rational defense

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty prohibits all nuclear explosions for any purpose. Signed in 1996, the treaty has yet to be ratified by all parties and thus has not yet taken effect. Yet despite a handful of test by India and Pakistan in 1998 and a single ‘test’ in 2006 by North Korea[1], the ban has been observed in practice, over time establishing a taboo on further testing.

Obviously, even a signed treaty fully in force will not guarantee that even a signatory might not one day feel the need to test or use a nuclear weapon. RD is hardly professing a deep faith in the inviolability of written agreements when it comes to geopolitical struggles. But the more established that the ban becomes, the higher the cost of breaking it becomes. It does not actually prohibit anyone from anything, but it does change the calculus for testing and thus reduces its likelihood to some degree.

RD has argued that as long as this prohibition is observed, that it has profound implications for worldwide nuclear weapons development. In short, even crude nuclear devices are extremely complex mechanisms. Modern two-stage thermonuclear weapons are an intricate synthesis of a series of advanced technologies. Though obviously quite classified, current American warheads are widely thought to be two-stage thermonuclear designs, the newest with a non-spherical primary shaped like an egg. Translation: two distinct, but carefully timed nuclear chain reactions that must be precisely timed to a fraction of a fraction of a second. The non-spherical detail is important because it makes the already enormously complex implosion design even more intricate and complicated. Also hardened to endure not only the acceleration of launch, the cold vacuum of space and the immense heat of reentry but also electromagnetic interference, these warheads are then crammed into a steeply conical reentry vehicle composed of advanced composites to endure the heat of friction during reentry at extremely high speeds. These reentry vehicles are as small as six feet tall and less than two feet wide at the base. In sum, it is without exaggeration one of the most complex devices ever constructed by man.

These modern designs are the product of hundreds of nuclear tests (over a thousand in the American case) and dozens of operationally-fielded warheads over the course of nearly half a century. That testing is of paramount importance to the design of such a complex weapon. Though the U.S. National Labs now extensively use complex computer modeling, these models are informed by the data obtained through decades of testing.

In short, the testing freeze has the effect of severely curtailing the pace of global nuclear weapons development. Without testing, it is difficult for a country to make more than conservative evolutionary alterations to its existing, proven warhead architecture. Anything beyond conservative and evolutionary alteration would make certification without testing something of a gamble. Even with such a gamble, it would be difficult for a national command authority to have a particularly high confidence in such a warhead.

As such, the practical taboo against testing that gains credence with each passing year has the effect of removing much of the dynamism out of the global nuclear balance. The frantic pace of weapons development during the Cold War was only possible because of the equally frantic pace of testing. Without that testing, countries are in practice locked into conservative and evolutionary changes to the most modern warhead designs in their arsenals that they were able to verify through testing before the ban took effect. The more ambitious their changes, the more difficult those new designs become to accurately certify and the lower confidence will be that they will actually work.

So the test ban benefits most the countries that have the most advanced weapon designs: the United Kingdom, France, Russia but especially the United States (and perhaps Israel and China). Without the opportunity to validate extensive design changes and attempts at generational leaps in warhead architecture through actual testing, such weapons are difficult to certify. Ultimately, even with the inexorable improvement in computer modeling, without a resumption of testing on a broad scale,[2] the prospect for a highly dynamic nuclear balance reminiscent of the second half of the 20th century seems increasingly remote.

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1 Weak seismographic data from the October 9, 2006 North Korean nuclear ‘test’ suggests a yield of less than a kiloton — and perhaps as low as half a kiloton. Though some radioactive output was detected, this suggests that the device fizzled. In other words, Pyongyang has never conducted a successful nuclear test.
2 Should testing on a 20th century scale resume, of course, all bets are off.

Position Paper #1 — Aggressively pursue the most viable means of ensuring the long-term sustainability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent by building and fielding the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

RD has consistently argued in favor of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) on the basis that it is most viable means for ensuring the long-term sustainability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent while minimizing the chances of further nuclear testing.

The precise nature of nuclear weapons design is obviously highly (and legitimately) classified. But while the finer points of the technical debate are obviously limited to experts and a select few elected representatives, the broad strokes of the issue at hand are clearly discernible. (Indeed, RD has been founded in part on the belief that such broad strokes can and must be discerned and understood.)

The RRW program proposes modest and conservative design changes to Cold War-era warhead architecture that would seek to maximize safety, reliability and maintainability with an eye towards an essentially indefinite service life. With only modest and conservative tweaks, RRW is intended to be certified without requiring nuclear testing (though there admittedly cannot be any absolute guarantee of that in such an endeavor). New warheads would then be built to serve as the mainstay of the American nuclear deterrent for the foreseeable future.

This proposal has experienced strong opposition from many in the arms control community, and the program was consistently denied funding by the 110th Congress. With an even stronger Democratic 111th Congress now in session, prospects appear bleak. In any event, little is likely to happen before the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States reports its findings April 1 (the Commission released an interim report last Dec. 15). Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is also moving to accelerate the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review process, which will help chart the Pentagon’s course well into the next decade. So despite the opposition of the 110th Congress, the issue of the RRW remains very much alive.

