence doctrine for both states with respect to the putative nuclear threat posed by the other, with leftover weapons for dealing with other contingencies. While these reductions do not go as far as some nuclear arms controllers or disarmers would prefer, they reflect an improved climate for U.S.– Russian political relations in the aftermath of 9/11. Future agendas might include operational as well as structural arms control. Experts suggested that nuclear powers should have fewer weapons on ready alert, place more into storage or deactivated conditions, and perhaps move toward virtual nuclear arsenals in which bombs are not fully assembled until a crisis has developed. The George W. Bush administration also sought to neutralize the effects of nuclear weapons and long range delivery systems by deploying a national missile 4

INTRODUCTION

defense (NMD) system. Groundbreaking for a limited NMD system designed to deflect attacks from rogue states or accidental launches began in June, 2004 in Alaska. Russia ceased objecting strongly to U.S. plans for missile defenses, although its leadership emphasized that it regarded the entire enterprise as either superfluous or dangerous to stable deterrence. The U.S. was much more likely to be able to deploy credible theater missile defenses to protect its forward deploying troops or military installations against the threat of short and medium range ballistic missile attacks. National missile defenses were not intended to be good enough to repeal or overturn deterrence based primarily on the credible threat of unacceptable retaliation. But they might complicate the simple calculus of “retaliation only” based deterrence, and U.S. proponents of NMD openly acknowledged that the larger issue was U.S. military space preeminence in the twenty-first century. Whether missile defenses would, if successfully deployed, discourage other states from deploying additional offensive nuclear weapons, or whether, to the contrary, they would provoke offsetting modernizations designed to overwhelm the defenses, remained a debating point among scholars and policy planners.

Plan of the study The research plan to carry out our purposes, as explained above, is as follows. In Chapter 1, we provide an overview of the relationship between technology and deterrence. One by-product of the Cold War years was that deterrence became an all-purpose solvent for various national security and foreign policy problems. It became convenient and then necessary for the United States and the Soviet Union to justify arms races and defense expenditures in terms of the requirements for deterrence. Increased reliance upon deterrence as a focal idea made it more difficult to specify precisely the conditions under which deterrence would, and would not, work. Politicians skated over the ambiguities lurking in deterrence so long as it appeared to work tolerably well. But its success or failure could not be proved or disproved authoritatively. The outbreak of a nuclear war was not necessarily a failure of deterrence, and deterrence was not necessarily the sole or primary cause for having avoided a nuclear war. In the post-Cold War world, deterrence has been redefined by U.S. policy makers to incorporate the military-related technologies of the information age. Deterrence now, as explained by the George W. Bush administration and likeminded analysts, requires the assertive exploitation of an American “system of systems” for reconnaissance, command-control, and long range precision strike. U.S. military victories in Iraq (1991), Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq again (2003) convinced many that a new template for advanced technology, conventional warfare now provided leaders with the tools to restore the traditional military approach to deterrence. During the Cold War, nuclear deterrence had been based primarily on the capability of states to guarantee assured retaliation against any attacker: i.e. the essential destruction of its society and economy. Henceforth 5

INTRODUCTION

deterrence would be based on the credible threat to deny the opponent its objectives, to destroy its armed forces, and to depose its regime at an acceptable cost to the U.S., and while minimizing collateral damage to the enemy society. However, in order to make permanent this enhancement of deterrence to include deterrence by denial as well as by threat of retaliation, the U.S. or aspiring peer competitors need to move beyond the already demonstrated effects of seeing the battlefield, communicating a reliable picture of the battle to commanders and troops, and placing reliable and accurate fires on distant targets. Future adversaries will pose “asymmetrical” threats, including the possible use of weapons of mass destruction. In addition, and somewhat perversely, the smart tools of the information age may “collaborate” with the blunt instruments of nuclear destruction in order to cause accidental nuclear use or inadvertent nuclear war. Attacks on information systems themselves may degrade warning and control systems during crises, leaving leaders more uncertain whether they are actually under attack or seeing a false warning on computer screens. In Chapter 2, we take the issue of deterrence by denial another step, into the question of whether new anti-missile defense technologies can overturn or seriously mitigate the dominance of offensive nuclear weapons. During the Cold War there were no effective defenses against massive ballistic missile attacks by either the U.S. or the Soviet Union. Some felt that this condition was permanent: an endowment of science or nature. Others sought to overturn this condition of “mutual assured destruction” or deterrence by reliance on a mutual suicide pact as between the nuclear superpowers. But the twentieth century ended with defenses still lagging offenses. The George W. Bush administration launched a variety of exploratory technology studies in missile defenses as part of its commitment to abrogate the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty of 1972 and to begin deployment of a U.S. ballistic missile defense system in 2004. U.S. missile defense technologies in research and development in 2004 included airborne lasers, sea launched missile interceptors, and ground-based missile interceptors: the last ready for deployment in Alaska in June, 2004. Theater missile defense technologies to protect U.S. allies or troops overseas were also being upgraded or newly developed. Although it seemed prudent for the U.S. after 9/11 to improve its capability to deter or defeat light missile attacks from rogue states or terrorists, the goal of a defense-dominant world among nuclearpowers remained a distant objective, not an imminent likelihood. The possibility of reducing nuclear danger is not confined to the option of preclusive anti-missile defenses. Another option is to “conventionalize” or denuclearize the long range missiles and bombers which serve as the launch vehicles or delivery systems for nuclear weapons. In Chapter 3, we explore largely uncharted terrain by asking: what would happen if either, or both, the U.S. and Russia were to remove significant numbers of nuclear warheads from missiles or bombers and replace them with conventional weapons. There might be two arguments for doing so. First, at current or even Moscow Treaty compliant standards, some of these weapons might be judged as superfluous for nuclear 6

INTRODUCTION

retaliatory strikes. Second, removing nuclear weapons from launch ready missiles would reduce the risk of those missiles being caught in a “use them or lose them” situation creating pressure for retaliation based on false warning of attack. In Chapter 3, we sketch a number of possibilities for substituting conventional for nuclear force loadings on a variety of platforms: land-based missiles; sea launched missiles; and long range bombers. We compare a variety of hypothetical force structures for Russia and for the United States in which various launchers of nuclear weapons are “downloaded” and fitted with conventional munitions. Our analytical model then interrogates the performance of the partly denuclearized forces: to what extent can each of these “downloaded” forces still provide for survivable, retaliating warheads sufficient for deterrence? Force ceilings compatible with the Moscow Treaty of 2002 as well as significantly lower limits are used as benchmarks for the analysis in this chapter. Chapters 2 and 3 show two faces of issues that remain for deterrence, apart from American ability to dominate the conventional info-driven battlefield. Chapters Four and Five take up another challenge for deterrence: that posed by the existing and potential spread of nuclear weapons and the problem of resolving upon effective deterrence doctrines for new nuclear powers or unacknowledged, but de facto, nuclear states. In Chapter 4, we review and evaluate the theoretical and influential argument that “more may be better” when it comes to nuclear weapons spread. Nuclear weapons were a stabilizing force during the Cold War, according to this school of thought. Therefore, it follows that, if post-Cold War nuclear powers exercise minimum prudence, the danger of their plunging their states into a nuclear war will be no greater than that posed by the original Big Five members of the nuclear club. The chapter explains how the risk-acceptant view of nuclear weapons spread is derived from international systems theory, or at least from one variety of it. The theory, as it applies to nuclear proliferation, is critiqued with pertinent examples and by examining its interior logic. In favor of the “more is better” school are two things: the parsimony of their arguments and the deductive clarity of their reasoning. Nevertheless, their arguments, however well reasoned in the abstract, assign too much credit to the compelling power of “systems” and insufficient weight to the system-disturbing power of dissatisfied actors. Added to the difficulty for proliferation-tolerant optimists is the possible acquisition of nuclear or other WMD by non-state actors: terrorists, and especially those bent on nuclear apocalypse. The case study presented in Chapter 5 is the logical sequel to the general discussion about proliferation in Chapter 4. In Chapter 5, we consider the problem of nuclear proliferation in Asia by modelling an eight-sided potential nuclear arms race. In the concluding chapter, we summarize the arguments heretofore and offer some additional observations about the past and future of nuclear weapons and deterrence. Our arguments also offer some insights that may appear as afterthoughts or excursions from the main road, but they are designed deviations into necessary observations about deterrence and nuclear weapons. In politics as in 7

INTRODUCTION

art, subjectivity is all, and we thankfully have no “objective” historical experience in two-sided nuclear wars. One must dare an occasional excursion off the map because the map of potential danger is never static: from Pearl Harbor to 9/11, we learned that strategic military surprises are inevitable in international affairs. And the next unpleasant surprise may be the first nuke fired off in anger since Nagasaki.

8

1 TECHNOLOGY AND DETERRENCE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER

American political and military cultures worship science and technology. The results of this worship are not always bad. Technology innovation has its place in the advance of military strategy and the art of war. Commanders holding the advanced technology “high ground” will prevail against their opponents, other things being equal. In war, however, a contest between opposed wills and forces, other things are rarely equal. Technology is part of strategy, and strategy, part of policy: the possibilities for error and mischief under the best circumstances are enormous. And all this before the enemy has even been taken into account! The discussion that follows considers the relationship between technology and deterrence in the context of present and foreseeable security challenges. First, we review what is worth keeping in mind about the concept of deterrence: we are in a post-Cold War, but not a post-deterrence, world. Second, we consider some of the more interesting security problems in the new world order and some of the kinds of challenges they might pose to existing notions of deterrence. Third, we discuss the problem of knowledge innovation in technology related to deterrence, using the example of ballistic missile defense. Fourth, we offer some discussion of possibly transformative ideas related to force structure and defense planning.

The idea of deterrence The idea of deterrence as applied to the prevention of nuclear war grew out of studies by policy analysts and think tanks in the early years of the nuclear age.1 Although earlier uses of the term “deterrence” to apply to military affairs have been documented, deterrence captured the imagination of U.S. students of nuclear weapons policy and arms control and became a term of art. Throughout the nuclear age, arguments for and against specific policy proposals or military strategies were couched in terms of their presumed effect on deterrence. A large literature on the subject remains among the artifacts of the Cold War, along with Lenin’s tomb and endless studies of the Cuban missile crisis. For all that, deterrence remains somewhat elusive. Among the references to deterrence that one finds in the literature, one can detect use of the term “deterrence” to mean any one, or all, of the following:

TECHNOLOGY AND DETERRENCE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER

1

2 3

4 5

deterrence as a process of influence by which one party, a threatener or deterrer, affects the estimated costs and benefits attached to actions by another party, the threatened or deterred party; deterrence as a condition of having been deterred; deterrence as a relationship between two actors that takes place within a relatively short time period and involves at least one explicit threat of military action; deterrence as a latent feature of an international system made up of sovereign states and non-state actors who are reliant upon self help for survival; deterrence as one part of a policy-prescriptive orientation toward a particular state, especially a potential military adversary; thus, for example, deterrence as a military support for containment policy.

Students of conflict resolution, bargaining and game theory have also identified various approaches to deterrence, in terms of the means of influence by which deterrence is thought to work: 1 2 3 4

5

by credible threat to inflict decisive defeat on the adversary’s armed forces (deterrence by denial); by threat to inflict unacceptable destruction to the society and economic infrastructure of the other side (deterrence by punishment); by threat to destroy or paralyze the brain and central nervous system of the other side’s war machine (deterrence by decapitation); by threat to set in motion a progression of events over which both sides will eventually lose control, as a result of Clausewitz’s “friction,” organizational pathology, misperception or other forces that will pull the contestants into mutual disaster (deterrence by uncertainty or risk);2 existential deterrence, or a nuclear weapons equivalent of cogito, ergo sum: the weapons are there and can inflict unprecedented destruction; therefore refinements of threat systems and nuanced nuclear diplomacy are superfluous.

Of course, there are sub-categories within each of these categories. One of the most obvious is that each of these kinds of deterrent effects can come about rapidly or slowly. In category (1), for example, the conventional armed forces of a state can pose the threat of a campaign of annihilation or of attrition. Reliance on a form of deterrence not suited to conditions can be dangerous. In July and August, 1914 a threat system based on fears of rapid conquest failed to deter, and a prolonged war of attrition that destroyed four empires resulted. Theorists have also recognized that there are relatively more active and passive forms of deterrence. The more active is often referred to as compellence.3 Compellence takes place after the fact of an aggression or other undesired action by the other side; deterrence, before the fact. Compellence occurs in at least two forms: to persuade the adversary to stop an activity already in progress; and to persuade the opponent to undo and reverse an action already completed. 10

TECHNOLOGY AND DETERRENCE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER

An example of the first form of compellence was the Berlin airlift in 1948; of the second, U.S. ultimata about the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in 1962. Deterrence is also related to coercive diplomacy. Coercive diplomacy is something like compellence, according to Alexander George.4 But one can also think of coercive diplomatic demarches that were backed up by military power and took place before the fact of an undesired event: therefore, in terms of timing, they might be more deterrent than compellent. George emphasizes that coercive diplomacy is a “defensive” not an “offensive” strategy for crisis management and that it needs to be distinguished from pure military coercion. Coercive diplomacy can use the threat of force or even exemplary demonstrations of force but it is an essentially diplomatic strategy that excludes bludgeoning the opponent into submission. Coercive diplomacy can also resemble an ultimatum although it need not embody all three components of ultimata: a specific and clear demand; a time limit for compliance; and, third, a credible threat of punishment for noncompliance.5 This résumé of various meanings of deterrence is obviously not exhaustive.6 Critics of deterrence theory have charged that it was a rationalization for living with nuclear danger that should have been done away with by means of disarmament or by more aggressive forms of arms control. Others have claimed that deterrence dogmas fortified defense industry and military demands for greater budgets throughout the Cold War, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Some skeptics have doubted that deterrence is a truly serious intellectual construct, and others have seen the idea as a Trojan horse for psychology or economics applied to military art. The tendency of writing in social science journals to load up on neologisms is off-putting to military officers and, especially, to military historians. Some of both groups blame deterrence theories borrowed from nuclear into conventional warfare for the reversals suffered by U.S. policy and military strategy in Vietnam. Deterrence, at least the academic versions of it, also suffered from the bandwagon effect that is so important in determining the half life of ideas within the university and among policy élites who still pay attention to professors. During the Cold War, circles of academics who were in regular contact with policy makers and government bureaucrats became very influential in transfusing their ideas into the national dialogue on military strategy and policy. Because most of these academic policy influentials were associated with prestige universities, their preferred concepts became part of the lingua franca of the national policy debates over nuclear and other military strategy, arms control, deterrence and defense policies. Some of these academics even served time in the government, and an occasional one, such as Henry Kissinger, acquired substantial power over the making of U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy. One result of all this conversation about “deterrence” throughout the Cold War was that a certain elasticity of meaning and laziness of thought took hold. When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union passed into history, policy makers and scholars began to look over their shoulders and wonder whether any of their Cold 11

TECHNOLOGY AND DETERRENCE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER

War analyses would be left standing amid the rubble of the ruble.7 Post-Soviet Russia faced an enormously steep learning curve in its attempts to develop a market economy and a functioning democracy. Russia inherited the mantle of the Soviet Union for purposes of nuclear arms control and nuclear weapons accountability, but the entire context of U.S.–Russian political relations had now changed. So, too, had the military aspects of this relationship. Both Americans and Russians had a hard time accepting this on account of their addiction to Cold War ways of thinking about deterrence and defense. For example, the U.S. continued with Russia the strategic nuclear arms reduction talks (START) that had begun under Cold War auspices. The object, admirable in itself, was to reduce the numbers of superfluous warheads and launches on both sides while each side retained a number of survivable warheads and launchers sufficient to guarantee assured retaliation. Notice something peculiar here. The two states were no longer political enemies in principle: communist ideology had been superseded by post-Soviet uncertainty. Yet, the military dialogue between the two states on strategic nuclear weapons continued very much as if nothing of political importance had changed in 199l. Admittedly the last sentence is not entirely true. The U.S. did authorize defense funds for the safety, security and dismantlement of former Soviet and now Russian nuclear weapons (under the so-called Nunn-Lugar legislation), and other “cooperative engagement” between the two countries took place in security related matters such as nonproliferation, transparency of warning and assessment, and military to military exchanges of personnel. Russian officers were even invited to NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) to watch with their U.S. counterparts the transition to a new millennium. But, although these attributes of the U.S.–Russian nuclear relationship changed, the essence of that post-Cold War relationship remained locked within a deterrence oriented model that resembled Cold War redux. A stable balance of nuclear terror between Washington and Moscow was the assumed object of START. Stability was defined as the assured survivability of enough retaliatory power to destroy either society in retaliation for a nuclear surprise attack by the other. Why either America or Russia would launch a nuclear first strike at anyone, including each other, was a subject that received very little exposition or rethinking. In fact, the entire START–deterrence-by-assured-vulnerability model was begging for replacement with a model driven by reassurance and cooperative security. Toward that end, Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin signed the Moscow Treaty in May, 2002, requiring each state to reduce its operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons to a maximum of 1,700–2,200 warheads by 2012. Despite this apparent commitment to significant reductions in the quantities of weapons deployed, the quality of the U.S.–Russian nuclear relationship remained in need of improvement. Experts warned that nuclear safety and security were jeopardized between the U.S. and Russia by the possibility of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war based on hair trigger launch doctrines, flawed command and warning systems, and other factors.8 12

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The late Herman Kahn, once the eminence grise of defense policy analysts, argued that deterrence was, at best, a way station: a way of coping with exigencies forced on policy makers until something better came along. Despite this modest beginning, deterrence has outlived most of its creators, proponents and detractors. Deterrence is very much like that over-the-counter cold medication that we have all learned to depend upon at the first signs of flu symptoms. In lieu of expensive doctor visits or interminable waits for HMO approval, our favorite over-the counter remedy works fine and does no harm, so we assume, even if our self diagnosis is incorrect. Deterrence is perhaps that kind of meta-solution where there is insufficient time or knowledge for extensive and detailed diagnosis of the problems. Since the success or failure of deterrence in isolation from other complex social variables is difficult to prove, deterrence may be of sufficiently protean character to outlive another generation of college faculty and policy makers.

Deterrence in the new world order The new world order of the twenty-first century will pose significant security challenges for the U.S. and for its NATO allies. Some of these threats or problems will be posed by actors favoring asymmetrical strategies that offset American superiority in high technology, conventional military power based on information related technology. Four kinds of asymmetrical strategy have already presented problems for U.S. policy makers in the post-Cold War world or can be expected to. The question is whether either kind of strategy is related to deterrence as we understand it. Unconventional warfare The first is the strategy of unconventional warfare, low intensity conflict or small wars, frequently related to the breakdown of states and to disorder based on ethno-nationalist, religious or other primordial values.9 The deep structure of these problems is enormous even within cultures where the United States and its European allies have some hands-on experience and sense of affinity. U.S. military interventions in these situations will be controversial for a number of reasons: (1) they will usually take place in parts of the world that are nonWestern, offering cultural and social barriers to understanding; (2) Western armed forces may confront irregular forces or unruly mobs who play by no particular rules of war and who are clever at exploiting U.S. interest in the avoidance of collateral damage; (3) ubiquitous television coverage and other video transparency bring a global network of observers and second guessers into the electronic grandstand. Equally protean and deserving of an essay in itself, with regard to the problems it poses for deterrence, is the widespread interest in terrorism by selfdefined freedom fighters, paramilitaries, hosts both religious and secular, and state-supported entities fighting surrogate wars.10 At this low-lethality end of the spectrum of the relationship between force and technology, asymmetrical strategies seek to turn technological strength into 13

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political weakness. For example, the U.S. has become more reliant on long range, precision strike delivered by airpower and other manifestations of high technology, conventional warfare based on the information revolution. Thus the terrorists who attacked American soil on 9/11 exploited vulnerabilities between the cracks of bureaucracies responsible for various aspects of domestic security and counterintelligence including: airport security; visa processing; border controls; and insufficient cooperation between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement agencies. The al-Qaeda playbook was right from Sun Tzu. A second kind of challenge based on asymmetrical strategy appears at the other end of the spectrum of lethality: the use of weapons of mass destruction in order to intimidate and coerce other states or, if necessary, to inflict military defeat or societal devastation on them. The spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons after the Cold War has been much remarked upon in the literature and in policy debates. There is some false comparison among apples, oranges and tomatoes here. Nuclear weapons inflict the greatest destruction but they require considerable effort to acquire or fabricate. Chemical weapons are easy to acquire but cumbersome to use in the field and have limited killing capacity. Biological weapons may combine the “advantages” of both nuclear and chemical weapons: easy to acquire and truly massive kill potential.11 The attributes of various weapons of mass destruction are summarized in Table 1.1, below. Nonetheless, all qualify as weapons of mass destruction that, in all likelihood, would be threatened or used against cities or military objects of value. In addition to the proliferation of WMD, the spread of ballistic or cruise missiles as the long range delivery systems of choice for aspiring regional powers poses problems for U.S. and allied military planners. Weapons of mass destruction combined with ballistic or cruise missiles could enable regional rogues or others opposed to U.S. policy to coerce their neighbors, including some American allies, with the threat of prompt and devastating attacks. WMD and ballistic missiles could also empower regional actors to deter U.S. military intervention in or near their territories by threatening disruptive attacks on U.S. logistics, airfields, ports, communications or other assets, including expeditionary forces themselves. This is of no small importance, given the greater U.S. dependency now, compared to most of the Cold War, on power projection over long Table 1.1 WMD characteristics Killing potential

Acquisition

Use

Nuclear

Highest

Difficult

Biological

High

Easy

Chemical

Low

Easy

Recent testing or simulation – not fired in anger since 1945 Reported use in several conflicts since WW II, widely tested in laboratories Documented use in large and small twentieth-century wars

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distances as opposed to permanent military bases in theater. According to one expert assessment: From the perspective of a rogue nation facing the formidable conventional military power of the U.S. and its allies, a LACM (land attack cruise missile), especially if equipped with a BW [biological warfare] agent payload, is a very politically and militarily cost-effective weapon system. Politically, the mere threat of using a system such as the Biocruise-1000 (a land attack cruise missile with a biological payload and range of 1,000 km) with a payload of 120 kg of anthrax against a major U.S. or allied city could deter the U.S. from becoming involved in a rogue nation’s aggression against a neighbor or bid for regional hegemony.12 The conundrum of “deterring” the spread of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile delivery systems is that deterrence may be the wrong word to use to describe the problem or the solution. The process of proliferation is driven by both economic and psychological variables that are difficult to put into any calculations of military deterrence (see also Chapter 4 in this volume). The economic variables relevant to proliferation include the financial incentives for the supplier states, or for state-sponsored “deniable” networks of scientists, influence-peddlers and middlemen, to pass blueprints and technology to WMD aspirants among state actors or others. The psychological variables pushing proliferation are related to the prestige value of nuclear weapons among states that are currently non-nuclear. Whereas most states have agreed to extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty indefinitely, a significant minority has refused to do so and some members of that minority (India) are now acknowledged nuclear powers. The U.S. and its NATO allies are apt to assume, on the basis of their Cold War experience and post-Cold War hopes, that nuclear weapons are at best a necessary evil, to be marginalized as instruments of influence in favor of information-based, advanced conventional forces. This may not be the perception everywhere. In some regions weapons of mass destruction may combine with feelings of nationalistic assertiveness and/or resentment at past treatment by the West. For example, in Asia some states wishing to flex their military muscles may see nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction as components of a broader military modernization.13 This broader military modernization may also be designed to change geostrategic space in Asia. India and China, for example, may combine weapons of mass destruction with ballistic missiles and some enhanced C3I (command, control, communications and intelligence) to extend their military reach well beyond previous confinements. In so doing, they would force the U.S., Japan and Russia to recalculate their estimated costs and risks from military deployments or interventions in the Pacific Basin.

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Information warfare In addition to unconventional warfare and the spread of weapons of mass destruction along with long range delivery systems, a third kind of asymmetrical warfare is posed by the possible exploitation of the information spectrum for military purposes. The significance of information in warfare is not new.14 But the widespread dependency of modern militaries on computers, communications and electronics has opened new possibilities for attack and established new requirements for U.S. national defense. Experts disagree on the significance of cyberwar as an actual military threat but no one denies that it poses some security problems that will at least spill over into the lap of the Department of Defense. Attacks on U.S. military computer systems by hackers and other unknowns are now commonplace. Some experts distinguish information attacks pursuant to the conduct of battle from the more diffuse possibilities of attacking the national information infrastructure or other soft targets (see Table 1.2, below). The U.S. is ironically both the most advanced state, in terms of its ability to exploit the information spectrum for military purposes, and potentially the most vulnerable state to information warfare, on account of its pluralistic society and high military dependency on info-tools. Table 1.2 Varieties of information driven warfare War form

Objective

Means

Targets

Cyberwar

Neutralize or destroy military and command system targets Achieve shared awareness, increased speed of command, higher tempo of operations, greater lethality, increased survivability, and a degree of selfsynchronization Influence society and government of the opponent, including public opinion and media

Conduct military operations on information-based principles Increase combat power by networking sensors, decision makers, and shooters

Enemy military forces and supporting C4ISR*

Net centric warfare

Netwar

Perceptions management, disinformation, PSYOPs (psychological operations) and other means of influence based on information

Enemy C4ISR and information and decision networks

Enemy society and government, including public opinion, media and armed forces/ security services

Source: Based on John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds, In Athena’s Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1997), Ch. 1, and Edward Waltz, Information Warfare Principles and Operations (Boston MA: Artech House, 1998), p. 193. *C4ISR = Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance

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In addition, the cumulative exposure to cyber tools on the part of warriors and policy makers may create a dependency of another sort: a truncated way of thinking about problems. Computers and information systems “think” successfully by narrowing the definition of the problem and by limiting what goes into the algorithms that move the situation from problem to solution. Computers and “C3I” or “C4ISR” systems, that is to say, succeed by simplification of a more complex reality. On the other hand, warriors in battle are required to think contextually or “out of the box” because war plans rarely survive initial contact with the enemy, as General von Moltke once said. The danger that warriors will begin to think like computer programmers or systems managers, once given “land warrior” suits and cyber controls to play with, may seem far removed from the actual stuff of deterrence. But, consider the relationship between cyberwar and deterrence with regard to early warning of nuclear missile attack, or the possible activation of a missile defense system for preemptive strike against a presumably attacking offensive missile force. We would not want to trust computers or artificial intelligence systems to make these decisions. The possible relationship between accidental/inadvertent nuclear war and automated information systems deserves more detailed consideration: as follows immediately. Accidental/inadvertent nuclear war in the information age A number of the most important political and military requirements for the avoidance of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war are potentially at risk from information warfare or from over-dependence upon automated information systems. First, the balance between positive and negative control becomes a more complicated juggling act as alert levels are raised. Some components of the force, say ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), are permanently at high levels of readiness for prompt launch. Others, such as the bomber force, require a great deal of care and feeding under stressful conditions before they are launch ready. Nuclear armed sea-based cruise and ballistic missiles can be readied to fire in a short time provided that the submarine is on station, but some submarines may need to proceed from port to station and others may be moved in connection with targeting requirements or possible threats to their survivability. Elements of the command system also require synchronized movement across disparate services and civilian departments. If NATO alerts are involved in addition to U.S. forces, as they would have been during any Cold War confrontation with the Soviets, the management of alert phasing and timing becomes even more complicated. Info-weapons introduced into this alerting process have the potential to disrupt the desirable balance between positive and negative control as forces are gradually empowered to go to war. From an enemy perspective, this might be considered a good thing: confuse the American alerting process and make the wartime command system only partly ready for battle. That is conventional, not nuclear, logic. In a nuclear crisis, the two sides have a shared interest in avoiding nuclear war as 17

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well as a competitive desire to prevent one another’s gains. Accordingly, each will want the other to maintain assured control over the balance between unlocking the cocked pistol for retaliation and preserving control over the military movements and actions that might trigger inadvertent war. And those military movements and actions are dangerous precisely because their inherent danger might not be so obvious. As Thomas Schelling has noted, war can begin not as a deliberate decision by policy makers, but as the result of a process over which neither side has full control. The possible loss of control to be feared here is not military usurpation of civil authority or military disregard of authorized commands. Instead, it is a lack of correct foresight that results in a sequence of events foreseen by neither side, creating a new and more adverse climate of expectations about future behavior.15 If the two sides in a nuclear crisis get into a sequence of events not correctly foreseen by either and seek to interpret those events correctly, information warfare will be harmful, not helpful, to correct interpretation. An example is perceptions management by one side designed to suggest to the media, public and legislature of the other side that the first side’s intentions are only honorable.16 The second side, according to this carefully orchestrated set of perceptions fed from one side to another, is really the “aggressor” or the “uncooperative” partner. And the media and political élites of the second side might believe the image created by enemy perceptions management, calling upon leaders to stand down forces and accept the demands of the opponent. Or, leaders of the second side might be outraged at the cyber-propaganda of the first side, escalate their demands, and become more intransigent. As Robert Jervis has noted: A state tends to see the behavior of others as more planned, coordinated, and centralized than it is. Actions that are accidental or the product of different parts of the bureaucracy following their own policies are likely to be perceived as part of a coherent, and often devious, plan. In a nuclear crisis, the propensity to see all of the other side’s behavior as part of a plan would be especially likely to yield incorrect and dangerous conclusions.17 Messages may be received as intended, but their political effect is not necessarily predictable. Hitler’s propaganda efforts to dissuade British and French military reactions to his occupation of Czechoslovakia worked as intended in the short run, but established in the Nazi dictator’s mind misleading impressions of the two states’ weakness in resisting any further tearing up of the map of Europe. Boomeranged perceptions management appeared in Soviet Cold War forgeries of diplomatic and military communications between the U.S. and its allies. Most of these were transparent, and once found out, gave additional evidence of Soviet diplomatic perfidy to hawkish U.S. politicians and commentators. Forces poised for immediate retaliation to possible surprise attack also interact with warning systems looking outward for indications of such an attack. False indicators planted by the other side’s info-warriors to bring down air defense systems and missile attack warning radars are harbingers of disaster once forces and 18

