Countries spend billions of dollars on defense every year, and some of that money inevitably gets squandered. Nobody likes “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but it’s impossible to eliminate it completely when you are spending vast sums on a wide array of military programs. More effective efforts to address this problem are desirable—i.e., it would be nice if the U.S. Defense Department could pass an audit every now and then—but the most obvious way to save money on defense is to simply not waste money pursuing unnecessary capabilities and impossible goals.
Case in point: Now that most of the major arms control treaties have expired or been abrogated, the United States, Russia, and China are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals. Other nuclear-armed states are improving their forces too, albeit more modestly.
Countries spend billions of dollars on defense every year, and some of that money inevitably gets squandered. Nobody likes “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but it’s impossible to eliminate it completely when you are spending vast sums on a wide array of military programs. More effective efforts to address this problem are desirable—i.e., it would be nice if the U.S. Defense Department could pass an audit every now and then—but the most obvious way to save money on defense is to simply not waste money pursuing unnecessary capabilities and impossible goals.
Case in point: Now that most of the major arms control treaties have expired or been abrogated, the United States, Russia, and China are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize and expand their nuclear arsenals. Other nuclear-armed states are improving their forces too, albeit more modestly.
In this case, however, “modernizing” doesn’t just mean replacing aging or obsolete systems with more reliable versions: It also means making one’s forces more lethal, accurate, stealthy, rapidly retargetable, etc., and significantly increasing the number of warheads in the arsenal. And the underlying goal behind all this spending isn’t merely preserving each state’s second-strike capability, because that is comparatively easy for major powers to do. Instead, the United States (and probably some others) will spend a lot of that money trying to obtain a credible ability to fight a nuclear war without suffering unacceptable damage.
Here’s the problem: Since the very beginning of the nuclear age, it has been obvious that the nature of these weapons makes it extremely difficult to achieve genuine invulnerability against any reasonably capable adversary. Modern nuclear weapons are small, light, easily hidden, and enormously destructive. For any country, having five or 10 atomic or hydrogen bombs land on its major cities would be a disaster of horrific proportions, far exceeding any possible political gains. Just try to imagine what possible benefits would be worth the United States losing New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, or Washington, or China losing Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou.
Unless a country’s leaders are confident that they can completely escape an opponent’s second strike, they aren’t going to push the button, save perhaps to signal resolve through a demonstration strike against an unoccupied region or because they are convinced that war is inevitable and are hoping to get in the first blow. But as critics have warned for decades, acquiring more lethal first-strike capabilities makes the latter danger worse and decreases crisis stability.
If all you need to deter a rival from attacking you or threatening your independence is a plausible capacity to retaliate with a relatively small number of weapons, then it makes little sense to spend vast sums trying to gain the ability to completely disarm a potential adversary.
The logic of this position—famously labeled “existential deterrence” by former U.S. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy—has never been convincingly refuted, but neither the United States nor the former Soviet Union ever accepted it as the basis for policy. Instead, during the Cold War, each spent vast sums developing more accurate missiles, better reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare capabilities, missile defenses, and the like, either because they believed it might be possible to escape the logic of mutually assured destruction, because they believed that only the threat of total nuclear annihilation would be sufficient to deter an enemy attack, because defense contractors had a lot of political clout, or some combination of all three.
These efforts have long been justified by esoteric arguments about the need for and alleged benefits of “nuclear superiority.” For starters, many experts believe that superior nuclear war-fighting capabilities are necessary to make “extended deterrence” credible. To convince an adversary that the United States might use nuclear weapons to defend a nonnuclear ally, Washington supposedly needs to be able to inflict more damage on the adversary than it could inflict on the United States. If the United States had “escalation dominance,” so the argument ran, the other side would be deterred from using force by the knowledge that it would end up relatively worse off no matter how far up the escalation ladder it went.
This argument was never very convincing, however, as it assumed that United States would be willing to escalate and suffer enormous damage provided that it knew the other side would suffer even more, and that both our allies and our adversaries believed that too.
But as U.S. economist Thomas Schelling and others pointed out many decades ago, resolve in a crisis isn’t determined solely by the balance of forces or by which side will suffer most, especially when the outcome would be disastrous for both. The real issue is which side cares most about the issues at stake and is willing to run the greatest risks or bear the largest costs.
And because states typically care more about defending what they have than they care about taking something away from others, the logic of nuclear deterrence powerfully favors the side defending the status quo, even if its forces are somewhat less capable than those of its opponent.
