U.S. Reviews Its Strategic Nuclear Deterrence Plans

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, defense experts are re-examining the traditional doctrine of strategic deterrence and voicing new doubt about the need to maintain thousands of nuclear weapons to protect U.S. interests in the post-Cold War world.

While the White House has yet to undertake a government-wide assessment of the change, some Pentagon advisers already have concluded that the U.S. nuclear arsenal should be reduced far below the levels called for in pending U.S.-Soviet arms treaties.

A classified report prepared for the chief of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, for example, calls for reducing the roughly 11,000 long-range weapons each side now possesses to a new level of “5,000 plus or minus 20%.” This is significantly below the reductions decreed in last July’s Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which would reduce arsenals on both sides to about 8,500 weapons.

The 25-person study group, chaired by former Air Force Secretary Tom Reed, also proposes more flexibility in U.S. nuclear war plans, including creation of a “Nuclear Expeditionary Force” for possible use against China and Third World nations. And it recommends formation of a non-nuclear attack force, much like that employed against Iraq in the opening days of the Persian Gulf War, for use around the world as needed.

Even deeper nuclear cuts are urged by a prestigious National Academy of Sciences commission, which believes that the security impact of the Soviet demise is “almost irreversible.” It would withdraw the U.S. nuclear umbrella from Europe and reduce strategic weapons initially to 3,000 to 4,000, and eventually to 1,000 to 2,000.

But critics complain that both of these high-profile efforts failed to address in depth the larger questions of whether the very concept of strategic nuclear stability and deterrence have much real meaning any more. They note that both take the traditional thinking of the past 40 years as starting points.

But since the bipolar world that shaped and spawned nuclear deterrence is essentially dissolved, “it is no longer possible to project the future as an extension of the past,” writes Carl H. Builder of RAND Corp., the Santa Monica think tank.

Congress, for its part, continues to call for “maintaining strategic stability” with the former Soviet Union, as it did in last month’s missile defense act. But few officials in Washington seem certain what “strategic stability” actually means, now that the Red Army has gone home from Europe and the world has only one superpower.

U.S. doctrine for four decades has held that nuclear arsenals should be roughly equal in the belief that nuclear balance would deter a hostile, expansionist Soviet Union, without giving Moscow reason to fear U.S. attack.

But now, who does the United States seek to deter? With how many and what kind of weapons? And targeted against what? Should they be aimed at the war-fighting nuclear missiles in nominally democratic Russia and other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States, or pointed at major cities in a purely retaliatory strategy of deterrence?

Robert S. McNamara, who as defense secretary in the Kennedy Administration oversaw tremendous growth in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, asserts that “nuclear weapons serve no military purpose whatsoever” in the emerging world order.

“They are totally useless, except to deter one’s opponent from using them,” he argues, adding that 1,000 weapons, or even fewer, are required to achieve such political deterrence.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has ordered a very small group of senior Pentagon officials to re-examine nuclear war plans. But other high-ranking Pentagon officials, as well as outside specialists, believe that these matters transcend Pentagon concerns and expertise.

Experts both in and out of government are surprised that Bush has not yet ordered a sweeping policy review to address the issues raised by the Soviet Union’s collapse and to outline a framework to replace the Cold War doctrine of “containment.”

It is unfair to accuse the Administration of doing nothing, counters one senior Administration official. “We haven’t been standing still,” he contends.

The most important example of the Administration’s “new thinking” was a Sept. 27 initiative mandating the withdrawal and dismantling of most short-range, tactical nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal and ordering all nuclear-armed bombers to stand down from alert status. Bush acted unilaterally, but the Soviets reciprocated.

Another example is the emphasis by Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III on Moscow’s nuclear command and control, aimed at preventing dispersal of nuclear weapons across republics of the former Soviet Union. Yet another is the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization adjunct organization, the North Atlantic Cooperative Council, to bring former members of the Warsaw Pact into closer military ties to Western Europe.

In addition, since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Defense Department has reduced the number of nuclear targets by more than one-third and anticipated a compensating reduction, as a result of the START-ordered cuts, in the number of U.S. strategic weapons.

About 10% of the targets disappeared with the withdrawal of the Red Army from Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. The remaining reductions were achieved by more realistically reinterpreting presidential guidance and recognizing the widespread effects of nuclear explosions, such as fallout, beyond the immediate destruction caused by their blasts.

These cuts have largely confirmed the longstanding suspicions of critics who held that the Pentagon’s super-secret nuclear war plans were based not on the number of legitimate targets but rather on the number of weapons available to U.S. forces.

The recent moves, according to the senior official, demonstrate the Administration’s forward-leaning posture toward the Soviet collapse. “If you were to look back into the late 1940s to see how the ‘containment’ policy took form, you’d find it was built rather slowly, over two or three years. Our time scale now is weeks and months, not years,” he says.

And these moves, he adds, set the stage for the “new agenda” in relations between the United States and the residual Soviet nuclear powers. The next step might be accelerating the START-ordered weapons cuts, now programmed to take seven years, and negotiating further cuts by eliminating multi-warhead missiles on both sides.

But these actions do not obviate the need, critics say, for an even broader and deeper study of how the deterrence theories of the past need to be adjusted to reflect current realities. Such a study would be likely to arrive at one of three general conclusions:

* Relatively negligible adjustment is necessary because deterrence still works, both politically and militarily. This assumption, which anticipates that Russia will inherit the superpower status and most of the Soviet nuclear weapons, is the basic conclusion of the Reed group.

Among its findings: Strategic nuclear weapons still play a “significant” role in deterring attack, or the threat of attack, by the Soviet Union and China (the study was completed before the union’s break-up). U.S. “extended deterrence” remains necessary to protect Europe. Planning of “limited” and “major” nuclear attacks on Soviet targets is still needed as an insurance policy. Besides reflecting the scope of the Russian arsenal, the number of U.S. weapons should never be less than the combined strengths of the other nuclear powers--China, France and Britain, which together have 1,500 to 2,000 weapons.

* Deterrence theory remains intact politically, but the significantly reduced threat posed by the former Soviet states requires modifications. “Extended deterrence” for NATO is no longer necessary. The United States should declare a “no-first-use” policy to replace current doctrine, which threatens to meet an overwhelming conventional invasion of Europe with nuclear weapons. Nuclear arsenals can be cut significantly, particularly if China, France and Britain can be induced to make reductions. This is the basic conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences study.

While acknowledging “major uncertainties” in the wake of the Soviet break-up, the study contends that the end of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation and the unification of Germany “have transformed the security landscape almost irreversibly.” Even a centrally controlled authoritarian regime in Moscow “would likely be too preoccupied with internal problems to engage in external aggression,” the study says.

In the future, U.S. security will largely rest on “cooperative measures with other countries,” while “nuclear weapons should serve no purpose beyond the deterrence of, and possible response to, nuclear attack by others.”

* Radical revision of the deterrence theory is required, because the concept of nuclear deterrence has lost its meaning for the big powers and turned old nuclear equations on their heads. Some analysts, for example, see the wealthy “have” nations of the world as more vulnerable to nuclear deterrence than the “have-nots,” because nuclear weapons can deter only nations that have something to lose--such as large, vulnerable cities.

Consequently, nuclear weapons “may become the bane rather than the power symbols” of the big nations, says RAND’s Builder, as underdeveloped and undeterrable nations such as Iraq and Libya come to possess their own nuclear weapons.