Indeed, Gates has argued consistently for RRW — most prominently in a speech late last year to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Gates expressed grave concerns about the long-term sustainability of the American nuclear arsenal and warned that without RRW, the existing arsenal would eventually need to be subjected to nuclear testing as it continued to age in order to maintain a high degree of confidence in reliability.

To have meaning, a nuclear deterrent must be credible in not just its existence but the much more complicated willingness to actually employ it — at the very least in a second or retaliatory strike. Inextricably linked to this is the issue of confidence. Both the government that commands the arsenal and those it is intended to deter must be confident that the delivery systems and the warheads actually work.

The incredible complexity of modern nuclear weapons makes that confidence a challenge — especially over time. Though obviously quite classified, current American warheads are widely thought to be two-stage thermonuclear designs, the newest with a non-spherical primary shaped like an egg. Translation: two distinct, but carefully timed nuclear chain reactions that must be precisely timed to a fraction of a fraction of a second. The non-spherical detail is important because it makes the already enormously complex implosion design even more intricate and complicated. Also hardened to endure not only the acceleration of launch, the cold vacuum of space and the immense heat of reentry but also electromagnetic interference, these warheads are then crammed into a steeply conical reentry vehicle composed of advanced composites to endure the heat of friction during reentry at extremely high speeds. These reentry vehicles are as small as six feet tall and less than two feet wide at the base. In sum, it is without exaggeration one of the most complex devices ever constructed by man.

This complexity makes reliability particularly challenging. The U.S. Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories use the world’s most powerful supercomputers to model the effects of age on the existing arsenal as part of the current Life Extension and Stockpile Stewardship Programs (LEP and SSP).

But there are necessarily limits to what LEP and SSP can do. This has nothing to do with LEP and SSP and everything to do with the warheads they are working with. While safety, reliablitiy and maintainability have obviously always been key design considerations for nuclear weapons, other factors were extremely important in the Cold War arms race, during which and for which every warhead now in the U.S. arsenal was designed. For instance, high yield-to-weight ratios became an important metric in the Cold War, especially when mounting multiple warheads on a single missile (known individually as a multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, or MIRV). And maximizing accuracy was essential for counterforce targets like hardened missile silos. Accuracy favored particularly steep and narrow reentry vehicle cones (which were more stable during reentry and were almost certainly a key factor in the use of narrower non-spherical primaries).

Obviously weight and accuracy remain essential design considerations. But in the days of the Cold War, their importance was paramount, and design compromises were inevitably made that complicated warhead architecture from a sustainability standpoint. Indeed, at that time warheads were regularly displaced by newer, more advanced designs. The continual cycle of upgrades and replacements was simply part of the Cold War design paradigm. None of the warheads now in the arsenal would have been designed with the underlying consideration that they would be serving in an operational status essentially indefinitely.

Any nuclear warhead — like any weapon system — will invariably become increasingly complicated to retain in an operational status as it ages. But the existing arsenal was not optimized with such considerations in mind and consequently the challenges of sustainment will almost certainly come to a head faster.

Ideally, these mounting challenges to certification and thus confidence would be spotted years in advance, so that there might be time to begin designing a replacement warhead at that point. However, the current circumstances and the prohibition on nuclear testing now effectively in force (in practice, if not yet law) make the issue urgent even if (hypothecially) current modelling does suggest that LEP and SSP can continue to ensure confidence for some time to come.

This is because the engineers that had first-hand experience with nuclear weapons design during the Cold War and in the era of nuclear testing are aging. That expertise and experience not only would likely ensure a better design, but would also almost certainly play a role in minimizing the risk of nuclear testing becoming necessary for certification. As these engineers age and approach retirement, they will be transfering their knowledge and experience to the next generation of nuclear weapons engineers. But something will inevitably be lost in that transfer, and the subtlety and nuance of design work

As such, if the primary goal for the United States is to sustain a decisive U.S. nuclear deterrent indefinitely and to do so without full scale nuclear testing, the answer is RRW. RRW maximizes the long-term sustainability of the arsenal by being tailored for that mission. Pursuing RRW now also maximizes the experience and expertise of Cold War weapons engineers and consequently helps minimize the chances for full scale nuclear testing.

The new warhead would also have the benefit of drastically reducing the size of the nuclear stockpile by maximizing confidence and minimizing the need for hedge stocks, when compared to current requirements. The result is a streamlined and more cost-effective nuclear enterprise.

In sum, further disarmament is absolutely in the cards. But total disarmament — ‘getting to zero’ — remains unforeseeable in the current geopolitical climate.[1] While some may consider that an admirable goal, it would be irresponsible to bank on its success in the foreseeable future. And the longer the United States relies on its Cold War-era arsenal, the closer it gets to implicating itself in a nuclear test for certification. Meanwhile, the longer RRW is pushed to the right, the less Cold War-era expertise and experience the program will have in the design phase.

As such, RD believes that the the aggressive pursuit of RRW is the most viable means of ensuring the long-term sustainability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent.

