rational defense

No nuclear weapons were tested in 1997 — only the second year since mankind detonated its first atomic bomb in 1945 that no testing took place. The 1990s saw what has proven to be — in effect — the end of Cold War-era nuclear testing. In 1998, of course, India and Pakistan both carried out a series of nuclear tests. But since that year, there has been only a single nuclear detonation: North Korea’s in 2006 (and the seismographic data from that test was not indicative of even a rudimentary nuclear device).

This has profound implications for the future of the world’s existing nuclear arsenals.

What has now become the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (founded in 2000) has argued, along with the current administration, that the current Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs are not sufficient for the long-term maintenance of the American nuclear arsenal, and that there is a mounting need for what has been dubbed the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). While there remains a need for a clear, concise and compelling articulation of the role of nuclear weapons in the 21st century, there are very real constraints in play.

The concept of RRW is not about designing a new weapon tailored for the 21st century, but rather making carefully calculated tweaks to existing warhead designs in order to enhance reliability and maintainability and maximize sustainability and safety considerations.

The modern two-stage thermonuclear warheads currently in the arsenal are extraordinarily complex things. They are the product of literally hundreds of nuclear tests — both full-scale tests and even more subcritical experimentation (including hydronuclear and hydrodynamic techniques) — and are thought to contain non-spherical primaries, a particularly complicated design. These warheads were designed in the last days of the Cold War, and were designed to maximize accuracy and what is know as yield-to-weight ratio — maximizing the destructive power per pound, an important consideration for weapons to be mounted on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). At that point, these warheads were configured for use in multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, with multiple warheads mounted on a single ICBM.[1]

The U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise uses some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to run simulations and model the impact of age and time on the current arsenal. But ultimately, these Cold War-era warheads were designed in a paradigm of regular testing and ongoing weapons development. New weapons were expected to eventually replace them so indefinite shelf life was not a design consideration.

The Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs have stretched these designs, and there is no doubt that the current arsenal remains credible. This confidence is one of the most important considerations for a country’s nuclear arsenal. The nuclear weapons a country fields must be reliable and proven in order for both the government itself and other countries alike to have a high degree of confidence in the credibility of the deterrent itself.

But while the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs have certainly achieved this objective (and could likely continue to do so for years to come), a degree of uncertainty and prudence has required the maintenance of two warhead types for each delivery system so that, in the event that one design is found to have an irreparable problem, it can be replaced without affecting the status of the American deterrent. This has resulted in many more warheads being kept in a reserve status than would otherwise be the case.

The question about how America prepares to sustain a nuclear arsenal for the foreseeable future — i.e. indefinitely — is reaching a critical juncture. The engineers that have first-hand experience with nuclear weapons design and testing are approaching retirement age. Their personal and intimate knowledge about the smallest and subtlest design choices made in the current weapons architecture will soon test the institutional knowledge of their labs, and something will almost certainly be lost.

As attractive as it might be to think about scaled-down warhead designs or articulating a mission before the design process might begin, the reality is that the ultimate goal has already been articulated: a sustainable deterrent without further nuclear testing. The implication of that goal is a decisive constraint that defines the weapon to be built. It is, simply, the very weapons with which the current engineer pool — both the elder engineers that actually designed the warheads and the next generation that has come up learning the finer points of sustaining them — has the most intimate experience, and more pointedly the experience of working to sustain and extend service life. These are the most modern warheads in the arsenal and are equipped with the most advanced safety features.

This underlying design is the inescapable choice for a country that intends to sustain its arsenal indefinitely without testing. And if that is the goal, the way to maximize the chances for success without testing is to allow the nuclear weapons labs to design and build new warheads now based on the articulated objectives of the RRW program.

While total disarmament is a nice conversation to have, the geopolitical reality is that there remains a deep uncertainty about the future threat environment, and while reductions in the nuclear arsenal are absolutely in the cards, so long as America intends to forgo testing, the warheads of that arsenal are necessarily constrained to only modest and conservative tweaks to the designs of the warheads currently in the arsenal.