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command systems have been alerted to war expectant levels. Under those conditions, the vanishing of information from radar screens or fusion centers could be assumed as the first info-wave of a nuclear attack, calling forth a preemptive response. Blank screens and obstructed communications leaving personnel in the dark for orders helped the U.S. in Desert Storm to clear the way for its air strikes against targets in Baghdad and at other locations within Iraqi state territory. The same phenomena might create unacceptable panic if the stakes were vulnerability to nuclear instead of conventional attack. Terrible pressures would rise from lower to higher command levels to “use them or lose them” before communications between and among NCA (National Command Authority), CINCs (commanders-in-chief: regional or functional force commanders, now Combatant Commanders) and geographically dispersed force commanders were completely severed. The U.S. President might be loath to order into effect any retaliation under these or similar circumstances, but this legal consolation might not make much practical difference. High altitude detonation of a small nuclear weapon by an enemy over its own territory and causing no prompt fatalities to U.S. or allied military personnel could nevertheless destabilize U.S. ground and space assets and confuse decisions based on those assets. For example, a nuclear explosion of about 50 Kt above 100 km altitude would disrupt space assets by prompt radiation effects and by creating atmospheric disturbances. Unhardened satellites in low earth orbit (LEO), even after they survived the initial radiation, would be vulnerable to total dose destruction as they passed through aggravated radiation belts. Within weeks to months, all unhardened LEO satellites within a theater of operations could be degraded or inoperative. For example, the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a single nuclear burst at an altitude as low as 40 km has the potential to weaken electronics across the entire Persian Gulf region, or throughout the Korean peninsula. Ironically, today’s more sophisticated microelectronic systems are more vulnerable to radiation than the cruder and simpler (less integration density, slower operating speed) electronic systems of yesteryear.18 In theory, no president would authorize the firing of nuclear forces on the basis of ambiguous warning information. But in the exigent circumstances, while clarification of the status of schizoid information systems was sought, force commanders would not be idle. At DefCon 3 (defense condition 3) or higher they would be taking appropriate measures to protect their divisions, fleets and air wings from enemy surprise. These moves would almost certainly be noticed by the other side’s intelligence and warning, even if no U.S. or allied nuclear weapons were released, moved or loaded. Few if any military experts ever thought that a war would begin with a nuclear “bolt from the blue,” absent preceding events: by definition, “bolt from the blue” is not accidental or inadvertent. Any accidental/inadvertent nuclear war in the years between 1946 and 1990 would have almost certainly begun at the level of foot patrols wandering off the map into restricted areas, maritime collisions on the heels of U.S.–Soviet “dodge-em” games at sea, or inadvertent strays by one side into restricted air space of the other.19 Confrontations at the tip of the lance have an entirely different meaning 19

TECHNOLOGY AND DETERRENCE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER

higher up the chain of command if links in the chain have been deliberately confused, or their inter-link communications distorted, by cyber-pathological strikes. As Bruce G. Blair has noted: Central authorities cannot reasonably expect military organizations simply to carry out orders, however rational the orders may be. Organizations are not that pliant. Any attempt to assert positive or negative control in a way that requires major abrupt changes in operating procedures, a situation more likely to occur if operating routines escape attention in peacetime, would invite confusion and disorder.20 Consider, for example, the impression created by former Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin, pursuant to their agreement of 1994, that U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear missiles are no longer aimed at targets on one another’s state territory. The agreement may have symbolic value, but it did little to change essential procedures for missile targeting. Although Russian missiles are supposedly set on “zero flight plan,” the missiles’ memory banks still store wartime targets. The Russian General Staff can, from command posts in Moscow and elsewhere, override the de-targeting by means of a Signal-A computer network, re-aiming silo-based missiles at U.S. targets within ten seconds.21 U.S. missiles can be re-targeted against Russia just as rapidly. Russia’s command system and early warning network have obviously deteriorated since the end of the Cold War, along with the rest of Russia’s military, raising the potential for accidents or inadvertence. Local utility managers have reportedly shut off electric power to Strategic Rocket Forces bases when commanders failed to pay their bills. Frequent malfunctions occur in the equipment that controls nuclear weapons. A retired Strategic Rocket Forces officer charged that at least one recent system malfunction caused parts of the nuclear arsenal to go spontaneously into “combat mode.”22 A number of former Soviet radars for detection of missile attack are no longer operational, making the information provided by Russian early warning systems even less reliable than hitherto. In February, 1997, Russian Defense Minister Igor Rodionov stated that “Russia might soon reach a threshold beyond which its rockets and nuclear systems cannot be controlled. (Even) today, no one can guarantee the reliability of our systems of control.”23 Among the specific reasons given for Rodionov’s concern were the “increasing psychological weariness of the corps of officers” and the fact that “owing to a shortage of satellites, there are several hours at a time when we are unable to carry out tracking work outside the Russian borders.”24 Finally on the question of info-war and the avoidance of accidental or inadvertent war or escalation, the problems of delegation of authority and devolution of command are exacerbated by information distortion in the command system of either side. In the case of the U.S. nuclear command system, for example, the “cocked pistol” analogy implies that the pistol will fire back at the highest levels of alert unless authorized commands hold back retaliation.25 An enemy seeking to paralyze U.S. 20

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retaliation by confusing the information networks for nuclear command would, instead, have an equal chance of cutting the command and control system into pieces. Each piece and the forces with which it could connect would then be a sovereign, post-attack entity, firing back with whatever resources remained to it at targets of opportunity. Commanders unable to communicate with one another might assume that their counterparts were already dead or hopelessly cut off from proper orders. A dumb, blinded and disaggregated nuclear response system would then take over from what had been a singular chain of nuclear command and control. The U.S. nuclear command and control system is highly diverse and redundant against any conceivable attack, especially so now that the Soviet Union exists no longer. U.S. leaders could afford to wait out any ambiguous threats or glitch of unclear dimensions in their warning and response systems. The command systems of “nth” countries with smaller nuclear arsenals that are potentially vulnerable to decapitating first-strikes, or to significant info-war disruption, are not so well situated. When the screens go dark or generate computer “noise” in Islamabad or in Pyongyang during a period of rising political tension, will leaders’ instincts lead them to withhold launch authority or to jump the gun for fear of suffering catastrophic losses by striking second? States that have little space to trade for time, as Israel does, must also consider that defeat in a major conventional war, if leaders were caught by surprise and unprepared, could create pressure for hasty decisions about nuclear first use. An important aspect of the difference between conventional and nuclear deterrence is that the strategic problem is so much more linear in the conventional case. The object of the military in a conventional war is to obtain dominant battlespace awareness and to deny the opponent the opportunity to use cyberspace effectively. On the other hand, the problem of avoiding accidental/inadvertent nuclear war is more nonlinear, perhaps even chaotic, with regard to the information spectrum.26 Exploitation of information, including electronic, is both a cooperative and a competitive activity when the avoidance of nuclear war is equally as significant as the accomplishment of one’s military object, should war occur. One side does not necessarily want to drive the other side’s information regime off the field, or to corrupt it into a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of misinformation. Further, the distinction between “offensive” and “defensive” info-war may be more muddled in the case of nuclear deterrence and the avoidance of accidental war or escalation compared to the more straightforward task of prevailing in war, should it occur. The relationship between conventional and nuclear deterrence becomes further complicated if the Bush administration concept of a “new triad” takes hold. The old triad of the Cold War years was composed entirely of nuclear forces: land- and seabased missiles, and long range bombers. The new triad will consist of: (1) conventional and nuclear offensive forces; (2) anti-missile defenses; (3) defense related infrastructure, including research and development. The commingling of conventional, long range precision strike with intercontinental nuclear weapons, should it become a staple of U.S. military planning, might erode the firebreak between nuclear and conventional operations, and, therefore, between conventional 21

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Table 1.3 Possibly asymmetrical challenges to deterrence Type of strategy

Who

Tactics

Unconventional warfare, including terrorism with possible use of WMD

States/ NSA (non-state actor)

Cyberwar/Netwar

States/NSA

Accidental/inadvertent nuclear war

States

Frustrate U.S. commanders with unorthodox means; deter U.S. military intervention in regional conflicts by threats of WMD attacks Disrupt U.S. military operations or attack parts of the U.S. national information infrastructure by using clandestine attacks on computers, networks and communications systems Failures of positive or negative control, involving possible technical malfunctions, rogue commanders, or deliberate but mistaken launch based on faulty intelligence

and nuclear deterrence. Presumably, weapons for offensive information warfare would be part of the “package” of offensive conventional and nuclear forces, along with command-control-communications and reconnaissance systems. Miniaturization of nuclear weapons in the form of “mininukes” or “tinynukes” suitable for bunker busting or for attacking other hardened targets is also under study in U.S. weapons laboratories. Miniaturized nuclear weapons could be mated to U.S. capabilities for long range precision strike in order to bring the fear of regime change directly to the doorstop of rogue state leaders, regardless of their levels of protection. An arguable question is whether actual use of nuclear weapons, in isolation or as part of a combined arms strike package, would further erode existing restraints against nuclear proliferation and thereby weaken deterrence. In conclusion, this section identifies three possibly asymmetrical or deterrencedaunting domains for military activity in defiance of technological supremacy, from the meanest “grunt” environment to the heavens above: unconventional warfare; cyberwar; and accidental or inadvertent nuclear war. Table 1.3, above, summarizes some of these possibilities.

Thinking about innovation Part of the difficulty in relating possible technology futures to military strategy is that covariation in politico-military and technical variables cannot be assumed. Political scenarios and technology innovation are often related, but the relationship is mediated by other social and psychological variables. What we need is a better handle on the problem of technology or knowledge innovation and its relationship, or lack thereof, to changes in politics and in military strategy. As Colin Gray has noted, with regard to the subject of “revolutions in military affairs” or RMAs: 22

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From time to time strategic history can appear to accelerate to such a degree that great discontinuities, nonlinear “events”, are discernible which we have come to label as RMAs (or transformations of war). Whether or not it is misleading to identify periods of rapid change, or apparently rapid change, as revolutionary, is at least as much a matter of intellectual taste and political convenience as it is of empirical evidence. RMAs are intellectual constructs; they are the inventions of scholars and other thinkers.27 One possible schematic for understanding knowledge innovation has been proposed by Anthony Oettinger of Harvard University. Oettinger sets up a table that classifies ideal of types of knowledge as “cow” (data without context) and “bull” (context without data). He then hypothesizes that each ideal type of knowledge can be relatively static or dynamic in its rate of change. When types of knowledge are classified by rate of assumed change, Table 1.4 results (see below). These categories of knowledge innovation can be related to the historical development of U.S. debates over ballistic missile defenses. (The next chapter takes up the subject of missile defenses per se – the discussion here is illustrative.) During the Cold War the debate was essentially about “cow”: whether anti-missile technology could be deployed that was cost effective compared to offenses and reliable against foreseeable offensive countermeasures. The consensus of most U.S. deterrence theorists, arms control advocates and military planners during the Cold War was that anti-missile technology could not be deployed that was cost effective compared to offenses or capable of defeating offensive countermeasures. Technology dictated that mutual assured destruction or mutual deterrence based on offensive retaliation was the only game in town. With the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, the thrust of the debate over U.S. missile defenses has now turned away from arguments about technology per se to arguments about the probable shape of the new international order and its implications for U.S. deterrence and defense policies (from “cow” to “bull”). Advocates of American missile defenses in Congress, in the military and elsewhere in the defense and policy communities now point to the emerging new threats from rogue nations or “states of concern” armed with

Table 1.4 Aspects of knowledge innovation

Stasis Change

Cow

Bull

Steady-state Cow Transient Cow

Steady-state Bull Transient Bull

Source: “Anthony Oettinger, Knowledge Innovations: Celebrating Our Heritage, Designing Our Future,” slide presentation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Program on Information Resources Policy, November 13, 2000). Used by permission.

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ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton administration signed the Missile Defense Act of 1999 that called for a deployment of National Missile Defense (NMD) of the American homeland as soon as NMD technology became feasible. Clinton also attached the conditions that the NMD deployments had to be cost effective and not inconsistent with U.S. arms control objectives. Despite these reservations, the Clinton administration’s willingness to agree to an eventual deployment of missile defenses against limited attacks (accidental launches or deliberate attacks by rogue states) crossed a Rubicon by putting a liberal Democratic President on the record in favor of defenses under some conditions. President George W. Bush, in his speech to the National Defense University on May 1, 2001 called for even more ambitious missile defenses than the Clinton plan along with offensive force reductions. Bush indicated that the ABM Treaty would have to be drastically amended or abrogated to permit U.S. missile defenses based on a variety of possible technologies, including ground- and sea-based interceptors and airborne lasers.28 Ultimately Bush announced the U.S. departure from the ABM Treaty regime in the fall of 2001, and construction on U.S. national missile defenses began in summer, 2004. Following the typology of knowledge innovation, one could imagine disputants in the early twenty-first century BMD (ballistic missile defenses) debates arguing for any one of four positions: 1

2

The situation is a “steady cow”–“steady bull” condition. There are some test data on theater and national missile defenses that encourage their proponents. But the data also show that there is a long journey ahead for most of these technologies in research and development, and even more time needed for effective weaponization and deployment. Proponents of “steady cow”– “steady bull” acknowledge that the international system has changed since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But they deny that these changes have invalidated nuclear deterrence based on survivable retaliatory forces. Nuclear deterrence without defenses is still robust, from this perspective: defenses are neither necessary nor useful in order to make deterrence work. Proponents of the “steady cow”–“steady bull” position also express skepticism about the present and probable future performance of missile defense technology. In their view, even tests under relatively benign conditions, less stressful than those in the “real world,” reveal serious weaknesses in the various components of the U.S.-proposed NMD system and in several candidate theater missile defenses systems. The situation is a “steady cow”–“transient bull” condition. The essential data on the effectiveness of defenses relative to offenses have not changed, but the world has. The imminent threat of ballistic missile attack against the U.S. homeland or against forward deploying American troops and allies requires a fast track deployment of missile defenses, even imperfectly developed and tested ones. Deploying even a “strawman” missile defense system forces 24

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3

4

hostile states to think twice about the worst case possibility for them: they will launch against the U.S. only to have their missiles destroyed in flight; afterward, an angry U.S. President will destroy their society. Proponents of this view also contend that many rogue leaders are beyond deterrence as understood by Western scholars and analysts. Non-Western political leaders and their military advisors may not calculate costs and benefits in the same way that we do. They may have apocalyptic visions of glorious mutual suicide like terrorist truck bombers. Therefore, from this perspective, although deterrence based on offensive retaliation has not been superseded by missile defense technology, it might be prudent to supplement deterrence based on the threat of retaliatory punishment by deterrence based on the physical capacity to destroy light attacks. The present situation is a “transient cow”–“steady bull” scenario. Although some data suggest that future missile defenses technologies will be better than their Cold War predecessors, the basic context for the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence has not changed with the end of the Cold War. Proliferation of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles does make the world arguably more dangerous. But an attack against the American homeland by any state would be an act of national self destruction because the origin of the attack would be known and the U.S. President would be certain to retaliate. On account of this fact, rogue states seeking to strike at the American homeland with weapons of mass destruction would be more likely to turn to terrorist allies who could smuggle weapons across the U.S. border and attempt a nuclearized version of 9/11 or the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack. The present condition is one of “transient cow” and “transient bull.” Both technology and the policy context are changing very rapidly. This is good news and bad news for advocates of missile defenses. The good news for proponents of BMD is that a variety of new approaches to missile defense may come off the drawing boards in the next several decades. This plurality of new technical breakthroughs raises the likelihood that at least one will have the potential to provide a deployable, affordable and effective offset to (at least) light ballistic missile attacks. In addition, the acceleration of political and social change in the twenty-first century increases the likely appeal of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic or other delivery systems to states that reject the geopolitical status quo, either regionally or globally. The plausible spread of weapons into the hands of highly politicized armed forces in nondemocratic countries also suggests a pessimistic U.S. threat assessment, with regard to the likelihood of attacks against U.S. forces or allies.

A world of two-sided transience in data and in context (i.e. in technology as well as in policy) may accelerate beyond the boundaries of the present debate over missile defenses into new, and unknown, directions. For example: the military uses of space in the twentieth century were for essential missions in support of actual combat: reconnaissance, surveillance, command-control, communications 25

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and navigation. Space has not yet been weaponized. The introduction of weapons based in space, especially if they operate with the speed of lasers, particle beams or electromagnetic railguns, changes the context for missile attack and anti-missile defenses. But the context changes in unpredictable ways. Space-based weapons could be used not only to defend against ballistic missile attacks: they might also be used to attack another state’s warning, communications and navigational satellites. A first-strike against the satellite warning and communications of another state would have the potential to render the victim electronically silent and visually blind. The victim state could then be coerced or, if necessary, attacked with impunity. No scientist can guarantee against the possibility of a breakthrough in technology favorable to anti-missile defenses. The question is not only one of technology, but of politics and strategy as well. Russia’s large nuclear force and decrepit C3 system is a headache to Russians as well as to potential adversaries and a possible source of crisis meltdown into accidental nuclear war. In order to induce the Russians to adhere to offensive force reductions agreed in the Moscow Treaty of 2002, the U.S. must not make too convincing a case that it has technology over the horizon that might deter Russia’s deterrent. Russia already worries about U.S. cyber warfare against its strategic vitals, including its nuclear warning and control systems. (And Americans should worry that Russian information systems might mistakenly simulate a U.S. cyber attack during a crisis or confuse random errors with attacks.)29 U.S. missile defenses may impact upon Russian conventional deterrence also. The chain reaction from a nullified Russian nuclear deterrent, given Russia’s conventional weakness, invites bites at Russia’s periphery from the Caucasus, from Central Asia and from its Far Eastern borders. A post-nuclear Russia verges on toppling over into a collection of invasion corridors and internal wars. Other possible strategy and policy by-products could occur in China and in Europe: missile defenses of uncertain effectiveness would be a poor trade-in for a major Chinese ICBM buildup, or for a more assertive European Union unilateral defense. There is also the policy and strategy paradox of missile and space defenses that, the better they work, the more angst they raise among allies (and others) about shared strategic space: does the missile shield protect only North America, or does it include Europe, Japan, or even Russia? Inter-allied controversy about shared control over the missile defense “trigger” could rival in intensity the MLF (multi-lateral force) debate of the early 1960s. This problem of who protects whom and from what could bedevil theater missile defenses as well. An Airborne Optical Laser cruising at 20,000 feet can be exercised against a variety of missile threats in “out of the area” states not necessarily defined as within the U.S. or NATO collectively defended aerospace. Is a NATO “theater” missile deterrent a global threat to Indian, Pakistani or other new or aspiring regional powers?

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A new transformation? The preceding example is one of many that could be used to illustrate another point about the relationship between technology innovation and military strategy or policy. Ideas do matter, and the significance of ideas goes beyond creative thinking by imaginative officers or scientists. For new technologies to make a difference in military strategy and in military art, they must find their way into military doctrine that explains how forces fight, and they must be enabled within military organizations as standard operating procedures.30 Both processes take time, money and luck. Some ideas are ahead of their time, or at least, of the technology of their time. The first prototypes of “flying wing” aircraft were propeller driven and were test flown by Northrop as early as 1947, but the realization of this vision was impractical until the B-2 was deployed in the 1980s. By the time the flying wing became technically feasible, the strategic rationale for the bomber was less obviously justifiable. Enthusiasts for the “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA) in the U.S. military and policy communities underestimate the complexity of technology innovation as it relates to politics and strategy.31 They also emphasize the possible payoffs from innovation in C4ISR, precision strike and stealth technology that are the most tangible and immediate: targets destroyed, enemy command and control disrupted, and so forth. The impact of the information revolution on military strategy and political decision making in security policy is broader than battle. According to Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the relative importance of “soft” compared to “hard” power in world politics has changed as one consequence of the information revolution.32 Hard power is the ability to get others to do what they might otherwise not do by means of coercion: rewards mixed with threats. Soft power is the ability to get others to want the same outcomes that you do. Soft power includes the appeal of a state or non-state actor’s ideas, culture, values, society and political system.33 Other experts have recognized the need to rethink U.S. military strategy and defense organization on account of the requirement to mix hard and soft power. For example, Robert David Steele calls for an integrated national security strategy that would restructure the relationships among government agencies and realign the responsibility for war and peace operations among military commands.34 Arguing that many of the most important threats to U.S. security are based on social, economic or other nonmilitary conditions, Steele recommends a transformative strategy that requires four “threat-type” regional or theater commanders in addition to the existing regional military Combatant Commanders. The result of his proposal would be to create ten force components under four new functional commanders whose responsibilities included everything from public health and civic education to traditional war fighting. (The new force structure that would result from his proposals is summarized in Table 1.5, on page 28.) This schematic is admittedly a radical departure from current practice. But it moves in the right directions: toward multi-disciplinary, inter-departmental and

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Table 1.5 A transformative force structure CC WAR

CC SOLIC

CC PEACE

CC HOME

Force on force Small wars (traditional war fighting missions)

State/USIA

Domestic threat (includes FEMA and NMD as it develops) Electronic security (includes cyberwar, communications security and encryption, etc.)

Constabulary (maintains the peace, restores functions of a failed state – heavy on civil affairs, military policy, medical, engineers, and liaison with NGOs and indigenous population) Ground truth (new networks of overt and clandestine sources of information and assessment “on the ground” under improved policy guidance)

Peace Corps

Economic aid

Citizen education (a broad program of civic education to support social cohesion and public responsibility)

Source: Adapted from Robert David Steele, “Threats, Strategy and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security in the 21st Century,” Ch. 9 in Steven Metz, ed., Revising the Two MTW Force Shaping Paradigm (Carlisle Barracks, PA.: U.S. Army War College, 2001), p. 159. Parenthetical explanatory notes are supplied by me and the author is not responsible for them. The abbreviation “CC” indicates Combatant Commander, the term now used for regional or functional commanders formerly identified as CINCs.

nuanced threat assessment as the driver of military organization and of military definitions for the technologies needed for twenty-first century war and peace making. Steele’s out-of-the-box thinking reminds us that one of the U.S. strengths in technology is the relative openness of our policy debates on military innovation. This expanded, and sometimes contentious, American conversation on the future of technology as it applies to war is messy, but it prevents over-investment in faddism and sudden lurches in favor of the wonder weapon of the month. On the other hand, the decision overload that results from an ever expanding network of executive branch participants, Congressional staffers, media, think tanks, academics and others can lead to a stultifying “analysis paralysis” that makes timely innovation difficult. One of the United States’ “soft power” challenges of the twenty-first century will be to maintain the tradition of openness and pluralism in policy debates without losing the capacity to recognize important technology breakthroughs and to drive those breakthroughs into strategy and policy in good time.35

Conclusions Nuclear weapons live cautiously with the information revolution: like porcupines backing into one another. The info-based Revolution in Military Affairs promises to make long range, precision fires, reconnaissance and command-control systems 28

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more reliable. Information-based technology should make conventional weapons more capable of carrying out strategically decisive missions, allowing the U.S. and other major powers to become less dependent on nuclear first, or early, use. Advanced information technology may also make possible the redesign of some states’ “one size fits all” nuclear war plans into distributed versions with branches and options. On the other hand, information technology and nuclear deterrence are at cross purposes in some ways. The possibility of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war cannot be excluded in the twenty-first century, especially as nuclear weapons spread will take place among states with dubiously survivable nuclear forces and primitive control systems. Information warfare waged against an opponent’s intelligence and command-control systems could backfire, by creating a crisis slide of misperception that turned into mistaken or deliberate, but misinformed, launch directives.

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2 CAN MISSILE DEFENSES OVERTURN DETERRENCE?

Introduction U.S. President George W. Bush announced in December, 2001, that the United States would withdraw officially from the ABM Treaty of 1972. The U.S. decision opened the door to legal deployment of national missile defenses (NMD) of the American homeland. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not approve of the U.S. decision. But Putin refused to make the U.S. departure from the Treaty a reason for derailing further arms control or future U.S.–Russian security cooperation on other issues, including anti-terrorism. Regardless of Putin’s reaction, the passing of the ABM Treaty regime opens the door to a period of political and military uncertainty in the relationship between Russia and the United States.1 It also reflects U.S. concerns about post-Cold War threats for which deterrence without defenses might not suffice. In addition, Presidents Bush and Putin signed a nuclear arms agreement in Moscow on May 24, 2002 to reduce U.S. and Russian deployed strategic weapons by about two-thirds by 2012. The deep reductions agreed by Bush and Putin would allow each side to maintain a maximum of 1,700–2,200 warheads deployed on any mix of land-based, sea-based or airborne launchers.2 The political trade-off for this agreement was that Russia got a formal treaty and the U.S. got Russian agreement that disarmed warheads would not necessarily have to be destroyed: they could be put into operational or deep storage. In addition, NATO’s summit beginning May 14, 2002 in Iceland formalized alliance approval for a new relationship with Russia: a NATO–Russia Council that would permit Russia to sit with NATO’s permanent members as an equal for making joint policy on issues such as terrorism and proliferation.3 Thus missile defenses were only one aspect of a sea change in politics opening the door to new technologies and military missions. In this chapter, we consider some of the implications of deploying U.S. missile defense, especially national missile defenses, for nuclear arms control and deterrence in the early twenty-first century. First, we review some of the traditional arguments about missile defenses and nuclear deterrence that were part of the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War strategy and policy debates. Has the

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entire context now changed? Second, we discuss the implications of missile defenses for U.S.–Russian relations in a world of additional, and uncertain, nuclear threats. Common to both sections is the assumption that deploying missile defenses is not just a decision about preferred technology: elements of strategy and policy are also present, and even more important.

The past is prologue Anti-missile defense technologies were the subject of considerable thought and investment by the U.S. and Soviet military and scientific communities for approximately four decades of Cold War. Ultimately large sums were invested in several generations of interceptors and in warning and control systems. Despite these investments, neither U.S. nor Soviet technology could present a cost-effective threat to strategic nuclear missile attack. Deterrence based on offensive retaliation remained the sine qua non of nuclear war avoidance. Nevertheless, assured retaliation was not without its critics and various schools of thought about nuclear deterrence requirements were posed in the U.S. nuclear policy debates of the Cold War. The principal schools of thought and their major tenets are summarized in Table 2.1, below. Because U.S. nuclear strategy and policy were so often driven by technology, arguments against missile defenses were usually based on the premise that they were outgunned by offenses. Building defenses was an exercise in technofoolishness, according to critics of anti-missile defense systems during the Cold War and to the present.4 Proponents of missile defenses argued that critics Table 2.1 U.S. nuclear posture options, Cold War era Posture variant

Descriptor

Assured retaliation

Deterrence rests on the necessary and sufficient capability to destroy the opponent’s modern economy and society by inflicting “unacceptable” damage Deterrence requires only the ability to destroy a small number of cities and other value targets Deterrence requires the capability for assured retaliation, as above, plus sufficient forces and command/control for flexible targeting and protracted conflict Deterrence will fail eventually and the U.S. should also have a capability to defend its national values against attack – defenses also reinforce deterrence Deterrence requires that the U.S. be able to prevail in any nuclear conflict by maintaining survivable and enduring forces and command/control superior to that of any adversary

Minimum or finite deterrence Enhanced retaliation

Defense dominance/defense transition Nuclear superiority

Source: Author.

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engaged in deficient strategic thinking and had talked themselves into technological defeatism.5 Advocates of missile defenses pointed to the apparent Soviet interest in BMD and to the willingness of Moscow to deploy several variations of ground-based missile defenses as a commitment by the Politburo to a comprehensive strategy for victory in a nuclear war.6 The tasking of missile defenses held important implications for their presumed impact on deterrence. Missile defenses could be assigned primarily for the defense of cities and populations or for the protection of nuclear retaliatory force. The former mission was the harder: even a few enemy warheads leaking through the system could cause catastrophic damage to the defender. Defense of the retaliatory force was more forgiving. It would be possible to allow some considerable fraction of the attacking re-entry vehicles to flow through the defenses and still provide for a number of surviving and retaliating warheads adequate to accomplish the “assured destruction” mission. From this perspective, U.S. defenses could support deterrence based mainly on offensive retaliation instead of threatening to overturn deterrence based on offenses. There was, however, a catch to this reasoning based on defending the deterrent instead of populations. The defenses had to be kept deliberately limited. Defenses that were so competent as to threaten the second-strike capability of the other side were destabilizing, according to the requirements of assured retaliation. Soviet defenses that could defend their populations would therefore nullify the American deterrent based on offensive retaliation, as would equally competent U.S. defenses negate the Soviet deterrent. This model of reasoning was adopted by the mainstream U.S. arms control community and institutionalized in the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) treaties during the Cold War. But the argument was never accepted by a number of influential military analysts, think tanks and political conservatives who averred that it equated Soviet defenses with American defenses: a case of strategic and moral bankruptcy. Missile defense advocates saw the election of President Ronald Reagan as an opportunity to reverse the terms of trade between nuclear offenses and antinuclear defenses. Thus was born Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983. The President’s call for a research and development program leading to an eventual four-layered, comprehensive defense for the U.S. national territory was a concept far advanced of available, or foreseeable, technology. But it had the virtue of forcing the right questions onto the policy agenda. If, eventually, credible and cost-effective missile defense technology did emerge in the twenty-first century, would the U.S. want to deploy it, against whom, and for what? The questions remain important even in the aftermath of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union because the nuclear age still remains. We are now in a second or postmodern nuclear age in which the status of nuclear weapons is that they are becoming the preferred weapons of the weak instead of the strong.7 The twenty-first-century argument for U.S. missile defenses now rests not on the requirement for deterring or defending against a comprehensive Soviet or Russian attack: instead, the rationale put forward for defenses now is that they are needed 32

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as insurance against a rogue state or accidental launch of tens of warheads. As Colin Gray has noted: The strategic truth of the matter is that BMD may well prove useful for deterrence and defense, but no defensive measures literally can guarantee the tactical negation of the offense. If deterrence is unreliable, as strategic history in general – but not Cold War strategic history – shows, then the case for active defense against proliferant powers’ most probable weapon of choice, the ballistic missile, is strong indeed.8 However, before turning to the problem of deterring or defending against rogues or nuclear inadvertency, we need to make some additional observations about the prospects for missile defense based on past experience and military-technical realities. There are, broadly speaking, two major prerequisites for national missile defenses to become a major component of any U.S. deterrent/defense system in the twenty-first century: 1

2

one or more technologies for missile defense emerge that can survive the scrutiny of a rigorous test and evaluation process. Ideally, this would include a technology for boost-phase intercept of attacking ballistic missiles in their first few minutes of powered flight;9 the major nuclear powers either cannot or choose not to increase the sizes of their offensive nuclear retaliatory forces to a point at which defenses become impractical; this would assume the cooperation, among others, of the United States, Russia, and possibly China.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that these two requirements will be met within the first quarter of the twenty-first century. But, once we have left the innocence of offensive-dominated nuclear policy, the world of strategy becomes more, not less, complicated. The Cold War ended peacefully because strategic simplicity dominated military uncertainty. No general staff could give a persuasive briefing to policy makers during a crisis that a nuclear first-strike would lead to an outcome tolerably describable as “victory.”10 That simplification of reality was frustrating to military traditionalists, but it served to provide useful clarification for impulsive politicians who, in prenuclear times, might have stumbled into preemptive attack. The deployment of effective missile defenses that are competitive with offenses removes us from this model of simplified rationality and returns us to a condition in which victory is thought to be possible. At present and for the next decade at least, we are probably remote from having anti-missile technologies that can put fear into the hearts of major nuclear powers. Frightening off rogue states and terrorists is another matter. Deterring rogues and terror networks might require less technology than would be necessary to deter states armed with large and diverse nuclear arsenals. On the other hand, what is technically easier may be harder to accomplish politically. Rogues and 33

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networks may not respond to the traditional cost-benefit calculus of deterrence. Absolutist motives based on hatred may obviate the logic of dissuasion, regardless of how well defenses are expected to work. Or, the undeterred may choose not to attack defenses directly but to circumvent them by using proxies armed with unconventional weapons and tactics. Blade Runner meets jihad.