More recently, some scholars have claimed that states with superior nuclear capabilities are more likely to prevail in crises, but these studies are marred by serious conceptual and methodological problems and should not be used as a basis for policy. After all, if nuclear superiority were such a powerful coercive weapon, then why can’t Russia get Ukraine to surrender the Donbas by brandishing its nuclear weapons, and why can’t the United States use the threat of nuclear use to impose its will on Iran?
One can see just how potent minimum/existential deterrence still is by reflecting on how hard the United States has worked to prevent some countries from getting even a handful of primitive nuclear weapons, even though Washington has thousands. Why? Because U.S. leaders know that confronting even a lightly armed nuclear weapons state is dangerous. Consider also that the United States was not deterred from attacking nonnuclear armed states such as Libya, Iraq, or Iran but hasn’t used force against North Korea, which has only a few dozen weapons and modest—though improving—delivery capabilities. The United States has overwhelming “nuclear superiority” vis-à-vis Pyongyang, but that doesn’t appear to give Washington much (any?) leverage over Kim Jong Un’s decisions or make U.S. presidents willing to start a war with him. Washington’s weapons deter him from threatening U.S. vital interests, but that’s about all.
The case for a U.S. buildup has also been bolstered by scholars arguing that technological improvements are threatening the survivability of many existing nuclear arsenals and bringing the United States (and perhaps some others in the future) within reach of that elusive first-strike capability. They maintain that improvements in missile accuracy, surveillance, retargeting capacity, ballistic missile defenses, and anti-submarine warfare would enable the United States to disarm even a well-armed adversary in a first strike, leaving them with only a handful of weapons that would then be stopped by U.S. missile defenses.
Taken together, the twin claims that “nuclear superiority” both confers enormous strategic benefits and is within reach seems to create a compelling case for a costly round of nuclear modernization, and for building up U.S. forces so that the country could fight and “win” a nuclear war against Russia and China simultaneously.
Unfortunately, the claim that the United States either has or is within reach of a reliable first-strike capability rests on dubious, even dangerous, assumptions. It assumes, for example, that a large-scale attack on another country’s nuclear arsenal—which in the case of Russia would require hitting hundreds of targets more or less simultaneously—could be pulled off the very first time that it was attempted in real life, without much rehearsal and without tipping off the enemy in advance. Anyone familiar with complex military operations knows how unlikely this possibility is: Even the most successful surprise attacks in history still involved a nontrivial number of screw-ups, missed targets, and other glitches.
Moreover, unless you think that the United States would launch a bolt-from-the-blue attack involving hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons in peacetime, without any warning at all, then we are talking about a crisis situation where both sides are already on high alert and likely to launch on warning if they detect signs of an attack. In a realistic nuclear scenario, as opposed to theoretical models or even war games, every human error or overly optimistic planning assumption means more nuclear warheads heading back at the U.S. homeland.
It further assumes that an adversary concerned about a possible first strike hasn’t successfully hidden some number of weapons and thought carefully about nonconventional means of delivering them. What would stop North Korea, Russia, China, or some others from retaliating by sending bombs into Boston Harbor on what appeared to be a fishing boat or pleasure craft? If smugglers can get tons of illegal narcotics into the United States every month, one suspects that foreign adversaries could devise similar ways to get a bomb onto U.S. soil if they believed that it was necessary or if they merely wanted revenge. Certainly, no sensible U.S. president should assume otherwise.
In short, some of the trillions of dollars that the United States is likely to spend over the next few years are unnecessary and amount to a full-employment policy for weapons labs and aerospace contractors. To say this is not to say that the United States should not modernize its nuclear arsenal as existing weapons age, or that it should not keep tabs on developments that might threaten the survivability of the U.S. deterrent. Obviously, Washington should do both.
The real issue is whether the United States should build up its offensive forces and missile defenses in ways explicitly intended to threaten the Russian and Chinese nuclear deterrents, which will inevitably lead them to build up their own forces in response. Can you say “arms race”?
Alternatively, is Washington willing to make the compromises needed to entice them into some form of negotiated restraint that would preserve the United States’ own deterrent at less cost and risk? If the United States isn’t willing to do so, then Americans, Russians, Chinese, and some others will all be poorer, resources will be diverted from more useful elements of national power, and the risk of a nuclear war will increase.
