Why Nuclear Weapons in the Twenty-first Century?
They had been worried by thunderstorms. In the pre-dawn darkness, men gathered in a makeshift desert camp, the lucky ones busying themselves with dials and gauges, cables and checklists. The rest paced back and forth, smoked, and anxiously watched the clock. There was nervous conversation: What if it didn’t work? What if it did? So much had been invested in this one event, precious resources in a time of war, all based on a promise, a theory—and, some might say, scientific arrogance.
At the appointed time a brilliant flash lit up the sky, a flash brighter than a thousand suns, a flash that penetrated the thick welders’ goggles worn by the observers, making them wince. It was a silent flash, the light moving so much faster than the shock wave that followed it. Seconds later came the bang, and then the steady roar of the atmosphere being displaced by a heat never before known on earth. A titanic mushroom cloud rose from the desert floor, a boiling mass of dust and gas. Purple lightning flashed across it. Those who saw it stood in stunned silence, aware that this was something new, a turning point, a single explosion in history that would reverberate through years, decades, perhaps even centuries. The men standing in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, were its creators, those who had pulled the stopper on the bottle that contained the nuclear genie. Their wish was for their creation to end a war, but as with all genies, there were unintended consequences.
At the start of the twenty-first century, the United States stands at a position of unprecedented military superiority. No other country, or even most combinations of countries, could hope to defeat America in a conventional battle on land, at sea, in the air, or in space. Our technological prowess has enabled us to field weapons that can literally run rings around our competitors, giving us a superior fighting capability with fewer tanks, planes, and ships than any of our potential adversaries. More than just technology, we have military personnel who would have been the envy of any general or admiral of the past—well educated, highly motivated, and dedicated to their jobs. Finally, the United States has demonstrated the will to use military force in the pursuit of its national objectives. America is no shrinking violet that might tempt an aggressive challenger—everyone understands that America is the force to be reckoned with in the world.
The only real threat to U.S. military forces comes from nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Of the three, only nuclear weapons could inflict tactical defeat upon our forces. American troops are trained to fight and to win in environments contaminated with chemical or biological agents, but when a nuclear explosion occurs, there is nothing that can be done except to endure the blast, heat, and radiation, and hope that you are far enough away to survive. Protective suits and special vehicles enable soldiers to continue to function and advance even in thick clouds of phosgene, chlorine, and anthrax, but neither armor nor protective gear can protect against temperatures hot enough to melt steel and pressures great enough to crush a tank like a tin can. The United States has become the ultimate combat force on the planet—only the ultimate weapon can threaten that force.
But if nuclear weapons are the only real threat to our high-tech soldiers, sailors, and airmen, why don’t we have a concerted policy to eliminate them from the planet? Wouldn’t it make sense to just get rid of these uniquely threatening weapons so that the United States would reign supreme on any future battlefield? Why would we even consider the construction of new weapons, an action that might start another nuclear arms race that would only serve to put America at greater risk?
Conversely, when has history given any nation a permanent lock on power, one that will never be challenged by an adversary who would secretly violate international agreements to gain a strategic advantage? In the arms race preceding the Second World War, both Germany and Japan ignored treaties intended to cap the destructive capabilities of weapons. Each developed super-battleships, advanced aircraft, and more powerful artillery while their future adversaries stuck to their promises. Now, in another period of uncertainty and change, we are faced with the decision of what to do with the most powerful weapons ever created, the nuclear arsenals of the eight or ten nations in the world that have crossed a fundamental threshold in the ability to destroy.
Nuclear weapons, more so than any weapons that preceded them, touch not just the warrior but the citizen. As weapons of mass destruction, they protect—and threaten—the very foundations of civilization. The time has come to bring discussions of nuclear policy out of the cloistered enclave of defense strategists to engage a much wider audience. Nuclear weapons affect all of us, and all of us should have the opportunity to discuss their future.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS WERE the icons of the Cold War. Nothing so graphically illustrated the seriousness of the superpower standoff as did images of nuclear-armed bombers rising off the ends of runways and missiles launched from underground silos. Humankind has always had the capability to inflict destruction; with the advent of the nuclear age the character of that destruction changed in a fundamental way. A full-scale nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union would not only have killed hundreds of millions of people, it would have destroyed cities and industrial plants, and done enormous damage to the global environment. It would have dealt a staggering and perhaps even a fatal blow to the development of human civilization. It is astonishing that, even though the fear of Armageddon was palpable at times, that fear did not prevent the United States and the Soviet Union from building tens of thousands of nuclear weapons or from continuing to explore advanced designs that put ever more destruction into ever smaller packages. Not only did we walk up to the brink of worldwide destruction, we walked along that brink for decades.