The future context U.S. officials recognize that missile defenses are part of a larger and more complex agenda: that of establishing and maintaining U.S. military space primacy. Although pacifists might regret the fact, space is not like the Internet in its early years: a free-passage superhighway unobstructed by dangers to U.S. national security. To the contrary, the power that can best exploit space supremacy for both defensive and offensive missions may well set the standard by which others are rated for much of the twenty-first century and beyond. The space medium of today and tomorrow resembles the high seas that have witnessed repeated struggles for maritime supremacy. U.S. military space missions already on the agendas of Pentagon planners include those listed in Table 2.2, below. The complacency of the Cold War and immediate post-Cold War about nuclear and missile proliferation was shattered in 1998 by two events. First, India and Table 2.2 U.S. space control missions

Surveillance

Protection

Prevention

Negation

Precise detection, tracking and identification of space objects

Detection and reporting ofspace system malfunctions

Prevent adversarial use of U.S., allied or third party capabilities

Precision negation of adversarial use of space

Ability to characterize Characterization of an objects as threats or attack and location of its non-threats source

Strike assessment or BDA (bomb damage assessment) against target sets

Detection or Withstanding of and assessment when a defense against threats threat payload performs or attacks a maneuver or separates Restoration of mission capability Source: Office of the Secretary of Defense, Assistant Secretary of Defense (Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence) and Director, Defense Research and Engineering, Space Technology Guide, FY 2000-01 (Washington, D.C.: 2001), , p. 10–2. See also: Lt. Col. Merrick E. Krause, USAF, Attack Operations for Missile Defense (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Center for Strategy and Technology, Air War College, Occasional Paper No. 28, May 2002); and Lt. Col. Larry J. Schaefer, USAF, Sustained Space Superiority: A National Strategy for the United States (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Center for Strategy and Technology, Air War College, Occasional Paper No. 30, August 2002).

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Pakistan joined the club of declared nuclear powers with diplomatically noisy weapons tests two weeks apart. Second, North Korea test fired a multi-stage ballistic missile over the Sea of Japan and the Japanese mainland. These milestones in nuclear and missile development outside of the Big Five original nuclear states turned the South and North Asian regions into hot zones for possible nuclear conflict. Nonproliferation seemed to have hit a dead end. On the heels of these cases of weapons creep, prestigious study groups and members of Congress called for new approaches to the containment of nuclear proliferation and to the deterrence of attack against the United States, its allies or its forward deployed forces. Among these new approaches was missile defense. The Clinton administration had signed off on a research and development program for a light missile defense system designed to intercept small numbers of attacking warheads and based on then current non-nuclear, hit to kill technology for exo-atmospheric intercept. But Clinton postponed a deadline for the decision to deploy defenses from the fall of 2000 until the next administration. There was little doubt that the George W. Bush administration would deploy missile defenses of some sort. President Bush’s Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had chaired a prestigious study panel in 1998 whose report warned of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missile proliferation exceeding rates forecast by the U.S. intelligence community. Bush described the ABM Treaty as a “Cold War relic” and a U.S. decision to exit the treaty, with or without Russia’s blessing, became a foregone conclusion within administration policy circles. That having been said, important questions remained about technology development and about relations with Russia. The implications of 9/11 for a Bush administration decision to deploy missile defenses were not self evident. Two sets of somewhat opposite reactions, to the implications of 9/11 for national missile defenses, appeared within the U.S. body politic. One school of thought argued that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington proved the irrelevancy of NMD. Asymmetrical warfare, such as the use of civilian airliners as kamikaze bombers, could turn NMD into a postmodern Maginot line. The other, and opposed, reaction was that the 9/11 attacks strengthened the case for national missile defenses. From this perspective, the destruction of 9/11 showed how horrible would be the results of even very small attacks against U.S. urban areas. NMD was therefore a necessary component of homeland defense, now defined as America’s foremost strategic priority. Reasonable people can disagree about who won the debate in the abstract, but the political issue was settled by Presidential decision: in favor of both NMD and counterterrorism.11 Rumsfeld announced in January, 2002, the creation of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and its incorporation of programs (among others) previously assigned to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO). The technology development programs for missile defense were reorganized into three general categories: candidate systems for boost defense, midcourse and terminal defense.12 The MDA would support competing technologies for the same mission 35

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until a process of technology triage separated the winners and losers. No arbitrary deadline was stated for deployment: the President’s policy guidance was that defenses would be deployed as soon as practicable.

Russian response to NMD Russia’s reaction to the prospect of U.S. missile defenses was negative throughout the Yeltsin years. President Putin’s official position was also negative. But Putin showed flexibility on the issue of missile defenses that his predecessors in the Kremlin, both communist and post-Soviet, had not. Putin recognized that Russia’s geostrategic and economic futures demanded integration, not confrontation, with the West. It was worth slowing down U.S. missile defenses by diplomatic means. But it was not worth the cost to Russia of making a U.S. national missile defense program a “do or die” issue that would otherwise bring improved relations to a halt. With or without missile defenses, the Americans and Russians were agreed on further, and significant, reductions in their deployed strategic nuclear offensive weapons. Continuing cooperation on offensive force reductions and Russian acquiescence to NMD did not equate to a new nirvana in U.S.–Russian security relations, however. As one expert assessment has noted: A closer look at various aspects of the U.S.–Russian relationship shows that in spite of recent rapprochement it is still characterized by a significant degree of mistrust and has a fairly strong confrontational component. Nuclear deterrence is still considered an important component of the relationship.13 Putin’s positive relations with George Bush over the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were intended to set the stage for a wider set of agreements on nuclear arms control and other issues of American and NATO European relations with Russia. Russia’s attempt to forge a U.S.–Russian anti-terror coalition was motivated in part by Russia’s own struggle against Islamic insurgents in Chechnya. But Russia sought improved relations with the West over other issues too, including: the possible limitation of, or influence over, NATO enlargement; the opening of additional doors for economic and security collaboration with the European Union and NATO; and U.S. support for Russian entry into the World Trade Organization. With all these queens and rooks on the table, Russia could sacrifice the pawn. Since Moscow could not forestall a U.S. decision already taken in principle to deploy missile defenses, Russia could hope to gain some leverage in Washington by toning down its objections to NMD and hyping its desires for commonality on terrorism and integration. Russia has another overlapping interest with the United States in preventing or limiting the spread of weapons of mass destruction and long range delivery systems. In international system terms, Russia is a status quo power. Russia has more to lose than to gain from overturning the international pecking order. But Russia 36

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cannot defend the international status quo, either in Europe or in Asia, by its own military or economic means. Russia’s present military is far from the size and capability of the Soviet armed forces of several decades ago. Indeed, Russia’s military capability without nuclear weapons is barely sufficient to defend its frontiers and project power into selected parts of its near abroad. Russia’s conventional military weakness is related to at least two important politico-military decisions that depart from former Soviet precedent: (1) Russia’s decision to put nuclear first use in its military doctrine in the event of attacks on Russian territory or of attacks near Russia that are judged to be a significant security threat to the state; (2) the support by Russia of former Soviet states near or bordering Afghanistan to permit U.S. military bases in their countries for the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. In addition, under the second point, Russia provided useful intelligence support to the U.S. war effort. This Russian support for the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan came despite misgivings from some of Russia’s leading generals and politicians. Because Russia favors the international status quo instead of revisionism, it also supports the U.S. in general with regard to nonproliferation. The revised NATO–Russian security partnership officially launched in May, 2002 will give Russia a more consistent voice on a number of issues affecting stability in Eurasia, including missile defenses and proliferation.14 Of course, Russia also needs hard currency. Therefore, and despite American objections, Russia will continue to traffic in arms shipments and technical assistance to states that the United States regards as pariahs, including Iran. But Russia’s leaders are not so naïve as to trust the Ayatollahs, once they have acquired nuclear weapons and/or ballistic missiles of intermediate or longer ranges, to remain passively acceptant of the regional status quo. Iran has declared that it has scores to settle with Iraq, Israel and the United States. There is no guarantee that Russia will not be involved in regional disputes growing out of one of these axes of conflict. Therefore, Russian trade and technical assistance to Iran will be accompanied by diplomatic warnings against nuclear swaggering and strategic revisionism otherwise threatening to regional stability, and therefore, to Russia. Russia’s general interest in North and South Asia also dictates slowing the rate of nuclear weapons spread and encouraging moderation on the part of the existing nuclear states. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could escalate to include China and Russia. Russia has nothing to gain from a nuclear capable North Korea that could draw American preemptive attacks (with modern conventional weapons) or nuclear retaliation to the Korean peninsula. A significant growth in China’s long range nuclear arsenal and delivery systems implicitly threatens Russia as much as it threatens the United States, despite recent Sino-Russian agreements on military cooperation. For these and other reasons, additional nuclear weapons spread in Asia or in the Middle East cannot but detract from Russia’s sense of security and assumed international power status. Can Russia reach a new cooperative security regime with the U.S. on the subject of nonproliferation that leaves room for an American missile 37

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defense system?15 Perhaps, if Russia feels it can rely on deterrence as a necessary and sufficient condition for preventing an outbreak of war. The official U.S. view is that deterrence is no longer enough. Only missile defenses of the U.S. national territory can guard against the foreseeable possibility of a future rogue state or accidental nuclear launch. In addition, American military planners regard theater and national missile defenses as necessary for deterrence and for denial of regional aggressors armed with WMD and ballistic missiles targeted against forward deploying U.S. forces, installations and command-control or against American allies (“anti-access” strategies). U.S. regional theater commanders (formerly CINCs, now Combatant Commanders) will insist upon the development and deployment of improved theater missile defenses (TMD) regardless of the fate of national missile defenses: in turn, some TMD can provide test beds for one or more technologies also relevant for NMD. Given the demise of the ABM Treaty and the official U.S. installation of the first NMD missile site in Alaska in June, 2004, the technology development within MDA will probably overlap systems previously defined as “theater” and “national” missile defenses within reorganized competitive packages. The prognosis for U.S.–Russian security cooperation with the U.S. bent on missile deployments is therefore a mixed forecast. Russia has at least four basic options for reacting to inevitable U.S. missile defenses: ●

●

●

●

acceptance of the U.S. decision, without Russia taking a decision to compete in missile defenses or to offset U.S. defenses by enlarging or modernizing its offenses; acceptance of the U.S. defense deployments, but modernizing or enlarging Russia’s offenses in order to preserve its assured retaliation under any foreseeable conditions; non-acceptance of the U.S. defense deployments, modernizing or enlarging Russia’s offensive retaliatory forces, and emphasizing a military space program that includes the potential for missile defense development and deployment; non-acceptance of the U.S. defense deployments, maintaining a minimum assured retaliation, and deciding to compete with the U.S. in military space and missile defense capabilities across the board.16

At present, it would appear that Russia’s realistic, resource-constrained choices push it toward the first or second options, but additional resources could expand the menu of choices. Much depends on the status of U.S.–Russian political relations in the next decade or so: whether the post-9/11 atmosphere of security cooperation continues on autopilot, or whether new issues and technologies will cause the two states to pull apart on nuclear security matters.

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Analysis: stability parameters and defense effectiveness The open ended nature of U.S.–Russian relations with regard to security issues in general, and with respect to missile defense and nuclear arms control specifically, cries for closure. Economic factors will impose some limitations on Russia’s ability to modernize its offensive nuclear weapons, to develop its own strategic anti-missile forces, and to compete with the United States in the military uses of space. Nevertheless it should not be assumed that Russia will remain passive, even if cash starved, in the face of robust U.S. defense modernization. Russia might focus its modernization effort on selective weapons platforms or on two instead of three components of the historically sanctified nuclear “triad” of land-based missiles, sea-based missiles and bomber-delivered weapons. A focused offensive modernization, instead of a Cold War style pandemic pursuit of new systems across the board, could free Russian research and development funds for a “hedge” missile defense system against “nth” states or accidental launches. A Russian version of an anti-rogue missile defense system would not have to mimic the U.S. program emphasis on technology for non-nuclear, hit to kill, exoatmospheric intercept of warheads in their “midcourse” phase. Midcourse intercept requires defense systems that can distinguish attacking warheads from decoys designed to fool the defenses. Neither terminal nor boost phase defenses necessarily impose this requirement for discrimination between warheads and decoys. Terminal defenses benefit from atmospheric filtering that separates the trajectories of warheads from those of decoys. Boost phase defenses attack the rising rocket booster before it has had the opportunity to release its payload carrying one or more warheads. Russia might try to develop boost or terminal defenses that circumvent the demanding technical requirements of successful intercept in space. And the Soviet leadership during the Cold War showed a willingness to deploy nuclear armed ballistic missile interceptors. How much difference would either American or Russian missile defenses actually make in one another’s assumptions about deterrence or crisis stability? Our analytical model permits us to interrogate this issue at several levels. First, if the Americans deploy missile defenses and the Russians do not, how will this onesided deployment affect expectations about the viability of Russia’s deterrent? In this regard, we want to estimate how successfully U.S. defenses might be in eroding Russia’s second-strike capability. In Figure 2.1, p. 40, we summarize the Russian forces that would survive a U.S. first-strike and penetrate American defenses, against U.S. defenses offering a range of capabilities: from a minimal defense that allows 80 per cent “leakage” (80 per cent of the retaliating warheads penetrate the defense and arrive at their targets) to a defense of maximum effectiveness that permits only 20 per cent of the attackers to penetrate the defense. Calculations are based on assumed force structures for each side that meet the requirements of the Moscow Treaty not to exceed 2,200 operationally deployed weapons.

39

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600.00 500.00 400.00 300.00 200.00 100.00 0.00 Phase IV U.S. Defenses 121.70

Phase III U.S. Defenses 243.39

Phase II U.S. Defenses 365.09

Phase I U.S. Defenses 486.7

Figure 2.1 Russian Ballistic Triad 2,200: Surviving RVs (re-entry vehicles) versus defenses

For contrast to the “hypothetical” in Figure 2.1, let us suppose another possibility: Russian missile defense deployments, also offering a gradient of capability from very weak (80 per cent leakage) to highly competent (20 per cent leakage). Now both states will have to estimate their probable numbers of surviving and retaliating warheads by taking into account the uncertainties of enemy defense effectiveness. In Figure 2.2, p. 41, we compare the numbers of U.S. and Russian surviving and penetrating warheads across various ranges of defense capability. Our model assumes notional force structures (see Tables 2.3 and 2.4, pp. 42–43) and routine performance parameters for various delivery systems, based on U.S. and Russian or Soviet precedent. Different assumptions might complicate the analysis, but outcomes very different from those summarized in Figures 2.1 and 2.2 are improbable unless either state’s offensive force modernization takes surrealistic paths. Instead, we have probably estimated on the high side of the willingness of both states to (selectively) modernize their deployed ICBMs, SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) and bombers equipped with airlaunched cruise missiles (ALCMs). Russian political and military leaders have already indicated that they would prefer even lower levels of offensive forces than those permitted under Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT)–Moscow Treaty limitations. Russia’s long range bomber force is in temporary stasis and perhaps permanent eclipse, and its fleet ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) modernization program may be confined to a single new platform and/or missile. If these numbers are illustrative of possibilities, it appears that even missile defenses well in excess of expected technical competency (even by optimists) for 40

Surviving and Penetrating Warheads

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600.00 500.00 400.00 300.00 200.00 100.00 0.00

Phase IV Phase III Phase II Phase I U.S. U.S. U.S. U.S. Defenses Defenses Defenses Defenses 121.70 243.39 365.09 486.79

Phase IV Phase III Phase II Phase I Russian Russian Russian Russian Defenses Defenses Defenses Defenses 140.49 280.97 421.46 561.94

Figure 2.2 Surviving-penetrating warheads versus U.S.–Russian defenses/2,200 deployed

the next decade or so will not eliminate the deterrent (i.e. the second-strike capability) of either side. The U.S. and Russia will therefore choose to deploy defenses, or not to, based on one or more of the following considerations: (1) prestige and a desire to maintain the appearance of military-technical avant gardeedness; (2) fears of a threat posed by rogue states or accidental launches; (3) hedging against a defense technology breakthrough by Moscow or Washington that might conceivably nullify the other side’s deterrent many years down the road; and (4) continuing research and development in missile defenses, with or without actual deployments, as part of a longer term strategy for competition in military space dominance, including technologies for BMD and anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons.

Conclusions U.S. missile defenses after 9/11 are part of a broader spectrum of options for homeland security, for military space policy, and for defense transformation. Technology breakthroughs, in order to bear fruit, need to be accompanied by rethinking of previous premises about strategy and policy. Missile defense technology during the Cold War was arguably a research and development perpetual motion machine. Once missile defenses actually work, U.S. military planners and policy makers will have to consider how this development affects relations with allies, potential adversaries and others. Who is protected by whose umbrella, and under what conditions, is a question that will require more than a 41

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single controversial answer. U.S.–Russian relations will be influenced by American missile defenses, but not necessarily catastrophically. Technological uncertainties, as well as political and economic necessities, suggest that security cooperation between the United States and Russia will not be stopped by missile defenses.17 Table 2.3 Russian strategic nuclear forces Russian forces

Launchers

Warheads

SS-11/3 SS-13/2 SS-17 SS-25 silo SS-19/3 SS-27 mobile

0 0 0 200 0 150

Sub-total fixed land

350

SS-25 (road) SS-27 (road)

250 200

Sub-total mobile land

450

450

Sub-total land-based

800

800

SS-N-6/3 SS-N-8/2 SS-N-18/2 SS-N-X SS-N-23

0 0 0 112 48

Sub-total sea-based

160

Tu-95 H 6 / ALCM Tu-95 H 16 Tu-160 Blackjack

0 30 12

Sub-total air-breathing

42

576

1,002

2,192

Total Russian forces

1 1 1 1 1 1

Total warheads 0 0 0 200 0 150 350

1 1

1 1 1 6 3

250 200

0 0 0 672 144 816

6 16 8

42

0 480 96

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Table 2.4 U.S. strategic nuclear forces U.S. forces

Launchers

Warheads

Minuteman II Minuteman III Minuteman IIIA Peacekeeper MX

0 0 300 0

1 1 1 10

Sub-total land-based

300

Trident C-4 Trident D-5/W-76 Trident D-5/W-88

0 0 336

Sub-total sea-based

336

Total warheads 0 0 300 0 300

4 4 4

0 0 1,344 1,344

B-52G gravity B-52G gravity ALCM B-52H ALCM B-2

0 0 0 24 20

Sub-total air-breathing

44

528

680

2,172

Total U.S. forces

0 0 0 12 12

43

0 0 0 288 240

3 CONVENTIONALIZING U.S. AND RUSSIAN STRATEGIC NUCLEAR FORCES

Introduction Reducing the sizes of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear forces may be a necessary step toward continued improvement in their shared political climate as well as a useful contribution to military reassurance. But smaller forces are only one step that can be taken toward the objectives of political engagement and nuclear force management. Also important are measures to de-nuclearize or conventionalize those parts of the retaliatory forces that are prospectively superfluous for assured retaliation, and possibly dangerous for future crisis management. Whether portions of American or Russian intercontinental nuclear forces lend themselves to conventionalization raises many issues for force planning and strategy that go beyond the scope of this study. Our immediate object is to inquire whether the Moscow Treaty-compliant Russian and U.S. forces, anticipated to arrive by the end of 2012, provide living space for mating some launch vehicles with conventional instead of nuclear weapons. If so, the availability of intercontinental launchers with a mix of conventional and nuclear weapons could turn some blunt instruments of mass destruction into more useful tools for deterrence based on denial, or for bargaining during war itself.

Pertinent concepts The nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia are pre-modern relics in a post-modern world. Mechanisms of deterrence stability in a Cold War international system of bipolar confrontation, the American and Russian “strategic” offensive weapons now stand in embarrassing contrast to their officially nonhostile post-Cold War political relationship. As the U.S. and Russia have common interests in maintaining Europe as a pacified security zone and in fighting terrorism, their long range nuclear weapons and delivery systems have mostly become anachronisms. In the twenty-first century, weapons of mass destruction have been supplanted by weapons of long range, precision strike, together with advanced information systems for reconnaissance and commandcontrol.1

CONVENTIONALIZING U.S. AND RUSSIAN NUCLEAR FORCES

In addition, the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and Russia are not merely superfluous: they are dangerous. Russia’s deterrent is melting down: its deteriorated early warning systems and unproved post-Cold War command and control systems might trigger an accidental or inadvertent nuclear war. Knowing that the Russian system is accident prone, U.S. officials might, in a tense political crisis, assume that Russia is pinned down in a “use it or lose it” condition. The Bush administration doctrine of preemption, officially part of U.S. national security strategy and manifest in Iraq in 2003, might further suggest to Russian planners a nuclear hair trigger posture that tipped a simmering crisis into inadvertent war. The problem of getting rid of unnecessary nuclear weapons is not so easy to accomplish as it might be for theorists to demand. Governments live in the real world, where Thomas Hobbes and Thucydides rule over an international state system of legal anarchy. Nuclear weapons seem to provide for the Americans and Russians a measure of intimidation and control over fledgling nuclear powers like North Korea, growing regional powers such as India and Pakistan, and aspiring peer competitors like China. It turns out that, in dealing with policy makers who may or may not be tutored in all things military, there is a certain advantage in holding a blunderbuss the use of which creates destruction beyond doubt. If the new world order prescribes that deterrence remains necessary, and aggression is not obsolete, how do we reduce the reliance of the U.S. and Russia on nuclear weapons that might provoke, not deter, war? The classical Cold War approach was to freeze offensive modernization and prevent the deployment of anti-nuclear defenses, embodied in the logic of various SALT and START agreements and the ABM Treaty. The logic behind this approach was that the deliberate creation of a mutual suicide pact would prevent either state from playing too recklessly at nuclear brinkmanship. The certainty of “mutual assured destruction” or assured retaliation would preclude nuclear adventurism and also deter large scale conventional wars between the Americans and the Soviets, thus freezing the political status quo in Europe. The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union changed the political context that supported the military arguments for mutual vulnerability.2 In addition, beginning with Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the emerging superiority of information-based weapons and communication, command and control systems demonstrated that a new relationship between force superiority and deterrence had emerged. Twenty-first century deterrence, in contrast to Cold War deterrence, would be based more on the ability to destroy the opponent’s military capability and to deny the opponent its military objectives without having to use nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons would recede into the background of deterrence, having as a future role the deterrence of another state’s first use of weapons of mass destruction. The United States, on account of its economy and culture of entrepreneurship, advanced faster into the age of information-based weapons and “system of systems” for command, control and communications than did Russia after the Cold War. Russia’s economy in the 1990s was in virtual free fall, causing deterioration 45

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in its fighting power that was apparent in its military performance in Chechnya from 1994 through 1996. President Putin’s administration made it a point of emphasis after 2000 to improve the conditions of the armed forces, including modernization as well as pay and living conditions. But it will be some time before Russia fulfills its goals of basing more of its armed forces on voluntary recruitment, of improving training and morale, and of removing its obsolete weapons from service and replacing them with up to date systems. Meanwhile, Russia has its hands full with internal war in Chechnya and concerns about its “near abroad” of contiguous former Soviet states. Despite Russia’s economic difficulties that delay its military modernization, its path is inevitable should Russia wish to preserve its credibility as a major military power. While depending on its nuclear weapons in the short run, Russia must follow the U.S. and others into the age of information-based weapons and warfare. And to do so, Russia will have to reduce costs and personnel associated with its deployed and stored nuclear weapons and nuclear infrastructure. It is sometimes forgotten that Russia inherited from the former Soviet Union a rickety rustbelt of deteriorated nuclear laboratories, weapons storage sites, and even nuclear towns and cities where scientific expertise and security were concentrated. Breaking up this complex in the post-Cold War world without permitting the unsanctioned leaking of nuclear scientific knowledge or fissile material has been one of Russia’s larger challenges. Given the preceding discussion, policy makers in the U.S. and Russia might give further consideration to interim measures or “out of the box” proposals that might help both to transition to a world in which conventional weapons are the queens of the chessboard and nuclear weapons have a backstopping role. One such proposal is offered here. Many of the longest range or intercontinental delivery systems or launchers, including land- and sea-based missiles and bomber delivered weapons, could be de-nuclearized. Instead of carrying nuclear warheads, these missiles and aircraft could be armed with conventional warheads. Intercontinental delivery systems armed with conventional weapons could be assisted by smart technology for improving their accuracies, including GPS navigation and location systems, against a variety of targets. There are a number of advantages for the U.S. and Russia in converting some of their currently nuclear assigned delivery systems for use with conventional weapons. First, reduction in the numbers of fast flying, first-strike weapons carrying nuclear charges, like ICBMs, would improve crisis stability and reduce the risks of inadvertent war. Second, conventional weapons would be usable in ways that nuclear weapons would not be. Long range precision strikes against various troublemakers and disturbers of the status quo might be more feasible politically since the attacks would not violate the nuclear taboo that many have felt important to preserve. Third, intercontinental land-based and sea-based missiles and long range bombers armed with conventional weapons could augment realistic deterrence based on denial, instead of on an apocalyptic retaliation. 46

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Neither the United States nor Russia would have to de-nuclearize its entire force of long range delivery systems under this proposal. There are various approaches that either might employ as part of a nuclear to conventional transition. Land-based missiles might be converted from nuclear deterrent to conventional war fighting missions, while submarine launched missiles and bomber delivered weapons remained nuclear armed. The contribution this would make to crisis stability has already been noted: ICBMs, especially those that are silo-based, invite attack on themselves in a crisis. De-nuclearizing them turns them into smart versions of the original German V-2 rocket once information upgrades have been applied. Another and more drastic approach would be to convert all ballistic missiles for conventional weapons only, leaving bombers or “slow flyers” equipped with nuclear armed gravity bombs and air-launched cruise missiles. A third possible approach would be to make ICBMs and bombers conventional while leaving nuclear armed submarines as a last ditch deterrent. The advantage of this path is that submarines are more survivable and resistant to nuclear surprise attack than either ICBMs or bombers. U.S. and Russian military planners might realistically be more willing to maintain nuclear weapons only on their most survivable platforms before turning other delivery systems into conventional weapons. There are, of course, problems and counterarguments to take into consideration for each of these proposals. Russia would not want to de-nuclearize most or all of its ICBM force because the other arms of its nuclear triad, submarines and bombers, are so weak compared to its land-based missiles. Some Russian ICBMs would have to remain nuclear armed. On the other hand, it would enhance crisis stability if Russia were to remove from nuclear assignments its silo-based ICBMs and leave only mobile land-based missiles carrying nuclear warheads. Another problem is that deterrence “oldthink” remaining from the Cold War still holds sway in much of the Russian military establishment. There is a tendency to compare the U.S. and Russian nuclear inventories in size and quantity instead of quality, and to posit an enduring deterrence relationship of the kind that obtained between the two states during the Cold War. This postCold War hangover on both sides would also raise difficulties for the verification of de-nuclearization of long range delivery systems as part of any arms control or other agreement.

