To What End Does America Have A Nuclear Policy?: Sixth Post in the Nuclear Policy Series

The unanticipated consequence of the Superpower arms race was the end of interstate war between great powers who increasingly relied upon client states and by the 1970’s and 1980’s, non-state actors as proxies for armed conflict.  To a great extent, the unthinkability of a superpower nuclear exchange has accelerated the devolution toward anarchy in warfare by making the option of “total war” an increasingly remote one for statesmen and enhancing the incentives to acquire “plausible deniability” by using irregulars as cut-outs – irregulars who increasingly no longer require states as patrons for acts of terrorism or to wage insurgencies. As Martin van Creveld has written:

“Owing largely to nuclear proliferation, the armed conflicts of the second half of the twentieth century were, without a single exception, fought either between third and fourth rate states or by a first rate state against a third or fourth rate state”. [2]

In a large measure, the absence of great power warfare, nuclear proliferation and the granular devolution of warfare represent the strategic legacy that the Cold War has bequeathed to the 21st century and constitute major problems in crafting a new American nuclear policy. What to do then ?

• As WWII resulted in approximately 60 million deaths, American national interests are served by a continued general suppression of great power warfare provided for my American and Russian nuclear preeminence (and the astronomical costs of attempting to field a high-tech military that can play on the same battlefield as the United States). That being said, there remains considerable room for nuclear arms reductions by both Russia and the United States without endangering the comparative advantage that inhibits third parties from engaging in a new arms race; these further reductions in nuclear arsenals should come only jointly, and in return for a dramatic  strengthening the Non-Proliferation regime to which non-nuclear states adhere. “Linkage” to other, unrelated but “incentivizing” issues should be considered to draw in the most likely would-be new nuclear powers.
• A diplomatic “Come in from the Cold” option for *all* rogue states enmeshed with terrorism and WMD proliferation threats to follow the path of Libya, receiving diplomatic and economic normalization and security from “regime change” in return for transparently divesting themselves of threatening or injurious activities.
• An international “quick reaction” agreement in place in case of a nuclear club member undergoing state failure and anarchy that imposes nuclear security obligations on all nuclear weapons powers and an intervention process until a new government can exercise responsibility obver the nuclear arsenal. Pakistan is the poster-boy candidate here but we should not oversetimate how quickly seeemingly secure states can disintegrate. We were all very lucky in 1991.
• Clarification of American nuclear targeting doctrine regarding hostile states attempting to acquire nuclear arms or engage in “first-use” against American allies or sponsor non-state actors who use WMDs in terrorist attacks. We should be both credible and clear.
• Conventional alternatives to nuclear weapons ( “bunker busters”, EMP bombs etc.) should be pursued.
• Recognition that while no “near peer” nuclear threat toward the United States exists today, this cannot be an assumption for all time. How many of us, in 1985, imagined the USSR would no longer exist six years later ?

Making nuclear policy for the United States is hard but it is immeasurably easier in 2007 than it was in 1957. The world has changed for the better, not for the worse. Let’s keep it that way.

1. Brodie, Bernard  Strategy in the Missile Age. 1959  RAND Corporation 

2.  Creveld, Martin van  The Changing Face of War: The Lessons of Combat from the Marne to Iraq. 2006. Ballantine Books

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