the Obama administration released its own review of nuclear doctrine in 2010, critics almost immediately derided it as little more than a continuation of tradition rather than anything substantively new.20
Of course, it could be argued with some justice that American thinking about nuclear weapons was never all that clear-headed in the first place. To be sure, U.S. planners and their Soviet counterparts worked hard on these issues. They came up with elaborate, highly detailed scenarios for various kinds of nuclear conflict, all of which were predicated on optimistic assumptions about how nuclear conflicts could be fought, controlled, and terminated despite the vast damage and widespread chaos that would characterize even a modest nuclear exchange.
These efforts consumed immense human and material resources, but never produced useful answers. As Lawrence Freedman noted in a landmark study of nuclear strategy written in the early 1980s: “The question of what happens if deterrence fails is vital for the intellectual cohesion and credibility of nuclear strategy…. No operational nuclear strategy has yet to be devised that does not carry an enormous risk of degenerating into a bloody contest of resolve or a furious exchange of devastating and crippling blows against the political and economic centers of the industrialized world.”21 If U.S. nuclear strategy seemed complicated and fantastic during the Cold War, in part it was because there was an opposing Soviet superpower whose own nuclear doctrine was clearly defined and no less intricate. Soviet planning provided a constant spur to thinking, creative or otherwise, about American nuclear forces and what purpose they were supposed to serve.
Today, all that is left of the Soviet nuclear superpower is a faded Russian successor that can barely contend with problems on its own borders. Russia’s nuclear forces, while still a notional danger, lack the ideological and imperial purposes that made the Soviet arsenal such a deadly threat. With the Soviet Union gone, the United States is left with a massive nuclear complex that was designed to fight, and if possible survive, a global nuclear war with a similarly armed superpower. Deprived of its original logic, U.S. doctrine has since lost whatever internal coherence it might have had, and cannot provide guidance for answers to nuclear threats that are evolving and changing. Reforming U.S. nuclear doctrine is the key not only to the reform of U.S. national security policy, but also to the continued reduction of nuclear arsenals and the prevention of the wider spread of nuclear weaponry.
A less alarmist view might be to ask why there should be any serious concern about nuclear doctrine in the United States or in any other of the major powers. The United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China have already adopted clear views on the role of nuclear weapons, with all-out nuclear war among them deterred by the promise of assured destruction, and smaller strikes by regional proliferators deterred by the considerable nuclear muscle of the bigger nations. Whether by accident or design, the outcome is the same: steep reductions in the world’s arsenals have obviated the complicated nuclear warfighting scenarios of the past.
Where the smaller nuclear powers are concerned, presumably they will replicate the successful Soviet-American experience. (“Success” in this sense is measured by more than a half century in which there was no use of nuclear weapons.) Why not assume that the Indians and the Pakistanis, and perhaps the Israelis and the Iranians, will be deterred by the thought of even a small nuclear war? These relative newcomers to the nuclear game may well be developing strategies for regional conflict and thinking through the implications of localized exchanges of nuclear weapons, but that does not mean that they are willing to risk war with each other any more than the superpowers were.
Moreover, with the twin boons of the end of the Cold War and the advent of globalization, the Russians, Americans, Chinese, and almost everyone else should now rest assured that they are safer in a less ideologically charged, more transparent, and more interconnected world. The arcane intricacies of brinkmanship have been displaced by attempts to get to, or stay at, lower numbers of nuclear weapons, and maybe even achieve the grail of “zero” in a more tranquil future. Scholar John Mueller, for one, has dismissed the idea that nuclear arms were ever all that important; in 1988 he predicted that the “nuclear arms competition may eventually come under control not so much out of conscious design as out of atrophy born of boredom.”22 In the years since the end of the Cold War, he has continued to maintain that the fixation on nuclear threats is misguided and wasteful.23
Unfortunately, the real world stubbornly refuses to conform to such optimistic expectations. Even if we accept the arguable proposition that something like the classical model of nuclear deterrence will operate among the established nuclear powers and prevent all-out nuclear war, simply to leave it at that is to seize upon the least likely threat and declare the nuclear issue solved. Scholar Paul Bracken has for many years pointed out that the stability of deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union will be no guide to the future, a warning he issued again in late 2012: “Back in the Cold War, it’s my view that there was never a time when either side seriously considered a calculated strike on the other. All of them had plans—and you could find colonels and one-star generals who thought about these things—but at the top of the government, both sides backed down. That’s not going to be true in the case of North Korea. It’s not going to be true in South Asia with Pakistan and India, nor is it going to be true in the Middle East.”24 In other words, to say that traditional notions of deterrence, or even the much-debated nuclear “taboo”—if one actually exists—will likely govern great power relations is not to say very much, and may not be all that accurate.25 Even analysts who continue to insist on the utility of nuclear deterrent threats accept that the outcome of the Cold War may have had more to do with luck than design.26
Russian and U.S. nuclear inventories have been reduced since the late 1980s. But all of the nuclear-armed powers retain a single-minded focus on nuclear deterrence, and they continue to modernize their arsenals. Worse, fears of rogue nuclear programs and nuclear terrorism have fueled confusion and overreaction in Washington and elsewhere. As arms control analyst Hans Kristensen wrote in 2007, “it is as if the uncertainty and unpredictability of the post-Cold War world have clouded strategic deterrence thinking and caused planners to incorporate all capabilities, just to be safe, into every potential scenario.”27
These nuclear war plans, while smaller and less complicated than in the past, remain confused and convoluted. For example, U.S. and Russian war games since the Cold War have envisioned firing very small numbers of strategic nuclear missiles, as though this would contain or settle a major conflict among Russia, the United States, or China. A Russian war game in 1999 assumed a bizarre NATO attempt to grab the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in the Baltic, and concluded with Russian nuclear strikes—two in Western Europe, two in North America itself—that led not to retaliation, but to the “aggressor” desisting from its designs on Russian real estate.28 A decade later, another Russian exercise simulated a nuclear response against Poland, likely as a show of displeasure over U.S. missile defense plans in Europe.29
The Americans have generally been more sensible, but not by much. In late 2006, the U.S. military ran an exercise called “Vigilant Shield,” in which a conflict with “Nemazee,” “Ruebek,” and “Churya” (that is, North Korea, Russia, and China) somehow led to a nuclear attack on the Pentagon and a government bunker in Maryland. Miraculously, only 6,000 people were killed when these hypothetical nuclear weapons detonated within sight of the White House and the Washington Mall, but the Americans finally prevailed with just a handful of U.S. strategic nuclear launches against targets in Eurasia. No reason was given for the attack on the U.S. capital region or why it was not followed by more strikes, although the likely reason is that a larger attack, requiring a larger response, would have complicated the tidy assumptions of the game designers.30 All of this prompted journalist and Pentagon critic William Arkin to note that two of the core assumptions in the game were obviously that “nuclear warfare can break out for no particular reason at any particular time,” and that “small nuclear weapons, while bad, don’t really kill that many people.”31
Removing nuclear weapons from their pride of place