Data analysis Despite these acknowledged obstacles to any conventionalization of previously nuclear armed delivery systems, the gains in crisis stability and in usable military power might offset institutional inertia and political suspicion. Analysis might play a role also. An assessment of how much usable military power would be gained, or how much nuclear deterrent capability would actually be given up, in moving to a conventional-nuclear hybrid of long range delivery systems, is certainly suggested and probably overdue. 47

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The preceding discussion prompts the data analysis that follows. The object is to provide some crude but pertinent measurement of the possible impact of conventionalizing one or more arms of the U.S. or Russian strategic nuclear triad. To do so, we took as a point of departure the Moscow Treaty on offensive force reductions of May, 2002. This agreement calls for Russia and the U.S. to reduce their numbers of operationally deployed nuclear weapons on intercontinental launchers to between 1,700 and 2,200 warheads by the end of 2012. Apart from these very general guidelines, the treaty is open ended with respect to details of implementation. States have freedom to mix among different types of weapons and launchers, and no specific timetable was established for step by step accomplishment of required limitations. In addition, the U.S. unilaterally abrogated its commitment to the ABM Treaty in 2002, so both states are free to develop and to deploy defenses as they build down offenses. In our analysis, we posit for the U.S. and for Russia four hypothetical force postures, each consistent with Moscow Treaty requirements.3 Each force is a different mix of weapons and launchers. For Russia, forces created for the analysis include: a balanced triad of ICBMs, SLBMs and bombers; a “no bomber” force including only a dyad of ICBMs and SLBMs; a “no SLBMs” force including only ICBMs and bombers; and, fourth, an “ICBMs only” retaliatory force. For the United States, the forces created for the analysis are: a balanced triad; a “no bomber” force of ICBMs and SLBMs; a “no ICBM” force including SLBMs and bombers; and, fourth, an “SLBMs only” retaliatory force. In comparison, the two sides have two mirror image forces and two mirror opposite forces. Each has a balanced triad and a “no bomber” force. The U.S. has a dyad without ICBMs and Russia has a dyad without SLBMs. The U.S. has a monad based only on SLBMs; Russia has a monad based only on ICBMs. The “mirror image” mix and the “mirror opposite” mixes permit comparisons across force types and between states. We want to interrogate our model to determine whether the various forces offer significantly different numbers of surviving and retaliating second-strike warheads. The results of this analysis will help to determine whether the U.S. or Russia might conventionally arm one or more parts of its formerly nuclear triad without sacrificing meaningful assured retaliation. In the world of policy making as opposed to that of nuclear theory, only if military planners and political leaders are reassured that dyads or monads can provide for assured deterrence will they consider assigning one or more formerly nuclear delivery systems to conventional weapons. Our analysis is preliminary and therefore purposefully simplified. We will try to establish the extent to which elimination of one or more arms of the nuclear triad would, or would not, make a difference in the surety of nuclear retaliation. For this purpose, we will not enter into speculation about the exact properties of conventional warheads assigned to erstwhile nuclear delivery systems. Instead, we will simply factor out of the equation of nuclear retaliation those launch vehicles not dedicated to the U.S. or Russian nuclear strike plans. It is assumed for discussion 48

CONVENTIONALIZING U.S. AND RUSSIAN NUCLEAR FORCES

purposes that other delivery systems have been assigned conventional weapons (although not necessarily “conventional” missions or targets – a separate issue). Table 3.1, below, summarizes across the various force types, for the U.S. and for Russia, the numbers of estimated surviving and retaliating nuclear warheads within an initial deployment ceiling of 2,200 weapons. Table 3.2, immediately following, summarizes the same information for the various force structures, but

Table 3.1 Surviving and retaliating nuclear weapons – forces 2,200 U.S. forces Force

Surviving and retaliating WH

Balanced Triad No Bombers No ICBMs SLBMs Only

702 906 824 1,016 Russian forces

Force

Surviving and retaliating WH

Balanced Triad No Bombers No SLBMs ICBMs Only

509 525 325 394

*Source: Author’s estimates, based on an analytical force exchange model originally developed by Dr James J. Tritten. He is not responsible for its application here.

Table 3.2 Surviving and retaliating nuclear weapons – forces 1,700 U.S. forces Force

Surviving and retaliating WH

Balanced Triad No Bombers No ICBMs SLBMs Only

544 669 666 790 Russian forces

Force

Surviving and retaliating WH

Balanced Triad No Bombers No SLBMs ICBMs Only

469 475 281 485

*Source: Author’s estimates, based on an analytical force exchange model originally developed by Dr James J. Tritten. He is not responsible for its application here.

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within an assumed deployment ceiling of 1,700 weapons. Admittedly the eventual U.S. or Russian deployments may fall between these two parameters but they provide useful benchmarks since the numbers 1,700 and 2,200 weapons are established in the Moscow Treaty. Some preliminary findings are suggested in the preceding tables. For the U.S. forces at 2,200 and at 1,700 deployment ceilings, the performances of the various forces rank as follows: SLBMs Only; No Bombers; No ICBMs; Balanced Triad. The rank order for Russian forces is not identical within the two deployment ceilings. For 2,200 deployed warheads, Russia’s forces rank as follows: No Bombers; Balanced Triad; ICBMs Only; No SLBMs. For 1,700 deployed warheads, the rank order of Russian forces is: ICBMs Only; No Bombers; Balanced Triad; No SLBMs. On account of different emphases in deployments and force modernizations over the years, U.S. and Russian forces display some offsetting strengths and weaknesses. Russian ICBM forces are its mainstays; for the U.S., its submarine launched missiles provide the backbone of its deterrent. The U.S. bomber force is greatly superior to its Russian counterpart and will continue to be so in 2012. Russia’s deterrent is therefore more dependent upon ICBM modernization. At the same time, Russia cannot afford to permit the total deterioration of its SLBM force, already dangerously close to obsolescence and insolvency. The data in Tables 3.1 and 3.2 show that Russia’s worst relative performance, at the higher and lower bands for the Moscow Treaty, is provided by retaliatory forces without SLBMs. What do the results suggest for the U.S. or for Russia about possible options for de-nuclearization or conventionalization of delivery systems? The U.S. could, even at reduced Moscow Treaty levels, equip either its ICBM force or its bomber force entirely with conventional ordnance and still fulfill the requirements for assured retaliation. The option of conventionalizing bomber forces is tempting because they have already been used as part of general purpose forces in various military campaigns. On the other hand, U.S. weapon laboratories and some members of Congress support the development of mini-nukes of ten to 100 kilotons for bunker-busting missions against hardened and deeply buried targets (HDBT). Presumably the bunker busters would be delivered by aircraft. One might divide the force into two parts: one armed for missions approved for conventional ordnance only; and the other, for nuclear assigned missions. A more daring departure from precedent would be for the U.S. to convert its Minuteman III ICBM force from nuclear to conventional armament. The argument might be made that American silo-based ICBMs have suspect survivability as second-strike weapons and, on account of Russia’s dependency on ICBMs, increase the likelihood of preemption based on mutual fears of surprise attack. U.S. land-based intercontinental missiles turned to conventional missions would no longer be arms control or crisis stability “suspects” in a U.S.–Russian relationship. Instead, they could be used in conventional war fighting between the U.S. and other powers, including regional rogues and others seeking to destabilize the 50

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international order. ICBMs could be tasked to attack enemy conventional or nuclear armed short and medium range missiles; headquarters and command centers; field forces; depots, storage sites and other installations. U.S. ICBMs could, in effect, be turned into longer range equivalents of conventionally armed cruise missiles, capable of providing decisive fire strikes across regional boundaries and theaters of operations. In addition, unlike ICBMs that required nuclear warheads for their missions, those assigned conventional strike and fire missions could be produced in larger numbers and stored for easy replenishment of spent launchers. Launchers that were neither nuclear assigned nor nuclear capable would not have to have the elaborate security and command-control protocols associated with nuclear release. Conventional missile launchers would be the same as long range artillery, except that ICBMs would not have to be forward deployed into a hostile military environment where they would be exposed to “counterbattery” fire. Only Russian or Chinese nuclear attacks on the American homeland could destroy American ICBMs and the risk would not be commensurate with the gain. Russia’s options for converting nuclear launchers to conventional forces are more restricted than those of the U.S. But some possibilities might be worth exploring. For example, if the U.S. were to conventionalize its ICBM force, Russia might follow suit by de-nuclearizing its silo-based missiles, leaving its mobile and more survivable missiles for nuclear retaliatory missions. Such a decision by Russia’s leadership would require backing away from its post-Cold War declaratory policy of opening the door to nuclear “first use” under a number of conditions, including an outbreak of conventional war that jeopardizes Russia’s vital interests. Conventionalizing Russia’s silo-based ICBMs might actually enhance its usable (because non-nuclear) strategic strike potential against enemies threatening its borders or making non-nuclear attacks into Russia proper. Russians preoccupied with NATO enlargement and the possibility of future NATO nuclear deployments in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania might consider whether partial conventionalization of Russia’s land-based missile force could be traded off for de-nuclearization of some or all of NATO’S nuclear weapons deployed outside of the continental United States. Russia’s ballistic missile submarine and bomber forces are at a fork in the road, technologically speaking. Russia’s SSBN force is in poor shape, as President Putin discovered in February, 2004, when sea trials staged to make a favorable media impression turned into an international embarrassment.4 Russia can stay in the game of major nuclear powers, although not necessarily in parity with the United States, if it commits to modernizing its SSBN fleet. Currently some estimates place the number of reliable Russian ballistic missile firing submarines on patrol, at any given time, as low as two. The problem is not only low numbers of reliable subs, but poor training for crews and inadequate maintenance for safety. Russia’s financial difficulties for most of the 1990s hit its nuclear navy a near death blow. Russia should be able to afford, in the next decade or so, the replacement of existing model SSBNs by at least one new design (the much touted Iurii 51

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Dolgorukiy or its equivalent) and the fielding of a minimum force size of nuclear armed ballistic missile submarines. It is in the interest of the U.S. to encourage Russian SSBN modernization to this extent (although not to the extent of creating a parity with U.S. forces, unlikely as that is). Russian SSBNs are, like their American counterparts, more survivable than ICBMs and therefore more crisis stable. If Russia concentrated on a single line of development and production for its new “Vladimir Putin” class of SSBNs, it might field as many as five or six subs by 2015–2020. And these subs would not have to have all of the technological “gee whiz” found on American ballistic missile submarines, nor would they need to be as heavily equipped as their Russian Cold War predecessors. A new Putin class submarine might be fitted for ten missile launching tubes: five tubes are standard and each carries a submarine launched ballistic missile; the other five tubes are adaptive for launching cruise missiles instead of ballistic missiles. The cruise missiles could be conventionally or nuclear armed, with the conventional SLCMs (sea-launched cruise missiles) available on short notice for strikes against land-based targets. Russia’s bomber force is uninspiring of respect. As a component of an intercontinental strategic nuclear triad, it has been passé for some time. Russia could and should convert its bomber force entirely to conventional missions, tasked for regional and local wars in Europe or Asia. There is a considerable amount of work to do in this regard, enough to keep even a modernized Russian long range air force busy. Chinese military power waxes and China eyes a depopulated Siberia for its natural resources. Central Asia abounds with post-Soviet regimes of uncertain relationship with Russia. India now looms as a regional power to rival China and Russia in the East, and Japan cannot be expected to remain demilitarized for very much longer into the present century. Border wars and incursions from a NATO dominated Western Europe are politically improbable, but not, from the standpoint of Russian military planners, impossible. The good news for Russian airpower enthusiasts is that aircraft can be modernized and deployed in militarily significant numbers at a far lower cost per platform than can missile submarines, and with far less risk to the safety of military personnel. And Russia has a tradition of success in military aviation, dating from its Soviet days, which provides a platform for future success. Aircraft also lend themselves to diversified packages of ordnance: some nuclear capable and others equipped for conventional warfare only. Once scrambled and airborne, nuclear capable air forces are survivable for a time and therefore contribute more to crisis stability than do silo-based ICBMs. If Russia is to maintain portions of its long range air force as nuclear capable, then it will probably equip those nuclear capable aircraft with air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) instead of gravity bombs. ALCMs can be fired from standoff ranges outside the airspace of the enemy and therefore reduce the risk of flying directly against the air and missile defenses of the opponent.

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Operational issues Whether nuclear and conventional forces for strategic employment can be made partly interchangeable depends upon the operational as well as the structural aspects of arms control and force development. That is, reductions in nuclear force loadings and substitutions of conventional weapons on various delivery vehicles may improve crisis stability and increase the utility of some arms of service. The story does not end there. Political decision makers and military planners must make some important decisions about force and command system readiness and launch doctrines. These decisions about the operation of forces, in normal peacetime situations and under conditions of crisis or threat, influence the probability of war and the range of outcomes should war occur. In nuclear force operations, assumptions must be made about the preparedness of forces for retaliatory launch, if needed. This preparedness has two aspects: are the various delivery systems maintained on “generated” alert for quick response after receiving authorized commands; or, are they forces on “day to day” alert below the threshold of rapid response? Second: are the forces in question expected to launch “on warning” of an attack that is detected and defined as already in progress, although not yet completed? Or, to the contrary, are forces to be postured so that they will strike only after “riding out” an attack: absorbing an enemy first-strike before retaliating? The conditions of possible alertness and launch doctrine are well known to military specialists and their possible combinations produce a four-fold table, see Table 3.3, below. These combinations of force readiness and launch doctrine require policy makers to choose among competing values. Situation (1) with generated forces and launch on warning provides the largest number of surviving and retaliating forces but carries the greatest risk of crisis instability. Situations (2) and (3) are intermediate with regard to the numbers of probable “survivors” after a surprise attack, and they are also intermediate with respect to the degree of nonprovocation implicit in their selection. Finally, situation (4) provides the least provocative posture, but it also guarantees the least number of surviving and retaliating warheads. In the preceding Tables 3.1 and 3.2 (p. 49), we assumed a “standard” situation for alertness and launch as postulated in many Cold War scenarios: both sides’ forces were on generated alert, and both chose to ride out the attack and then strike back. This canonical scenario may or may not have fitted the actual conditions of U.S.–Soviet arms races at a given time, depending upon the temperature of political relations and the conditions of the deployed forces. Some experts on Table 3.3 Schematic combinations of alert status, launch doctrines Generated alert, Launch on warning (1)

Generated alert, Ride out attack (2)

Day to day alert, Launch on warning (3)

Day to day alert, Ride out attack (4)

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both sides have contended that, under conditions of imminent hostilities, either or both would have launched “on warning” or even chosen to strike preemptively in defiance of their declaratory policies to the contrary.5 The military pressures attendant to a particular crisis and the personalities of the leaders in power would also weigh heavily in the selection of force options. It is therefore prudent to extend our earlier analysis by considering how the alternative alert conditions or launch doctrines would affect the numbers of surviving and retaliating warheads for various U.S. and Russian Moscow Treaty compliant forces. Tables 3.4 and 3.5, pp. 54–55, compare the outcomes for the various forces at 2,200 and 1,700 levels. The summaries in Tables 3.4 and 3.5, pp. 54–55, show that it makes a considerable difference in outcomes whether forces are maintained on generated or day alert, and whether they are launched on warning or after having absorbed a firststrike. The patterns across types of forces and alert-launch doctrines lend

Table 3.4 Surviving and retaliating warheads – Russian forces

Balanced Triad Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO

2,200 deployed

1,700 deployed

610 509 407 305

563 469 375 282

690 575 460 345

570 475 380 285

390 325 260 195

338 281 225 169

413 344 275 206

582 485 388 291

No Bombers Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO No SLBMs Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO ICBMs Only* Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO

*The apparently anomalous larger numbers of survivors in the 1,700 case for the ICBMs only option, compared to the 2,200 case, reflects the larger importance of mobile as opposed to silo-based missiles in the force at 1,700.

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Table 3.5 Surviving and retaliating warheads – U.S. forces

Balanced Triad Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO

2,200 deployed

1,700 deployed

843 702 562 421

653 544 436 327

1087 906 724 543

802 669 535 401

989 824 659 494

799 669 533 400

1219 1016 813 609

948 790 632 474

No Bombers Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO No ICBMs Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO SLBMs Only Gen/LOW Gen/RO Day/LOW Day/RO

themselves to some interesting, and more specific, observations. For the United States in both 2,200 and 1,700 initial deployments, the “balanced triad” provides the smallest number of surviving and retaliating warheads: forces without nuclear armed bombers, without ICBMs, and SLBM-only forces outperform it. The pattern for Russian forces is more mixed. Russia is primarily dependent upon its ICBM forces both for prompt launch and for delayed launch survivability; in contrast, the U.S. has more capable bomber and submarine forces that can ride out attacks and retaliate. On the other hand, a modernized Russian force could incorporate more than one new type of mobile land-based missile. And Russia’s ballistic missile submarine fleet requires reconstitution and rethinking. Even in the Cold War, a Soviet Navy that was much better equipped and funded than the current Russian one was unable to challenge the U.S. for blue water supremacy in the open oceans. Russia need not try. Its SSBN fleet should be parked in contiguous narrow seas that are well defended by surface ships and attack submarines. A small number of well armed and modernized SSBNs would provide more survivable second-strike capability for Russia. Other funds available for naval modernization might be better 55

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spent on attack submarines fitted to fire cruise missiles or guided torpedoes, conventionally armed. Unless Russia can field sufficient numbers of mobile ICBMs and revitalize its ballistic missile submarine fleet, it will be forced into a launch on warning posture that is highly unstable in crisis. Already Russia suffers from deteriorated and unreliable early warning systems for missile attack. Gaps in Russia’s satellite coverage and deficiencies in its radar network allow hypothetical attacks that would go undetected. Knowing this, Russian military and political leaders in the chain of communication and command for nuclear release could be jumpy. As is now acknowledged, in 1995 Russian President Boris Yeltsin for the first time opened his “football” suitcase containing launch codes necessary to authorize nuclear release and force operations. Yeltsin responded to a possible nuclear attack warning that was generated by the launch of a Norwegian scientific research rocket. The initial stages of the rocket’s trajectory resembled one possible path for a U.S. submarine-launched ballistic missile aimed at Russian territory. Even during the years of Cold War, when the Soviet and American warning and control systems were far more reliable than the current Russian ones, mistaken indicators were sometimes confused temporarily with real attacks. It is all the more regrettable, therefore, that along with conventionalization of some portions of their present nuclear launchers, the U.S. and Russia have not made faster progress in setting up a joint nuclear attack warning center. President Clinton signed agreements with then-President Yeltsin (in 1998) and current President Putin (in 2000) to establish such a center. Russians were invited to visit NORAD in 1999 to see how the U.S. systems operated and the two states shared information about the possible risks attendant to the “Y2K” problem at the turn of the millennium. But progress in creating a joint warning center has been slowed since 2001, on account of other priorities in both governments and for other reasons.6 The major benefits of a U.S.–Russian joint warning center for nuclear or other ballistic missile attack would be twofold. In addition to reassuring one another against surprise strikes or accidental launches, the U.S. and Russia could cooperate to monitor and deter missile attacks from third parties, such as rogue states. Admittedly, an early warning center is only one of several steps that the U.S. and Russia could take together to reduce the risks of war and, as well, to reduce the likelihood of nuclear proliferation that could lead to war. Among these additional steps is continuation of the “Nunn-Lugar” U.S. support for improving the safety and security of Russia’s remaining nuclear stockpile and for the dismantlement of obsolete weapons. Apart from stockpile management and joint warning systems, there is also a strong case for reducing the numbers of Russian and U.S. tactical nuclear weapons. U.S. interest in developing new classes of air delivered nuclear bunker busters goes in the wrong direction. The side effects of such strikes can contaminate wide areas, and the willingness to employ nuclear weapons for tactical purposes sends the wrong message about nuclear restraint and nonproliferation.7 56

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Russia’s engorged inventory of tactical nukes is simply a case of canned salmon or caviar left over from the Cold War and its reflexes. These many thousands of tactical weapons of mass destruction create temptations for black marketers, rogue scientists and terrorists aspiring to acquire weapons of mass destruction. And, like their longer range counterparts, tactical nukes are examples of military obsolescence and escapism in the twenty-first century. They provide no usable military power apart from genocide, and they allow commanders to base plans on options that political leaders would be loath to authorize in the event.

Conclusion The case for conventionalization of U.S. and Russian long range nuclear delivery systems is worth exploring. Admittedly Russia would have a harder time parting with its strategic nuclear weapons, on account of its limited options for modernization and its comparative insufficiency in high technology, information-based conventional weapons. On the other hand, Russia does not require “nuclearstrategic parity” of the Cold War variety with U.S. nuclear weapons and delivery systems except for the purpose of great power image making. As Russia’s economy rebounds and its state making potential improves, Russia may prefer to rely less on threats of mass destruction for deterrence and more on usable conventional military force with precision aim. Russian military power does not have to equate with that of the U.S. overall, nor in nuclear weapons specifically, in order for Moscow to remain in the great game of world powers. Russia’s territory, scientific base, economic potential and military traditions are assets that can be drawn upon by prudent military planners and future political leaders.

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4 NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION AND CAUSAL EXPLANATION Who’s right and what’s at stake

Introduction Prominent academic theorists and policy analysts have argued that the spread of nuclear weapons is perhaps compatible with international stability. The arguments, although against the grain of official U.S. government policy during and after the Cold War, have a strong appeal. Optimists about proliferation base their case on rational deductions from theory and on their interpretation of U.S. and other Cold War experience. If these arguments are valid, then U.S. government strategies for controlling the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD) may be misguided. Instead of promoting a “one size fits all” policy of prevention, the U.S. should acknowledge the inevitability of (at least) selective nuclear proliferation and promote the creation of stable regional balances of terror. These proliferation-acceptant arguments are not necessarily removed from the theory or policy chessboard by the attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath. Keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists or other non-state actors is in the interest of most states, apart from their own possession or denial of nuclear weapons. Existing, as well as aspiring, nuclear states have nothing to gain by passing technology or scientific know-how to unaccountable non-state actors unless those nuclear or nuclear-aspiring states are sponsors of terror. Inter-state collaboration against terrorists with WMD is perfectly compatible with policy positions more acceptant of proliferation among “responsible” state actors, at least in principle. Where the principle might break down in practice is another matter. In this chapter, we discuss the theory and policy assumptions behind arguments made in favor of the probable compatibility between nuclear weapons spread and international stability. We review some of the more important assumptions on which the proliferation-permissive arguments are predicated, and we offer counterarguments to show how the reasoning in favor of proliferation is suspect. In general, we contend that proliferation-permissive arguments mistakenly, and dangerously, extend Cold War deterrence reasoning into a very different political and military future.

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Realism and international politics Some theorists and policy makers now predict that the slow spread of nuclear weapons can be made compatible with future international peace and stability by mixing the same ingredients: realism and deterrence.1 The argument that the postCold War world may be compatible with a hitherto unknown, and unacceptable, degree of nuclear weapons spread rests on some basic theoretical postulates about international relations. These basic assumptions are derived from the “realist” or neorealist school of international political thought.2 We are interested in the realist-derived assumptions that are specifically related to nuclear proliferation. Realist principles have considerable explanatory power and predictive utility at a very high level of abstraction: thus their appeal to some scholars. Realism also has an inherent pessimism about some aspects of international relations: thus its road-tested user friendliness for worldly heads of state and military planners.3 A summary of the major tenets of some of the more important schools of modern realist political theory appears in Table 4.1, below. Proponents of international realism confronted nuclear technology with mixed reactions. The nuclear revolution separated the accomplishment of military denial from the infliction of military punishment. The meaning of this for strategists was that military victory, defined prior to the nuclear age as the ability to prevail over opposed forces in battle, now was permissible only well below the level of total war. And less than total wars were risky as never before. Nuclear realists admit that these profound changes have taken place in the relationship between force and policy. They argue, however, that the new relationship between force and policy strengthens rather than weakens some perennial principles of international relations theory. Power is still king, but the king is now latent power in the form of risk manipulation and threat of war, instead of power actually displayed on the Table 4.1 Assumptions of major realist theories Human nature realism Principal cause of state competition for power

Inherent lust for power on the part of states or governments, based in human nature Amount of power States seek to that states want maximize power relative to other states; regional or global hegemony is states’ ultimate goal

Defensive realism

Offensive realism

Structure of the international system, especially system polarity and its impact on alliance formation States emphasize preservation of the existing balance of power and favorable incremental adjustment of the status quo

Structure of the international system, especially system polarity and its impact on alliance formation States seek to maximize power relative to other states; regional or global hegemony is states’ ultimate goal

Source: Adapted from John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 22. Mearsheimer is not responsible for changes made by the author, nor for its use here.

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battlefield. Peace is now guaranteed by the threat of war unacceptable in its social consequences, instead of being dependent upon the defender’s credible threat to defeat the attacker’s armed forces in battle.

Problems in realist theory The nuclear version of international realism has a number of intellectual and policy prescriptive weaknesses. In general, systems theorists are not always as careful as they ought to be in crossing over from the abstract logic of models into the prescriptive worlds of policy analysis and policy making. The gap between theory and practice invites two problems into the analyses. First, the explanatory status of systems as causal or dependent variables is left unresolved. Second, in some widely cited versions of realist international systems theory (RIST hereafter), formal causes are confused with efficient causes. The hypothesized intellectual “system” morphs into a high wire player on the world stage instead of a descriptive or explanatory tool for thinking. This transition from an intellectual construct to a Leviathan gives “systems” credit for behavior actually caused by actor perceptions, goals and capabilities. Bismarck, Metternich and Kissinger are no longer writing the play, but merely reading their lines. Independent or dependent variables? Assumptions that do no damage in the world of models (where all assumptions are equal, as all angels in heaven have wings) can be pathologically misguided when they leak into policy-derived explanations or predictions. For example, Kenneth Waltz explicitly compares the behaviors of states in an international system to the behavior of firms in a market. As the market forces firms into a common mode of rational decision making in order to survive, so, too, does the international system, according to Waltz, dictate similar constraints upon the behavior of states. The analogy, however, is wrong. The international system does not dominate its leading state actors: leading states define the parameters of the system. The international system, unlike the theoretical free market, is sub-system dominant. The “system” or composite of interactions among units is the cross product of the separate behaviors of the units.4 International politics is a game of oligopoly, in which the few rule the many. Because this is so, there cannot be any “system” to which the leading oligopolists, unlike the remainder of the states, are subject against their wishes. The system is driven by the preferred ends and means of its leading members on issues that are perceived as vital interests to those states or as important, although not necessary vital.5 Realists, especially structural realists who emphasize the number of powers and their polarities as determinants of peace and war, assume that some “system” of interactions exists independently of the states that make it up. This is a useful heuristic for theorists, but a very mistaken view of the way in which policy is actually made in international affairs. Because realists insist upon reification of 60

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the system independently of the principal actors within the system, they miss the sub-systemic dominance built into the international order. Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolph Hitler, for example, saw the international order not as a system that would constrain their objectives and ambitions, but as a series of swinging doors, each awaiting a fateful, aggressive push. If the international “system” were as determinant as systems theorists insist, Iraq would not have defied the UN Security Council in 1991, nor would Saddam Hussein have dug in his heels in Baghdad in 2003 in the face of George W. Bush’s undisguised determination to bring down his government. In 1991 an intransigent Hussein stared down a coalition of the world’s greatest military powers, including NATO and most of the Arab world, and forced a UN-authorized military operation to restore the status quo ante in Kuwait. A much weaker Hussein, after more than a decade of economic strangulation, no-fly zones and attempted diplomatic isolation, nonetheless managed to divide diplomatically the UN Security Council and NATO in 2003, forcing the United States to relent or invade with a minimum “coalition of the willing.” Systems theorists might object that they cannot be expected to make point predictions about individual decisions at a particular time. But Hussein’s defiance of international opinion and threats of force, as well as his willingness to go to war against enemies with overwhelming power, occurred over more than a decade of activity in international relations. During this time Hussein was the closest thing imaginable to an internationally convicted felon. Yet he stood tall in the face of systemic seismic shifts, including American military unipolarity. Attempts by RIST theorists to circumvent some explanatory problems create others. As Robert Jervis has noted, one can divide international systems theorists according to whether the “system” is treated as an independent variable, as a dependent variable, or as both.6 Waltz contends that the most important causes of international behavior reside in the structure of the international system, i.e. in the number of powers and in their positions relative to one another.7 Jervis notes that Waltz’s structure omits some important variables and processes that are neither exclusively at the system or actor level: for example technology and the degree and kind of international interdependence.8 Formal or efficient causes A second problem in RIST theories is the confusion of formal and efficient causes. System polarity is virtually identical with system structure in many RIST arguments. But this near-identity of polarity and structure is flawed. Polarity is more the result of past state and non-state actor behaviors than it is the cause of future behaviors. Cold War bipolarity was the result of World War II, of nuclear weapons, and of the fact that leaders perceived correctly the futility of starting World War III in Europe. Leaders’ perceptions of the balance of power are an intervening variable between polarity and outcomes such as stability, including peace or war. In other words, leaders’ perceptions, including their risk aversion or 61

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risk acceptance, are the efficient causes for international behavior: “systems” and polarity are formal causes. The difference between efficient and formal causes is important for theories that purport to be empirically testable. Formal causes are proved by an abstract process that follows a deductive chain of reasoning. Efficient causes are demonstrated by observation of temporal sequences and behavioral effects. International systems theorists who emphasize the importance of structure have been more successful at proving formal than efficient causes. There is merit in doing so, and Waltz and others who have argued from this perspective deserve credit for their rigor and for the insights derived from their perspective.9 The danger for international systems theorists lies in transferring inferences from the realm of deductive logic to the world of policy explanation and prediction. For example, Waltz argues both that (1) because there were only two Cold War superpowers, each had to balance against the other at virtually any point; and (2) disputes among their allies could not drag the U.S. and Soviets into war because they could satisfy their deterrence requirements through internal balancing, rather than alliance aggregation.10 The first argument is at least partly inconsistent with the second, and neither is confirmed by Cold War evidence. The U.S. and Soviets sometimes conceded important disputes to one another in order to avoid the possibility of inadvertent war or escalation, as in the U.S. refusal to expand the ground war in Vietnam on account of expected Soviet and Chinese reactions. And allies sometimes did drag the superpowers into crisis and under credible threat of war, as the Israelis and Egyptians did in 1973. Net assessment Despite these logical problems in RIST theory, it remains influential as time passes for two reasons. First, international relations and security studies are as subject as are other fields to bandwagoning effects. Prominent ideas gather new adherents in leading graduate schools, and the products of those graduate schools carry the ideas far and wide into the profession like St Paul’s missionary journeys in Asia Minor. Second, RIST does have one major virtue. Unlike the majority of social science theories applied to international politics and foreign policy, it is self consciously aware of the importance of military history and of strategy. John Mearsheimer’s The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, previously cited, is exemplary of RIST theorists’ ability to mine history for pertinent lessons about policy. These “positives” about RIST might balance its negatives in a world made up of only non-nuclear powers (before World War II) or of only two nuclear superpowers (the Cold War). But an emerging landscape of “n” nuclear armed state and non-state actors changes the context within which prior arguments worked. RIST works (conditionally) in a world of conventional deterrence, where great powers can still fight major wars at an acceptable cost. Nuclear weapons change this calculation. One might save RIST in a world of nuclear plenty by arguing that nuclear deterrence replaces conventional war fighting as the major stabilizing 62

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dynamic. But this argument cannot fast forward from a bipolar nuclear world into a multipolar system for reasons that RIST theorists themselves have acknowledged: multipolar systems, especially those that are unbalanced, are more war prone than bipolar systems are.11

Nuclear weapons spread: the anointed, aspiring and repentant Pertinent information about the current status of nuclear weapons spread appears in Table 4.2, below. North Korea North Korea reached an agreed framework with the U.S. in 1994 to freeze its plutonium-based nuclear weapons development program in return for aid from the U.S., South Korea and Japan. In October, 2002, Pyongyang admitted that it had been conducting a clandestine uranium enrichment program for the past several years, and it further announced an end to its compliance with the 1994 agreement.12 The DPRK also expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and engaged in brinkmanship with the United States throughout the winter of 2002–2003 by threatening to begin reprocessing of spent fuel rods from its plutonium separation reactor at Yongbyon. The Bush administration was divided between those who preferred a strictly diplomatic track in defusing the Korean nuclear issue, and those who advocated a tougher line that included coercive diplomacy and the possible use of force. Table 4.2 Nuclear proliferation: status Recognized nuclear weapon states

Unrecognized nuclear States of immediate Recent adherents to weapon states proliferation concern NPT

United States Russia United Kingdom France China (PRC) India Pakistan

Israel

North Korea Iran

Algeria Argentina Belarus Brazil Kazakhstan South Africa Ukraine

Source: Arms Control Association, www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/statefct.asp. Downloaded September 15, 2003, and updated by author. Notes 1 India and Pakistan declared themselves nuclear powers after having completed a series of tests in May, 1998. India is estimated to have approximately 50 to 95 warheads and Pakistan 25 to 50 warheads. Neither state is a member of NPT. See Center for Defense Information, The World’s Nuclear Arsenals, updated February 4, 2003, downloaded April 23, 2004, http://www.cdi.org/issues/nukef&f/database/nukearsenals.cfn and Federation of American Scientists, Weapons of Mass Destruction: WMD Around the World, downloaded April 29, 2004, http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/summary.htm. 2 Israel is thought to have from 75 to 125 warheads. Israel is not a signatory of NPT.

