Since the end of the Cold War, nuclear deterrence between Russia and the United States has receded into the background in terms of day-to-day foreign policy and official public relations.1 Although both countries retain thousands of nuclear warheads, they have ceased to be global rivals, and the chances of a deliberate war between them have fallen close to zero. There are serious differences on some issues, such as Yugoslavia (1999), Iraq (2003), Russian domestic politics and their effect on elections in Ukraine (2004), the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1999, 2003, and 2007), the war in Georgia (2008), a growing U.S. presence in several of the former Soviet republics, and the planned deployment of U.S. ballistic missile defense (BMD) sites in Europe.
Nonetheless, Moscow and Washington are no longer the leaders of two coalitions of states and political-ideological movements that had made bipolarity and severe rivalry the global norm in international relations for almost five decades. Their relations—despite continuous ups and downs, friction, disagreements, and mutual recrimination—include numerous and important areas of cooperation.
This cooperation has embraced various economic and political spheres: peacekeeping operations, resolution of regional conflicts, nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the struggle against terrorism, joint ground and naval exercises, programs to secure and eliminate stockpiles of nuclear and chemical weapons, safe disposal of nuclear materials and decommissioned nuclear submarines, salvage operations at sea, and joint human space systems.
The legacy of the Cold War—mutual nuclear deterrence—is becoming less and less relevant as an instrument for dealing with post–Cold War international realities, threats, and risks. Eventually either nuclear deterrence will be abandoned, or the deterrence will lead to the collapse of international security through nuclear proliferation and actual use of nuclear weapons, either in combat, through an accident, or as a terrorist act.
Since the early 1990s, the United States and Russia (and in a more limited way, Britain and France unilaterally) have halved their deployed strategic nuclear forces in terms of nuclear reentry vehicles (warheads) under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), and are expected to reduce them by another 60 percent by 2012 under the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reduction Treaty (SORT) and a new START agreement. Combined with cuts in both sides’ tactical nuclear arms, the reductions will apparently amount to more than 80 percent over the twenty-year period since the middle 1980s.
But there is the other side of the coin. The decade and a half that has elapsed since the end of the Cold War has demonstrated at least three great paradoxes in regard to nuclear weapons.
The first is that mutual nuclear deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union (and now Russia) has quietly outlived the two states’ global rivalry and confrontation, with which it was closely associated from 1945 to 1991, and which continued in its self-perpetuating momentum even after the collapse of one of the main subjects of deterrence—the Soviet superpower. These inexorable dynamics of mutual nuclear deterrence have acquired a growing and negative “feedback effect” on political relations between former opponents, sustaining a muted, though multifarious, fear: of the supposed evil intentions of the “strategic partner”; of inadvertent or accidental nuclear attack; of possible loss of control over nuclear weapons leading to their acquisition by rebel groups or terrorists; of the one’s plans to gain control over the other’s nuclear weapons or to deliver a disarming strike against nuclear sites—all this in the absence of any real political basis for suspecting such horrific scenarios or actions.
The second paradox is that, with the removal of the fear of escalation of any nuclear weapon use to a global catastrophe, the United States, Russia, and some other nuclear weapon states have become much more casual about contemplating initiation of the actual combat use of nuclear weapons in service to specific military missions. Thus, the end of the Cold War has actually lowered, not raised, the nuclear threshold, to say nothing of not bringing an end to nuclear warfare planning altogether.
During the George W. Bush administraton, Washington emphasized the right to launch preemptive selective nuclear strikes, thereby promoting a doctrine of actual nuclear warfare rather than of traditional nuclear deterrence. This example is being followed by Russia, although with some reservations and a variety of controversial official declarations. After a rather weak resistance, Moscow resigned itself to the Bush administration’s lack of interest in arms control treaties. Instead, despite scarce funding, Russia unwisely is attempting to carry out a “balanced modernization” of all three legs of its nuclear triad (that is, air-, land-, and sea-based systems); shrinking from discussing tactical nuclear weapons; and seeking to make up for its setbacks through the export of civilian nuclear technologies and materials, as well as massive arms sales abroad.
As early as 1993, democratic Russia officially repudiated the no-first-use commitment made by the totalitarian Soviet Union in 1982. During 2000 and 2001 Moscow reconfirmed that position, and it now says that nuclear weapons play a leading role in ensuring Russian national security. Moscow even acknowledges the possibility of “a selective and limited combat use” of strategic nuclear weapons in order to “de-escalate the aggression.”2 This implies accomplishing specific tasks involved in conducting and terminating nuclear warfare, rather than merely deterring aggression through the capacity to inflict “devastating retaliation,” as previously claimed by Soviet official military doctrine.
