[D66] Combidoom: The New Nuclear Threat - NYBOOKS

[R.O.]

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/08/20/new-nuclear-threat/

The New Nuclear Threat
Jessica T. Mathews	
August 20, 2020 Issue

The Age of Hiroshima	
edited by Michael D. Gordin and G. John Ikenberry
Princeton University Press, 431 pp., $99.95; $32.95 (paper)
The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War	
by Fred Kaplan
Simon and Schuster, 372 pp., $30.00

The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman 
to Trump	
by William J. Perry and Tom Z. Collina
BenBella, 268 pp., $27.95

The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against 
the United States: A Speculative Novel	
by Jeffrey Lewis
Mariner, 294 pp., $15.99 (paper)


Seventy-five years ago, at 8:16 on the clear morning of August 6, the 
world changed forever. A blast equivalent to more than 12,000 tons of 
TNT, unimaginably larger than that of any previous weapon, blew apart 
the Japanese city of Hiroshima, igniting a massive firestorm. Within 
minutes, between 70,000 and 80,000 died and as many were injured. 
Hospitals were destroyed or badly damaged, and more than 90 percent of 
the city’s doctors and nurses were killed or wounded. By the end of the 
year, thousands more had died from burns and radiation poisoning—a total 
of 40 percent of the city’s population.

The mushroom cloud became a universal symbol of horror. As Michael D. 
Gordin and G. John Ikenberry, the editors of The Age of Hiroshima, 
describe, entirely new ways of thinking about war and peace had to be 
invented, together with a new understanding of global 
interconnectedness. “Very few aspects of life,” geopolitical, 
technological, or cultural, they write, “have been left untouched,” not 
just among the superpowers but worldwide.

In part because of effective deterrence, fear of their destructiveness, 
and a growing taboo against their use, and in part because of dumb luck, 
nearly a century has passed without nuclear weapons being used again in 
conflict. The US and the Soviet Union survived the cold war, living on a 
knife edge of fear that drove each to accumulate more than 30,000 
nuclear weapons, enough to destroy all life on the planet many times 
over. In retrospect, as documents are declassified and participants 
speak and write about their experiences, and as brilliantly chronicled 
by Fred Kaplan in The Bomb, the competition emerges, on the US side at 
least, as a largely mindless cycle of more and larger weapons aimed at 
ever more targets, and more and more targets deemed to require ever more 
weapons, the whole enterprise impervious to the efforts of 
administration after administration to define saner policies.

Kaplan tells the story of how, two weeks into the Kennedy 
administration, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara traveled to 
Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters in Omaha for his first briefing 
on nuclear war’s holy text, the Single Integrated Operational Plan 
(SIOP). One of its thousands of targets, he learned, was an air defense 
radar station in Albania. The bomb slated to destroy it was—by then only 
a few years into the arms race—roughly three hundred times larger than 
the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. “Mr. Secretary,” said the commanding 
general, “I hope you don’t have any friends or relations in Albania, 
because we’re going to have to wipe it out.” Albania, a tiny country, 
was Communist but politically independent of Moscow.

Decades later, the same thinking—if that’s what it should be 
called—still prevailed. A Carter administration effort to reduce the 
consequences of nuclear war added “leadership” targets to the list of 
those to be hit in the belief that it would effectively deter Soviet 
leaders. The SIOP was accordingly revised to include not only government 
ministries but the homes and vacation dachas of every government 
minister, not just in Moscow but in every oblast across Russia. The use 
of megaton bombs to kill individuals meant, of course, that many 
hundreds of thousands of other people would also be killed.

The cold war ended peacefully, and the deployed nuclear arsenals of the 
US and Russia have been reduced by nearly 90 percent, but we are not 
safer today—quite the reverse. After decades of building just enough 
weapons to deter attack, China is now aggressively modernizing and 
enlarging its small nuclear arsenal. Russia and the US are modernizing 
theirs as well with entire menus of new weapons. Activities in space are 
enlarging the global battlefield. Advances in missile technology and 
conventional weapons “entangle” scenarios of nuclear and nonnuclear war, 
making outcomes highly unpredictable. The risk of cyberattacks on 
command and control systems adds another layer of uncertainty, as does 
research on artificial intelligence that increases the prospect of 
accidents and the unintentional use of nuclear weapons. Arms control 
agreements that significantly limited the US–Soviet arms race are being 
discarded one by one. And from Russian efforts to destabilize America 
through social media attacks on its democracy, to Chinese bellicosity in 
the South China Sea and clampdown on Hong Kong, to erratic lunges in US 
foreign policy, there is deep and growing distrust among the great powers.

