Arms-control advocates are sounding the alarm over recent press reports about Washington's new nuclear posture review, which calls for developing nuclear plans and capabilities to deter or defend against nuclear, biological or chemical weapons attacks not only by Russia and China but also by Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Libya.
The critics of the nuclear review claim that increasing the number of instances in which the US might consider using nuclear weapons could well make their use more likely and is liable to stimulate further proliferation of such weapons.
These arguments do not stand up under scrutiny. In fact, the Bush administration deserves praise for its candor in dealing with the security dilemmas posed by the post-Cold War strategic environment. The US is right to redefine the requirements of deterrence in order to meet new threats to its security, its forces abroad and its allies.
Countries hostile to the US are indeed developing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons that could do us grave harm. Their leaders may not be deterred by traditional threats of massive nuclear retaliation. And they are producing and storing these weapons in deeply buried and hardened sites that might be invulnerable to all but nuclear weapons.
Posing a threat to targets that are highly valued by an adversary has been a staple of US deterrence doctrine since the beginning of the nuclear age. But leaders of rogue states may not take seriously US threats to launch massive nuclear strikes on leadership and weapons sites -- nuclear, chemical and biological -- that are inaccessible except to the most destructive nuclear weapons in our arsenal: the types left over from the Cold War. These US weapons, would, of course, cause a huge loss of innocent lives. Thus, having the capability to destroy such targets with smaller and less destructive weapons would strengthen rather than erode deterrence.
It is preposterous to believe, as some scaremongers have suggested, that the Bush administration is preparing to carry out nuclear preemptive strikes around the world. But it is not hard to imagine circumstances under which a president might want to have the nuclear option available for preventing or responding to a rogue state's use of highly destructive weapons.
Suppose, for example, that the US had just suffered the loss of 100,000 lives in a biological warfare attack, that it not only knew the identity of the rogue state attacker but also had reliable intelligence it was preparing additional attacks on US territory -- and that these weapons could be destroyed only with nuclear weapons. Under these conditions, why shouldn't the president have the option of limiting further American deaths?
A key criticism of the nuclear posture review is that it envisions using nuclear weapons to deter or possibly respond to not only nuclear threats to the US but also attacks with chemical and biological weapons (CBW). Critics point out that during the Cold War, nuclear weapons were an option of last resort, to be used only to deter a nuclear attack on the US by the Soviet Union -- in other words, only when national survival was at stake.
This interpretation is a misreading of history. Throughout the Cold War, the US reserved the right to use nuclear weapons to deter both conventional and nuclear attacks on its NATO allies and on Japan, Korea and Australia. The prime example of the US' "lowering the threshold" for the use of nuclear weapons was Europe, where official NATO doctrine called on the alliance to use nuclear weapons to deter or defeat a conventional attack by the Warsaw Pact that was also expected to include the use of chemical weapons.
The credible threat to use nuclear weapons to offset the conventional superiority of the Warsaw Pact helped keep the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War. Similarly, holding open the option of using nuclear weapons against chemical or biological attacks may also help to keep the peace.
The issue is not that, as some critics suggest, nuclear arms are strictly for deterrence rather than war-fighting -- this is a false choice. US plans for employing nuclear weapons over the past few decades have not specifically targeted population centers. These plans were based on the sound logic that threats work only if they are credible, and that it was simply incredible to threaten the Soviet Union with total destruction, and thus put the survival of the US at risk, regardless of the nature of the Soviet nuclear attack.
Critics of the nuclear posture review worry that it will increase nuclear proliferation because, in contemplating possible use of nuclear weapons in response to CBW attacks, the US is abandoning a policy enunciated in 1978 forswearing US nuclear attacks on countries that do not possess nuclear weapons. In truth, however, over the past decade senior government officials have publicly stated that the US reserves the option of using nuclear weapons in response to CBW attacks -- a flat contradiction of that 1978 policy.
Advocates of nuclear disarmament assert that US backtracking from an outdated policy that effectively gives non-nuclear countries a "safe haven" for developing CBW will prompt further nuclear proliferation. They exaggerate the impact of US nuclear policy decisions on the calculus of other countries to acquire or increase their nuclear capabilities. There is little evidence to suggest that such decisions by Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Pakistan or India were driven by the US nuclear posture. Conversely, the US could get rid of all its nuclear weapons tomorrow and these countries would not follow suit. On the contrary, the one sure way to stimulate further proliferation of weapons of mass destruction would be for the US to level the playing field by slashing its nuclear arsenal to a few hundred weapons.
The nuclear posture review represents an evolutionary change from the nuclear doctrine that has emerged since the Cold War ended. The reality is that nuclear weapons have a useful role to play in deterring or defeating the use of certain weapons of mass destruction.
Instead of making overblown and misleading arguments, critics of the nuclear review should debate the implications for deterrence and stability of its one truly innovative feature -- the decision to rely more heavily on conventional and missile defense capabilities in US strategic doctrine. Moreover, posing a credible threat to critical targets in rogue states (or, for that matter, Russia and China) does not require the thousands of nuclear warheads the administration plans to keep. Critics should continue to press the administration for a more convincing explanation of why the new nuclear strategy it has articulated will produce a strategic force posture and force levels almost identical to those planned by the Clinton administration under a Cold War nuclear doctrine the Bush team has correctly discarded.
Richard D. Sokolsky and Eugene B. Rumer are senior research fellows at the National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies.
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