change in the way Americans and others think about their security. Efforts to change the Cold War nuclear paradigm will encounter significant political, ideological, and bureaucratic obstacles, because reducing the importance of nuclear weapons will involve remaking American security strategy as a whole.
A major obstacle to this kind of reform is that the relatively nonviolent outcome of the Cold War has had a lasting effect on thinking about war and peace well past the fall of the Soviet Union. As the saying goes, “nothing succeeds like success,” and policymakers and their bureaucracies understandably tend to want to stay with what they think worked and thus repeat their previous successes. They therefore defend long-standing concepts and programs that over time become almost impossible to challenge. As defense scholars Janne Nolan and James Holmes pointed out in an autopsy of repeated failures to change U.S. nuclear strategies, “career officials are capable of mounting a devastating defense against initiatives put forth by political appointees…. As a country, [the United States] has never had a real debate about how much deterrence is enough.”32 The strategic rationales of the Cold War are more difficult to defend today, but reams of papers, slides, and studies protect the nuclear bureaucracy like an intellectual Maginot Line.
This intellectual stagnation is especially unfortunate now that the moral dimension of nuclear use is more complicated than ever. The mutual Soviet-American stranglehold, in which nuclear deterrence and retaliation were coupled to national survival itself, obviated much of the discussion about the morality of nuclear weapons. Even during the worst periods of tension with the USSR, however, Western leaders and their advisors wondered about the moral acceptability of inflicting massive and indiscriminate casualties on an enemy once all is lost, and whether an existential threat was worth an equally existential response. Today, large-scale nuclear war is highly unlikely, and nuclear use against a smaller power will therefore be a discretionary option rather than a desperate necessity. Without a threat to American civilization itself, nuclear weapons are now more an instrument of choice rather than necessity, and this has led many men and women who were once the chief advocates of nuclear deterrence to argue for abandoning outdated concepts of nuclear combat and dismantling the weapons that serve them.
In the end, only the United States, with its fortunate geopolitical advantages, its unique position of international leadership, and its huge qualitative edge in nuclear matters (to say nothing of other technologies) can meaningfully lead any kind of change in global norms about the purpose and meaning of nuclear arms. This will require difficult and politically unpopular choices, material sacrifice, steadfast diplomacy, and the courage to assert America’s confidence in its ability to lead and protect the international order without nuclear threats. But the creation of a post-nuclear age will not happen without a fundamental rejection both of beliefs about nuclear weapons and ideas about what constitutes “national security” in the twenty-first century.
Overview
Concepts about nuclear weapons, rather than the weapons themselves, are central to the problem of security in a nuclear world. Consequently, this book is about the current state of U.S. nuclear doctrine and strategy, the effects of American thinking about nuclear weapons on international security, and the various ways that the United States might reduce the overall threat of nuclear weapons to the international community. This book is not about nuclear technology, nor is it meant to present a comprehensive history of the Cold War or the nuclear arms race. Those books and articles have already been written over the past three decades, as seminal contributions by Robert Jervis, Lawrence Freedman, John Newhouse, and others, and they are works to which this one owes a clear intellectual debt.
Instead, this study is aimed at reducing the centrality of nuclear weapons in U.S. security strategy in the twenty-first century. Of course, it is impossible to understand the current nuclear situation without understanding the intellectual and physical legacy of the Cold War. The U.S. missiles that stand on alert at this moment were designed and built in the 1960s, and were the result of a series of strategic debates and decisions that now seem like ancient history to students and specialists alike. We live in a world that was shaped by the Cold War, and engaging current policies about nuclear weapons means unavoidably engaging the thought and work that laid their foundations decades ago. Accordingly, the next chapter of this book will present an overview of U.S. nuclear strategy from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War.
Chapter 2 recounts the disarray and confusion that settled over U.S. nuclear doctrine after the Soviet collapse. Three times since the Cold War, the United States has tried to engage in a full review of its nuclear doctrine. Each time, these efforts failed to move U.S. nuclear thinking beyond formulations that represented an amalgam of outdated intellectual constructs and stubborn rationalizations for existing weapons systems. These missed opportunities repeatedly produced cautious documents that served, in the main, to reaffirm the status quo and defend the right to use nuclear weapons.
Eastern and Western planners alike were obsessed by an arms race that was dominated by numbers and capabilities, and so they routinely contemplated thousands of nuclear strikes during a world war. Whether even the most courageous or iron-willed leaders would have been able to make some sort of sense out of a situation that would likely have degenerated into uncontrollable global chaos within minutes was a question uneasily subordinated to the all-encompassing task of deterrence. With the Cold War gone, however, so is the need to arm for protracted nuclear war, and Chapter 3 argues for reforming U.S. nuclear doctrine around the concept of “minimum deterrence,” the notion that even the largest nuclear powers can be deterred by the threat of only a very few strategic nuclear strikes.
Minimum deterrence is increasingly growing into official policy in the major nuclear powers, and is already the foundation of nuclear defense in Britain, France, and the People’s Republic of China. Still, a U.S. doctrine of minimum deterrence needs to be given greater coherence and more explicit recognition if it is to enhance the international stability required both for further nuclear reductions and a lasting nuclear peace. The United States remains the leader of the wealthiest and most powerful military alliance in human history, and neither the United States nor NATO faces any severe nuclear danger. While Russia has the ability to destroy the United States and its European allies, and China could inflict grievous damage to Eurasia and North America, there is no threat remotely like that posed by the former Soviet Union in the twenty-first century, nor is one likely to emerge over even the longest horizon, and there is no reason to continue to act, speak, and spend as if there were.
If nightmares are measured not by their intensity but by their likelihood, then the most terrifying scenario is a nuclear crisis with a small nation. After the Soviet implosion, the United States found itself a superpower able to destroy the Earth itself but paralyzed in the face of lesser threats. Chapter 4 will examine this problem of small nuclear powers, a far more complicated dilemma than it might appear—and more than U.S. policymakers have been willing to admit.
The United States has long relied on the policy of “ambiguity,” in which Washington has intentionally left unclear how it might respond to a chemical or biological attack, or perhaps to the use only of a single nuclear weapon, by a small nation. This lack of clarity leaves the door open for nuclear use, but without forcing the Americans to make threats that could come back to haunt them if those threats have to be fulfilled. Meanwhile, rogue regimes and their leaders are ostensibly deterred by their uncertainty about the consequences of their actions. But is any threat to use nuclear weapons against small states in crowded regions either credible or morally defensible? It is one thing to contemplate a strike on the Soviet Union during World War III in a desperate bid for survival; it is another entirely to contemplate the massive, and perhaps grossly disproportionate, dislocation and havoc that would be created by engaging in nuclear strikes in small, densely populated areas such as East Asia or the Middle East.
Simple promises of nuclear