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North Korea assented in fall 2003 to take part in multilateral talks including the United States, South Korea, China, Russia and Japan. Pyongyang sought security guarantees against American or other aggression and economic assistance in return for possible limitations on its nuclear program. The Bush administration was adamant that North Korea must disarm its nuclear capability and open its facilities to international inspection in order to receive aid and nonaggression guarantees. Bush preferred a diplomatic solution if one were available, given his preoccupation with Iraq in 2003 and a military spread quite thin as a result of commitments already undertaken. China was expected to help restrain the DPRK’s nuclear ambitions: the PRC (People’s Republic of China) was North Korea’s major source of economic assistance. Russia played a cautious hand, offering supportive gestures on behalf of Korean peninsula de-nuclearization but noncommittal on the specifics of its willingness to contribute to deterrence of North Korean adventurism. Japan’s reaction to the impasse held important implications for stability in North Asia: a North Korea in serial production of nuclear weapons would invite Japan and South Korea to go nuclear also. An open door to an Asian nuclear arms race would result. North Korea indicated during the summer of 2003 that it had completed reprocessing of the stored spent fuel rods from its plutonium-based nuclear program, providing enough weapons grade material for about six nuclear weapons.13 One year later, U.S. officials reportedly concluded that North Korea now had at least eight functional nuclear weapons derived from its plutoniumbased program. They also expected that the DPRK’s uranium-based program would be operational by 2007, providing enough fissile material to produce six additional nuclear weapons per year.14 In addition, the plutonium-based program that is already operational may be able to produce between 29 and 56 weapons annually during the same period. As a result, North Korea could enable between 120 and 250 nuclear weapons of variable yields by the end of the decade.15 U.S. behavior toward North Korea, in contrast to the Bush administration’s energetic march on Baghdad in 2003, is testimony to the persuasive power of a small nuclear arsenal that is even suspect of existence. North Korea poses not only the threat of its own tactical nuclear weapons for military or deterrent purposes, but also the possibility that it could use either its suspect uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing program to go into serial production of fissile material. Already an exporter of ballistic missiles, North Korea could become the world’s leading distributor of assembled warheads or weapons grade material. The now acknowledged success of the clandestine network headed by a former Pakistani nuclear scientist, in distributing nuclear know-how and technology across state borders and under governments’ noses, shows how difficult it would be to interdict an economically desperate and nuclear rich North Korea short of a war on the Korean peninsula that nobody wants.

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Iraq redux The U.S. military campaign against Iraq in 2003 to impose regime change should not cause amnesia about pertinent lessons to be learned from prior efforts to contain Iraqi proliferation. The world was fortunate that Saddam Hussein’s lagging oil revenues prompted his attack on Kuwait in 1990 instead of five years later. Iraq’s massive military establishment included a multi-pronged strategy for acquiring nuclear weapons and a substantial chemical and biological weapons arsenal. Iraq’s nuclear program was, according to authoritative sources, “massive” and “for most practical purposes fiscally unconstrained.”16 The pre-Desert Storm Iraqi nuclear program was also “closer to fielding a nuclear weapon, and less vulnerable to destruction by precision bombing than Coalition air commanders and planners or U.S. intelligence specialists realized before Desert Storm.”17 Coalition target lists on January 16 included two suspect nuclear production facilities: postwar UN inspectors uncovered more than twenty sites related to Iraq’s nuclear program, including sixteen described as “main facilities.”18 The case of Iraq is instructive for optimists about the stability of a new world order marked by proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and modern delivery systems. Consider how different the problem facing the U.S. would have been if Iraq had invaded Kuwait in 1996 instead of 1990. The U.S. in 1990 did not face an Iraqi adversary already equipped with usable nuclear weapons. The U.S. had available for Desert Storm the large, forward deployed forces built up in the Cold War years for a theater-strategic campaign against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev decided with some reluctance to support the UN authorization for the forcible expulsion from Kuwait of its former ally in Baghdad. Iraq’s unwillingness to employ chemical or biological weapons against the U.S. was probably related to its expectation that a U.S. nuclear retaliation might follow, to which Iraq could not respond in kind. An Iraq in 1996 (absent Desert Storm) possessing nuclear charges capable of delivery by air or missile, even over distances of several hundred kilometers, could have posed a threat against outside intervention by the U.S. and its NATO allies, or against regional antagonists like Saudi Arabia and Israel, very different from the threat it posed in 1990. Consider, as well, the implications of the events of 1990 for strategic and tactical intelligence pertinent to deterrence. Iraq successfully concealed from the most technically complex intelligence systems in the world the prewar location of most of the installations related to its nuclear weapons program. Iraqi mobile SCUDs (surface to surface, short range land-based missiles) confounded coalition air war planners to the extent that there exists not even a single documented case of mobile SCUD destruction by coalition fixed-wing aircraft.19 Notably, this level of frustration marked the efforts of the winning side in a very one sided military contest: an essentially post-industrial strategy for warfare against a static defensive strategy accompanied by political ineptitude in Baghdad of the highest order.20 In addition, the U.S. and its allies had five months to build up forces, collect intelligence and plan countermeasures against

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Saddam’s anticipated moves while Iraqi forces inexplicably squatted down in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations. All these considerations point to the uniqueness of the environment surrounding Desert Storm and contain tacit warnings about the potential mischief of a future Saddam, strategically tutored and more decisive. If U.S. intelligence underestimated Iraqi investments in weapons of mass destruction prior to 1991, the opposite error appeared in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. The Iraqi Survey Group of weapons inspectors, led by CIA analyst and former UN weapons inspector David A. Kay, reported in 2004 that they were unable to find the large quantities of biological and chemical weapons attributed to Iraq by U.S. intelligence prior to the outbreak of war in March, 2003. President George W. Bush and others holding key portfolios in his administration had based their public case for war against Iraq mainly on the imminent danger posed by Iraq’s possession of WMD. Bush’s appointment in February, 2004 of a special commission to investigate the performance of the U.S. intelligence community was forced by élite and popular recognition that either prewar intelligence had failed or the administration had cherry picked those parts of intelligence estimates that gave credibility to worst case scenarios. In addition, the question naturally presents itself: if the intelligence got it wrong about the most publicized aspect of the most important threat upon which the Bush team was focused from 9/11 onward, how reliable would intelligence be in a future situation, perhaps of less visibility but equally deadly? Iran The U.S. fixation on Iraq as the military candidate of choice among the charter members of the Axis of Evil left open the status of Iran as well as that of North Korea. The Bush administration acknowledged that Iran was a problem that could not be deferred indefinitely. According to U.S. Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, Iran in June, 2004 was “still pursuing a strategic decision to have a nuclear weapons capability.”21 Iran, according to Bolton, already possessed chemical and biological weapons and was developing longer-range ballistic missiles. He added that “Iran has violated its NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) and IAEA commitments” by covert uranium enrichment and plutonium separation.22 In the same hearing, a U.S. Department of Defense official warned of the military consequences of Iranian nuclearization. Peter Flory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, noted that a nuclear armed Iran would threaten American allies in the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions as well as U.S. forces deployed or deploying there.23 The Bush administration urged a more assertive stance with regard to the IAEA and its approach to the monitoring of conditions in Iran. The U.S. wanted increased transparency with regard to Iran’s probable plutonium separation and uranium enrichment programs. The European Union reached an agreement with 66

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Tehran on nuclear transparency in October, 2003, but it accomplished little or nothing in the way of slaking Iran’s nuclear aspirations. The United Nations Security Council was in an acute diplomatic situation with regard to a potentially nuclear Iran. If the UN were to accept Iran’s going nuclear, the Non-Proliferation Treaty would be meaningless and the ability of the international community to deter further proliferation, greatly impeded. In addition, Iran was judged by the U.S. as a leading sponsor of terrorism: atomic ayatollahs might transfer nukes to terrorists with scores to settle against Israel, the U.S. or U.S. allies in and beyond Europe.24 Whether in support of terrorists or by using its own nuclear arsenal as a deterrent, a nuclear capable Iran would stand in the way of the Bush strategy for checkmating terrorism in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. U.S. security interests in the region are now tied to the outcomes of American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran stands between those two states geographically and geopolitically. Its extensive border with Iraq and with Afghanistan and its own connections to various terrorist organizations, in Palestine and elsewhere, give Iran the potential to disrupt the creation of stable order and security in postTaliban Afghanistan and post-Saddam Iraq. Current U.S. declaratory policy is that Iran, as North Korea, must meet the gold standard of CVID: complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear program. This stated policy would preclude acceptance of any “bomb in the basement” status for Iran on the part of the UN or the United States. According to press reports, Iran told British, French and German officials in July, 2004 that it could produce enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb within a year.25 But Iran even without nuclear weapons has cards to play relative to the long term future of Iraq and Afghanistan, as explained above. In addition, once assumed to be nuclear capable, Iran can engage in denial of access to U.S. or other intervening forces that might go against Tehran’s ambitions to support its aspiring status as a regional superpower by military means. Even tens of nuclear warheads supported by bomber and missile delivery systems of suitable range could exclude intervention or raise the price of intervention by outside powers to unacceptable levels, or nearly so. The risk of nuclear escalation growing out of a conventional war or prewar crisis was also considerable, especially with regard to the relationship between Iran and Israel. Faced with irrefutable evidence that Iran had stood up a bomb making capability, Israel might choose to attack preemptively the Iranian nuclear facilities. Precedent for such an attack had already been set in 1981, when Israel struck the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak in order to deny nuclear capabilities to Saddam Hussein. Iran has already given explicit consideration to this scenario. Iranian Defense Minister Vice Admiral Ali Shamkhani warned in August, 2004 that Iran might preempt the preemption: it might strike first in order to prevent the destruction of its nuclear facilities.26 The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards also warned that, in response to any Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear power plant at Bushehr, Iran would destroy Israel’s nuclear facilities and weapons 67

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stored at Dimona. And Admiral Shamkhani directly connected the deterrence of Israeli preemptive attack to Israel’s relationship with the U.S.: Israel would not carry out such an attack, he said, without a green light from Washington.27 Iran’s arsenal of nuclear capable missiles as of January, 2004 is summarized in Table 4.3, below. Considerable diplomatic intercourse took place with regard to Iran’s possible proliferation during fall, 2004, including robust intervention by a multinational group including Britain, France and Germany. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), nuclear watchdog for the United Nations, decided not to refer the case of Iran to the UN Security Council for further action after Tehran agreed to freeze temporarily all of its activity that might be used to make bomb-grade material. The immediate issue in contention was Iran’s uranium enrichment program. In November, 2004, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that Iran was developing nuclear warheads for use with its ballistic missiles. An Iranian exile group claimed in December, 2004 that Iran was working on long range missiles capable of reaching European capitals, as well as nuclear and chemical warheads. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) reported that Iran was developing missiles with a range of 1,600 to 1,900 miles, capable of hitting cities such as Berlin.28 And, based on intercepted technology shipments to Iran, U.S. intelligence suspected and Bush officials reported that Iran was trying to develop an intercontinental-range ballistic missile that would reach Europe and the United States.29 U.S. and Israeli intelligence were certain to maintain a close watch on the ayatollahs’ nascent deterrent. U.S. nuclear policy and proliferation The Bush administration Nuclear Posture Review, a conceptual study briefed in February, 2002 that may provide a forecast of future research and planning, Table 4.3 Iran’s nuclear capable missiles (as of January, 2004) Name

Range

Payload

Source

Operational status

Scud B (Shahab 1) Scud C (Shahab 2) Shahab 3

Up to 300 km

770–1,100 kg

Deployed

@500 km

@700 kg

Libya, North Korea North Korea

1,300 km

@750 kg

Shahab 4

1,800-2,000 km @1,000 kg

Russia, North Korea Based on Russian SS-4

Tested, some may be deployed Uncertain

Deployed

Source: Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, www.iranwatch.org/wmd/wmd-missile charts.htm. Downloaded September 15, 2004, adapted by author.

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urged rethinking of the relationship between nuclear and conventional weapons in support of U.S. military strategy. The Pentagon study called for a “New Triad” or more diverse set of nuclear and non-nuclear, offensive and defensive, capabilities for a variety of missions.30 Components of the new triad are offensive nuclear and non-nuclear strike means; passive and active defenses, including missile defenses; and the defense-industrial infrastructure that supports offensive and defensive elements of the new triad. The new conceptual approach means that nuclear weapons will be integrated with other military capabilities and not necessarily treated as separate compartments. It also implies that nuclear weapons will not be reserved for deterrent missions only, as was the case for much of the Cold War. Instead, U.S. nuclear weapons could be tasked to accomplish important wartime missions that were beyond the capabilities of non-nuclear munitions: for example the destruction of enemy command bunkers deeply buried under many feet of rock and concrete.31 On the other hand, the Bush nuclear policy review also calls for the development of non-nuclear weapons capable of striking targets previously assigned to nuclear forces, in order to reduce collateral damage and avoid crossing the nuclear threshold unnecessarily. Pentagon planners apparently sought a spectrum of options that would include the use of variable-yield or low-yield nukes so that “nuclear attack options that vary in scale, scope and purpose will complement other military capabilities.”32 Critics of the study (portions of which remained classified) contended that the creation of low-yield nuclear bunker busters and other tactical nuclear weapons would return the world to the early Cold War climate of expectations. As part of its nuclear guarantee to NATO, the United States deployed numerous short or medium range nuclear weapons in Western Europe. Although part of NATO’s deterrent mission, the weapons were also deployed for possible nuclear first use against invading Soviet motorized rifle regiments and tactical air forces. Eventually, technology development in non-nuclear strike systems and strategic rethinking, under the aegis of AirLand Battle and NATO’s Follow-On Forces Attack (FOFA), improved the firebreak between conventional war and nuclear first use. But the early decades of the Cold War involved military planning in Washington, Brussels and Moscow that anticipated prompt use of theater nuclear weapons in any major war. What might happen after the early exchanges of tactical nuclear weapons was not clear. The Cold War and the Soviet Union are both gone. So the possible use of “micronukes” by the United States is not automatically connected to a nuclear chain of escalation that would result in global conflagration. Nevertheless, reactions from post-Cold War Russia and China to the leaked U.S. nuclear policy guidance were highly critical. A Russian legislator opined that, since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Americans “have somewhat lost touch with the reality in which they live.” And the director of the Institute of International Relations at Qinghua University, People’s Republic of China, said that the “Bush administration seems determined to go back toward a Cold War strategy.”33 69

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On the other hand, the Bush administration claimed that its strategy was really two sided. It was agreeing to reduce significantly the total numbers of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons and delivery systems. At the same time, it was seeking to diversify both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons to support a military strategy of long range, precision warfare based on advanced sensors, communications and command-control systems. Nuclear weapons were part of a new military synergy and no longer a door opener to world war. It was the Bush administration’s view that its critics were still locked into a Cold War mentality that treated all nukes as equally bad regardless of their size or purpose. Scholars might be appalled by the assumption of a single spectrum of capability including nuclear and conventional munitions. But post-9/11 American policy makers seemed to feel empowered to reach for any tools that would deter or defeat state sponsors of terrorism or anti-systemic nuclear proliferators, especially charter members of the “Axis of Evil” who remain in Tehran and Pyongyang.34 In addition to having recognized the need to constrain the options of the most dangerous nuclear-aspiring states, Bush policy also recognized the need for more inclusive measures to limit the supply or demand for nuclear weapons. On the supply side, the U.S. supported movement toward a Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty or other international agreement that would restrict the production of plutonium and enriched uranium for military purposes. On the demand side, it became clearer to experts inside and outside of government that “coalitions of the willing” were less reliable in retarding the spread of WMD than were firm alliance commitments offering multilateral security guarantees. U.S. security pacts with NATO allies, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan had helped to forestall interests on the part of those states in going nuclear, during and after the Cold War. U.S. “extended deterrence” in the future would depend less on a nuclear umbrella cast over allies, as it operated during the Cold War, and more on the evident U.S. superiority in advanced technology conventional warfare. Nevertheless, behind U.S. leadership in conventional war fighting stood the shadow of America’s nuclear deterrent if needed to deter nuclear adventurism by rogues or others. The impact of Bush nuclear policy on proliferation was certain to be a subject of future academic and policy debates.35 A useful conclusion to this section, summarized in Table 4.4, p. 71, is to identify the main schools of thought about nuclear proliferation that divide the policy community and academic experts. Adherents of each perspective make some important assumptions about the nature of the international system, to be sure, but they also make important assumptions about the probable behavior of state actors and the expected consequences of those behaviors. And some of the assumptions about the likelihood and controllability of nuclear proliferation made by the various schools are equally valuable in comprehending debates about other WMD. The schools of thought summarized in Table 4.4 refer to various views of nuclear proliferation among states. The problem of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons is discussed in the next section. Thus far, it would appear that a significant gap is 70

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Table 4.4 Nuclear proliferation: academic and policy perspectives Position

Definition

Pro-proliferation pandemicists

The spread of nuclear weapons can be controlled and made compatible with international stability. Under some foreseeable conditions, “more” is actually “better.” Nuclear weapons are no more dangerous after the Cold War than they were during it. New nuclear powers are not necessarily more accident prone or risk averse than older ones. Pro-proliferation Proliferation is dangerous if weapons and delivery systems spread to selectivists rogue regimes, terrorists, and those with grudges against the existing order. But in the hands of states that support peaceful resolution of disputes and among whom a stable security community exists, nuclear weapons do no harm and may reinforce stability. Anti-proliferation No spread of nuclear weapons is good. Efforts should be made to systemists prevent any additional non-nuclear states from going nuclear, and opportunities to roll back existing nuclear arsenals should be taken advantage of. “Fewer” is always better. Anti-proliferation Despite the best of intentions, nuclear weapons, other WMD and incrementalists missile delivery systems are fated to spread beyond the circle of present holders. U.S. policy should aim to check those aspiring nuclear powers who might pose security risks to U.S. allies, to the American homeland, or to U.S. capabilities for military deployment overseas. Source: Author.

evident between the expectations of small, or aspiring, nuclear powers for deterrent effect of nuclear weapons, on one hand, and the complications introduced into their security dilemmas and foreign policies, on the other. As Mark T. Clark has noted, about the short history of small nuclear powers: Acquiring nuclear weapons means acquiring a whole host of new problems, even greater than the problems of not having them. Trying to figure out how to secure them, use them, or lose them are among only a few of the numerous problems that attend such weapons. More importantly, having nuclear weapons means having to consider how to defend against them, and how to rebuild society should deterrence fail; neither consideration is easy.36

Terrorists and the spread of nuclear weapons The terrorist attacks of 9/11 on the American homeland upset some prior assumptions about state actors as the most probable sources of threat to U.S. national security. The Bush administration, in the aftermath of 9/11, emphasized the possibility that terrorists might acquire weapons of mass destruction and use them to create an even more devastating attack than 9/11. The possibility that rogue states

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armed with WMD would transfer those weapons to terrorists was emphasized by Bush in building his case for U.S. military intervention to topple the regime in Iraq in 2003. U.S. national security strategy included the explicit option of preemptive strikes against terrorists and rogue states armed with WMD and thought to be plotting attacks against the United States or its allies. For purposes of this study, the pertinent question is how WMD-equipped terrorists affect the argument between optimists and pessimists about nuclear weapons spread. At first blush, the possibility of nuclear armed terrorists might strengthen the arguments of proliferation pessimists. Nuclear armed states, in pessimists’ eyes, constitute enough of a danger already; adding terrorists into the mix only makes things worse. However, from the standpoint of theory, it does not necessarily follow that increasing danger from nuclear capable terrorists makes a stronger case against further spread of weapons among nuclear armed states. States have more legal accountability than terrorists do. Intelligence on the behavior of most governments is easier to compile than intelligence about widely dispersed and cellular terrorist groups. States share a common interest in saving their regimes and this makes them suspicious of WMD-capable terrorists, even of those with similar political confessions. Thus, for example, Saudi Arabia, the principal state financier for the spread of radical Islam in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, would be loath to provide al-Qaeda or other Islamic terrorists with WMD that might be used against the regime in Riyadh or its allies. And despite the claims of the Bush administration prior to the U.S. war against Iraq in 2003, there is still only ambiguous evidence of any connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq prior to 9/11. Why a secular socialist like Saddam Hussein would have passed WMD to Islamic fundamentalists, motivated by a desire to destroy regimes like his, can only be explained by assuming that Hussein was purposefully self delusional. We have just stated that the risks of terrorists with nuclear or other WMD are not necessarily transitive to additional weapons spread among states. The point conceded, it is necessary to make others. Although there is no necessary connection between spreading weapons among non-state and state actors, international politics does not always follow the logic of necessity. Actors choose, and not all actors choose wisely, especially from the standpoint of international peace and security. More weapons available to more states might tempt unscrupulous political or military leaders, or their advisors, to transfer technology or know-how through clandestine networks across state boundaries. These clandestine networks could serve as templates to empower not only states but also terrorists. Something like the process described above may have happened in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s. The former scientific director and founder of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program has been identified as the ringleader of a transnational black market that made available nuclear technology, materials and expertise to a variety of rogue states and others, including Iran, Libya and North Korea.37 The mélange of government scientists, entrepreneurs, and expeditors involved in this Wal-Mart of privatized proliferation may never be fully sorted out. But it is far 72

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from reassuring that this mafia of nuclear technology transfer operated under the radar of governments for decades with, or without, their collusion. If terrorists failed to acquire any relevant technology or expertise as a result of this international nuclear festschrift, it’s a fortunate miracle: but don’t bet the farm on it. The problem of terrorists or other non-state actors with nuclear weapons is partly analogous to the problem of states with small and first-strike vulnerable nuclear arsenals. States with vulnerable forces are required to operate their weapons and delivery systems on a hair trigger. If two or more states with vulnerable forces live in the same regional neighborhood, preemption becomes more appealing during a crisis that creates a reciprocal fear of surprise attack. Terrorists do not usually have a singular “address” or central command post, the destruction of which can guarantee the nullification of their striking power. But the states that harbor terrorists might invite preemptive raids or attacks against terrorist operations centers or planning cells. If these terrorist cells anticipate such an attack from outside or within their host country, they could fire off their own preemptive attack against enemy forces. Or, a more compelling option for terrorists who fear imminent attack by state actors might be a first-strike against civilians, as a warning designed to deter their host state and/or outside interveners from further adventurism. For example, suppose the following scenario. Pakistan’s shaky government is about to fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalist parties by means of elections, insurrection or coup. The position of the Pakistani military and intelligence services is unclear, with shifting coalitions and plots afoot. As various factions contend for power, dissident groups of military and security officers infiltrate nuclear weapons storage sites, obtaining possession of warheads for airborne or missile delivery. The nuclear chain of command and control between the President and the armed forces, including custody of weapons and control over launch vehicles, begins to unravel. Faced with this possibility, U.S. leaders decide to authorize clandestine operations in order to gain custody of remaining warheads and/or to exfiltrate as many weapons as possible before Islamic militants supported by military dissidents can seize the weapons. U.S. special forces, backed up by sympathetic Pakistani troops, clash with indigenous armed factions of militants near weapons storages sites, airfields and missile depots. Fighting spreads into civil war between Islamic radicals and U.S.–Pakistani forces on one axis, and among various armed Islamic groups on the other, with the control of nuclear weapons as one of the stakes. Eventually an armed Islamic faction is thought to have obtained control over several warheads and one or two delivery systems, with the probable support of some Pakistani military. Militants, blaming the United States for invading Pakistan without provocation and seeking to bring down the regime by war widening, fire a nuclear tipped missile into India. Admittedly there is some Hollywood aspect to the preceding scenario: a compound felony of opportunistic grasps for power, a deteriorating chain of command, and an external intervention for the purpose of controlling WMD otherwise falling into unauthorized hands. But the Hollywood scenario is not entirely 73

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fictional: scenarios such as this have been war gamed, and played with the assumption that the U.S. might be forced to intervene in a failed or failing state with unclear control over its WMD. One recipe for disaster would be states with failing political legitimacy, widespread armed dissidence, and ethno-religious fault lines of socio-political cleavage. States with these political attributes might already be safe havens for terrorists capable of acquiring and using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. An Iran caught up in revolutionary upheaval between contending factions of modernizers and mullahs, and already in possession of nuclear weapons, could witness a power struggle that led to unauthorized delegation of nuclear command authority and/or illicit transfer of nuclear weapons to third parties allied to one faction or another. The third parties could include terrorists. Another danger presented by the possible trickle down of nuclear weapons from states to terrorists lies in the cellular and highly distributed structure of transnational terror groups. A terrorist group or faction that acquired a nuclear weapon might not be able to exercise sustained or effective control over it. Weapons could pass in and out of the flexible, amoeba-like structure of terror networks and be lost to any international or domestic system of tracking. It is unlikely that this eventuality would provide enough weapons for a catastrophic attack against a major military target, but even one or two loose nukes could create unprecedented havoc and destruction in U.S. or allied cities. Worse than the threat you can see coming, at least in a general way and from a somewhat predictable direction, would be this kind of directionless and blindsiding attack orchestrated by a few demented or apocalyptic individuals willing to die for their cause. The idiosyncratic, proto-terrorist strike by armed and disturbed individuals is not only beyond deterrence, but in all likelihood, also beyond detection until too late. Therefore even a few loose nukes or a grapefruit sized sphere of plutonium at large brings the possibility of mass destruction down from the shelf of the (hitherto) fictional into the realm of actual disaster. The danger posed by nuclear armed terrorists for the U.S. and other states is, therefore, not easily fitted in to probabilistic models of asymmetrical attacks and deterrent or preemptive responses. Motivations and the attributes of terrorist organizations matter, and the logic of rational deterrence theory is not irrelevant to the problem, but very much based on fresh and accurate intelligence. As we have learned, intelligence on issues of WMD has often been challenged to get it right. The U.S. greatly underestimated the scope of Iraq’s pre-1991 WMD program, including its effort to acquire a nuclear weapons capability. The same U.S. intelligence community was surprised to find no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the conclusion of the active combat phase of Iraqi Freedom in 2003 (after almost a year of expert searching). North Korea’s acknowledgment that it had been violating the Agreed Framework of 1994 to freeze its nuclear program caught U.S. officials off guard in 2002. And U.S. intelligence failed to predict the Indian and Pakistani decisions to go publicly nuclear in a series of reciprocal tests in May, 1998. Most memorably and regrettably, the use by 9/11 attackers of civilian 74

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airliners as strategic (although non-nuclear) weapons of mass destruction circumvented the defenses and expectations of a number of U.S. bureaus and agencies, including immigration controls, airport security and counter-intelligence. Complacency is not recommended.