Not surprisingly, Great Britain, France, and China are not going to undertake any limitations of their nuclear forces through arms control treaties, alleging that they lag far behind the two major nuclear powers. Indeed, all three are implementing planned long-term modernizations and, in some weapon systems, a buildup of nuclear arsenals. Besides, Britain and France are elaborating limited nuclear strike options of their own.
Now, as never before, nuclear deterrence looks like the factor most likely to remain a permanent part of international relations, at least until a more devastating or efficient weapon is invented. Moreover, this posture is taken not because of the colossal technical or political difficulties of achieving “general and complete nuclear disarmament,” but because of the presumably considerable “inherent advantages” of nuclear weapons as a means of sustaining national security and “civilizing” international relations.
Obviously, the Big Five (the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, and China) openly or tacitly treat nuclear deterrence as an indispensable and legitimate instrument of their security and military policies, even as they claim that other countries have no right to acquire nuclear weapons.
It will never be proved with finality whether nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence saved the world from a third world war during the Cold War decades. Fortunately history does not have a subjunctive mood. Certainly the USSR and the United States conducted their foreign policy and military actions abroad with much greater caution than otherwise might be the case, and avoided direct armed conflict.
There was only one example when the great powers came to the brink of war and after some maneuvering stepped back out of the horror of possible nuclear conflagration. This was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. However, the irony of that case was that the crisis was provoked by the very nuclear deterrence that is now portrayed by many as an insurance against nuclear war. Moscow had decided to secretly deploy medium range missiles in Cuba to catch up with the U.S. crash missile buildup of 1961–64, which was provoked by Nikita Khrushchev’s bluff of Soviet missile superiority after the triumph of Sputnik in 1957. Hence, the “remedy” (nuclear deterrence) barely saved the world from the catastrophe provoked by the application of that very “remedy” (arms race within the context of nuclear deterrence).
Be that as it may, the realities of nuclear deterrence are much more frightening and controversial than it seems in peacetime, when nuclear deterrence is no more than a theoretical notion buried in the deep background of day-to-day international affairs. If a new crisis happens, which cannot be excluded and which may be much more difficult to resolve in multipolar and uncontrolled international affairs, deterrence may once again move to the foreground of practical politics and fail, with catastrophic consequences. A miniature reminder of such a possibility occurred during the August 2008 conflict in the Caucasus.
It is commonly assumed that the sense of nuclear deterrence is making nuclear weapons not tools for conducting war, but a political instrument, which guarantees that nuclear weapons will not be used in practice—neither within the context of a premeditated attack nor as a result of the escalation of a nonnuclear conflict between nuclear nations. Now, in the sixth decade of the nuclear era, this circumstance is seen as being perfectly natural. Some even talk about the “civilizing” effect of nuclear weapons on politicians and the military and on international politics. However, the reality of nuclear deterrence is much more controversial, because there is no clear watershed between nuclear deterrence and nuclear war-fighting.
Even the most destructive strategic nuclear forces carry out their political mission of deterrence specifically through their ability to carry out assigned combat missions—that is, destroy certain targets—and nothing else. These missions are embodied in operational plans, target lists, and flight programs loaded into ballistic and cruise missiles’ onboard computers. These operational plans provide for the use of weapons with varying degrees of expected effectiveness in a first strike, a launch-on-warning (LOW) strike, a launch-under-attack (LUA) strike, or delayed retaliatory second strike. These options envision massive salvos, limited groupings, or even single missile nuclear strikes at various combinations of states and targets.
The “gray area” of no clear distinction between the concepts of deterring and waging nuclear war relates even more to operational-tactical and tactical nuclear systems (TNW) than is the case with strategic forces. Since TNW are viewed as means to promote success in a theater or at the battlefield level more rapidly or to offset an enemy’s superiority in conventional forces, it is nearly impossible to draw a distinction between deterrence and war-fighting.
Moreover, the division of nuclear weapons into strategic and tactical categories is also quite conditional. For the USSR/Russia, American forward-based systems in Europe have always been equated to strategic weapons, since from their forward bases they can reach deep into the territory of the USSR/Russia. For Eastern Europe and Russian neighbors in Asia, in turn, Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons are also seen as equivalent to strategic weapons, both in operational range and destructive consequences of their use.
Still more dangerous is the so-called hair-trigger nuclear posture, associated with weapons that must be launched quickly upon receiving information about an opponent’s attack in order to avoid destruction on the ground. Altogether there are now probably about 2,000 nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert in line with LOW/LUA concepts and operational plans: most of the U.S. and Russian ICBMs, and the Russian SLBMs on submarines at bases.