Ultimately, there are almost certainly — even necessarily — limits to what the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs can accomplish because of the considerations that informed the original design of the warheads currently deployed. The finer points of this are obviously both classified and best left to the engineers themselves. But these underlying considerations make RRW (or a similar program under a different name) the path most likely to maximize the long-term sustainability of the arsenal and minimize the chances of further testing. But the problem with RRW, aside from the public distaste for it, is that the question has already been delayed for years and the way to both set up RRW to succeed and to maximize the chances for its success is to push forward as soon as possible.

The Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs can probably continue to do the trick for a decade or more. But at some point, a new design will likely become necessary. The further down the road that this point is reached, the more familiarity with the existing designs and the more first-hand experience with actual weapons design will have been lost.

–

1 The exception to this is the cancelled MGM-134 “Midgetman” light ICBM, which was to be armed with a single Mk-21 reentry vehicle — the same multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle mounted in sets of eight to ten on the LGM-118A Peacekeeper heavy ICBM.

RD was founded in part on the belief that American nuclear weapons policy in the formative years of 1945-1949 was insufficiently debated and uniformed by public understanding and buy-in appropriate to a democratic society. The implication of that assertion, given that the current American nuclear weapons enterprise is still deeply rooted in Cold War conceptions — and remains entirely reliant on Cold War-era weapon systems — is that the people of the United States were not sufficiently conscious of the implications of their government’s nuclear weapons policies.

To be clear, RD is not arguing and does not advocate for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. Obviously, nuclear weapons cannot be uninvented. They cannot be made to go away, and no country in the world has surrendered them once they have become firmly established as part of the defense establishment. (South Africa developed and fielded a handful of rudimentary nuclear devices after a suspected test in 1979, and subsequently dismantled them.)

But as the Soviet Union collapsed and the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the question of the underlying purpose of the nuclear weapons enterprise has again come to the fore. Obviously, during the Cold War, as the Soviet Union pursued — and ultimately surpassed — the American nuclear arsenal in quantitative terms, it was imperative for the United States to retain its qualitative advantage. Even after the Kremlin had successfully overtaken the Pentagon in raw quantitative terms of deliverable weapons, the Soviet military’s mindset quickly shifted towards conceptions of ‘deep parity,’ accounting for more than just warhead numbers and incorporating calculi of accuracy and penetration — essentially rationalizing even further expansions of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

But the United States and the Soviet Union began to find ways to step back from the brink and arrest the frantic pace of the nuclear arms race. The Cold War eventually saw the emergence of the arms control regime that still exists today with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I, set to expire in 2009) and the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow Treaty, set to take effect and expire on a single day at the end of 2012).

The lesson from the 20th century — that the terrifying and ferocious pace of the nuclear arms race of the Cold War is neither sustainable nor desirable — is a premise for nuclear strategy in the 21st century. But while reorganization and reductions did take place in the American, Russian, French and British nuclear arsenals after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, they have largely been made from within the paradigm of 20th century thinking about nuclear weapons and necessarily remain dominated by Cold War-era weapon systems.

Since then, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty — though not yet legally in force — has been observed in practice since 1996 with only a few exceptions. The robust and extensive nuclear testing that allowed for rapid advances in weapons design is unlikely to re-emerge in the 21st century in the current geopolitical paradigm, leaving the world’s nuclear powers heavily reliant on the existing Cold War-era designs certified by testing.

As the theory goes, nuclear weapons serve as the ultimate guarantor of sovereignty. But their history has provided important counterpoints. The American nuclear arsenal did not deter the Chinese from surging ten divisions across the Yalu river into North Korea in 1950 in a surprise maneuver that cut off advancing American, South Korean and other units operating under the United Nations aegis (General Douglas McArthur subsequently advocated for and was denied permission to use nuclear weapons on the battlefield). Similarly, the Egyptians and the Syrians knew that the Israelis possessed nuclear weapons in 1973 when they invaded — briefly making significant advances into a country with no strategic depth, effectively threatening the very existence of Israel.

