No Use. Thomas M. Nichols
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and as chillingly as nuclear weapons.”13
Nonetheless, achieving a small additional reduction should not have proved so contentious, especially after the major, and sometimes unilateral, U.S. arms reductions of the early 1990s. It is clear that most U.S. political leaders and many in the other established nuclear nations see significant possibilities for nuclear reductions and lowering the danger of nuclear conflict. It is just as evident, however, that the Americans and others continue, as a matter of national policy, to invest an immense amount of faith in nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, rogue states and would-be great powers pursue nuclear programs as shortcuts to what they hope will be more security and greater prestige.
Why is it so difficult for the major powers, and the United States in particular, to break the nuclear addiction, and what role should nuclear weapons play in America’s national security? These are the central questions of this book.
Nuclear Doctrine and American Security Strategy
Nuclear weapons are different from other instruments of war. Not only is their power beyond imagination, but also they are still the first and only weapons capable of eradicating human civilization. Historical analogies fail us, because none exist.
Every country that possesses nuclear weapons has had to wrestle with questions about the political and military utility of their arsenal—in effect, about what nuclear weapons mean. The answers to these questions are expressed in each nation’s overarching beliefs and assumptions about nuclear arms and their purpose, which in turn guide nuclear strategy, planning, and forces. This collection of informal beliefs and formal policies constitute nuclear doctrine, a word that appropriately suggests an almost theological set of assumptions about why nuclear weapons exist and how they should be used. (This is not “doctrine” as the U.S. military often uses the term, which only describes particular guidance for combat and weaponry of various types.) These concepts, at least in theory, provide the foundation for building strategy, in which large-scale military assets such as nuclear weapons are employed to achieve the goals of national policy.
Once the objects of intense study and detailed analysis, nuclear doctrine and strategy have eroded into disarray both among civilian thinkers and government nuclear strategists, whose numbers are dwindling. The U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, noted in 2010 that the experts who once worked through these problems are now largely gone: “We have not worked very hard to find [their] replacements. We don’t have anybody in our military that does that anymore. It’s as if we all breathed a collective sigh of relief when the Soviet Union collapsed and said to ourselves, ‘Well, I guess we don’t need to worry about that anymore.’ We were dead wrong.”14 The careful analysis and comparison of nuclear arsenals has become, in arms control thinker Michael Krepon’s words, “the province of an aging, shrinking demographic.”15 Even in senior American military educational institutions such as the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College or the U.S. Naval War College, the study of nuclear strategy fell by the wayside almost before the first stones of the Berlin Wall were cleared away.
As a result, Cold War–era precepts about nuclear weapons have continued to dominate national security policy and nuclear strategies by default. The doctrines of the Cold War continue to lock the United States, Russia, and others into outdated thinking about nuclear weapons, especially the tenacious, unshakeable belief that nuclear force is integral to the national security of any major power. This was a reflexive article of truth for most leaders during the Cold War, as well as for the generation of thinkers and policymakers whose formative experiences were forged in the tense later years of the Soviet-American struggle.
Former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, for example, decades later recalled the incredulity of the British prime minister when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev broached the topic of eliminating the world’s nuclear weapons during their 1986 summit in Iceland:
When I came back to Washington from Reykjavik I was more or less summoned to the British ambassador’s residence. And Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher “hand-bagged” me. That is, you know, she carried that little stiff handbag, and she whacked me. She said, “George, how can you sit there and allow the president to agree to a world free of nuclear weapons?” I said, “But Margaret, he’s the president.” She said, “Yes, but you’re supposed to be the one holding his feet on the ground.” “But Margaret, I agreed with him,” I said.
Her reaction was typical. I think people were enamored of the idea of deterrence through nuclear weapons…. The idea of a world free of nuclear weapons would not have gone down well in Washington and among our allies in 1986…. I don’t think the world was ready for it.16
The world, apparently, is still not ready for it. Assumptions about the utility of nuclear force and the strength of nuclear deterrence continue to echo through the entire security architecture of the nuclear-armed nations.
In the United States, the stubborn adherence to the idea that nuclear weapons have broad political as well as military utility is a construct that continues to have a powerful effect on choices about weapons, the formulation of strategies, and the daily conduct of U.S. diplomacy, especially with NATO and the Russian Federation. In the early 1990s, U.S. Air Force General George Butler found himself taken aback by the breadth and staying power of these beliefs when he called for phasing out the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the wake of the Soviet collapse. He was “dismayed,” he later wrote, “that even among more serious commentators, the lessons of 50 years at the nuclear brink can still be so grievously misread; that the assertions and assumptions underpinning an era of desperate threats and risks prevail unchallenged; that a handful of nations cling to the impossible notion that the power of nuclear weapons is so immense their use can be threatened with impunity, yet their proliferation contained.”17
In 1999, almost a decade after the end of the Cold War, a group of scholars at the Brookings Institution noted that U.S. thinking about the role of nuclear arms continued to adhere to the belief that the “targeting and declaratory doctrines developed during the [Cold War], which emphasize early and large attacks against nuclear forces and permit the first use of nuclear weapons [are] valuable in deterring threats to U.S. interests.”18 Ten years after the Brookings report, a joint working group of scientists and policy analysts found that “U.S. nuclear strategy and policy continued to lack a coherent and compelling rationale.”19 And when 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.