With ICBM flight time being about 30 minutes and SLBM about 15 to 20 minutes, these concepts provide political leaders with a decision-making time of only 4 to 8 minutes (subtracting the time of missile attack detection and confirmation, and the time for the response launch sequence and fly-away). And this time would be available only if the leaders are safe and ready, and ev erything works perfectly according to planned procedures. Besides, the leaders will have to operate under enormous stress, receiving controversial intelligence information and the on-duty officers’ interpretation of data from early warning systems. On top of all this, there is no difference between the upgrading of the alert status of strategic forces for the first (preemptive) or the second (retaliatory) strike. Operations officers would most probably interpret the actions of the other side in the most conservative way, and they would hardly have either the time or authority to educate political leaders on the details and possible misperceptions of strategic forces’ crisis activities.
No doubt, maintaining several thousand nuclear warheads on hair-trigger alert is the ultimate absurdity of nuclear deterrence twenty years after the end of the Cold War, when political, economic, and security relations, at least among the P5 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council), render deliberate nuclear attack virtually unthinkable. Moreover, it was and remains extremely dangerous. During the Cold War years there were dozens of false alarms on both sides, and the fact that nuclear war did not erupt out of a technical malfunction or a decision-maker’s miscalculation should be to an important degree attributed to sheer luck.
Nowadays a number of new dangers are contributing to such a catastrophic possibility. Proliferation of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to an expanding number of states with inadequate negative control makes unauthorized or deliberate provocative launch of a missile much more probable and threatening as a trigger of massive nuclear exchange. Of special concern is the proliferation of long-range cruise missiles and sea-based ballistic and cruise missiles, which are capable of delivering an anonymous strike. Some new nuclear states are politically unstable, and a launch of nuclear weapons may happen there as a result of civil war, putsch, or a contest among rival groups or between political and civilian leaders for control over nuclear weapons. As a result of nuclear proliferation there is a growing danger of terrorists getting access to nuclear materials or weapons. A terrorist nuclear explosion in one or several capitals might provoke a spontaneous nuclear exchange by great powers’ forces on hair-trigger alert.
The third paradox is that with the end of the Cold War, the focus has been on doing away with nuclear arms limitations and reductions, transparency, and confidence building, rather than doing away with nuclear deterrence and even tually the nuclear weapons themselves. The victims of this process (primarily at the initiative of U.S. policy makers of 2001–8) already include the ABM treaty, START II, and the START III Framework Treaty, an Agreement on delineation between strategic and tactical BMD systems of 1997, as well as the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), and negotiations on the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT). Emulating U.S. policy, Russia suspended its adherence to the Treaty on Conventional Force Reduction in Europe (CFE) in 2007 and threatened to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces and Short Range Nuclear Forces Elimination Treaty of 1987, if the U.S. plan of deploying ballistic missile defense sites in Europe were to be implemented. Potentially, even the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) might fall apart—at least that is how it looked from the results of a disastrous NPT Review Conference of May 2005. The whole structure of nuclear arms control is collapsing, with most dire predictable consequences from the growth of new threats and risks.
The new beginning of a nuclear free world, started by the article of four respected American former state figures and later supported by the new U.S. administration of Barack Obama, has been a promising change, but it is yet to be substantiated by practical policy.
Of the main reasons why nuclear deterrence should be superseded by some type of constructive strategic relationship between the United States and Russia, and eventually among all nuclear weapon states, the first is nuclear deterrence’s irrelevance to the real threats and challenges of the post–Cold War era.
Deterrence remains effective against the least probable or nonexistent threats: nuclear or massive conventional attacks by great powers (and their alliances) against each other. But it does not work against the new real and present dangers, such as nuclear proliferation, international terrorism, ethnic and religious conflicts, drug and arms trafficking, transborder crime, and illegal migration, to say nothing of climate warming and world economic crisis. It has been a highly debatable point—whether nuclear disarmament could prevent nuclear proliferation in the past or might do it in the future. It is certain, however, that nuclear deterrence cannot stop proliferation, and it is quite probable that deterrence encourages further expansion of the “nuclear club.”
The second reason for replacing deterrence with a new strategic relationship is that the relations involved in mutual nuclear deterrence place tangible limitations on the ability of great powers to cooperate genuinely in dealing with new threats and challenges. The degree of cooperation during Cold War times, when most arms control treaties, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, were concluded, is not enough for the new era. Such endeavors—cooperation between the leading states’ secret services and special forces, joint counterproliferation policies (for example, Russian participation in the Proliferation Security Initiative, and the envisioned actual U.S.-Russian combat operations against terrorists and rogue and failed states), officially initiated joint early missile launch warning and BMD systems—virtually imply a common security alliance of a new type. Much stricter nuclear and missile export control regimes, greater emphasis on securing and accounting for nuclear warheads and nuclear materials (which implies broad transparency and access to each other’s secret sites), verifiable cessation of production of weapons-grade nuclear materials throughout the world, common policy on internationalization of nuclear fuel cycle facilities, and ambitious Global Partnership projects—all these require a greater magnitude of trust and cooperation among partner states.