Conclusion It’s a split decision. RIST and RDT (rational deterrence theory) theories offer some important insights about international politics, and they have a justifiable center of gravity based on recognition of the importance of military history and strategy. But theorists and policy makers need to borrow carefully from RIST and RDT theories. RIST theory offers explanatory and predictive hypotheses that fit some worlds better than others. A world of many nuclear armed states has the potential to drive RIST theorists, not to say deterrence models, into the wood chippers of history. Two variables will help to determine whether RIST and RDT theories will remain compelling in a world of nuclear plenty: (1) whether the distribution of power among nuclear armed actors is relatively balanced or unbalanced; and (2) whether the aims of nuclear states are status quo or revisionist in their attitude toward the existing distribution of international power and other values. RIST and RDT have a lot to say about the first set of variables but understate the importance of the second set. The relative military potential of state actors matters a great deal for the future of deterrence; so, too, do the aspirations and motivations of the future nuclear heads of state. Adding terrorists into the equation of possibly nuclear armed actors, with even more obscure or solipsistic motives, creates new uncertainties for defense planners and theorists alike. Respect for uncertainty and surprise can leaven even the most determinate and deductive international relations theories, and should – especially when so much is at stake, for so many.

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5 NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION IN ASIA Beyond control?

Introduction In February, 2005 the arms race in Asia turned another corner when North Korea publicly acknowledged it had available one or more nuclear weapons. U.S. military strategy and arms control policy both emphasize the containment of the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The most dangerous WMD are the nuclear ones, and a nuclear arms race is now under way in Asia. Although policy makers and others concerned about nuclear weapons spread can continue to hope for the best, it is time to begin thinking seriously about the worst. In the discussion that follows, we conjecture about a future in which at least eight nuclear armed Asian powers are linked by shared danger and, therefore, a common deterrence space. We project to the year 2020 or shortly thereafter: into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The eight candidate Asian nuclear powers are provided with notional forces, making possible comparisons among states’ forces on a variety of dimensions. The political context of an Asian nuclear arms race is obviously different from the political context that surrounded U.S.–Soviet competition throughout the Cold War. Therefore, the consequences of variations in the performances of assorted forces may be more significant for crisis and arms race stability in an eight-sided arms competition, compared to the two-way street of the Cold War.

Growing danger Official United States policy has been to support the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), requiring non-nuclear state subscribers to the treaty to abjure the option of nuclear weapons. Non-nuclear states have, under the NPT regime, the right to develop a complete nuclear fuel cycle for peaceful purposes: generating electricity, for example. States adhering to the NPT are required to make available their facilities and infrastructure for scheduled or challenge inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The IAEA has a mixed track record: depending on the cooperation or resistance of the regime in question, inspectors may obtain an accurate roadmap of a country’s nuclear program, or be

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misled. In Iraq, for example, regular IAEA inspections prior to 1991 failed to detect the complete size and character of Saddam Hussein’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence has also performed erratically in ascertaining the extent of WMD, including nuclear, activities in potential proliferators. The CIA assured President Bush and his advisors that the presence of large quantities of WMD in Iraq in 2003 was a “slam dunk”; in the event, no WMD were found by inspectors after the completion of Operation Iraqi Freedom and the ousting of Hussein from power. The CIA was apparently taken by surprise in 1998 by the Indian and Pakistani nearly simultaneous detonations of nuclear weapons, followed by announcements in New Delhi and Islamabad that each was now an acknowledged nuclear power. The U.S. government signed an agreement with North Korea in 1994 freezing its nuclear development programs, but in 2002 North Korea unexpectedly denounced the agreement, admitted it had been cheating, and marched into the ranks of nuclear powers. The difficulties in containing the spread of nuclear weapons and delivery systems are only compounded by the possibility that materials or technology could find its way into the hands of terrorists, to deadly effect. Reportedly, al-Qaeda has tried to obtain weapons grade material (enriched uranium and plutonium) and assistance in assembling both true nuclear weapons and radiological bombs (conventional explosives that scatter radioactive debris). Nuclear weapons are in a class by themselves as weapons of “mass destruction”: thus, a miniature nuclear weapon exploded in an urban area could cause much more death and destruction than either biological or chemical weapons similarly located. In addition to the plausible interest of terrorists in nuclear weapons, there is also the disconcerting evidence of nuclear entrepreneurship resulting in proliferation. The A.Q. Khan network of Pakistani and other government officials, middlemen, scientists and nondescripts trafficked for several decades in nuclear technology and know-how. The Khan network, described as a Wal-Mart of nuclear proliferation, apparently reached out and touched North Korea, Libya and Iran, among others.1 States seeking a nuclear start-up can save enormous amounts of time and money by turning to experts in and out of government for help, and the knowledge how to fabricate nuclear weapons is no longer as esoteric as it was in the early days of the atomic age. In response to 9/11 and to the possible failure of nuclear containment in Asia and the Middle East, the Bush administration has sought to reinforce traditional nonproliferation with an interest in preemptive attack strategies and missile defenses. U.S. superiority in long range, precision weapons makes preemption technically feasible, provided the appropriate targets have been identified. U.S. policy guidance apparently also allows for the possible use of nuclear weapons in preemptive attack against hostile states close to acquiring their own nuclear arsenals.2 Missile defenses are further behind the curve, compared to deep strike, but the first U.S. national missile defense (NMD) deployments took place in 2004, under the Bush administration commitment to deploy defenses based on several 77

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technologies against rogue state or terrorist attacks. Preemption strategies and defenses are controversial in their own right. For present purposes, however, they are simply talismans of U.S. government awareness and acknowledgment that containment and deterrence can no longer complete the anti-proliferation tool kit. The almost inexorable march of nuclear weapons after the Cold War has caught some observers by surprise. During the Cold War, nuclear weapons spread from state to state at a slower rate than pessimists projected. In part, this was due to the bipolar character of the international system and nuclear preeminence of the Soviet Union and the United States over other contenders. Both superpowers discouraged horizontal proliferation among other state actors, even as they engaged in vertical proliferation by creating larger and more technically advanced arsenals. The end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union have moved the zone of political uncertainty, and the interest in WMD and missiles, eastward, across the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific basin.3 The states of North America and Western Europe, pacified or at least debellicized by an expanded NATO and a downsized Russia, regard nuclear weapons as dated remnants of the age of mass destruction. The most recent “Revolution in Military Affairs” has created a new hierarchy of powers, based on the application of knowledge and information to military art.4 Nuclear and other WMD are, from the standpoint of postmodern Westerners, the military equivalent of museum pieces – although still dangerous in the wrong hands. On the other hand, major states in Asia, and in the Middle East within the range of long range missiles based in Asia, see nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles as potential trumps. The appeal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems for these states is at least threefold. First, they enable “denial of access” strategies for foreign powers who might want to interfere in regional issues (read: the U.S. and NATO). U.S. military success in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003 only reinforced this rationale of access denial via WMD for aspiring regional hegemons or nervous dictators. Second, nuclear weapons might permit some states to coerce others who lack countermeasures in the form of deterrence. Israel’s nuclear weapons, not officially acknowledged but widely known, have appealed to Tel Aviv as a deterrent against provocative behavior by Arab neighbors and as a possible “Samson” option on the cusp of military defeat leading to regime change. Third, nuclear weapons permit states lacking the resources for advanced technology, conventional military systems to stay in the game of declared major powers. Russia is the most obvious example of this syndrome. Without its nuclear arsenal, Russia would be vulnerable to nuclear blackmail, or even to conventional military aggression, from a variety of strategic directions. Russia’s holdover deterrent from the Cold War, assuming eventual modernization, guarantees Moscow military respect in Europe and makes its neighbors in Asia more circumspect. North Korea is another example of a state whose reputation and regard are enhanced by its possible deployment of nuclear weapons and long range ballistic 78

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missiles. Absent a nuclear capability, North Korea is a politically isolated outlaw state with a bankrupt economy that would receive almost no international respect. But as an apparent nuclear power, North Korea plays nuclear poker with the five-nation coalition attempting to disarm its program by peaceful means: the U.S., Russia, China, Japan and South Korea. North Korea’s bargaining power in this situation is immense, and not only on account of the possible outbreak of war between the two Koreas or the launch of a DPRK ballistic missile against Japan. Failure to contain proliferation in Pyongyang could spread nuclear fever throughout Asia. Japan and South Korea might seek nuclear weapons and missile defenses. A pentagonal configuration of nuclear powers in the Pacific basin (Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas – not including the United States, with its own Pacific interests) would put deterrence at risk and create enormous temptation toward nuclear preemption. Worse might follow. The five-sided nuclear competition in the Pacific would be linked, in geopolitical deterrence and proliferation space, to the existing nuclear deterrents of India and Pakistan, and to the emerging nuclear weapons status of Iran. An arc of nuclear instability from Tehran to Tokyo could place U.S. proliferation strategies into the ash heap of history and call for more drastic military options, not excluding preemptive war, defenses and counter-deterrent special operations. In addition, an eight-sided nuclear arms race in Asia would increase the likelihood of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war. It would do so because: (1) some of these states already have histories of protracted conflict; (2) states may have politically unreliable or immature command and control systems, especially during a crisis involving a decision for nuclear first-strike or retaliation, and such unreliable or immature systems might permit a technical malfunction that caused an unintended launch, or a deliberate, but unauthorized, launch by rogue commanders; (3) faulty intelligence and warning systems might cause one side to misinterpret the other’s defensive moves to forestall attack as offensive preparations for attack, thus triggering a mistaken preemption. Thus far, we have discussed the problem of an Asian nuclear arms race as an abstract, albeit sufficiently alarming, problem. In the sections of the chapter to follow, we want to pin down the concept by detailed interrogation of one hypothetical scenario: an eight-sided nuclear polygon of force structures and, therefore, of probable operational performances in deterrence, in crisis management and, if necessary, in war. Before being scenario specific, however, we need to resolve, or at least address, matters of “philosophy of analysis” or analytic points of departure pertinent to this study.

Linear, nonlinear or chaotic? The effort to choreograph a many-sided Asian nuclear arms race circa 2020 presents a number of conceptual problems. For example, the investigator needs to consider whether the spread of nuclear weapons will take place in a linear, nonlinear or chaotic fashion. In a linear case, one new nuclear state leads directly to 79

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the creation of one or several others. In a nonlinear situation, either one new nuclear power may set off a chain reaction that multiplies the number of states bent on nuclear arsenals, or (the opposite) a controversial case of proliferation causes international outcry and makes further weapons spread more controversial. The first situation, of nuclear multiplication, is a case of positive feedback in a nonlinear condition; the second, of negative feedback. In contrast to the linear or nonlinear condition, a chaotic situation is one in which the relationships between cause and effect are so complicated and/or so arbitrary that they defy scientific analysis and policy planning. The difference between chaos and nonlinearity is not always clear to the observer and, especially, to the participant-observer who is living through a time of crisis or war. The image of war as chaos attracts novelists, but some military historians and political scientists consider war to be more nonlinear than chaotic.5 Carl von Clausewitz leaves the issue open for later argument. His own copious work, especially his masterpiece On War, was an effort to explain the essentials of war and its relationship to policy.6 His success in defining some of the more important attributes of war and military art, for generations of successors among historians and warriors, argues for the presence of some enduring regularities in the conduct of war and battle. On the other hand, no writer has outperformed Clausewitz in characterizing the atmosphere of combat and the psychology of war. You can call it nonlinear, chaotic or otherwise, but Clausewitz’s discussions of friction in war, chance, uncertainty and other imponderables of battle, including the psychological burdens on the mind of the commander, caution against scientific and military complacency.7 Clausewitz’s masterpiece suggests that the true understanding of war is both intellectual (from the outside in) and existential (from the inside out). And what the commander thinks he knows prior to the start of battle may soon dissipate in the fog of war, leaving him morally and psychologically stunned: like Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace. So, at a personal level, war is nonlinear, chaotic and worse – but it is also sometimes noble, efficient and patriotic. At the very moment that soldiers and scholars feel that they have comprehended war, it surprises them again. Arms races are less complicated in this regard, compared to war. There is nothing noble about the spread of nuclear weapons and the dangers it poses. If that spread is linear, then traditional measures of containment, such as treaty regimes and trade embargoes, may work. If nuclear proliferation becomes nonlinear, with positive feedback, then more active anti-proliferation steps may need to be taken: including preemption, defenses and nuclear counterterrorism. A chaotic process of nuclear weapons spread would resist modeling altogether, unless Freudians are willing to have a crack at it. There exists a mathematics of chaos theory, but it would fall short of the complexity of human behavior related to decisions about state policy and nuclear decision making – especially those not yet taken. The present discussion leaves us somewhere between linear and nonlinear models of nuclear proliferation, leaning toward the latter. As untidy as this decision might be, from a strictly scientific point of view, it fits the spongy reality of 80

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world politics and the uncertainty of forecasting social unknowns. In the next section, we develop a specific scenario for multiple Asian nuclear actors and test out some propositions about their arsenals.

States and forces Comparative deployments and outcomes What would a nuclear arms race in Asia look like, after the second decade of the present century? If proliferation in Asia is successfully contained or rolled back, by politics or by war, speculation becomes irrelevant. Therefore we will assume a more pessimistic future: proliferation is not contained. The third decade of the twenty-first century witnesses an eight-sided nuclear club, to include: Russia, China, Japan, North and South Korea, India, Pakistan and Iran. Although proliferation is not contained under this set of assumptions, it does not automatically result in war. The assumption that nuclear weapons can spread among these states without war will be questioned by some, and with some justification. For example, the U.S. has declared that an Iranian or a North Korean nuclear capability is presently unacceptable: the former must be prevented, and the latter must be rolled back. And some experts would surely argue that China would never accept a Japan armed with nuclear weapons. On the other hand, the rollback of North Korea’s nuclear program is not a certainty: a complicated international bargaining process may leave the DPRK as a standing nuclear power, with a trade-off including more glasnost on the part of the regime, a willingness on the part of Pyongyang to adhere to international arms control agreements, and economic assistance from the U.S. and other powers to help rebuild North Korea’s moribund economy. As for the Iranian nuclear case, both Israel and the United States have obliquely threatened preemption (presumably with conventional weapons) against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and against any nuclear capable military forces. But the costs of carrying out the threat of preemption against Iran must be factored into the equation. Iran is a large state and cannot be conquered and occupied by outside powers, unlike Iraq. Iran could therefore reconstitute any destroyed nuclear power plants or other infrastructure. An additional consideration is political. An Israeli preemption against Iran becomes a recruitment poster for another holy war by jihadists against Israel. Iran has been one of the major sponsors of Hezbollah and other groups that have carried out past terror attacks in Palestine. An Israeli preemption against Tehran might reignite the intifada or otherwise destabilize the peace process headed toward political devolution and Palestinian self rule. The point is that many uncertainties loom, and the exclusion of any specific candidate state from the future nuclear club is not automatic. Therefore, we will include all eight in the analysis and assign to them notional forces. As a benchmark, we assume that the older and newer nuclear forces are deployed within an agreed limit comparable to the agreed ceilings of the Moscow Treaty between the

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U.S. and Russia: a ceiling of 2,200 warheads on launchers of “strategic” or intercontinental range, with freedom to mix various types of launch platforms among land-based, sea-based and air-launched weapons. However, given the geography of the situation, it is not necessary for some states to have missiles or aircraft of transcontinental range in order to inflict strategic, i.e. catastrophic and decisive, damage on one or more adversaries. Therefore, nuclear capable missiles of intermediate or medium range, and bombers with comparable combat radii, might qualify as strategic launchers: depending on who is actually threatening, or shooting at, whom. For analytical purposes, we will simply stipulate that “ICBM” or “bomber” could also include ballistic missile or fixed-wing aircraft of less than transcontinental range. (Cruise missiles are omitted from the present analysis for purposes of simplification, but the reader should be alerted that, as cruise missiles become smarter, stealthier and more widely available, they could be a preferred weapon for some states if capped with nuclear charges, compared to ballistic missiles.) States and forces in the analysis are thus summarized as follows: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Russia = Balanced Triad Japan = No ICBMs China = Bomber Light North Korea = ICBM Heavy South Korea = SLBM Light India = Full Menu Pakistan = Few SLBMs Iran = Missiles Forward

Figure 5.1, p. 83, summarizes the forces deployed and available to the various state parties, under the agreed (formal or tacit) ceiling of 2,200 warheads.8 Each nation would have to plan for the likelihood that only a portion of its forces would survive a nuclear first-strike, retaliate and arrive at their assigned targets. The relationship between each state’s initially deployed forces and its survivable and retaliating forces is summarized in Figure 5.2, p. 84. In addition, the numbers of surviving and retaliating warheads are grouped by the alert status and launch doctrines for each military. Forces may be on either of two alert statuses (generated or day alert), and they may be planning for prompt or delayed launch after attack. Several findings of significance are already apparent, and some are counterintuitive for advocates of nonproliferation. From the standpoint of deterrence stability, there is no clear metric by which one can say that “so many additional nuclear powers equate to such-and-such a decline in deterrence. First, it is not impossible for a many-sided nuclear rivalry, even one as regionally robust as this case is, to be stable. Nor is stability guaranteed. Provided it has the resources and the technical know-how to do so, each state could deploy sufficient numbers of “first-strike survivable” forces to guarantee the “minimum deterrent” mission, 82

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Figure 5.1 Total strategic weapons

and perhaps the “assured destruction” mission as well. Both “minimum deterrence” and “assured destruction” are terms of art that overlap in practice. Assured destruction (or assured retaliation) forces are second-strike forces sufficient under all conditions of attack to inflict “unacceptable” societal damage. Unacceptable varies with the recipient of the damage and depends on cultural values and political priorities. But it would be safe to assume that the decapitation of the regime and the loss of at least 25 per cent of its population and/or one-half its industrial base would satisfy the requirements of assured destruction for “rational” attackers (defining “rationality” is a separate problem – see below). Minimum deterrence is a standard presumably less ambitious than assured destruction: it requires only that the defender inflict costs on the attacker that would create enough pain to make the gamble of an attack insufficiently appealing. For example: during the Cold War, the French nuclear retaliatory forces were not sufficient by themselves to deter a Soviet attack on NATO, but they might have deterred nuclear blackmail against France separately by threatening Moscow with the prospect of “tearing an arm off,” or destroying several Soviet cities. To see the preceding arguments more clearly, let us compare the outcomes for two sets of operational assumptions. First, in Figure 5.3, we summarize the performances of each state’s forces under the most favorable operational conditions: the retaliator has forces on generated alert and decides in favor of 83

N U C L E A R P R O L I F E R AT I O N I N A S I A Arriving retaliatory weapons 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 Russia Bal Triad GEN, LOW 1784 GEN, ROA 1379

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Figure 5.3 Maximum retaliation: generated alert, launch on warning

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Figure 5.4 Assured retaliation: day-to-day alert, ride out attack

prompt launch. This maximum condition for each state’s forces is compared to the minimum condition of alertness and launch readiness, summarized in Figure 5.4. Some of the states’ forces perform more effectively than others. Much depends on force mix as well as alertness and launch protocols. States more dependent upon land-based missiles in fixed basing modes, as opposed to submarines and bombers, will find themselves more dependent upon prompt as opposed to delayed launch for survivability. And bombers are not nearly as assuredly survivable as submarines. On the other hand, the complexity of operating submarine missile forces is daunting: ballistic missile firing submarines require advanced construction techniques, sophisticated command-control systems, and highly educated officers and enlisted personnel. Political reliability is also necessary: submarine forces cause problems for dictatorships, since once at sea, captains and crews can resist micromanagement better than land-based forces can. The Soviet Union attempted to solve this problem during the Cold War by assigning special political officers to each boat, watching over the political reliability of the captain and crew and having to acquiesce to any orders that required other than routine business. Nor should the complexity of operating bombers as nuclear retaliatory forces be underestimated. Bombers have the advantage that they can be scrambled, or even launched, to signal firm intent, but then recalled short of attack. They are less first-strike survivable than submarines, but more so than silo-based missiles. 85

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Bombers also have men in the loop who have considerable discretion once they are in flight and enroute to “fail safe” points prior to final attack confirmation. Bombers would probably exist in so many varieties among the various states that no single standard of readiness, flight training or technological performance would serve as an adequate basis for deterrence planning. A number of states included in our analysis might still rely on tactical fighter-bombers instead of “true” special purpose strategic bombers for the delivery of nuclear munitions by air-to-ground missiles or gravity bombs. As “slow flyers” compared to missiles, bombers pose less of a threat of preemptive attack provided early warning is obtained: the quality of air defenses throughout the region and among our states of interest varies considerably. The preceding discussion is only the tip of the iceberg, however. The stability of the Asian balance of terror rests more on the political intentions of the actors than it does on the characteristics of their forces. Their forces can support a policy of adventurism and brinkmanship or one of adherence to the political status quo and “live and let live,” or a range of policies in between. In international systems terms, stability is enhanced when the power of states favoring the status quo exceeds the power of states or other actors in favor of systemic overthrow. The “status quo” here refers to the existing number of major actors, their relative military and other power positions, and the polarities that create tension and possible conflicts among them. These matters can be unpredictable and surprising even for heads of state and military planners whose business it is to avoid systemic surprise. As an example, the process by which the July crisis of 1914 avoided diplomatic resolution and led the great powers into World War I involved preexisting alliance commitments, ill considered diplomatic demarches, and inappropriate military plans highly dependent upon rapid mobilization and deployment immediately prior to war. Leaders saw hasty mobilization as a deterrent, but overlapping mobilizations, combined with political alarms in late July and early August, created a vortex of suspicion that leaders seeking an “out” were unable to control. Although the projection of past events into future scenarios is always perilous, something like the July, 1914 crisis in Europe could erupt in Asia once nuclear weapons have been distributed among eight states and in numbers sufficient to tempt crisis-bound leaders. National, religious or other cultural hatreds could be combined with the memory of past wrongs and the fear of preemptive attack. This could occur not only between dyads of states but between alliances, as it did on the eve of World War I. Coalitions might form among a nuclear armed China, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran – lined up against Russia, Japan, South Korea and India. This would be an alignment of market democracies of various stripes against dictatorships or authoritarian regimes of sorts. Another possibility would be conflicts between dyads within, or across, democratic and dictatorial coalitions: for example, rivalry between Japan and China, between the two Koreas, or between India and Pakistan. Russia might find itself in bilateral competition or conflict with China or with Japan. Iran might use its nuclear capability for 86

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coercion against U.S. allies, such as Saudi Arabia or Israel, drawing American political commitments and military power directly into a regional crisis. China might coerce or attack Taiwan, with the same result. Measuring stability and sensitivity We noted previously that decisions for war or nuclear blackmail will probably be driven by political variables more than military ones. Nevertheless, even in the case of nuclear forces which are intended more for coercion than for actual use, it can matter a great deal how they are deployed, and operated, short of war. The deployments and operational modes for nuclear forces may seem as if they are “hard” or “objective” facts, and to some extent they are: whether weapons are to be land or sea based, how many warheads or re-entry vehicles are carried by a particular missile, and so forth. On the other hand, nuclear force deployments and operational characteristics also have subjective properties. Weapons, launchers and command-control protocols “communicate” intentions with respect to the probable or possible behaviors of states and their leaders: intentions that might not be correctly interpreted or understood by other states. During a crisis in which one or more states contemplate the possibility of nuclear attack, countries will not only listen to one another’s diplomatic statements: they will also watch what the other fellow is doing, including his military capabilities and maneuvers, for clues about his future behavior. How could one estimate the delicacy or sensitivity of states’ nuclear forces to the risk of a mistaken preemption or other hasty decision for nuclear war? One approach would be to compare the various states’ survivable and retaliating warheads under the following exigent conditions: prompt launch stability under conditions of “generated” versus “day” alert; and generation stability, under conditions of prompt or delayed launch. In Figures 5.5 to 5.8, we summarize the results of those comparisons. Figure 5.5 shows the differences among the states’ performances in generation stability while riding out the attack (delayed launch) or in launching on warning (prompt launch). In Figure 5.6, the states’ performances in prompt launch stability on day alert, compared to generated alert, are summarized. The figures are interpreted as follows. For each state, two vertical bars appear together with a superimposed percentage figure. The percentage is the relationship between the lower (left) and the higher (right) bar. For example, Russia’s generation stability in Figure 5.5, under conditions of delayed launch, is 51 per cent. In Figure 5.6, Russia’s generation stability under prompt launch is 62 per cent. The difference measures how much more Russia depends on prompt launch for survivability when its forces are not already on high alert. Although the data summarized in Figures 5.5 to 5.8 are based on notional forces only, they offer important insights about the kinds of systems that states might deploy and their consequences. In order to make these insights clearer, we have deliberately set up an artificial situation in which total force sizes are more 87

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Figure 5.5 Generation stability: ride-out-attack scenario

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Figure 5.6 Generation stability: launch-on-warning scenario

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Figure 5.7 Prompt launch stability: day-to-day alert scenario

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Figure 5.8 Prompt launch stability: generated alert scenario

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or less similar across states. In the “real world” of Asian nuclear arms races, one danger is that richer states, like wealthier American baseball teams, will outspend their rivals into nuclear bankruptcy and deploy forces intimidating by sheer size. However, against this, there is the likelihood that the U.S. and Russia, among other states, would look upon a situation of nuclear inequality in Asia as worse than one in which a relative balance of power obtained among limited but survivable forces. A lopsided nuclear balance in Asia might tempt the stronger states into aggressive coercion or nuclear war against the weaker. So the artificial situation created in the thought-experiment presented here is not as improbable as it might first appear. Even under the “optimistic” assumption of eight-sided nuclear parity in force size, force characteristics and operational assumptions make a considerable difference for crisis and arms race stability. Most states in Asia will depend on land-based missiles and/or bomber delivered weapons as the bulwark of their deterrents. Few will be capable of operating fleets of ballistic missile submarines as does the United States. Thus, ICBM or IRBM/MRBM (Intermediate/Medium Range Ballistic Missile) dependent countries in Asia will rely on alerted forces and prompt launch to guarantee survivability. Hair triggers may be more the rule than the exception. In addition, many of the land-based missiles available to Asian powers for use as “strategic” launchers will be of medium or intermediate range: theater, as opposed to intercontinental, missiles. These theater range missiles will have shorter flight times than true ICBMs, allowing less time for the defender’s launch detection, decision making and response. Errors in launch detection, in the estimation of enemy intentions, and in choice of response are more likely with shorter, compared to longer, range missiles. The high dependency of Asian forces on land-based missiles will be compounded by command and control systems that may be accident prone or politically ambiguous. In democratic states, political control over the military is guaranteed by checks and balances and by constitutional fiat. In authoritarian polities, the military may operate as a political tool of the ruling clique or it may be an autonomous political force, subject to intrigue and coup plotting. The possibility of political overthrow or military usurpation during a nuclear crisis would not be ruled out in systems lacking constitutional or other political safeguards. The danger is not only that of Bonapartism on the part of disgruntled officers. It is also the danger of panic in the face of nuclear threats and an institutional military bias for getting in the first blow, in order to maximize the possibility of military victory and avoid defeat. The performance of forces in our illustrative and hypothetical case is also influenced by the command and control systems that connect political and military leaders with force operators, and with one another. Although command and control variables have not been built into the model, the implications for command decision making, and for the problem of control during crisis management, are clear enough. The forces most dependent on land-based ballistic missiles show the most discrepancy between hair-trigger and slow-trigger responses. On 90

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the other hand, states with balanced forces such as Russia, or with major reliance upon sea-based as opposed to land-based missiles (Japan), are comparatively less reliant on jumpy warning and fast firing. If hair trigger responses are necessary for survivability, then policy makers and commanders will have few minutes in which to make life-and-death decisions for entire societies. And missiles of theater or shorter range offer even fewer minutes of decision time than ICBMs, whose intercontinental reach requires twenty minutes or so from silo to silo. Faced with this analysis, states might decide to supplement vulnerable and potentially provocative land-based ballistic missiles with cruise missiles. Cruise missiles can be based in various environments; on land, at sea and in the air. They can be moved on relatively short notice and can attack from various azimuths with high accuracy. Other states cannot have failed to notice the U.S. use of cruise missiles to great effect during the Gulf war of 1991 and in punitive strike campaigns throughout the 1990s, as well as during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Cruise missiles can be fitted with conventional or nuclear warheads: the choice obviously depends on the target and mission, and the decision whether to arm the missile with nuclear or non-nuclear munitions affects its operational range. But it is certainly conceivable that various states in our mix will turn to ALCMs (air-launched cruise missiles), SLCMs (sea-launched) and GLCMs (ground-launched) as weapons of choice for high priority conventional, or nuclear, missions: the absence of air defenses of any consequence, in many states, invites their opponents to explore this option if they can. The analysis performed here also underlines the truth of the old saying that “everything old is new again.” The end of the Cold War did not repeal the nuclear revolution, although it did make deterrence calculations more complicated. It remains the case that nuclear weapons are in a class by themselves as instruments of mass destruction: very small numbers can produce historically unprecedented destruction and social chaos almost anywhere. States in our example showed, for a variety of force structures, meaningful percentage differences based on three variables: their mix of land, sea and airborne launch platforms; their levels of alert; and their respective launch proclivities. What is important about these differences is not the numbers and percentages, however, but the possible effect of leaders’ perceptions that higher alerts and faster launches are necessary in order to avoid catastrophic defeat, should war occur. There are no “winnable” nuclear wars depicted here; nor would there be, even if agreed levels among the powers were reduced to 1,000 or so warheads. The danger is that a war might begin, not so much from deliberation, but from desperation: states feeling that their nuclear deterrents were threatened, and therefore coerced to make a yes–no decision on a time line that permits neither reflection nor appropriate vetting of the information at hand.

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Conclusions A nuclear arms race in Asia between now and 2020 is not an inevitability. It is, however, a possibility, and this possibility lends itself to extrapolation in numerous scenarios. Our scenario is not a point prediction, but a heuristic exercise. It shows that a variety of Asian and Asia-reaching Middle Eastern nuclear forces may be competitive within several decades, unless the North Korean genie is rebottled and proliferation is avoided in Iran. However, nuclear weapons spreading in Asia do not automatically yield a catastrophic outcome. A stable arms competition is possible even within a nuclear octagon. Stability of a regional balance of terror resides mainly in the policies of states and in the intentions of their leaders. Nevertheless, states’ nuclear forces may be deployed and operated with more, or less, sensitivity to the problem of provocative crisis behavior and the danger of foreclosing options on the brink of war. Asian states with high dependency on land-based missiles for their retaliatory forces may find their freedom of action constrained by the “lose or use” quality of these launchers: irrevocable decisions, pressed into service on the basis of insufficient evidence and desperate hopes. A better world is certainly possible, and desirable.