Yet the public isn’t scared. Indeed, people are unaware that a second 
nuclear arms race has begun—one that could be more dangerous than the 
first. Decades of fearing a nuclear war that didn’t happen may have 
induced an unwarranted complacency that this threat belongs to the past. 
A million people gathered in New York’s Central Park in 1982 to call for 
an end to the arms race in the largest political demonstration in US 
history. Today the prospect of nuclear disaster is barely noticed.

In the US, the nuclear age has been a fruitless, decades-long search for 
answers to three linked questions. The most basic is: What is our goal 
in a nuclear war? The military has a definite answer: “to prevail.” 
Civilian leaders’ answers have varied widely. President Eisenhower 
favored nuclear weapons because they were less expensive than 
conventional forces, yet he nevertheless told the Joint Chiefs that our 
aim in a general nuclear war should be not “to lose any worse than we 
have to.” Defense Secretary Harold Brown, reaching for a formula to 
satisfy President Carter, described the goal as ending a war “on 
acceptable terms that are as favorable as practical,” leaving 
“acceptable” and “practical” undefined. Ronald Reagan wrote in his 
memoir that he thought that those who claimed nuclear war was “winnable” 
were “crazy,” apparently forgetting that he had signed a nuclear policy 
document that stated the US “must prevail.”

What winning might look like is what makes this seemingly simple 
question so hard to answer. In the early 1960s, SAC was asked how many 
Russians, Chinese, and Eastern Europeans would die from its all-out 
attack plan. The answer was a nearly inconceivable 275 million, just 
from the bombs’ blasts. (Heat, fire, smoke, and radiation would kill 
tens of millions more, but the numbers would vary depending on wind and 
weather, so SAC did not count them.) Presidents and their advisers found 
it difficult if not impossible to imagine the conditions under which 
they would launch such a holocaust. Only in the basement at SAC 
headquarters—where targeters sat, day after day, assigning weapons to 
targets in a policy-free environment—did it make sense. “Look,” yelled 
the SAC commander General Thomas Power at a nagging policy analyst from 
Washington who was arguing for a war plan with fewer casualties, “at the 
end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!”

The second question concerns deterrence: What weapons and force 
structure are needed to deter an enemy or enemies from attacking us? 
Unfortunately there are no metrics to measure what makes a deterrent 
credible. Answers are entirely in the eye of the beholder, and arguments 
can almost always be contrived to justify the need for more weapons. 
What can be said with certainty, however, is that the threshold the US 
judges necessary to deter the enemy is always set immensely higher than 
what has actually deterred the US. In The Button, former defense 
secretary William J. Perry writes that at the time of the Cuban missile 
crisis the US had about five thousand warheads to the Soviets’ three 
hundred, but “even with this seventeen-to-one numerical superiority, the 
Kennedy administration did not believe it had the capability to launch a 
successful first strike.” Notwithstanding the enormous gap between the 
two arsenals (which has never again been anywhere near as large), 
Washington was deterred by the risk of a Soviet counterstrike.

The third question, closely tied to what it takes to create deterrence, 
asks what happens if deterrence fails. Can nuclear weapons then be 
useful instruments for fighting, as opposed to preventing, a war? 
Understandably, presidents demand all kinds of flexibility—weapons and 
war plans suited to a general war and to regional aggressions in 
different settings of greater or lesser geopolitical importance. The 
problem is that weapons and plans tailored to every situation, 
especially smaller weapons and plans for limited nuclear war, may be 
understood by the enemy (and by domestic opponents) as preparations for 
going to war. “The logic,” writes Kaplan,

     involved convincing adversaries that you really would use the bomb 
in response to aggression; part of that involved convincing yourself 
that you would use it, which required building certain types of 
missiles, and devising certain plans, that would enable you to use 
them—and, before you knew it, a strategy to deter nuclear war became 
synonymous with a strategy to fight nuclear war.