But all of these are impossible to imagine while the United States and Russia still aim thousands of nuclear warheads at each other, keep missiles on hair-trigger alert, and modernize nuclear forces to preserve devastating retaliatory capabilities against each other. Besides, as was mentioned above, the momentum of nuclear deterrence, in combination with new threats and missions and technological developments, may destabilize strategic relations among the great powers, further undercutting their ability to think and act together.
The current crisis over the Iranian nuclear program, despite the apparent similarity of the U.S. and Russian positions, provides a good illustration of this point. Neither the United States nor Russia wants Iran to have uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing capabilities, to say nothing of Teheran’s potential acquisition of nuclear weapons. However, action in the form of United Nations Security Council sanctions against Iran, or a UN authorization of the use of military force, is where U.S.-Russian unanimity stops. For the United States, the prospect of eventually being targeted by Iranian nuclear missiles is totally unbearable and warrants all means of prevention. For all conservative Russians, the dire political, economic, and security implications of supporting (even if passively) UN sanctions or U.S. military action against Iran—Russia’s long-standing partner—may be seen as too high a price to pay. After all, as hard-liners would point out, Russia is already targeted by thousands of U.S. nuclear weapons, as well as by the nuclear weapons of American allies and part ners (Britain, France, Israel, and Pakistan). A nuclear-armed Iran would not add much to this picture, and it probably would target its missiles elsewhere anyway.
The prospect of Iranian nuclear materials or weapons being leaked to Islamic terrorist organizations is much more frightening. However, Russian hawks would claim that this is a hypothetical scenario, while actual transactions of that kind might have been already attempted or done through A. Q. Khan’s black market connections with the Taliban, al Qaeda, and Iran—without ensuing aggressive U.S. attempts to investigate and prosecute the case. Apparently this benign position was motivated by Washington’s desire not to destabilize its partner regime in Pakistan, which is important for other American interests. As for Russia, the majority of its political-strategic elite would not support sacrificing cooperation with its partner regime in Iran, which is likewise important for many Russian interests, in favor of cooperation with the United States, particularly in view of the state of U.S.-Russian strategic relations.
The third reason for initiating a new strategic relationship in place of mutual nuclear deterrence is the problem of resource allocation. In annual defense budgets the allocations for nuclear weapons are relatively small (10–15 percent).3 But the costs of the whole 20- to 30-year service life cycle of strategic systems (R&D, procurement, deployment, maintenance, and eventual dismantling and utilization) are staggering. Sustaining nuclear deterrence at current levels, or even at reduced levels (such as the 1,550 deployed warheads called for under the New START treaty), is an expensive luxury, given that the two biggest powers assign the bulk of these forces the mission of destroying each other, as well as serving “as a hedge against future uncertainty.” This aimless “hedge” may be relatively inexpensive for the United States, which has the largest overall defense budget in the world (about as big as the sum of all military spending by the other major powers), and which fully modernized its strategic nuclear force during the 1980s and 1990s, investing in “strategic capital” that will last for decades into the future. Still, even for the United States it would be easy to find a much better allocation for these resources, whether within its defense budget or outside it, in particular in times of harsh economic crisis.
The burden of maintaining robust nuclear deterrence is much heavier for Russia, which is now implementing a “balanced modernization” of all elements of its strategic triad and planning to keep up with the New START treaty ceilings. Faced with a severe deficiency of appropriations for an expensive military reform, as well as modernization and restructuring of its conventional forces, Russia nonetheless has to spend huge sums on nuclear weapons. The budget share for nuclear deterrence is relatively still bigger for France, Britain, and China.
By maintaining mutual nuclear deterrence, the great powers are wasting resources that otherwise could be applied to more appropriate military and security tasks and missions. Moreover, significant scientific and technical intellectual resources are tied up by nuclear deterrence. Powerful state, business, research, and political organizations are locked into sustaining nuclear confrontation in economic, technical, and mental respects, instead of addressing the more realistic and urgent needs of national and international security.
There are three principal routes for doing away with mutual nuclear deterrence, at least as a principal operational mode of U.S.-Russian military relationship.