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1 This is hardly a minor point, but not one RD intends to delve into here. In short, every other nuclear power in the world has made choices to modernize its arsenal or is actually manufacturing new warheads to sustain its arsenal well into the 21st century. This makes the American arsenal unique in that Washington has refused to bite the bullet and accept responsibility for the politically unpopular but nevertheless necessary decision to sustain the arsenal indefinitely.

In addition to attempting to give definition to the outside parameters of a defense debate — even if the operational capabilities that actually define those parameters are classified — there is also the matter of understanding internal technical restraints that prohibit the ways in which outside parameters are addressed or confronted.

The distinction is an important one, when understanding exactly what the wider public does not — and cannot — know in specific and concrete detail. The contribution of, for example, Tom Stefanick’s Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy or Air Power Australia is largely in defining the operating environment and demands that will be placed on a new technology or weapon system in the real world. Stefanick takes the nature of the environment and the limitations that the operating environment imposes in order to argue a larger point about the implications of a doctrinal choice to target Soviet ballistic missile submarines. Carlo Kopp and his associates at Air Power Australia define the future operating environment in order to argue that the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is insufficient to meet Australia’s needs. This is not to oversimplify or argue that Stefanick and Kopp have not also made contributions in other regards. But their emphasis has been to argue against a particular doctrinal or procurement choice (respectively) based on wider outside parameters.

But another class of consideration that is equally important to properly estimate and account for is internal technical and capability limitations.

This can at times be forgotten when the debate is taking place in the United States, where the technological edge — if not a generational lead — is percieved as the rule (if not always in practice). But other countries deal with this problem on a much more regular basis. With limitations in terms of funding, development timeline and existing technical capacity, there may not always be a technological solution to the problem. At the very least, the operating environment or the defined objectives can easily force new constraints on the problem and require sub-optimal counters and solutions.

The perfect example of this is the debate about the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW).

The challenge in this case is not that the American nuclear enterprise does not have the technological know-how or the institutional knowledge necessary to design a first-rate and fundamentally new nuclear warhead (though it has nevertheless lost most of those who had first-hand experience with weapons design in the days of extensive nuclear testing — and the rest are on the cusp of retirement). The problem with such new weapon design is that it requires nuclear testing to develop and certify — something few are interested in — and almost no one is advocating for.

This is in part because the current modern nuclear weapons design is exceptional. In terms of its mission, the late two-stage thermonuclear warhead is exceptional. With highly accurate guidance and yields — sometimes selectable — in the 100-500 kiloton range (ten to twenty times or more the strength of the Hiroshima bomb), these modern weapons are sufficient to impact and ensure destruction. Even in the case of a pinpoint target like a specific missile silo, even if the silo is so hardened to nuclear attack that it cannot be destroyed directly through destructive force, the crater from the blast is thought to potentially be sufficiently wide enough to encompass the silo and its below-ground structure, depriving it of its very foundation. This is known as crater-death.

With such accuracy and destructiveness already achieved and the drive of intellectual and resource investment over the course of nearly half a century that made these designs possible, improvement in the post-Cold War world becomes a much more subtle — and with the collapse of the Soviet Union, much less urgent — matter.

But in the case of the RRW and the American deterrent, the defining characteristics of the requirement have already been made clear (if not explicitly):

1.) the desire to sustain, in one form or another, a decisive U.S. nuclear deterrent indefinitely
2.) to do so without full scale nuclear testing

These defining characteristics place immense constraints on the possible technological solutions. Without nuclear testing to certify new design changes or to continue to sustain a high degree of confidence in the existing arsenal indefinitely. Both of these routes almost certainly eventually implicate the Pentagon in nuclear testing, despite the impressive simulations and modeling that some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers are undoubtedly capable of achieving.

The decisive constraint is the the existing design work — design work only achieved as the highly refined product of half a century of nuclear development that included not only the immense investment of resources, intellectual capital and money but extensive nuclear testing. This is not an RD argument for a renewal of testing. But the long-term solution in this case is rooted in the internal, technical limitations that a moratorium (in practice if not in legal effect) on nuclear testing carries with it.

RRW — or a fundamentally similar concept under a different name — would take existing design work and combine it with what remains of Cold War-era design and development experience and move to expediently refine existing designs. This refinement would be extremely conservative and limited tweaks in order to maximize long-term sustainability, maintainability and reliability along with the latest safety features.

While these have always been design considerations, they were not all the highest priority during the Cold War, especially when the continual development and fielding of replacement warheads was ingrained in the process. The best chance of doing this is the current moment, when the nuclear enterprise both still remembers (as an institution) the era of warhead design and testing as well as having accrued a great deal of first-hand experience with sustainability issues through the Stockpile Stewardship and Life Extension Programs that have helped maintain the arsenal since the Cold War.

While the debate will undoubtedly rage over the next few years about the proper way to sustain the American nuclear arsenal, the debate must begin with the understanding of the internal constraints that leave very little maneuverability or options if the underlying objectives are sustainment and the avoidance of nuclear testing.

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.

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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.

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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.