rational defense

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.