Finally got to read through the entirety of Keith Payne’s 2009 deterrence article. In the same way the Strategic Posture Commission (of which Payne was a commissioner) balked at providing a specific number of nuclear weapons needed to the Congress, Payne makes a strong case about the problems of starting with a number centric approach and reverse engineering a strategic posture from there. The article reiterates the importance of deterrence, damage limitation, assurance, and dissuasion, including a nifty venn diagram to represent the overlapping nature of various aspects of U.S. deterrence requirements. There’s also interesting argument made in one of the early sections of the article:
the credibility of the U.S. deterrent may rest not on how much damage can be threatened à la the Cold War’s “assured destruction” standard, but rather on how controlled is that threatened damage. Low-yield and accurate nuclear weapons may contribute to a U.S. deterrent threat that is more believable than otherwise would be the case. The U.S. “legacy” Cold War nuclear arsenal’s generally high yields and limited precision could threaten to inflict so many innocent casualties that some opponents eager to find a rationale for action may seize on the possibility that a U.S. president would not execute an expressed nuclear deterrent threat.
Deterrence is in the eye of the beholder so it is tough to determine the exact implication of being able to control damage may have on deterrence calculations. The larger problem, however, will stem from how an argument like this gets played out on the Hill and elsewhere. It will be spun as RNEP 2.0 that will unravel any gains made in the nonproliferation department by the Obama administration, even if that may not be the case. If it is possible to credibly make U.S. weapons that kill less civilians but actually enhance deterrence credibility it seems like a win win. If this was done while adhering to something like the Strategic Posture Commission’s requirements of staying within existing U.S. policy of no new tests, no new fissile material, and no new military capabilities it could have legs but proving that is the case (or perceived as such) may be fighting an uphill battle.
Micah Loudermilk: This may
Micah Loudermilk:
This may well be true, but in that case do the smaller bombs lead to a more credible deterrent?
Quoting the article:
That seems premised on the idea that there would be less of a stigma on those weapons. I tend to agree that nuclear retaliation is rather unlikely, but it has been an option official policy hasn’t taken off the table. In any case, this is very much an arguments at the margins, I just think that if there’s deterrent benefit they are likely accompanied by increasing odds of use as the same logic underlies both.
That said, an alternate case for lower yield bombs would be that they’d result in fewer deaths while still achieving their objectives. That’s a reason worth considering even if it wouldn’t deter the eager enemy rationalizer mentioned above.
To play devil's
To play devil’s advocate here - I’m not sure that that smaller yield weapons would, as Greg wrote, “bleed over into a willingness to use the weapons in other circumstances.” The general stigma on nuclear weapons use, especially for the U.S. having used them in 1945, is so strong, that even if weapon yield was reduced all the way to the 10-20 kiloton range (Hiroshima/Nagasaki) - incentive to use the weapons would not change as even weapons of such “low” caliber are still incredibly destructive. I’d feel pretty confident in a bet that the U.S. would not use one of the massive warheads in its arsenal no matter what, but, even if those warheads were small (and equally capable of wiping out cities/countries), I’d probably still place the same bet. Especially with the growing capabilities of conventional weapons and explosives, a nuclear retaliation to a non-nuclear attack, as insinuated by Greg, seems incredibly unlikely, even with the smallest of bombs.
Ah, I see Dante beat me to
Ah, I see Dante beat me to my comment.
This proposal raises the
This proposal raises the worry that a more credible deterrent based on a willingness to employ the weapons might bleed over into a willingness to use the weapons in other circumstances.
So long as we’re saber rattling by keeping all options on the table for a cyber attack I worry that easier to use weapons may well mean a reduction of the taboo. Counter-force vs. counter-value debates aside, I think any move towards easier to use weapons should be accompanied by policy moves to mitigate the temptation of using such weapons in all but the most extreme circumstances.
The "more usable/more credible"
The “more usable/more credible” linkage is what drives diversification and sophistication in capabilities, all in the name of giving the President flexibility in terms of his options. The problems are:
a) It’s hard to show that more capability results in more deterrence. Testing deterrence empirically is dubious because its product is the absence of war, so a lack of one thing (war) is taken as proof of another (deterrence). This not the most rigorous method for imputing cause-effect relationships.
b) More than one can play this game and we can expect that others will seek out some way to offset whatever advantage the new capability brings or otherwise undermine its credibility as a possible response to a problem. Taking a (not implausibly) pessimistic view, you could say that then we’ll need a new capability. And then there will be a response. And eventually we’ll have spent billions on new capabilities for the sake of some unquantifiable deterrence effect when the actual stakes involved in the conflict are possibly, if not probably, worth considerably less, in which case there’s a strong incentive to find another way to deal with the problem.
c) Implications for threshold use are interesting. Having a low-yield, low-fallout option sounds good, but we should be careful about blurring the lines between conventional and nuclear war. In this construct, more usable = more credible, but it seems to me that it must also meant that more usable = more likely to be used. If not, then there’s no value added for deterrence, is there? And if that’s the case, then we should think about what the consequences are for the nuclear “taboo” and whether or not we may eventually find ourselves in a debate regarding what constitutes “acceptable” or “appropriate” nuclear weapon use in war (e.g. how big is too big, when is it (or that size) appropriate or not). I’m not sure we want to go there. In any case, if the deterring effect is a function of the weapon’s specific capability and not the fact that the weapon is nuclear, then it begs the question as to why the capability needs to be nuclear at all.
Payne takes an expansive view of deterrence and sees it as an intricate and highly nuanced thing. In this case, the application points towards more capabilities, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing all the time, but there may also be unintended consequences in pursuing this vision of deterrence.