Hassan, Amy Hull, Michael Miner, David Nicholson, Joshua Sheehan, and Chris Thomas for their help.
Bill Finan, my editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press, was a source of constant support and wise advice for this book from conception to publication. Bill and I worked on my previous book as well, and once again I have not only benefited from his steady editorial hand (which I know I’ve put to the test over the years) but also from his friendship, optimism, and encouragement.
This book is dedicated to my father, Nick James Nichols, and to my daughter, Hope Virginia Nichols. My father was one of America’s dwindling number of World War II veterans, and although he passed away as the book was nearing completion, we had many conversations about its subject. He was stationed in California as a private in the U.S. Army in early 1945, and while the first nuclear bomb may well have saved his life, he never believed that anyone would ever be crazy or evil enough to fight an all-out nuclear war. He had a confidence and peace of mind about this that I envied during the Cold War, but his wisdom seems to have been borne out, at least where the Americans and the Russians are concerned. My daughter, born in Moscow long after the Cold War’s end, is too young to know what all the fuss was about. I hope that when she reads some of these pages in later years, she will wonder exactly the same thing.
Introduction
Why Nuclear Weapons Still Matter
We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal.
—George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger, and Sam Nunn, 2007
As long as nuclear weapons exist, the United States will maintain safe, secure, and effective nuclear forces, including deployed and stockpiled nuclear weapons, highly capable nuclear delivery systems and command and control capabilities, and the physical infrastructure and the expert personnel needed to sustain them.
—U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, 2010
Isn’t Nuclear War Yesterday’s Problem?
The Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin for the last time on Christmas Day 1991. That evening, U.S. President George H. W. Bush addressed the American people and assured them that the long nuclear nightmare of the Cold War had finally come to an end. “For over 40 years,” Bush said, “the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. This struggle shaped the lives of all Americans. It forced all nations to live under the specter of nuclear destruction.”
That confrontation, the president declared, “is now over.”1
And so it was. For a brief period at the close of the twentieth century, it seemed as if the nuclear anxieties of the Cold War could finally be put aside. Both the United States and the new Russian Federation began to dismantle their nuclear weapons, target them away from each other, and to corral and secure what was left of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal. Nuclear war receded into the recent past as yesterday’s worry, no longer relevant in a world released from the constant tension of the longstanding Soviet-American nuclear confrontation.
Prominent Cold Warriors in the United States and Europe, and even some in Russia, have since advocated deep reductions in nuclear arms. Many have supported the goal of reaching “global zero,” the complete eradication of nuclear weapons. In 2008, a bipartisan group that included former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Senator Sam Nunn, and former Secretary of Defense William Perry (sometimes collectively called the “Gang of Four”) issued a now-famous open letter in which they called for a world free of nuclear weapons.2 For a time, this message of nuclear abolition resonated widely and attracted considerable attention among both policy elites and ordinary citizens, and a collection of senior officials and top military commanders from several countries soon joined these statesmen in rejecting the foundations of the strategic doctrines they helped to create. In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama formally committed the United States to the objective of the complete eradication of nuclear arms in a speech in Prague, a goal he reaffirmed in an official review of U.S. nuclear policies in 2010.
But the moment passed quickly. In May 2011, Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, and Nunn hosted a meeting in London later described by former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans as “featuring a worldwide cast of some 30 former foreign and defense ministers, generals, and ambassadors who share their concern and commitment” to nuclear disarmament. None of these officials, however, were still in their former positions of power. “Our average age was over 65,” Evans noted ruefully, and the limits of their effectiveness were neatly described at the conference by former British Defense Minister Des Browne: “People who used to be something really want to tackle this issue. The trouble is that those who are something don’t.”3 As President Obama began his second term in office, his administration retained and reaffirmed previous Cold War concepts, strategies and forces. Today, more than 20,000 nuclear weapons remain around the world, with some 5,000 of those operational and ready for war, and many arms control advocates are concerned that the window for further reductions, at least for some time to come, has closed.4
Despite this slowing momentum, the U.S. and its allies deserve credit for at least trying to reduce their dependence on nuclear arms. (Great Britain has seriously considered the question of whether it needs a nuclear deterrent at all.)5 Other nations, however, are trying to reach their own nuclear moment. North Korea, with a tiny arsenal (and a new leader assuming power in 2012 while still so young he would not have been allowed to be a member of the U.S. Senate) has made explicit nuclear threats against its neighbors and the United States. In late 2012, North Korea finally succeeded in testing a three-stage missile—the precursor to an intercontinental-range attack capability—by launching a satellite into space.6 A few months later, the North Korean regime issued a cascade of nuclear threats that were extreme even by Pyongyang’s typically extreme level of rhetoric, provoking an ongoing crisis with the United States and South Korea whose outcome is still uncertain.7 Meanwhile, Iran’s mullahs remain unswerving in their determination to join the nuclear club, and even backward Myanmar has been caught toying with nuclear weapons technology.8
Russia and China are long-standing members of the nuclear club, and strategic nuclear weapons remain central to their respective defense strategies, in part to compensate for the limited reach and power of their conventional forces. The Chinese appear to have made a decision, at least for the near future, to sustain a small but increasingly modern nuclear force.9 The Russians, however, remain stubbornly committed to their insistence on the right to maintain a large and varied nuclear arsenal—and to use it if necessary. Senior Russian military officers bluntly admit that this position is driven not only by a firm belief in traditional nuclear deterrence, but by the hope that nuclear weapons can compensate for the poor overall state of the Russian military. “The nuclear status of Russia,” according to the commander of Russia’s nuclear forces, “will remain in the foreseeable future, until scientific and technical progress or a change in the nature of international relations eliminates the deterring role of nuclear weapons.”10
The Indians and the Pakistanis, locked in their own regional nuclear arms race, continue to rely on nuclear weapons as the core of their national defenses. Israeli nuclear strategy is likely predicated on similar concerns about national survival, although the size of the Israeli arsenal remains unknown and unacknowledged. The Israeli nuclear program has long been one of the world’s worst-kept secrets, as part of a careful game meant to induce uncertainty and caution in Israel’s enemies (and to avoid international inspection and pressure for disarmament).
The United States, for its part, has for more than forty years maintained a public commitment