Numerous attempts were made to control the environmental damage done by the testing of nuclear weapons and to slow the inexorable rise of their destructive power. Treaties were put into place to prohibit nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, in the ocean, or in space, and to limit the explosive force of nuclear tests conducted underground. Strategic arms treaties placed caps on the number of missiles, bombers, and submarines that a nation could have, caps that could be verified by regular inspections. The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970 tried to halt the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the five nations that admitted to having them (the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China) by promising to provide peaceful nuclear technology to countries that agreed not to develop weapons. A Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, forbidding any type of nuclear explosion, was signed by many countries in 1996. The United States played a central role in the development and implementation of all these treaties, and although it did not ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, it has abided by its provisions and has not conducted a nuclear test since 1992. While recent years have seen nuclear tests by India, Pakistan, and North Korea, and development programs in Iran and elsewhere, the number of countries that chose the nuclear path is much smaller than was projected during the 1960s.
Looking backward from a world focused on the dangers of transnational terrorism, one in which stories of the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology are on the front page almost every day, the nuclear strategies of the Cold War look strange, even bizarre in their courting of global destruction. However, when seen from the perspective of the day, including the strongly held political ideologies of the principal participants, a certain logic appears, frightening perhaps, but nonetheless understandable. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the pace of nuclear development was most rapid, the United States saw itself in a life-or-death struggle with the evils of communism, a system that had already enslaved Russia, Eastern Europe, and large parts of Asia. Referring to the ultimate victory of world communism, Nikita Khrushchev shouted, “We will bury you!” in a speech at the United Nations. U.S. presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy were less dramatic but just as determined to contain the spread of communism and to make the benefits of democracy and free-market economics available to every nation. With such strongly held and diametrically opposite beliefs, there was an escalation of both rhetoric and weaponry, each side constantly attempting to gain the advantage while claiming that they were only seeking to maintain a balance of power against a threatening adversary.
In 1989, in the midst of a continuing arms race, the Soviet Union collapsed. While informed observers of communism saw its collapse as an inevitable result of inefficiencies and waste, few people expected the end to come when it did, or to occur so suddenly and so peacefully. Just months before the disintegration of the communist empire, military planners in the United States and other Western nations were busy studying Soviet military equipment and tactics and planning how we would defeat an invasion of Western Europe. The situation changed almost overnight in a way that hardly seemed real even as we watched history unfold on our television screens. The Berlin Wall was torn down under the eyes of guards who weeks before would have shot anyone who approached it. The Ukraine, the Baltic States, and the countries of Central Asia quickly seized the opportunity to assert their independence. Trainloads of Russian troops hurried eastward as the headquarters of once-feared secret police were ransacked by angry crowds.
One of the few things that didn’t change during this turbulent time was that thousands of nuclear weapons continued to sit on alert status, aimed at targets that didn’t seem to make sense in an era of peace dividends and glasnost. Deep within the bunkers where military strategy was plotted, nuclear attack plans were doggedly maintained. Submarines continued to sail with cargoes more destructive than all the weapons used in all the wars of history. Exercises were conducted to prove that bombers could be armed on short notice, ready to fly anywhere in the world. Simply put, no one knew how to change the system, or to what it should be changed.
THE END OF the Cold War was unusual in that it was less of a victory by the West than it was a self-generated collapse by the East. The Soviet Union was not “defeated” in any sense. It was never occupied by hostile forces, and no document of surrender was signed. While newly independent Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan willingly returned Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia, there was no question that the Russian Federation would continue to remain a potent nuclear power, if only because the deterioration of its army, navy, and air force meant that nuclear weapons were the only viable means for the defense of the country. There was discussion, to be sure, of why either side needed so many weapons when the adversarial relationship in which they were built no longer existed, but moves to reduce their number or to change the doctrine under which they would be used were slow in coming.
It was not until four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the United States took stock of its nuclear strategy and began to make changes. A study known as the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) of 1993 took a comprehensive look at changes in the post–Cold War security environment and the role that nuclear weapons played in that environment. It recognized that, lacking the existential threat to America posed by the Soviet Union, fewer nuclear weapons were required to assure our future defense. However, uncertainty about the future suggested that the United States maintain a hedge—a reserve of nuclear weapons—should international events rapidly turn sour. Finally, to allay any suspicion that the United States might be abandoning a nuclear option, we reassured our allies that they should continue to rely on the security provided by our nuclear forces rather than develop their own.