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The age of mass destruction has been superseded by the age of precision warfare – but not entirely. Weapons of mass destruction are still out there, stalking leaders’ plans and popular hopes for international stability. The assertion that the world of the twenty-first century is more dangerous than the world of the previous century is doubtful, or at least, premature. But the present international system is dangerous enough. Nuclear weapons are part of that danger, and our argument is that they can be especially dangerous in one or more of the following ways: (1) nuclear weapons can be used for coercive bargaining or war by rogue states as part of regional “denial of access” or local intimidation strategies; (2) nuclear deterrence may be incompatible with information warfare: this commingling of old and new paradigms can contribute to accidental or inadvertent nuclear war; (3) the spread of nuclear weapons is assuredly more to be feared than welcomed; in addition to their possible use by states, nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists may find their way into American or allied cities, to deadly effect; (4) nuclear deterrence has moved from its Cold War setting, as an all purpose comfort zone for many strategists and policy makers, into a more complex and potentially self defeating paradigm for the twenty-first century; (5) nuclear deterrence may be superseded by post-nuclear advanced technology weapons, including missile defenses and long range conventional strike weapons, but the promise of post-nuclear technologies has often run far ahead of their performance; (6) the psychology of national leaders and non-state actors is as relevant to the likelihood of nuclear war as is the spread of nuclear weapons or the effectiveness of deterrence systems. Other points are argued in this study, but the preceding paragraph can serve for a synopsis of major findings that can assert reasonable claim to academics’ and policy makers’ attentions during the next decade or two. Politics and strategy are pragmatic arts. Mature judgment and experience count for more than do science and technology, however important the latter are. The principal challenge for political leaders in the twenty-first century is to reduce the numbers of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction lying around in global arsenals and awaiting their use by governments, or miscreants. In the remainder of this chapter, we provide additional pertinent observations about nuclear weapons and deterrence, past, present and future.

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The popular as well as the common academic image of the “nuclear revolution” and the “information revolution” is that these two events: (1) are opposite in their effects on war and military art; and (2) that one succeeded the other, especially with regard to its political and social importance. Although these popular images are not entirely wrong, they are only partly true. The atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 heralded a new age in the application of science to warfare. The deployment of thermonuclear weapons in large numbers by the United States, the Soviet Union and other countries during the Cold War created the technical possibility of a war that could end modern civilization in the northern hemisphere. Nuclear weapons seemed to have made war improbable, if not impossible, among rational leaders and developed states. There were some efforts during the Cold War to develop plans for the “tactical” use of nuclear weapons, against enemy armies or fleets within a defined geographical area, as opposed to “strategic” campaigns of annihilation against entire societies. Tasked to prepare these plans for limited nuclear war, planners squared their shoulders and produced documents that read nowadays like science fiction. As much as one might have imagined various ways in which the Soviets and member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) could fight a limited nuclear (or other limited) war in Europe, few heads of state or government took this possibility seriously. The reason was politics. To other states in their respective alliances, the idea of the United States and the Soviet Union fighting a nuclear war “limited” to their allies’ territory was not appealing. Such a war would be total for them, regardless of its comparatively limited scope on American or Russian national territory. Nuclear weapons survived the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. The end of the Cold War and the 1990s coincided with the explosive growth of information technology in American society. The Internet was “invented” in the 1970s but the full potential of this technology was not realized until the 1990s, when it combined with affordable desktop computers and user friendly software. The rapid and decisive American and allied victory over Iraq in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 seemed to mark the birth of a new informationbased warfare that superseded the age of mass destruction. The widely influential analysis of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, for example, divided the history of military technology into three distinct periods, based on the assumption that the way states and societies made wealth was the way in which they made war: (1) agricultural civilization, in which land was the basis of wealth, and war was over territory and related economic spoils; (2) industrial civilization, in which the basis of wealth and the stakes for war were capital and national industry; and (3) post-industrial civilization or the information age, in which the basis of wealth is knowledge and war is about information.1 The transition from the industrial to the information age would render progressively obsolete wars of mass destruction and the weapons suited to wage them. In their place, the information age would provide leading military states with smart munitions and reconnaissance-surveillance-control systems permitting precision warfare at lower cost in lives and collateral damage. 94

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Historians took up the subject of the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)” or “Military Revolutions” (MR) in a big way in the 1990s, and there was considerable disagreement about what qualified as a military revolution and about how many had actually occurred in modern times. In an influential study authored and edited by MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, the authors treated military revolutions as the more fundamental category with the more far reaching consequences. Military revolutions, according to Knox and Murray, cause a fundamental change in the entire framework for war, including the social, economic and political dimensions of warfare as well as the conceptual framework for military strategy. In contrast, revolutions in military affairs “require the assembly of a complex mix of tactical, organizational, doctrinal and technological innovations in order to implement a new conceptual approach to warfare or to a specialized sub-branch of warfare.”2 Knox and Murray identify five major military revolutions that have influenced modern Western history: (1) the creation of the modern nation-state in the seventeenth century, based in part on the large scale organization of trained and disciplined armed forces; (2) the French Revolution and its aftermath, combining national mass mobilization with Napoleon’s propensity for total war; (3) the Industrial Revolution, making possible the providing and maintaining of armed forces of unprecedented size and destructive power; (4) World War I, combining mass nationalism with industrialization to create the paradigm for twentieth century major coalition wars; (5) the deployment of nuclear weapons and long range delivery systems that made the world potentially more dangerous but also stabilized the Cold War competition between the Americans and the Soviets.3 Our present purpose is not to sort out the arguments about military revolutions. But a tacit consensus marks much of the writing on this subject: that the age of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including nuclear weapons, has now passed its prime if not faded into historical obsolescence. Mass destruction is what primitives seek to do. Advanced armies will now hit only what they aim at, based on improved sensing and targeting technologies. Long range precision weapons, many delivered by low observable or “stealth” platforms, will permit destruction of enemy targets from standoff distances without risking any or many “friendly” lives in combat. NATO’s war against Serbia over ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999, fought entirely from the air and with an even higher ratio of precision weapons than the percentage of precision guided munitions (PGMs) used in the Gulf war of 1991, appeals to some as a new model for high technology, low risk and nearly bloodless warfare. It is even imagined by some proponents of an American RMA based on technology for C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) that the U.S. might obtain “dominant battlespace awareness” relative to the picture of battle available to its enemies.4 Most optimistic among RMA proponents are those who expect a “system of systems” for computers, communications and networking combined with “dominant battlespace awareness” and more agile and lethal weapons to produce an American capability for global military reach and power projection.5 95

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Regardless how military revolutions or RMAs are defined, there is the problem of establishing when one military revolution or RMA ends and another begins. For example, the French and Industrial Revolutions overlap in time and in their social and political implications. So, too, do the various patterns of change in doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures spawned by these revolutions. The issue of timing is critical for our study because proponents of military revolutions have offered two very different storyboards with regard to the relationship between the nuclear revolution and the information revolution. The first storyboard is that the nuclear revolution is more or less of a historical “done deal.” Nuclear weapons may stubbornly hang around in the arsenals of major powers or others, but they are items of display, not instruments of real military value. At best, they deter another state or non-state actor from nuclear first use, but even then, nuclears and their indiscriminate effects will eventually give way to more precisely lethal and less socially destructive weapons. In addition, new technologies for missile defense will offer the possibility of negating the threat posed by offensive nuclear strikes, making nuclear weapons less appealing for coercion or for war. Liberal optimism about changing mores against mass destruction combines with conservative faith in new technology to push nuclear weapons to the margins of the military future. A second perspective or storyboard about the relationship between the nuclear revolution and the information age emphasizes the continuities and overlaps, instead of the divergence, between the two revolutions.6 This second perspective is the preferred view of this study. From this perspective, the nuclear and information revolutions overlap in ways that are not obvious, but have been and continue to be very important. The information age, in terms of its impact on the U.S. military, is actually in two parts. The first part is the esoteric computer age, when large mainframes were put to work in developing support systems for military command and control, logistics and administration. This esoteric information era coincided with the first three decades or so of the Cold War, until the latter 1970s and/or early 1980s. During this time, the U.S. was forced to think through and solve some unique problems about how nuclear weapons would be built into standard military organizations and war plans. For example, the United States recognized as early as the 1950s that nuclear weapons required a complete overhaul of the nation’s system of military warning and attack assessment. This challenge, posed by Soviet nuclear capable bombers and later by ballistic missiles, of massive surprise attack against the American homeland was an unprecedented threat to U.S. survival. New information and electronic technologies had to be harnessed to revised standard operating procedures and to new organizational formats in order to ensure the survival of as much of the retaliatory force and command structure as possible in the aftermath of a nuclear Pearl Harbor. Accordingly, the United States was required to devise new organizations for warning (NORAD), for retaliatory response with long range nuclear weapons (SAC: Strategic Air Command, now Strategic Command), and for the command and control of nuclear forces.7 This realignment of organizations and procedures did not take place all at once: there was considerable trial and error as military 96

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experience and technology evolved together. Policy makers had to go to school as well. A military armed with nuclear weapons posed some unique questions about the character of U.S. civil-military relations. As Peter Douglas Feaver has explained, nuclear weapons forced policy makers to rethink the relationship between positive and negative control: the “always” versus “never” dilemma of nuclear use. Nuclear weapons had to be made resistant to accidental or unauthorized use (“never”), but they were also expected to be promptly responsive to duly authorized commands (“always”).8 As Feaver notes, different American presidents and defense secretaries sought alternative solutions to this always–never dilemma. Some policy makers resisted much delegation of authority or responsibility to the military for the control or use of nuclear weapons. Other policy makers were more permissive of prewar delegation of authority and competency, under carefully drawn instructions. The reconciliation of the always–never dilemma would not have been possible without bringing to bear early information age technology and improvised organizational arrangements. U.S. early warning systems were electronically connected to decision centers that were in a separate military chain of command. The separation of NORAD from SAC was purposeful and ingenious: no single organization would be responsible for providing tactical warning of attack and for responding to attack. In addition, information and electronics technology also made possible the establishment of multiple criteria for confirming that a Soviet nuclear attack was actually in progress. For example, once reconnaissance satellites were in place for early detection of Soviet ballistic missile launches, verification of launch was automatically made known to warning systems and passed along to various military decision centers. But additional confirmation was required before actual military threat assessment conferences and alerts to policy makers took place. “Dual phenomenology” required that, in addition to launch detection from satellites, groundbased radars in and outside of the continental United States verified the numbers and trajectories of attacking missiles and re-entry vehicles. The early and primitive mainframe computers and punchcard decks that got us through these first decades of the nuclear age are now forgotten or elements of nostalgia. I recall a moment decades ago when a U.S. military officer in the Pentagon held up an enormous stack of computer output and informed me that this was the current version of the SIOP, the Single Integrated Operational Plan for strategic nuclear warfare. Actually it was not “the” SIOP but one component of it: a summary of nuclear targeting plans that assigned various weapons to target classes in the Soviet Union. Since I was not “cleared” to see the details I made no attempt to do so; in those days of earnest Cold War we were much more security conscious than now, and I was probably afraid my hair would catch on fire if I peeked. But the size of the computer output was revealing of the complexity involved in targeting thousands of weapons against many thousands of potential targets or designated ground zeros (DGZs) on Soviet territory. The construction of such an elaborate war plan required that targeteers at JSTPS (Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff) in Omaha, Nebraska develop 97

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elaborate lists of possible targets, establish criteria for target identification and destruction, and correlate available weapons with known targets by category. The categories of targets were matters for policy makers and senior commanders to define in a general way; JSTPS planners would then interpolate from general guidance down to the specifics of launchers, warheads and aim points. However, not all policy guidance for nuclear weapons employment was equally specific: some Presidential policy directives or Secretary of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff guidance for nuclear weapon use left reasonable room for argument about “how much was enough” in order to accomplish assigned missions. In theory, changes in declaratory policy would be followed by complementary shifts in actual employment policy for nuclear war, but the planning of options was never so precise. As technology made possible more weapons the numbers of targets and target classes also grew. As presidents demanded options for limited or protracted nuclear wars (or both), Pentagon commanders and nuclear target planners were challenged to provide options for a variety of scenarios and even for “withholds” of certain portions of the nuclear force, in order to prevent nuclear coercion of the United States in the postwar world. The details of nuclear targeting plans are not important here. The discussion of nuclear targeting is referenced in the context of the older, compared to the newer, information age and the military applications of both. The older or “mainframe” information age was necessary for the production of nuclear war plans, commandcontrol systems and other accoutrements of deterrence in U.S. policy. But the older information age was inflexible compared to the later time. Targeting plans and options were very menu driven: improvisation at the last minute was inconceivable. Attempted deviations from preplanned options would make the entire system unreliable. In addition, small errors would reverberate throughout the entire warning-command system because it was tightly coupled and hierarchically controlled. For example, in the late 1970s and early 1980s there were several false alarms at NORAD based on technical glitches, including the mistaken playing of a training tape simulating an attack through the circuits designed to signal a real attack. Errors such as this, or mistaken identification of innocuous radar blips as incoming missiles or bombers, caused anxiety on account of the tightly coupled character of the warning and control system that passed “intake” errors automatically throughout the network. These NORAD snafus were symptomatic of the last gasps of early information age technology. Nowadays the second or later information age (roughly from the latter 1970s or early 1980s until the present) provides flexible software, portable workstations, cellular phones with connected links to sources of data or text, and real time feed from satellite and airborne detectors to command center and field users. Military organizations have taken on more aspects of network, as opposed to hierarchical, processing of information. Although the military’s rank structure ensures that hierarchy will remain important, information flows across the boundaries of rank and over the vertical lines or “stovepipes” of military service organization. The impact of this second information age on the U.S. and other armed forces is not limited to 98

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precision guided weapons and reconnaissance-control systems. Adaptive networking around problems has become a norm in business as well as in government, including in defense. Modern software and hardware permits the existence of “teams” of problem related specialists who are geographically distant, who work for different organizations in and out of government, and who commingle various and competing disciplines within a single problem matrix. American business adapted quickly to this second information revolution and the U.S. military is already showing signs of rethinking its structure and missions for similar reasons. Nuclear weapons will be the subjects of rethinking as well. Mastodons of the Cold War designed to make major war impossible or unacceptable in its consequences, nuclear weapons will take on a somewhat new face in the twenty-first century. We can anticipate that the United States and Russia will continue their cooperative security and arms control initiatives that have already led to the Moscow Treaty of May, 2002 in which both states agreed to reduce their deployed strategic nuclear weapons to between 1,700 and 2,200 by 2010. This agreement was made possible, in part, by the new sense of U.S.–Russian rapprochement growing out of the terrorist attacks on the American homeland of 9/11. Presidents Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush found common ground on a variety of issues, including agreement on the broad objective of fighting transnational terrorism. The U.S. also continued its Nunn-Lugar programs with Russia to prevent the illicit spread of Russian nuclear weapons to terrorists or criminals as well as to rogue states. Later information age software has made it possible for the two sides to “detarget” one another without fear because each can “retarget” the other if necessary within several minutes. And modern hardware and software permit larger menus of preplanned options, as well as the flexibility of improvised options in good time. The U.S. Defense Science Board anticipates a future in which nuclear and non-nuclear offensive strike forces will be part of a “new triad” that also includes defenses and a revitalized technical and industrial infrastructure.9 Strategic strike is defined as a “military operation undertaken by the United States that is designed to alter decisively an adversary’s course of action in a relatively compact period of time.”10 Attacks of this nature could be designed to destroy enemy capabilities, or to degrade an opponent’s capacity for decision making, or both. The U.S. could employ ballistic and cruise missiles armed with conventional warheads as part of these timely and lethal strike packages. According to the DSB study, targets for strategic strikes could include: enemy weapons of mass destruction; leadership and control assets; other military targets such as C3 (command, control and communications), ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance), bases and military infrastructure; special targets, such as hard and deeply buried command bunkers; and specific capabilities or assets of particular value to enemy leadership.11 Future requirements for presidential flexibility in choosing strike options, according to the DSB, will include nuclear weapons “that produce much lower collateral damage (great precision, deep penetration, greatly reduced radioactivity); have robust performance margins; are 99

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devised for ease of manufacture and maintenance; and produce special effects (e.g., enhanced EMP, enhanced neutron flux, reduced fission yield).”12 The prospect of more usable nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal will raise concerns among those who fear that more versatile American nuclear weapons will promote, instead of discourage, nuclear and other WMD proliferation. U.S. nonproliferation programs, a sidebar in nuclear policy making during the Cold War compared to U.S.–Soviet arms limitations, took a more central place on policy agendas during the 1990s and into the next century. One reason for the new centrality of nonproliferation in U.S. policy was the fear that rogue states with weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, might use these weapons to strike at regional enemies or at U.S. forces being forward deployed into combat (regional anti-access strategies). Even worse: these rogues or others might pass nuclear technology and materials to terrorists, making possible a nuclear or biological version of 9/11.13 Iran, Iraq and North Korea were joined at the hip in the year 2002 by President Bush as charter members of the “Axis of Evil”: states that sought to acquire nuclear weapons, had demonstrably unfriendly views of U.S. regional or global policy, and had the potential or the history of exporting WMD to third parties. In this “second nuclear age” beginning with the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons might become the preferred instruments of coercion or of attack by the weak against the strong.14 That is, states unable to compete in the realm of advanced technology, information-based warfare could turn to cruder weapons of mass destruction as part of an offsetting or “asymmetrical” strategy to deter or defeat the U.S. and its allies. The Clinton administration acknowledged that, in addition to the traditional “nonproliferation” strategies centered on the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, more assertive U.S. programs for “counterproliferation” might be required to deter or destroy revisionist proliferators. The George W. Bush administration argument in 2003 for preemptive attack against Iraq to forestall Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is, in part, a textbook argument for counterproliferation. The assumption was that Hussein would sooner or later acquire these weapons and use them for coercion or actual war fighting. This policy of preemptive attack against Iraq or other potential proliferators was based on the traditional doctrine of anticipatory self-defense. But it showed one dimension of the lingering importance of nuclear weapons in the new world order, as against the assumption of nuclear obsolescence. Another dimension of continuing perceived utility for nuclear weapons appeared in 1998 when India and Pakistan both became declared nuclear weapons states. Neither state qualified as a “rogue” under current U.S. policy definitions, and Pakistan became an American ally in the war against terrorism following 9/11. Therefore a second dimension of the ability of nuclear weapons to escape political entropy is their appeal not only to “baddies” but also to normal states who feel threatened. India and Pakistan fear one another, India fears China, and China has provided nuclear assistance to Pakistan. Assessments of the implications of nuclear weapons spread to new “normal” actors have often been wide of the mark because these decisions are seen from a 100

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parochial U.S. or Western perspective. When India conducted a series of nuclear tests in May, 1998 that surprised U.S. intelligence and proclaimed publicly its nuclear status, Pakistan followed with its own test series and nuclear coming out party in the same month. The U.S. reaction was to condemn both states for joining the nuclear club and to impose a temporary economic squeeze on Pakistan. The U.S. was proficient in technical information about nonproliferation but equally deficient in political context with which to interpret Indian and Pakistani reactions. South Asian nationalism was asserting itself in India’s refusal to play second fiddle to China in India’s strategic backyard, in Pakistan’s disputes with India over Kashmir and other issues, and in a cooperative security relationship between Pakistan and China that made India nervous. In the second nuclear age, Asian nationalism combined with regional instability created a greater demand curve for nuclear weapons despite international nonproliferation norms against this trend.15 The obdurate reemergence of nuclear weapons as weapons of choice for aspiring regional powers was counterfactual for many Western analysts. All of us writing about this topic during the Cold War, forced to contemplate the non-fictive possibility of global thermonuclear war, developed an abhorrence of nuclear weapons in use (as opposed to nuclear weapons for the prevention of war by means of credible deterrence). The shattering of the Cold War paradigm and the emergence of new nuclear powers that might cross the threshold from saber rattling to rocket firing threatens obsolescence for generations of academics and policy makers. For one group of U.S. scholars and policy analysts, however, the suggestion about nuclear proliferation apart from rogues is “not to worry.” Nuclear weapons are self deterring: they were not used during the Cold War and they have not been fired in war since the end of the Cold War. The unwillingness of India and Pakistan to use their available nuclear weapons in numerous crises before and after they went officially nuclear in 1998 suggests to some that stability between hostile nuclear adversaries is still the norm. Proliferation is not necessarily destructive of international stability, from this perspective; fears to the contrary are cases of Western myopia and hysteria. The assumption that proliferation can be controlled and contained as it was during the Cold War, short of actual nuclear war fighting, is remarkably optimistic. It flies in the face of studies that show nuclear war was avoided by a razor thin margin in at least several Cold War crises. It also commits a “level of analysis” fallacy. Optimists about nuclear proliferation emphasize the “system” level of analysis for causal explanation and prediction. The international systems perspective emphasizes the interactions among states as opposed to the character of the states themselves or of their decision making processes. The systems view is one from “outside in” instead of “inside out.” The search for systemic regularities in the behavior of states is an important aspect of international relations scholarship, but it can be very misleading when relied upon to explain the idiosyncrasy of war and peace decisions. States’ bureaucratic and interest group politics, as well as the personalities of their leaders, have an enormous impact on their military affairs 101

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and war and peace decisions. Decisions that are taken for reasons of domestic politics and bureaucratic self interest are often dressed up after the fact with a strategic rationale. Graham T. Allison, in a landmark study of the Cuban missile crisis, showed how the Soviet decision to place missiles in Cuba in 1962, as well as the U.S. reaction to that decision, could be explained by referring to three very different models of social and political behavior. In addition to what he calls a rational policy model of the kind familiar to strategists (calculations of the U.S.–Soviet nuclear force balance and so on), Allison also explains important aspects of crisis decision making through “bureaucratic politics” and “organizational process” models.16 Indeed, his study demonstrates that the crisis cannot be understood correctly without the use of models other than the rational policy model, since that model is biased toward strategic interactions and rational calculations of cost and benefit. Allison’s study has lasting value for many reasons, but one is especially pertinent here. He takes the Cold War nuclear crisis that should be the easiest to explain with a rational policy model: limited to two sides; confined to a short time; controlled by states with a status quo instead of an anti-systemic bias; and ideological instead of religious or nationalistic motives in play. Other studies of the Cuban missile crisis, in addition to other Cold War confrontations, have shown the significance of leaders’ personalities in decisions related to arms races, crisis management and war avoidance. The personalities of John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, for example, are an important part of the story in explaining why crises over Berlin and Cuba happened when they did.17 Hitler’s personality was as central to Germany’s decision taking immediately prior to and during World War II, as was Stalin’s for Russia and Mao’s for China. Without Harry S. Truman in the White House there might not have been a U.S. decision to use the atomic bomb against Japan; without Franklin Roosevelt in the White House earlier, the U.S. might not have built the bomb in time for use in 1945. England might have got through World War II without Winston Churchill at the helm, but his elevation to the heights of power as British prewar policy collapsed in infamy empowered his wartime leadership like that of no other. It mattered very much that Mikhail Gorbachev was in charge in the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War and the demise of the USSR, and not one of the plotters who attempted to restore the defunct communist regime by military coup in August, 1991. History turns on small hinges as much as it does on grand strategy or on great “cycles” of causality. So, too, for the problem of nuclear weapons spread: leaders and policy making processes, including the behavior of military bureaucrats, matter. And among those states that nowadays aspire to nuclear weapons are political leaders and military bureaucrats who did not grow up with nuclear weapons in their Cold War crib. Future nuclear armed states may be captive to political leaders and to militaries that disbelieve in deterrence, or stability, or similar notions that have been the products of fertile minds of the first nuclear age. Partisans of international stability based on the continuing validity of nuclear deterrence are 102

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betting a great deal on the historical inevitability of what might have been a fortuitous set of circumstances. Liberals continue to depend on deterrence and nonproliferation; conservatives promise that missile defenses and preemptive strikes will nullify the rogues who want nukes. Politicians might borrow from the book of physicists. When physicists observe processes and behaviors that are not fitted to their existing models and equations, they assume a new particle or force must exist to explain the otherwise inexplicable. The empirical measurement of the new particle or force is less important than its demonstrative “efficiency” in theory: does it explain or predict the observed effects better than its alternatives? Politicians behaving as physicists do might notice that the spread of nuclear weapons along with rising Asian and Middle Eastern nationalism has also taken place in the mature, later information age as opposed to the earlier, mainframe era. The Internet marks the true emergence of the mature information age, along with the widespread availability of affordable desktop and laptop computers and user friendly software. The wired world of the mature information age now means that angry states and dissatisfied non-state actors can establish network forms of organization that expedite asymmetrical warfare.18 Terrorist groups and international criminal organizations have both exploited network forms of organization that resist efforts to crush or capture them, on account of networks’ flexible structure, rapid reconstitution and apparent lack of any single “address” at which they can be taken out. The al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. World Trade Center and Pentagon surprised U.S. intelligence by carrying out a strategic military operation against the world’s leading military and economic superpower. Al-Qaeda exploited vulnerabilities in the U.S. civil infrastructure and security establishment (airports, borders, visas), but even more important was its conspiratorial success combined with its cellular organizational flexibility. On the night, America was caught unprepared. Al-Qaeda’s success would not have been possible without an organizational infrastructure and communications made possible by modern information systems. It has been clear for some time that deterrence, old style, cannot explain or predict many of the important things that academics and policy makers need to know about the new world order.19 Deterrence is not totally irrelevant to the avoidance of future war, including war between nuclear armed states: far from it. Its burial is premature. But deterrence as it was explained in the Cold War was too putatively rational and insufficiently political. It depended upon a tightly reasoned world of interchangeable leaders and motives that could be fitted into matrices of cost-benefit analysis and nuclear exchange models.20 Leaders and states that refused to behave according to the models were dismissed as delinquent or logically flawed. One U.S. government analyst, attempting to explain the Soviet decision to place nuclear capable missiles in Cuba in 1962 despite U.S. intelligence forecasts to the contrary, argued that U.S. forecasters had not failed: Khrushchev had, by acting illogically!21 With regard to rational models of deterrence stability and assumptions of a benign nuclear 103

CONCLUSION

weapons spread, an appropriate forecast might resemble an assessment of then dominant ideologies provided by a member of the British foreign office in 1939, as the Hitler–Stalin pact opened the door to the start of World War II: “All isms are wasms.”

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Introduction 1

See Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Henry Holt/Times Books, 2004), pp. 1–15 and passim.

Technology and deterrence in the new world order 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

The concept of deterrence can be traced prior to the nuclear age as well. See George H. Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1986). Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 109. Schelling, Arms and Influence, pp. 69–91. Alexander L. George, “The Development of Doctrine and Strategy,” Ch. 1 in George, David K. Hall and William R. Simons, eds, The Limits of Coercive Diplomacy: Laos, Cuba, Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), pp. 1–35. George, “Strategies for Crisis Management,” Ch. 16 in George, ed., Avoiding War: Problems of Crisis Management (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1991), pp. 384–385. On the development of nuclear strategy, see Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); Colin S. Gray, Strategic Studies and Public Policy: The American Experience (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1982); Robert Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, When Does Deterrence Succeed and How Do We Know? (Ottawa, Ontario: Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security, 1990). On the early years of U.S. strategic theorizing, see Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 3–46. The logic of deterrence and deterrence rationality receives especially insightful treatment in Patrick M. Morgan, Deterrence: A Conceptual Analysis (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1977); in Phil Williams, “Nuclear Deterrence,” Ch. 5 in John Baylis, Ken Booth, John Garnett and Phil Williams, Contemporary Strategy: I: Theories and Concepts (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1987), pp. 113–139; and in Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 42–79. The nuclear revolution is put into historical context in Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: International Politics before and after Hiroshima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). On deterrence after the Cold War, see Morgan, Deterrence Now, pp. 238–284.

NOTES

8

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25

For elaboration, see David E. Mosher, Lowell H. Schwartz, David R. Howell and Lynn Davis, Beyond the Nuclear Shadow: A Phased Approach for Improving Nuclear Safety and U.S.–Russian Relations (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2003), esp. pp. 13–33, and Bruce G. Blair, “We Keep Building Nukes for All the Wrong Reasons,” Washington Post, May 25, 2003, in Johnson’s Russia List #7198, May 28, 2003, [email protected]. For an assessment of U.S. experience in small wars, see Max Boot, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), esp. pp. 336–352. For pertinent history and concepts of terrorism, see Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 49–78. Richard K. Betts, “The New Threat of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs, No. 1 (January/February 1998), p. 27 and Lt. Col. Rex R. Kiziah, Assessment of the Emerging Biocruise Threat (Maxwell AFB, AL, Alabama: USAF Counterproliferation Center, Air War College, August 2000), p. 11. Kiziah, Assessment of the Emerging Biocruise Threat, p. 49. For an expansion, see Paul Bracken, Fire in the East (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), passim. The point is well made in Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century (New York: The Free Press, 2003), passim. The most original thinking about this problem has been contributed by Thomas C. Schelling. See Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), esp. pp. 99–111. See Brian D. Dailey, “Deception, Perceptions Management, and Self-Deception in Arms Control: An Examination of the ABM Treaty,” Ch. 11 in Dailey and Patrick J. Parker, eds, Soviet Strategic Deception (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1987), pp. 225–260, esp. pp. 230–231. The author overstates the degree of Soviet deception involved in their approach to ABM Treaty negotiation, but the discussion of the concept of perceptions management remains useful. Jervis, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution, p. 155. R.C. Webb, Defense Special Weapons Agency, Implications of Low-Yield High Altitude Nuclear Detonations, briefing to Nuclear Weapons and the Revolution in Military Affairs Workshop, September 16–17, 1997. None of these illustrations is hypothetical. The first happened to U.S. forces in East Germany acting as authorized military observers; the second, to U.S. and Soviet naval forces in Cold War encounters too numerous to mention; the third, to KAL 007 in 1983, suspected by the Soviets (so they claimed) of espionage for the Korean CIA and for the U.S. Blair, Strategic Command and Control, p. 69. Testimony of Dr Bruce G. Blair, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies, Brookings Institution, before House National Security Committee, March 13, 1997, from Committee on Nuclear Policy, Policy Brief, Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 1. James T. Hackett in Wall Street Journal, March 28, 1997, cited in Russian Reform Monitor, No. 251 (Washington, D.C.: American Foreign Policy Council, April 4, 1997). The term “combat mode” does not necessarily reveal very much about the actual operational status of Russian forces. Soviet forces of the Cold War years used the term combat readiness (boevaya gotovnost’) to include at least three different levels of preparedness for troops: routine, increased, and full combat readiness. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, One Point Safe (New York: Doubleday, 1997), p. 244. Ibid. Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces, pp. 196–197.

