nuclear weapons worldwide, and withdraw all those on ships; stand down the strategic bombers from high-alert status; take off hair-trigger alert 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles; and cancel several nuclear weapon modernization programs. The announcement meant a pullback of 1,300 artillery-fired atomic projectiles, 850 Lance missile nuclear warheads, and 500 naval weapons.
In one stroke, Bush pulled back naval surface weapons that the United States had earlier refused to even discuss as part of strategic weapons negotiations.64
Bush also disbanded the institutional guardian of nuclear war planning, the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command, and replaced it in 1992 with the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), which would thereafter be responsible for all U.S. strategic nuclear weapons. The Air Force and the Navy would continue the day-to-day maintenance and control of their respective nuclear systems, but ultimate authority in time of crisis and war would rest with this new command.
The first Bush administration has since entered the history books as a committee of level-headed realists, including Secretary of State James Baker, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and others. In many subsequent depictions of the administration (including those of Bush and Scowcroft), these men and women formed a kind of college of foreign affairs cardinals whose policies rested primarily on cold calculations of U.S. national interest. In 1991, however, President Bush himself acted like anything but a realist. Reacting to the changing conditions of international politics, rather than to the distribution of power, he unilaterally discarded weapons and practices that had long ago ceased to serve any purpose.
George H. W. Bush was perhaps the most accomplished of all U.S. presidents in the field of foreign policy. Bush’s achievements were undeniable: he helped to reunify Germany, guided the final days of the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, and organized the most successful United Nations coalition since the Korean War to eject the Iraqi army from Kuwait. But by 1992, his services were no longer required. Voting less than a year after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the midst of a recession, Americans turned aside his re-election bid. Fifty years of war were over, the North American heartland was safe once again, and it was time to enjoy the fruits of peace and prosperity. The U.S. electorate was ready to turn its attention away from foreign affairs in general and from the nuclear arms race in particular. It even seemed to many people that the world had reached, in scholar Francis Fukuyama’s often-misunderstood phrase, “the end of history.”65
History, as new U.S. President Bill Clinton would learn, had other plans.
The end of this “second” Cold War and the cessation of political hostilities finally halted the surreal arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, but it resolved almost nothing among American defense intellectuals, military planners, and policymakers about nuclear deterrence. The legacy of these intellectual divisions lives on in current arguments about nuclear weapons and deterrence. Is deterrence a condition that can be created independently, or is there a way it can be sized or tailored to fit each opponent? Is there a minimum level of nuclear force that guarantees safety? Do nuclear weapons really deter other states at all, and if deterrence fails, can they be used?
These questions, as will be seen, have remained central to a series of dedicated but ultimately frustrating attempts in Washington to make sense of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and its purpose into the twenty-first century.
Chapter 2
Nuclear Weapons After the Cold War: Promise and Failure
Over time, as arsenals multiplied on both sides and the rhetoric of mutual annihilation grew more heated, we were forced to think about the unthinkable, justify the unjustifiable, rationalize the irrational. Ultimately, we contrived a new and desperate theology to ease our moral anguish, and we called it deterrence.
—General George Butler, U.S. Air Force, 1997
We have been unable so far to do better than just sort of go on intellectual autopilot.
—General Butler, a year later
The Power of Inertia
The end of the Cold War was supposed to mean many things: the spread of democracy, the reunification of Europe, an economic “peace dividend,” and maybe, with the competition between individual freedom and collectivist repression resolved, even the end of intellectual history. Most important, it was supposed to represent a final release from the nuclear nightmare. Today, some of that promise has been realized. Europe is whole, and the world goes about its business largely free from the fear of global nuclear war. And yet, the weapons and strategies of the Cold War remain: Americans who were young children when the Berlin Wall fell still crew the silos, submarines, and bombers that were all built for service in a previous century. The Soviet Union is gone, but like a ceremonial guard the U.S. nuclear deterrent continues to stand at attention over its remains.
Some of this “nuclear inertia” can be traced to the unexpected speed with which the Cold War ended.1 Although in retrospect that conflict and the nuclear arms race it spawned might seem to be a long historical process, the Cold War was shorter than the life span of a single human being. The relationship between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics went first from suspicion and hostility after World War I into an alliance of necessity during World War II, and then to existential confrontation and the final Soviet collapse of the late 1980s, all in the space of some seventy years.
And then it was all over in a matter of days. Many Western experts, until the very end, clung to the belief that a Soviet collapse was literally impossible—that what was happening could not be happening—and it was remarkable that U.S. and NATO policymakers were not caught more flatfooted than they were. (The advice they were getting didn’t help: the late Stephen Meyer of MIT even went so far as to tell the Senate Foreign Relations committee that “hints of military coups [in the USSR] are pure flights of fancy” in testimony he gave on June 6, 1991, just nine weeks before Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s ouster in the Soviet coup.)2 Even had Washington and its allies been better prepared for the Soviet implosion, however, there was no way for either side to plan for so sudden a peace, and the entire Soviet and American order of nuclear battle remained frozen in place despite the end of the political hostilities between East and West.
The Americans in the early 1990s were reticent about packing away their nuclear weapons. Their caution was understandable: a moment of “peace” does not mean an eternity of “stability,” and precipitous moves toward rapid nuclear disarmament immediately after the fall of the USSR would have been irresponsible. Russia’s leaders, for their part, had more pressing matters on their minds; in the first years after the Soviet collapse, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his advisors could not immediately tackle the immense job of securing and consolidating the old Soviet nuclear arsenal in the new Russian Federation mostly because they had their hands full trying to consolidate the new Russian Federation itself. In any case, political leaders cannot sweep away institutions, beliefs, buildings, and bombs overnight, no matter how revolutionary the circumstances. Dismantling the machinery of nuclear war is not a matter of simply turning off the lights and handing in the codes and keys. The disintegration of the Soviet Union opened a world of possibilities—and created more than a few headaches—for disarmament, but any serious reconsideration of the purpose and structure of the U.S. deterrent in the wake of the Cold War’s end necessarily demanded patience, creativity, and time.
Major reforms of the U.S. nuclear deterrent might have been too much to expect in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, but in the ensuing two decades since the Cold War’s end, Western governments have consistently shown a genuine desire to reduce both their nuclear and conventional arsenals. Prominent defense and foreign policy intellectuals, including former Cold Warriors in the United States and