Nevertheless, despite the risk of nuclear apocalypse, nuclear weapons also appear to have played a very real role in preventing the Cold War from becoming the third World War. Both sides were checkmated, and knew it. While nuclear weapons obviously have not and will not prevent armed conflict, they may help deter one nuclear power from too aggressively challenging the fundamental national interest of another. The current tensions between India and Pakistan will serve as a rare case study in the 21st century (thus far in this century, times of heightened tension between New Delhi and Islamabad have not escalated into the nuclear realm).

Overall, the pace of change, the degree of uncertainty and the sense of urgency in global nuclear dynamics have largely declined in the last two decades. Though the Pakistani-Indian competition does make for a noteworthy exception, their nuclear postures have largely remained more restrained than that of the Americans and Soviets during the Cold War. Yet even as the United Kingdom and France have reaffirmed their commitment to the long-term maintenance of their own nuclear arsenals, there remain very real questions about what a nuclear weapons enterprise means in the 21st century, much less what role it serves.

Nevertheless, at this point, the debate about the future of nuclear weapons must begin with reality: their existence, their continued existence and the constraints on nuclear weapons design.

RD has been founded on the belief that defense issues, like any issue of governance or policy, can — and must — be understood and debated beyond the walls and closed doors of the department or ministry of defense. The choices a society makes in order to defend itself reflect its deepest moral values. If a democratic society does indeed govern over and command its defense establishment, that society must be able to intellectually grasp and intelligently debate the doctrines and policies that govern its military.

A defense establishment is every bit as subject to excess and institutional inertia as any other governmental department or agency — matters only compounded by heightened senses of security, institutional loyalty and deference to authority. Without public debate and understanding, poorly monitored or understood defense policy can implicate a society in matters of the utmost significance — matters that society may not have even recognized as at issue, much less debated and come to informed conclusions about. On the more benign end of the spectrum, this can take the shape of vast sums of money being wasted on weapon systems that are for one reason or another inappropriate by the time they reach fruition (immense opportunity costs notwithstanding). At the other end of the spectrum, a society may fail to grasp — much less meaningfully participate in — policy decisions of the gravest consequence.

Case in point: on the last day of January in 1950 President Harry Truman publicly announced that the United States was pursuing “the technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.”[1] This decision — to attempt to build nuclear weapons orders of magnitude more destructive than the 300 or so fission bombs then currently in the American arsenal — was undertaken completely behind closed doors.

The potential for a thermonuclear weapon was raised in secret during World War II within the Manhattan Engineering District (the American effort to build the world’s first atomic bombs) but was at that time deemed too advanced to be weaponized in time to affect the outcome of the war and thus a detraction from the more obtainable fission efforts.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist that led the Manhattan ‘Project,’ also opposed this pursuit after the war on ethical grounds. At that time probably the most widely-recognized and highly-regarded scientist in the world (second, perhaps, to Albert Einstein himself), he spoke to the nation on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Sunday morning talk show less than two weeks after Truman’s announcement:

These are complex technical things, but they touch the very basis of our morality. It is a grave danger for us that these decisions are taken on the basis of facts held secret. [2]

His opposition to Truman’s policy was interpreted by some not as principled and informed policy advocacy, but literally as treason (and his was one of the few voices even broaching the subject in the public sphere). It was a position that would ultimately see Oppenheimer — a deeply patriotic man intimately knowledgeable about the American nuclear weapons enterprise — stripped of his security clearance and branded a communist at the height of the Red Scare.

Admittedly, Oppenheimer and many of the other intellectual leaders of the Manhattan Project had flawed conceptions. Oppenheimer, for one, was a deeply idealistic man. These men’s very deep — perhaps unique — grasp of the profound implications of the weaponization of atomic theory gave way for many of the nation’s preeminent physicists to what were ultimately naive notions of world government.

Indeed, Oppenheimer’s warnings of “a grave danger” are not presented here to be an argument that the pursuit of thermonuclear weapons was necessarily the wrong policy — and certainly not that the nuclear arms race could have been completely averted (though it had been Oppenheimer’s — and his compatriots — hope since before the culmination of the Manhattan Project to do just that).