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26 The distinction between nonlinearity and chaos in the understanding of war and strategy is discussed in Colin S. Gray, Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History (London: Frank Cass, 2002), pp. 5–6 and 104. On the issue of nonlinear relationships and their potential relationship to deterrence, see Robert Jervis, “Systems and Interaction Effects,” Ch. 2 in Jack Snyder and Robert Jervis, eds, Coping with Complexity in the International System (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 25–46, esp. pp. 32–33. 27 Gray, Strategy for Chaos, pp. 9–10. 28 President George W. Bush, speech at National Defense University, Washington, D.C., May 1, 2001, New York Times, May 2, 2001, p. A10. See also: Steven Lee Myers and James Glanz, “Taking a Look at the Workings of a Missile Shield,” New York Times, May 3, 2001, p. A10. 29 Jane’s reported on May 15, 2001 that Russia had no currently operational photoreconnaissance satellites. This raises the interesting possibility that, under some improbable but not impossible circumstances, Russia would be reliant upon U.S. optics for reassurance against the possibility of accidental/inadvertent war or deliberate attack. 30 As Colin Gray explains: “In common with strategy, RMA as a gestalt must be viewed as a complex open system whose several, even many, parts always function holistically. Technology, or military organization, or operational ideas, cannot perform in isolation. Each acts upon and through the others, and they all act together in the currency of more (or less) military effectiveness. In its turn, that military effectiveness translates into more (or less) strategic effectiveness.” Gray, Strategy for Chaos, p. 118. I am also in debt to James J. Tritten for my understanding of these relationships among technology, organization and doctrine. 31 For an assessment of the RMA, see Michael O’Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), esp. pp. 7–31. 32 Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr., “Power and Interdependence in the Information Age,” Foreign Affairs, no. 5 (September/October 1998), pp. 81–94. 33 For additional perspective on the importance of soft power in U.S. policy, see Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 8–12 and passim. 34 Robert David Steele, “Threats, Strategy and Force Structure: An Alternative Paradigm for National Security in the 21st Century,” Ch. 10 in Steven Metz, ed., Revising the Two MTW Force Shaping Paradigm (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, April 2001), pp. 139–164. 35 See Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, pp. 8–12, 69–74 and passim.

Can missile defenses overturn deterrence? 1 2 3 4 5

Nikolai Sokov, “The ABM Treaty: The End of One Saga and the Start of Another,” PONARS Policy Memo No. 218 (Washington, D.C. Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 25, 2002), pp. 47–51. “U.S., Russia agree to reduce nuclear arms,” CNN.com/U.S., May 14, 2002, http://europe.cnn.com/2002/U.S./05/13/bush.nuclear/index.html. “NATO to seal new pact with Russia,” CNN.com /WORLD, May 14, 2002, http://europe.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/europe/05/14/iceland.nato/index.html. For a recent critical assessment, see Craig Eisendrath, Melvin A. Goodman, and Gerald E. Marsh, The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2001), esp. pp. 81–102. Keith B. Payne argues that Cold War deterrence frameworks have been mistakenly fast forwarded into the post-Cold War world, including misplaced assumptions about

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7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

assured vulnerability and rational decision making. See Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), esp. pp. 39–96. For discussions of the history of U.S. and Soviet or Russian missile defenses, see Donald R. Baucom, The Origins of SDI, 1944–1983 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1992), and Jennifer G. Mathers, The Russian Nuclear Shield from Stalin to Yeltsin (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 2000). A more judgmental appraisal appears in Frances Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). For elaboration of this concept, see Colin S. Gray, The Second Nuclear Age (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999). Gray, The Second Nuclear Age, pp. 100–101. For an assessment of possible developments, see William H. Possel, “Lasers and Missile Defense,” Ch. 2 in William C. Martel, ed., The Technological Arsenal: Emerging Defense Capabilities (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001), pp. 20–37. I am in debt to Colin Gray for this idea, although he bears no responsibility for its application here. I gratefully acknowledge Peter Feaver for insights related to the preceding paragraph as well as other comments on an earlier draft. He is not responsible for arguments here. U.S. Missile Defense Agency, MDA Link, February 7, 2002, http://www.acq.osd.mil/ bmdo/bmdolink/html/boost.html and equivalent links for midcourse and terminal defenses. Pavel Podvig, “The End of Strategic Arms Control?” PONARS Policy Memo No. 217 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, January 25, 2002), pp. 41–46, citation p. 43. Michael Wines, “Accord is Near on Giving Russia a Limited Role in NATO,” New York Times International, April 23, 2002, p. A3. On prior U.S.–Russian experience in cooperative security, see Leon V. Sigal, Hang Separately: Cooperative Security between the United States and Russia, 1985–1994 (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2000), esp. pp. 231–280. This typology is the author’s, but I gratefully acknowledge Pavel Baev for his insights into Russia’s defense and security options pertinent to missile defense and arms control. For skepticism about the compatibility of missile defenses and arms race stability, see Robert S. McNamara and James G. Blight, Wilson’s Ghost: Reducing the Risk of Conflict, Killing, and Catastrophe in the 21st Century (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), pp. 192–200.

Conventionalizing U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear forces 1

2

Many sources support this point. Especially helpful is Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century (New York: The Free Press, 2003). See also: John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, eds, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001); Michael O’Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), esp. pp. 7–31; Admiral Bill Owens with Ed Offley, Lifting the Fog of War (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2000); and Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Swarming and the Future of Conflict (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2000). See James J. Wirtz and James A. Russell, “A Quiet Revolution: Nuclear Strategy for the 21st Century,” Joint Force Quarterly, No. 33 (Winter 2002–03), pp. 9–15 for a discussion of the implications for George W. Bush strategy. For additional theoretical

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6 7

perspective, see Colin S. Gray, The Second Nuclear Age (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999); and Keith B. Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). For information on present and prospective future Russian and U.S. forces, see: Pavel Podvig ed., Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001); Nikolai Sokov, Russian Strategic Modernization: The Past and Future (Lanham, MD.: Rowan and Littlefield, 2000), esp. pp. 125–156; Federation of American Scientists, Nuclear Forces Guide (regularly updated), http://www.fas.org/ nuke/guide/; and Center for Defense Information, http://www.cdi.org/program/ issue/document.cfm?DocumentID=2187&IssueID, updated April 27, 2004. “Strategic Failure,” CSIS Russia and Eurasia Report, no. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, February, 2004), p. 4. Soviet military doctrine on these points is Delphic throughout the Cold War. See Harriet Fast Scott and William F. Scott, Soviet Military Doctrine: Continuity, Formulation and Dissemination (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), esp. pp. 110–118, and Col. Gen. Makhmut Akhmetovich Gareev, M.V. Frunze: Military Theorist (Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1988), pp. 203–208 and 213–222. Scott Peterson, “U.S. and Russia Nukes: Still on Cold War, Hair-Trigger Alert,” Christian Science Monitor, May 6, 2004, in David Johnson, ed., CDI Russia Weekly #305, May 7, 2004, [email protected] Robert W. Nelson, “Lowering the Threshold: Nuclear Bunker Busters and Mininukes,” Ch. 4 in Brian Alexander and Alistair Millar, eds, Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Emergent Threats in an Evolving Security Environment (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003), pp. 68–79. A more optimistic appraisal of the necessity for these weapons appears in Wirtz and Russell, “A Quiet Revolution,” passim.

Nuclear proliferation and causal explanation 1

2

Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979). See also, and more specifically on Waltz’s views of the relationship between nuclear weapons and stability: The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: More May Be Better, Adelphi Papers No. 171 (London: International Institute of Strategic Studies, 1981); Nuclear Myths and Political Realities,” American Political Science Review, No. 3 (September, 1990), pp. 731–745; and his chapters in Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995). Other arguments for a positive association between the spread of survivable nuclear forces and international stability appear in Martin Van Creveld, Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict (New York: The Free Press, 1993). For a sorting of realist views on international politics, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), esp. pp. 14–22. See also Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). Paul R. Viotti and Mark V. Kauppi divide international political theories into realist, pluralist and globalist schools, a taxonomy similar to that offered by Kalevi J. Holsti. See Viotti and Kauppi, eds, International Relations Theory: Realism, Pluralism, Globalism (New York: Macmillan, 1993), esp. Ch. 1, pp. 61–227, and Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 328. See also Holsti’s comments on the roots of realism and neorealism, pp. 329–330. An excellent summary and critique of neorealist views is provided by Robert O. Keohane, “Theory of World Politics: Structural Realism and Beyond,” in Ada W. Finifter, ed., Political Science: The State of the Discipline (Washington, DC: American Political Science Association, 1983), and reprinted in Viotti and Kauppi, eds, International Relations Theory, pp. 186–227.

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

On the other hand, John Mearsheimer is correct to note that realism is inconsistent with much American public opinion and with a great deal of U.S. public diplomacy because it is “at odds with the deep-seated sense of optimism and moralism that pervades much of American society. Liberalism, on the other hand, fits neatly with those values.” Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 23. Realism/neorealism is contrasted with liberalism/neoliberal institutionalism and radical/dependency perspectives as competing perspectives on state policy in Karen Mingst, Essentials of International Relations (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). p. 129 and passim. The term “system” has many uses in international politics and in political science. Structural-realist theories of international politics emphasize the causal importance of system structure: numbers and types of units in the system and the distribution of military and other capabilities among those units. Other variations of systems theory emphasize the interactions among components of the system, including the interdependence of the actors or units. For a concise discussion of systemic theories of international politics, see James E. Dougherty and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff, Jr., Contending Theories of International Politics, Fourth Edition (New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 100–134. Mearsheimer’s capstone defense of offensive realism, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, passim, provides ample evidence for this point. Vital interests as used here refers to interests over which states resist compromise and for which they are willing to go to war. See Donald M. Snow, National Security: Defense Policy in a Changed International Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 173–180. Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 92–93 and passim. Waltz, Theory of International Politics, p. 80. Jervis, System Effects, p. 109. See Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1957), for an early and pioneering effort for its time. International systems theories are classified and critiqued in Jervis, System Effects, Ch. 3. Waltz, “The Stability of a Bipolar World,” Deadalus v. 93 (Summer, 1964), pp. 881–909, and Waltz, Theory of International Politics, pp. 170–171, cited in Jervis, System Effects, p. 118. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 337 and passim. David E. Sanger, “North Korea Says It Has a Program on Nuclear Arms,” New York Times, Oct. 17, 2002, pp. A1, A12. See also James Dao, “The Pact That the Koreans Flouted,” New York Times, Oct. 17, 2002, p. A12. Wade L. Huntley, “Ostrich Engagement: The Bush Administration and the North Korea Nuclear Crisis,” The Nonproliferation Review, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 81–115. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid. Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Revolution in Warfare? Air Power in the Persian Gulf (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995), p. 67. This is a revised version of the official U.S. Air Force Gulf War Air Power Survey (GWAPS) first published in 1993. Keaney and Cohen, Revolution in Warfare, p. 67. Ibid. Ibid., p. 78. Special forces teams may have destroyed some mobile SCUDs. Jeffrey Record, Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1993), pp. 71–73. Testimony of John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, before U.S. Congress, House International Relations Committee, subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia, June 24, 2004, cited in Garry J.

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34

35

36 37

Gilmore, Armed Forces Press Service, June 25, 2004, www.defenselink.mil/news/ subscribe.html. Ibid. Ibid. Peter Brookes, “Atomic Ayatollahs,” New York Post, in Military.com, June 28, 2004, www.military.com/. Dafna Linzer, “Iran a Nuclear Threat, U.S. Says,” Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com, downloaded August 20, 2004. Nazila Fathi, “Iran Says It May Pre-empt Attack Against Its Nuclear Facilities,” New York Times, August 20, 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/international/middleeast/20iran. Ibid. Madeline Chambers, “Exiles: Iran Making Missiles That Could Hit Europe,” Reuters, December 2, 2004, via Netscape News, http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/ story.jsp?floc=NW_1. Barry Schweid, “U.S. Suspects Iran Is Making New Missiles,” Associated Press, December 3, 2004, NetscapeNews, http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/ story.jsp?floc=NW_1. Statement of the Honorable Douglas J. Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, to Senate Armed Services Committee, Hearing on Nuclear Posture Review, February 14, 2002, p. 3. For an assessment of pertinent technology and options, see Robert W. Nelson, “Lowering the Threshold: Nuclear Bunker Busters and Mininukes,” Ch. 4 in Brian Alexander and Alistair Millar, eds, Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Emergent Threats in an Evolving Security Environment (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2003), pp. 68–79. Michael R. Gordon, “Nuclear Arms: For Deterrence or Fighting?” New York Times, March 11, 2002, pp. A1, A8. The Russian legislator and Chinese academic are cited in Eric Schmitt, “U.S. Tries To Explain New Policy for A-Bomb,” New York Times, March 11, 2002, p. A8. One of the more controversial locutions to issue from the George W. Bush administration, the “Axis of Evil” was an attempt to warn of states that combined potential WMD threats with support of international terrorism. North Korea fits the WMD category of fears but its profile in terrorism is low, outside of South Korea. See John Simpson and Jenny Nielsen, “Fiddling While Rome Burns? The 2004 NPT PrepCom,” The Nonproliferation Review, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 116–141, for an assessment of present challenges related to the NPT. See also Henry D. Sokolski, “Taking Proliferation Seriously,” Ch. 12 in Sokolski, ed., Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice (Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, November 2004), pp. 341–356. Mark T. Clark, “Small Nuclear Powers,” Ch. 10 in Sokolski, ed., Getting MAD, p. 281. Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Henry Holt/Times Books, 2004), pp. 38–39.

Nuclear proliferation in Asia 1 2 3

Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Henry Holt, Times Books, 2004), pp. 61–63. Lawrence Korb, with Peter Ogden, The Road to Nuclear Security (Washington, D.C.: Center for American Progress, December 2004), p. 5. Paul Bracken, Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), esp. pp. 95–124.

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Michael O’Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), pp. 7–31. The distinction between nonlinearity and chaos is explained in Colin S. Gray, Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History (London: Frank Cass, 2002), Ch. 4. According to Gray, a system is nonlinear when its performance “shows radical discontinuities because of an apparent disproportion between inputs and outcomes.”A system or phenomenon is chaotic when it shows “both nonlinearity in performance and such extreme sensitivity to the downstream consequences of unknown variations in initial conditions that predictive system behavior is impracticable.” (Ibid. p. 104). One might, by analogy, suggest that nuclear planning in peacetime is linear; crises involving the alerting of nuclear forces, nonlinear; and an actual use of nuclear weapons, entry into chaos. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976). For example, see Clausewitz’s discussion of friction in On War, pp. 119–121 and his comments on the consequences of the “dreadful presence of suffering and danger” in battle, p. 108. I am grateful to Dr James Scouras, whose AWSM@ model I have adapted and used for making calculations and preparing charts. He is not responsible for the data, nor for any arguments and conclusions in this study.

Conclusion 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Boston MA,: Little, Brown, 1993), esp. Ch. 5–6, 9. MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray, The Dynamics of Military Revolution 1300–2050 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 12. The definition and periodization of military revolutions and RMAs is now a cottage industry. A sensible treatment of this topic with exhaustive references appears in Colin S. Gray, Strategy for Chaos: Revolutions in Military Affairs and the Evidence of History (London: Frank Cass, 2002), esp. Ch. 2–3. Michael O’Hanlon, Technological Change and the Future of Warfare (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2000), p. 11. Ibid., pp. 12, 14–15. For additional perspective on this point with pertinent illustrations, see Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century (New York: The Free Press, 2003), pp. 34–37 and passim. Paul Bracken, The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 5–73. Peter Douglas Feaver, Guarding the Guardians: Civilian Control of Nuclear Weapons in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 12–21. Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Future Strategic Strike Forces (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of Defense, February, 2004), Ch. 1, p. 2 and passim. Ibid., Ch. 2, p. 1. Ibid., Ch. 1, p. 4. Ibid., Ch. 1, p. 10. The most dangerous possibility is nuclear terrorism. For an examination of pertinent threats and proposed solutions, see Graham Allison, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (New York: Henry Holt/Times Books, 2004), esp. pp. 140–175.

112

NOTES

14 For an expansion of this concept, see Colin S. Gray, The Second Nuclear Age (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), and Keith B. Payne, Deterrence in the Second Nuclear Age (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996). 15 Paul Bracken, Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age (New York: Harper Perennial, 2000), p. 111 and passim. 16 Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). 17 Bracken, Fire in the East, p. 111. 18 John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, “The Advent of Netwar (Revisited),” Ch. 1 in Arquilla and Ronfeldt, eds, Networks and Netwars (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2001), pp. 1–25. 19 Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New Direction (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), pp. 39–77. 20 On deterrence and rationality, see Patrick M. Morgan, Deterrence Now (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 42–79. Even in game theory logic, the shift from the Cold War, bipolar international system to the n-player game of twenty-firstcentury nuclear proliferation has profound, and destabilizing, implications for models of arms control and nonproliferation based on an earlier era. On this point see Bracken, “The Structure of the Second Nuclear Age,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, PA, September 25, 2003, distributed by e-mail, www.fpri.org. 21 I am grateful to Raymond Garthoff for this anecdote.

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119

INDEX

ABM treaty, 1972 24, 35, 45 accidental war, and information age 17–22 Afghanistan 67, 78 air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs) 52 AirLand Battle 69 al-Qaeda 14, 37, 72, 77 ALCMs (air-launched cruise missiles) 52 Algeria 63n allertness/launch conditions 53–6 Allison, Graham T. 102 anti-missile defenses see missile defenses anti-proliferation systemists/incrementalists 71 Table antisatellite (ASAT) weapons 41 Argentina 63n Asian proliferation 76, 92, 100–1; chaotic situation 80; coalition possibilities 86–7; comparative deployments/outcomes 81–7; containment issues 76–9; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91; linear/non-linear 79–81 assured retaliation 31 Table, 83, see also mutual assured destruction asymmetrical challenges 14, 22 Axis of Evil 66, 100 balanced triad 54–5 Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) 35 ballistic missile defense (BMD) debates 24–6, 33 bargaining theory, and deterrence 10 Belarus 63n bipolarity 61–2 Blair, Bruce G. 20

BMD (ballistic missile defense) debates 24–6, 33 Bolton, John 66 boost phase defenses 39 Brazil 63n ‘bull’/‘cow’: data 23–4; scenarios 24–5 bunker busters 50, 69 Bush, George W. 2, 4, 12; and Iraq 66; missile defenses 24, 30, 35–6, 76–7; new triad 21–2, 99; North Korea 63–4; Nuclear Posture Review 68–70; preemption doctrine 45, 61, 100 C3 (command, control and communications) 99 C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intellegence, surveillance and reconnaissance) 2, 16 Table, 17, 95 China 26, 37, 63n, 69, 101; coalition possibilities 86–7; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91 Churchill, Winston 102 Clark, Mark T. 71 Clausewitz, Carl von 10, 80 Clinton, Bill 20, 24, 35, 39, 56 coercive diplomacy 11 Cold War 1–2, 23; bipolarity 61–2; forward deployed forces 65; information/electronic technologies 96–8; missile defenses 31–4; tactical v strategic use 94, see also post-nuclear military era command, control, communications, computers, intellegence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) 2, 16 Table, 95

INDEX

command, control and communications (C3) 99 compellence 10–11 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB) 4 conflict resolution, and deterrence 10 conventionalization 44, 57; concepts 44–7; data analysis 47–52; operational issues 53 ‘cow’/‘bull’: data 23–4; scenarios 24–5 cruise missiles 91 Cuban missile crisis 102, 103 CVID 67 cyber war see information warfare decapitation, and deterrence 10, 83 defense dominance/transition 31 Table defensive realism 59 Table delegation of authority 20–1 denial, and deterrence 10 Desert Storm 19, 65–6 deterrence 9–13; active/passive 10–11; approaches 10; bandwagon effect 11–12; and bargaining theory 10; and conflict resolution 10; critics 11; and decapitation 10, 83; definitions 9–11; and denial 10; existential 10; finite 31 Table, 83; and game theory 10; information age 103–4; information warfare 17; information-based weapons 45; as latent feature 10; means of influence 10; minimum/finite 31 Table, 83; and new world order 13–22; policy-prescriptive orientation 10; postnuclear military era 12–13, 32–4, 93; as process 10; and punishment 10; as relationship 10; and risk 10; stability 82–3; and uncertainty 10; of weapons of mass destruction 15, see also asymetrical challenges detonation, high altitude 19 devolution of command 20–1 diplomacy, coercive 11 enhanced retaliation 31 Table entrepreneurship 77 European Union 66–7 existential deterrence 10 Feaver, Peter Douglas 97 finite deterrence 31 Table, 83 Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty 70 Flory, Peter 66 Follow-On Forces Attack (FOFA) 69

121

formal/efficient causes 61–2 France 63n game theory, and deterrence 10 George, Alexander 11 Gorbachev, Mikhail 65, 102 Gray, Colin 22, 33 Gulf Wars see Iraq Hezbollah 81 high altitude detonation 19 Hiroshima 94 Hitler, Adolf 18, 61, 102, 104 Hobbes, Thomas 45 human nature realism 59 Table Hussein see Saddam Hussein IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) 66, 68, 76–7 ICBMs (inter-continental ballistic missiles) 46–7, 48, 50–1, 56, 91 inadvertent war see accidental war independent/dependent variable 60–1 India 4, 34–5, 63, 100–1; coalition possibilities 86–7; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91 information age: and accidental war 17–22; revolution 2–3, 94–9; and terrorism 103 information warfare 16–18, 22 Table; and nuclear alerting process 17–18 information-based weapons, deterrence 45 innovation 22–6; adoption 26 intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) 99 inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) 46–7, 48, 50–1, 56, 91 international arms control regimes 4 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 66, 68, 76–7 international realism 59–60, 62–3; formal/efficient causes 61–2; independent/dependent variable 60–1 international systems 101–3 Internet 103 Iran 37, 63n, 66–8, 72, 74, 81; coalition possibilities 86–7; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91

INDEX

Iraq 2, 19, 45, 67, 74, 78; proliferation lessons 64, 65–6 Iraqi Survey Group 66 Islam 72, 73 ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) 99 Israel 4, 63n, 86; attack on Iraq 67, 81 Japan: coalition possibilities 86–7; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91 Jervis, Robert 18, 61 joint (US/Russia) warning/control systems 56 JSTPS (Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff) 97–8 Kahn, Herman 13 Kay, David A. 66 Kazahkstan 63n Kennedy, John F. 102 Keohane, Robert O. 27 Khan, A.Q. 77 Khrushchev, Nikita 102, 103 Kissinger, Henry 11 knowledge innovation see innovation Knox, McGregor 95 Kosovo 95 Kuwait 65–6 land-based missiles 90–1 Libya 72, 77 long range precision systems 44, 47–8 low intensity conflicts see unconventional warfare Mearsheimer, John J. 59n, 62 midcourse intercepts 39 military revolutions (MR) 95 minimum/finite deterrence 31 Table, 83 Minuteman III 50–1 missile defense 23–6, 30, 41–2; Cold War 31–4; requirements 33; survival rates 39–41; tasking 32; theater/national 38 Missile Defense Agency (MDA) 35–6 missile-targeting agreement, 1994 20 Moscow Treaty, 2002 4, 12, 26, 39, 40; requirements 48, 50, 82 multipolarity 63 mutual assured destruction 45, see also assured retaliation

122

Nagasaki 94 Napoleon Bonaparte 61 National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) 68 national missile defense (NMD) system 4–5, 24, 35, 77–8; Russian responses 36–8 NATO: Cold War era 94; Kosovo 95; and Russia 30; US nuclear guarantee 69; US security pacts 70 netwar see information warfare new triad 21–2; surviving/retaliating warheads 48–50, 54–5; US policy review 69–70, 99–100 new world order 13–22 9/11 attacks 2, 3, 14, 35, 69, 100; intelligence 66; and Nuclear Posture Review 69–70; and proliferation 71–2; US/Russian cooperation 36–8 non-proliferation treaties (NPT) 4, 63n, 66, 67, 76–7 NORAD 56, 96, 98 North Korea 4, 35, 37; coalition possibilities 86–7; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91; as nuclear power 79, 81; proliferation 63–4, 72, 74, 76, 77 nuclear arsenals 45–6 nuclear entrepreneurship 77 nuclear proliferation see proliferation nuclear superiority 31 Table nuclear weapons see proliferation Nunn–Lugar programs 56, 99 Nye, Joseph S., Jr. 27 Oettinger, Anthony 23 offensive realism 59 Table Operation Desert Storm 45 Osirak (nuclear reactor) 67 Pakistan 4, 34–5, 63n, 73, 100–1; coalition possibilities 86–7; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91 Palestine 81 perceptions management 18–19 polarity and structure 61–3 policy-prescriptive orientation 10 politics and strategy 93 population defense 32

INDEX

post-Cold War see post-nuclear military era post-nuclear military era 2, 4, 23–4, 34–6, 93; deterrence 12–13, 32–4; knowledge innovation 23–4, 94; proliferation 78; US/Russian competition 99 Powell, Colin 68 precision guided munitions (PGM) 2, 95 precision, long range systems 44, 47–8 preemption doctrine 45 pro-proliferation pandemicists/selectivists 71 Table proliferation 34–5, 93; Asian 76, 92; international systems 101–3; leaders/policy makers 102–3; postCold War 78; states’ views 70–1; status 63n; and terrorism 71–5; West’s reaction 101 proliferation–acceptant arguments 58, see also international realism punishment, and deterrence 10 Putin, Vladimir 4, 12, 30, 36, 99 RDT theory 75 Reagan, Ronald 32 realism see international realism realist international systems theory (RIST) 60–3, 75 regime decapitation 10, 83 retaliation, assured/enhanced 31 Table revolutions in military affairs (RMAs) 22, 27, 78, 95–6 risk, and deterrence 10 RIST (realist international systems theory) 60–3, 75 Rodionov, Igor 20 Roosevelt, Franklin 102 Rumsfeld, Donald 35–6 Russia: airpower 52; coalition possibilities 86–7; conventionalization 46–7, 51–2; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91; joint (with US) warning/control systems 56; military capability 37, 45–6; missile defense parameters 39–41; Moscow Treaty requirements 48; and NATO 30; nuclear arsenals 45–6; post-nuclear military era 12–13; reduction of inventories 4; SSBN fleet modernization 51–2, 55–6; strategic nuclear forces 42 Table; surviving/retaliating warheads 48–50, 54 Table; and (US) Nuclear Posture Review 69–70

123

SAC 96–7 Saddam Hussein 2, 61, 65–6, 72, 77 SALT agreements 45 Saudi Arabia 72, 86 Schelling, Thomas 18 SCUD missiles 65, 68 Table sea launched cruise missiles (SLCMs) 52 September 11, 2001 see 9/11 attacks Serbia 95 Shahab missiles 68 Table Shamkhani, Ali 67–8 SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan) 97 SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles) 48 SLCMs (sea-launched cruise missiles) 52 small wars see unconventional warfare SORT (Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty) see Moscow Treaty South Africa 63n South Korea: coalition possibilities 86–7; forces deployed 82, 83 Table; forces, operational assumptions 84–5 Tables; forces, stability/sensitivity 87–91 space-based weapons 26 space-control 34 SSBN fleet modernization 51–2, 55–6 Stalin, Joseph 102, 104 START agreements/talks 4, 12, 45 Steele, Robert David 27–8 Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) 32 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) see Moscow treaty, 2002 submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) 48 Sun Tzu 14 surviving/retaliating warheads 48–50 systemic analysis 101–3 tactical nuclear weapons 69 Taliban 37 technology innovation see innovation terrorism: and information age 103; and proliferation 71–5 Thucydides 45 Toffler, Alvin 94 Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) (US Army) 3 transformative strategies 27–8 triad, balanced see balanced triad triad, new see new triad Tritten, James J. 49 Table Truman, Harry S. 102

INDEX

Ukraine 63n UN Security Council 61, 67 uncertainty, and deterrence 10 unconventional warfare 13–15, 22 Table United Kingdom 63n United States: Cold War options 31–2; Cold War systems 96–8; command and control system 20–1; conventionalization 46–7, 50–1; cooperation with Russia 36–8; defense effectiveness 39–41; forward deployed forces 65; information-based weapons 45; Iraq intelligence 66, 74, 77; joint (with Russia) warning/control systems 56; missile defenses 23–4, 77–8; Moscow Treaty requirements 48; nonproliferation programs 100; and North Korea 64; nuclear arsenals 45–6; Nuclear Posture Review 68–70; postnuclear military era 12–13, 34–6;

124

reduction of inventories 4; spacecontrol 34; strategic nuclear forces 43 Table; surviving/retaliating warheads 48–50, 54 Table; transformative strategies 27–8 U.S. Army, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) 3 Vietnam 62 Waltz, Kenneth 60, 61, 62 warning/control systems (joint US/Russia) 56 weapons of mass destruction (WMD) 1, 93, 100; characteristics 14 table; Iraq 66, 77; obsolescence 95; proliferation 15–16, 35, 70, 77 Y2K problems 56 Yeltsin, Boris 20, 56

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