Many plans for limited nuclear war have been created on paper, but they 
immediately raise yet another critical question: Can there really be 
such a thing? To assert that the answer is yes, one has to believe that 
intentions can be clearly signaled (“I’m attacking you but with much 
less firepower than I might have used”), accurately interpreted by the 
other side, and responded to not in rage or fear but with calm 
reasonableness (“I’m retaliating but much more lightly than I might 
have”). There are all kinds of technical reasons to doubt that this is 
more than a fantasy. For example, at one point an American analyst 
discovered that Russian air defense systems could pinpoint no more than 
two hundred incoming missiles before they merged into a blob on the 
radar screen. Yet at that time the SIOP’s smallest limited attack option 
called for launching one thousand missiles, which would therefore be 
indistinguishable to the Russians from an all-out attack.

The more powerful reasons to doubt that there could be a limited nuclear 
war, to my mind, are those that emerge from any study of history, a 
knowledge of how humans act under pressure, or experience in government. 
In his “speculative novel” The 2020 Commission Report on the North 
Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States (2018), the nuclear 
analyst Jeffrey Lewis convincingly traces the path to an unintended war. 
The book’s lessons are much broader than the particulars of the Korean 
setting. Lewis uses variations on actual events to trace a series of 
miscalculations, mistakes, coincidences, domestic pressures, and 
misreadings of others’ intentions, beginning with the mistaken shooting 
down of a commercial South Korean plane by North Korea and ending in a 
nuclear war involving both Koreas, Japan, and the US. Each step toward 
disaster is plausible. After a limited South Korean missile response to 
the downing of its plane, to which Seoul chooses not to alert its 
American ally in advance, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un finds that he 
can’t use his phone. The phone system is simply overloaded, but in the 
aftermath, one of his aides tells the commissioners investigating how 
the war had happened that the North Koreans had concluded something 
quite different: “We assumed it was an American cyber-attack. Wouldn’t you?”
Photographers taking pictures of an unarmed intercontinental ballistic 
missile being tested by the US military at Vandenberg Air Force Base
Ringo Chiu/AFP/Getty Images
Photographers taking pictures of an unarmed intercontinental ballistic 
missile being tested by the US military at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 
California, May 2017

The recent real-world version of the recurring debates about limited war 
and the weapons needed to fight one is the Trump administration’s 
decision to deploy low-yield warheads on American Trident submarines. 
The move was prompted by Russia’s fielding of new low-yield tactical 
warheads aimed at Europe. Did this mean that Moscow had detected some 
gap in our deterrent that such a weapon could exploit? Didn’t Washington 
have to respond in kind, asked proponents of the new warheads? Opponents 
argued that Russia had turned to tactical nukes because it feared 
American advances in long-range conventional weapons. The disadvantage 
was on their side, not ours. Moreover, the Russians would be unable to 
quickly distinguish one of these low-yield warheads fired by a submarine 
from the many megaton strategic warheads these ships carry, and hence 
unable to immediately distinguish a limited from an all-out attack.* 
Nevertheless, proponents won the day. The warheads have been deployed, 
strengthening the hand of those who believe that nuclear wars can be 
fought and won.

A decade ago, President Obama made a fateful bargain to secure Senate 
approval of the New START arms limitation treaty he had reached with 
Russia. He agreed to a major upgrade of the aging American nuclear 
complex, including production facilities and laboratories, with a 
controversial price tag nearing $100 billion. This was the seed of a 
modernization program that has since multiplied to include command and 
control systems, all the delivery vehicles of the nuclear triad—bombers, 
ICBMs, and submarines—refurbishment of existing warheads, and the 
development of a range of new warheads and weapons.

The need for modernization results partly from aging systems that 
require replacement and partly, in an all-too-familiar pattern, from a 
perceived need to keep up with the Russians. Moscow began a sweeping 
modernization program in the early 2000s to keep up with American 
advances and compensate for weakness in its conventional forces. Rose 
Gottemoeller, the former deputy director general of NATO and chief US 
negotiator of the New START Treaty, argues that the real purpose of 
Russia’s program, which includes exotic weapons like an underwater 
nuclear drone and a nuclear-propelled cruise missile, had more to do 
with politics than with security. These weapons are meant, she says, to 
signal Russia’s “continuing scientific and military prowess at a time 
when the country does not otherwise have much on offer.”