Even Oppenheimer acknowledged the immense danger of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. And the 1980s arms build-up orchestrated by President Ronald Reagan’s administration (including the Strategic Defense Initiative that became known as “Star Wars” and the development of the LGM-118A Peacekeeper heavy intercontinental ballistic missile, its precision Mk-21 re-entry vehicles their high yield-to-weight W87 warheads) helped drive the utterly massive Soviet military-industrial engine into the ground — ultimately helping win the Cold War for the United States.

Only five months prior to Truman’s announcement, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its very first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan — modeled suspiciously precisely on the plutonium implosion design of “Fat Man,” the American bomb used against Nagasaki in 1945. Stalin’s Soviet Union was absolutely ruthless and dangerous, and the nascent Soviet nuclear weapons program obviously made it imperative for Washington, if it could no longer maintain its nuclear monopoly, to take decisive steps to establish and sustain a generational lead over what had become the second center of gravity in the international system.

But only after Truman’s announcement in 1950 would the United States subsequently spend $5.5 trillion to build more than 70,000 nuclear warheads.[3] The Soviets ultimately spent and built even more. Yet it was not until the late 1970s that the Soviet nuclear arsenal overtook the American’s in quantitative terms — and only in the early 1980s would the Soviets match and then exceed the absolute peak in warhead numbers that the United States achieved in the mid-1960s.

The emergence of that arms race cannot be pinned to a single policy decision. But in 1950, no arms race had yet begun. Early Soviet nuclear tests were heavily dependent upon espionage — essentially replicating the work the United States had already done. Meanwhile, the American people were essentially left in the dark in terms of understanding and debating the potentially genocidal implications of their government’s nuclear war plans.

(RD absolutely acknowledges the imperatives of technical — and especially operational — security. Secrecy and classification are inherently necessary in matters of defense and are absolutely justifiable when it comes to the technicalities of a nation’s nuclear weapons enterprise.)

In the critical early years after the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, America wielded the atomic bomb with no real debate of either the larger foreign policy or the wider moral implications. Steeped in a culture of not only the strictest secrecy — a wartime secrecy that, though it endured well beyond the surrender of Japan in 1945, was admittedly not without basis — but also a deep paranoia of communism, seminal decisions in American military policy were made without public debate.

The perpetual threat of a global nuclear holocaust did not exist in 1950. Then, it was a nightmare scenario that only subsequently became a reality — in large part based on the strategic choices made by a U.S. national command authority and the defense establishment from behind closed doors based on facts held secret.

That arms race may very well have been unavoidable. Power is a relative measure, and the atomic bomb was only a coercive tool to keep the Soviet Union in check only so long as the Kremlin did not have one. Thermonuclear weapons were the next step in maintaining a generational lead.

But nuclear weapons are a tool. Admittedly in the 20th century, they proved to be more of a political tool than a meaningful military one. But what happened after the Second World War was that the tool itself — from behind inscrutable layers of security — began to dictate policy, even as its implications were still being understood.

The public debate and outside expert analysis that gives definition and perspective — and provides a sort of check — to internal decisions being made behind closed doors ‘on the basis of facts held secret’ was not permitted. Yet this is the role of democratic government. This is not to say that the masses should make — much less are capable of making — such precise decisions on necessarily highly-classified matters. That is the role of elected officials and the relevant institutions. But the culture of secrecy and compartmentalization that pervaded after the end of the Second World War extended far beyond the technical aspects of weapons development and operational planning to underlying strategic assumptions and moral judgments. This largely prohibited meaningful public debate over the wider policy and ethical implications of America’s nuclear weapons policies. By the time the Soviets tested their atomic bomb – four years after the end of the Second World War and the culmination of America’s nuclear weapons efforts — the country was ill-prepared and ill-equipped to understand, much less debate, the implications of taking the next giant leap down the road of nuclear weaponization.

With this in mind, RD seeks to make defense issues and military policy choices, their underlying motivations and their implications accessible and understandable, with the underlying belief that a democratic society must be an educated and informed society in order to survive.

–

1 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Vintage Books, 2006 (1st Ed. 2004). 428.
2 ibid. 430.
3 ibid. 429.