The recommendations of the NPR seemed reasonable to many in the nuclear weapons community, but few changes actually took place. Perhaps the problem was that the momentum of the Cold War was simply too great, that there had been insufficient time to absorb the impact of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the growing dominance of American conventional military power. The slow pace of change in nuclear policy drove the Congress to direct the Department of Defense to conduct a second Nuclear Posture Review in 2001, a study with the broad mandate of taking a fresh look at our nuclear forces in the light of a fundamentally changed world. Far from a recitation of the status quo, the NPR engaged some of the most creative thinkers in the defense community and came up with recommendations that would have been startling just a few years before. It abandoned the historical “strategic triad” of bombers, land-based missiles, and submarines to advocate a new one based on nuclear forces, defenses (e.g., missile defenses), and a responsive infrastructure or industrial base that could rapidly adapt to changes in the world. Whereas “strategic” used to be almost synonymous with “nuclear,” the NPR suggested that nonnuclear conventional weapons could perform some of the missions currently assigned to nuclear bombs and missiles. This would enable a global response to impending danger without crossing the nuclear threshold and with vastly lower damage than would be inflicted by nuclear weapons. The NPR also recommended a break from the policy of “mutually assured destruction” as a deterrent against aggression and advocated using modern technology to create a system of missile defense against small-scale attacks, again upping the threshold for a devastating nuclear response. Finally, noting that the pace of technology change was accelerating, it suggested that special attention be given to military technological preeminence—the United States could not afford to be surprised by a new type of weapon that would render us defenseless.
The NPR found that the United States needed far fewer nuclear warheads than when it faced strategic confrontation with the Soviet Union. However, it also recognized that the abrupt end of the Cold War left us with the wrong types of nuclear weapons for future missions—the highly sophisticated systems that were intended to destroy Soviet missile silos and bomber bases were ill-suited to respond to a geopolitical environment of proliferation and terrorism. Planners worried that the growing mismatch between future military requirements and existing weapons would lead to “self-deterrence,” wherein the United States would be seen as never willing to use nuclear weapons, effectively destroying the very concept of deterrence.
With the NPR’s recommendations for fewer nuclear weapons and a greater reliance on nonnuclear technologies, Admiral James Ellis, commander of United States Strategic Command from 2002 to 2004, commented, “The anti-nuclear groups should be writing the Congress in support of the NPR.” Unfortunately, what was in fact an innovative and thoughtful report was all but killed by a series of lackluster and confused presentations by senior Pentagon officials and a classification mentality that kept even obvious conclusions a secret. Only a few official briefings of its principal findings were ever given, and several of those were by individuals who do not appear to have been adequately informed about the report. Rather than being embraced across a wide political spectrum as an agent of change, the NPR came to be seen by some as a mysterious instrument for perpetuating the Cold War. Even within the Pentagon the impetus for change was erratic and sometimes absent altogether.
The other failing of the Nuclear Posture Review—the extreme secrecy in which it was held—has yet to be corrected in a systematic manner. When I was the director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the DoD organization tasked with activities related to weapons of mass destruction, I attended a meeting at the Pentagon on future nuclear strategy. In attendance were senior officials from all the relevant government organizations having a role in nuclear weapons. The briefer had hardly gotten started on his presentation when a heated argument broke out among the dozen or so people in the room. The contentious point was who was likely to be a future adversary of the United States, essentially at whom we would point missiles in times of war. After about thirty minutes I raised my hand and asked if it struck anyone else as odd that we, the leaders of the American nuclear weapons program, did not agree with or even know the policy that governed the use of the weapons in our care. If we were not authorized to know, then the hyper-secret policy might as well not exist.
A significant portion of the U.S. population, including many members of Congress, came of age after the end of the Cold War. To them, nuclear weapons are anachronisms, holdovers of a conflict read about in history books or seen in movies, some of which propagate false myths and rumors for lack of better information. Knowledgeable organizations such as the Center for International Security Studies have made numerous attempts to engage the Congress and the public in a debate about the future of nuclear weapons, but the press of other urgent business, not least of which has been the necessity of responding to the traumatic terrorist attacks of September 2001, meant that nuclear-related discussions were often poorly attended. Today the worst fears of the NPR’s critics are coming to fruition: The United States is spending billions of dollars every year to maintain and refurbish weapons whose practical use military planners are hard-pressed to justify. Out of concern that any changes in the weapons in our nuclear arsenal (even those that would reduce the destructive force of our weapons) would result in a new arms race, the United States continues to maintain an arsenal vastly more powerful than we need. And at a time when the threat of terrorist attacks against nuclear facilities is a paramount defense concern, we have failed to implement modern security technologies that would greatly reduce the ability of any unauthorized person to use the components of a stolen nuclear device. It would be irresponsible if such policies continued after an informed and comprehensive debate. What is unconscionable is that such a debate has yet to occur nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War.