Unfortunately, the program coincides with an American president who 
loves nukes. At the disastrous briefing session arranged for Donald 
Trump in the summer of 2017 in the Joint Chiefs’ secure room at the 
Pentagon known as the “tank,” he was shown a chart illustrating US and 
Russian success in cutting their arsenals from more than 30,000 warheads 
to about 6,000 each (which in both countries includes 2,500 retired 
warheads waiting to be destroyed). Like everything else that awful 
morning, it backfired. Why aren’t we building back up to 30,000, Trump 
demanded in a tantrum, during which he called the assembled military and 
civilian leaders “dopes and babies.” Defense Secretary Mark Esper leaves 
no doubt that modernizing the entire strategic nuclear force is the 
president’s “priority number one.” The modernization plan now includes a 
new fleet of ballistic missile submarines, a new stealth bomber, new 
ICBMs, the first new warhead design in more than thirty years, a 
sea-launched cruise missile, and a new air-launched cruise missile. The 
estimated price tag over the coming twenty-five years is $1.7 trillion 
(assuming, against experience, no cost overruns)—seventeen times Obama’s 
down payment—and represents a policy that is as far as it is possible to 
go from Obama’s plan to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our 
national security strategy”—of which Vice President Joe Biden was a 
strong supporter.

Some modernization is necessary, but there is no question that the 
current plan goes far beyond what is needed. Contractors are now driving 
it forward, and there is no one with sufficient standing to say “Stop.” 
But there are ways to save hundreds of billions of dollars without loss 
to national security. For decades, the triad has been the sine qua non 
of nuclear force structure. The apparent need for missiles, submarines, 
and bombers is now so entrenched that it is difficult to remember that 
it emerged not out of strategic necessity but from fierce rivalry among 
the military services, the Air Force and Navy especially, each of which 
wanted its own nuclear weapons.

Of the three legs of the triad, ground-based ICBMs are both the most 
threatening weapons to the enemy, because of their number and huge 
megatonnage, and the most vulnerable, because they sit in fixed, easily 
targeted silos. They are therefore “use them or lose them” weapons that 
must be fired on warning of an attack, before they are hit by incoming 
missiles. This means that a president has about ten minutes—less than 
the time it takes to confirm an attack—to make a life-or-death decision 
for the country and probably for the planet. Rather than spend $150 
billion or more to replace these missiles, the sensible step is to 
retire them. Ballistic missile submarines, backed up by bombers plus 
cruise and hypersonic missiles launched from ships and planes, can 
provide the necessary firepower and strategic depth for an ironclad 
deterrent and the capability for a devastating second strike.

Years from now, the Trump administration’s wholesale withdrawal from 
international agreements, its “unsigning” of treaties, and its weakening 
of international organizations will stand out from the lies, the 
corruption, the incompetence, and the breaking of norms as one of its 
most damaging features. A partial list includes the Trans-Pacific 
Partnership (TPP) trade deal, NAFTA, the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran 
nuclear deal, the Arms Trade Treaty, and, most recently, the World 
Health Organization. Among these, withdrawals in the nuclear arena may 
prove to be especially harmful.

The administration’s hostile view of arms control was evident in its 
2018 Nuclear Posture Review: The US “will remain receptive to future 
arms control negotiations if conditions permit.” These agreements have 
their flaws. Negotiations take years and years. Often the sides agree to 
give up weapons they no longer want. Violations are not uncommon and, to 
satisfy domestic hawks, both sides frequently build new weapons to 
compensate for those they negotiate away. Nonetheless, over more than 
three decades of painstaking effort by Republican and Democratic 
administrations, a set of agreements was hammered out that built trust 
between the West and Russia, created a degree of transparency into what 
the other side was doing, and banned or severely limited particularly 
destabilizing types of weapons, such as missile defense systems and 
multiple-warhead missiles. Over time the agreements slowed the arms race 
from a gallop to a jog. Without them, the two sides might still be 
holding 65,000 warheads instead of 13,000.

The dismantling of these agreements began with President George W. 
Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, but in 
the last few years Trump has wiped away almost everything that was still 
in place. In 2018 he announced that the US would withdraw from the 
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Russian violations of 
the agreement, which Moscow had refused to acknowledge over many years, 
made this a close—and understandable—call. Still, withdrawing from an 
agreement gives the other side what it wants. And prompt American 
testing of a missile banned under the treaty suggests that Washington 
was eager to dispose of it.