The first of the three avenues toward the end of nuclear deterrence is to further reduce and “de-alert” Russian and American strategic nuclear forces. The second is to develop and deploy a joint ballistic missile early warning system and a missile proliferation monitoring system. The third is to develop and deploy joint BMD systems. Initially, the second and third avenues might be limited to nuclear and missile proliferation threats, but eventually—in parallel with transformation of the nuclear forces of both sides—they could embrace a growing part of the strategic assets of the two powers and their allies, and thus would transform their present mutual nuclear deterrence into a qualitatively new type of strategic relationship.
This new relationship could be called “strategic nuclear partnership,” “cooperative nuclear weapons policies,” “a common nuclear security framework,” “a mutual nuclear insurance [or assurance] strategy,” or any number of other names, depending on one’s tastes and semantic skills. In any case, the main problem is not the term, but the substance.
The first two steps on this long way are the ratification of CTBT by the United States, China, and other nations, without which the treaty cannot enter force, and successful ratification of the New START treaty by the United States and Russia to replace START I, which expired in December 2009.
After a decade of mockery and neglect, nuclear disarmament has returned to U.S.-Russian and other nuclear powers’ official documents and political commitments. This was due to the famous article by four respected Ameri can statesmen in favor of moving toward a nuclear-free world. The change of administration in Washington and President Barack Obama’s commitment to this idea have made nuclear disarmament once again a subject of practical diplomacy.
The new U.S. president promised to achieve the ratification of CTBT. In the spring of 2010, Washington and Moscow signed the New START treaty, which envisions reductions in the number of operationally deployed strategic delivery vehicles to 700 and of warheads to 1,550 for each side. However, besides the problems of ratification which the new treaty met in the U.S. Senate, a number of issues remain disturbing for Russia, and they may reappear in the negotiations for a follow-on to New START. One is the future of the U.S. BMD deployment plan, in particular in Europe. The first stages of deployment on ships in the Mediterranean, Rumania, and Bulgaria pose no serious challenge to Russia’s deterrence. However, there is no U.S. commitment to limit or coordinate with Moscow further deployments in any clear way, while Russia has to plan its strategic forces and arms control policies ten to fifteen years in advance. Other problems are the U.S. insistence on counting strategic warheads by their actual (operational) deployment, instead of maximum missile and bomber loadings, as in START I. Also, a growing concern of Moscow is the American deployment of thousands of strategic (long-range) air-launched and sea-launched cruise missiles and dozens of ballistic missiles with conventional precision-guided warheads on heavy bombers and submarines, capable of a counterforce strike at opponents’ strategic forces.
In contrast to President Obama’s call for a nuclear-free world, the practical policy of the United States for the first disarmament step is quite conservative, to say nothing of the open opposition of a part of the American political elite to New START. The Pentagon wishes to implement most of the New START reductions through removal of some MIRV warheads from missiles to storage, and by conversion of many strategic weapons for delivering conventional munitions. The first would leave the United States with a big reconstitution potential (the possibility of returning warheads from storage to missiles), and the second with a new conventional counterforce capability. Both are quite disturbing for Moscow.
Despite all general reservations about nuclear disarmament, Russia has been gradually becoming more receptive to the idea of further nuclear disarmament. On the other hand, Russia is reluctant to commit itself to much deeper reductions after the New START, in view of U.S./NATO advantages in BMD technologies and conventional weapon systems and forces, the potential threat from other nuclear weapon states (all eight of which have weapons that can reach Russian territory), and American space support and potential strike capabilities, as embodied in the Prompt Global Strike concept and systems.
If these obstacles are overcome, the process of nuclear disarmament will gain momentum and, eventually, involve other nuclear states and address the problems of tactical nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons in storage, fissile materials production and stocks, as well as numerous interacting military, political, and economic problems.
We may hope that, in the long run, nuclear disarmament will do away with nuclear deterrence, which would permit stopping and reversing nuclear proliferation. It goes without saying that this would be a long and difficult process. A future nuclear-free world cannot be just the present world minus nuclear weapons. It would have to be a very different world, not free only from nuclear weapons but also from weapons based on new physical principles, from large conventional wars, and from any arbitrary use of force by strong nations against weak ones. All in all it will have to be a world with a very different system of international security. But wouldn’t it be better to strive for a new foundation of international security instead of the mutual capacity of states to kill in several hours dozens of millions of each other’s citizens?
1. This essay draws on earlier work done with Vladimir Dvorkin published in Beyond Nuclear Deterrence (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2006).
2. Aktualnye zadachi razvitia Vooruzhennykh Sil Rossiyskoi Federatsii [Urgent tasks of the armed forces of the Russian Federation] (Moscow, 2003), pp. 41–42.
3. http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2010/assets/summary.pdf.