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 to nuclear disarmament in one form or another, while simultaneously asserting the right to possess and use nuclear weapons in any number of scenarios. The end of the Cold War allowed the Americans and the Russians to slash their nuclear inventories, but these were reductions from unimaginably huge levels. From a high of over 30,000 weapons in the late 1960s, the United States as of 2013 has more than 4,000 warheads, and many more in storage awaiting destruction. Fewer than 2,000 are deployed, a number that will drop to 1,550 in coming years as the result of “New START,” ratified by the U.S. Senate in the last days of 2010 and the Russian parliament shortly thereafter. Despite this step forward, thousands of nuclear arms, representing many millions of tons of destructive power, will remain in place on both sides. As U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) said during the ratification debate, he was willing to vote for the treaty because it left America with “enough nuclear warheads to blow anyone to kingdom come.”¹¹

      While we will return to New START in later chapters, it is worth noting that the difficulties and anxieties surrounding the treaty’s ratification were themselves testimony to the centrality of nuclear weapons to U.S. security thinking. The debate was mired in partisan politics, to be sure, but treaty opponents issued bitter warnings that even modest nuclear reductions would endanger U.S. national security—at a time when the United States is all but supreme as a military power and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the dominant alliance from Anchorage to Istanbul and beyond.¹² There is no denying that strategic nuclear weapons are today the only means capable of ending the American system of government and the United States itself in minutes; as the Pentagon’s advisory body, the Defense