The administration then announced its intention of leaving the Open 
Skies Treaty, a 1992 multilateral agreement that allows signatories to 
fly unarmed observation flights over the territory of the others to 
collect data on military forces and activities. Though its value to the 
superpowers has diminished with satellite technology, it remains 
important to European parties and has been a significant contributor to 
strategic stability.

The only remaining limit on strategic arms is New START, which is due to 
expire two weeks after the next president is inaugurated, unless 
extended by mutual agreement for a further five years. The treaty limits 
each side to 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 launchers. The US 
now insists it will not extend the treaty unless China is included. 
Since both Russia and the US have about five times as many warheads as 
China (which may double its arsenal in the next ten years), Beijing has 
absolutely no reason to become part of US–Russian arms control talks at 
this point and has made that clear on many occasions. Moreover, although 
the administration has been talking about this for two years, it has 
taken no diplomatic steps—plans, proposals, or drafts exchanged—to make 
it happen. The policy bears all the signs of a poison pill designed to 
force New START’s demise while obscuring the cause.

In addition, news leaked in May—perhaps purposefully—that administration 
officials were discussing breaking the twenty-eight-year moratorium 
among the major powers on nuclear testing. The stated reason was to try 
to use a nuclear test to pressure Russia and China to agree to 
Washington’s New START position. On the very long list of self-defeating 
moves this administration has made, breaking the moratorium belongs near 
the top. A nuclear test would not frighten Moscow or Beijing into doing 
what the US wants, it would drastically weaken global nonproliferation 
efforts, it would make the US an international pariah, and it would 
erase an important US advantage. The US has conducted more tests than 
any other country—more than one thousand to China’s forty-five, for 
example—so if testing is resumed, every other nuclear power stands to 
gain much more than the US.

Taken together, the loss of New START, a tease—at least—on a resumption 
of testing, and the vast weapons modernization plan, all enhanced by 
work on new cyber and space weapons, applications of AI, and a range of 
new weapons capable of carrying either conventional or nuclear warheads, 
amount to a running leap into a new arms race, this time among at least 
three powers, perhaps joined by North Korea, Iran, and other new nuclear 
states. The Trump administration seems eager for it, no matter the cost. 
“We know how to win these races,” said the US arms control negotiator 
Marshall Billingslea recently, “and we know how to spend the adversary 
into oblivion.”

Little can be done to reverse direction unless Donald Trump is defeated 
in November. Even if he loses, stopping a burgeoning arms race will have 
to compete for public attention with an overwhelming list of priorities: 
repairs to democratic governance, health care reform, racial justice, 
climate change, economic recovery—and enormous post-pandemic budget 
deficits. Only the last of these can help focus attention where it’s 
needed. Without public pressure the military-industrial-congressional 
complex will push nuclear modernization forward step by 
multibillion-dollar-step without attention to the $2 trillion bottom 
line, locking in a new generation of threats that Russia and China will 
feel they must counter. The deficits, however, demand a more provident 
approach to the ballooning defense budget (now larger than everything 
else in the federal discretionary budget combined). A spasm of spending 
on what are essentially twentieth-century weapons, without a pause to 
rethink, is strategically irresponsible and fiscally unsound. Congress 
can instead insist that appropriated dollars not be spent on nuclear 
weapons tests, support the new president in restoring various arms 
limitation agreements, and undertake a serious, nonpartisan study of the 
actual need for a new fleet of ICBMs.

The single step from which profound policy change could flow, 
domestically and internationally, would be formal endorsement by the 
five original nuclear powers—the US, Russia, the UK, France, and 
China—of the Reagan-Gorbachev principle, jointly articulated by the two 
leaders at their 1985 summit. It states simply, “a nuclear war cannot be 
won and must never be fought.” International adoption would 
simultaneously indicate the nuclear powers’ recognition of the rising 
dangers of nuclear conflict and the need to move toward nuclear forces 
around the world that are structured for deterrence, not war fighting. 
Words as principle have power. Eventually, these eleven words could 
underlie the next generation of arms control negotiations, strengthen 
the global nonproliferation regime, and help short-circuit a second 
nuclear arms race.

—July 22, 2020