Chasing rabbits: The (ill)logic of American nuclear strategy

Nuclear superiority is what states make of it

Kroenig suggests that there is a discrepancy between what some of the same minds that invented nuclear weapons deduced as the rational way of handling them in international affairs and the way US policymakers have actualized American nuclear strategy. He sides with the policymakers, suggesting that they are the ones who have it right due to their superior capacities in relation to academic scholarship. In this regard, he follows a distinguished lineage – Hans Morgenthau (1972: 36) observed that: ‘however deeply theoretical thought may penetrate the mysteries of the empirical world, it cannot do what even the most defective action achieves: change the world’.

As nuclear history has shown us though, nuclear decision makers have often laboured under false assumptions: for a mere few examples, while flexible response was the official doctrine in the United States, the reality was launching all of the US arsenal or none of it (Gavin, 2012); there were already nuclear warheads in Cuba during the missile crisis – unbeknownst to the US leadership (Morris, 2003); and American nukes have not been safe and secure, even while the best and brightest have been commanding and controlling them (Schlosser, 2013). As these examples are from a nuclear democracy, one could raise the question whether totalitarian or autocratic leaders are less fallible. The answer is a resounding no here too. For example, in the early 1980s, Soviet strategists thought that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) would use the cover of a military exercise to launch a surprise nuclear attack, which resulted in a dangerous misreading of the Able Archer exercise of 1983 (Barrass, 2016: 17). The Soviets also did not heed Dr Strangelove’s lesson by developing a semi-automated retaliation system against a US decapitation strike while keeping it secret during the 1980s (Adamsky, 2013: 15).

This is of course not to suggest that policymakers are necessarily irrational. They may merely be rationalizing other things than what deterrence or game theorists are modelling. Indeed, it is irrational by definition to have 1500 nuclear weapons for deterrence if 150 would be enough, just as it is irrational to spend 5% of the US defence budget on nuclear deterrence if 0.5% would achieve the same thing (obviously the relationship between numbers of warheads and their cost is not as direct as this, as Kroenig also points out, but it does make the point clear: spending or having more than you need to get the job done is irrational by definition). As we cannot assume that US policymakers are irrational, or that nuclear superiority has mere nonsense in it, there has to be some rationalization that elucidates the overspending and existential jeopardy for millions, hundreds of millions, entire states, or even civilizations that such numbers of warheads represent according to, for example, various anti-nuclear movements (Vuori, 2010; 2016b; 2018). Indeed, this is Kroenig’s question that drove him to write his book.

Strange’s question of cui bono is useful here. Kroenig (2018: 131) himself points to ‘Republicans, the US Department of Defense, the national laboratories in the Department of Energy, the defense industry, and right-leaning think-tank experts’ as the usual suspects in supporting policies of nuclear supremacy in the United States. At the same time, he argues that bureaucratic rivalries that have sometimes been pointed at as a reason for military build-up and excessive maintenance of capacities do not hold, at least fully, as some branches of the military have supported the decommissioning of some weapon categories. Yet this observation does not empty out the operation of the ‘military industrial complex’ that President Eisenhower (1961) soberly warned about in his farewell address. It is indeed quite probable that the usual suspects identified by Kroenig as the proponents of nuclear supremacist policies stand to gain the most from the maintenance, modernization and build-up of nuclear arms, and lose the most from decommissioning them.

This, however, does not mean that there has to be some conspiracy or cabal among these segments of the Washington beltway. Indeed, it is perhaps more of a field effect (Bigo, 2008) that the various competitions and accumulations of social capital that these people are engaged in bring about. Kroenig’s book itself is perhaps telling here. During the Cold War, the nuclear build-up was largely legitimated with the threat of the Soviet Union, and critics of deterrence theory pointed out that the theory only survives through the assumption of the direst of existential enmities. Once the Soviet Union was no more, the great antagonism also dissipated and it was more difficult to justify the hair-trigger systems of nuclear apocalypse. Russia was not the Soviet Union in ideological terms, and it was not the Soviet Union in power terms either. The justification of a large nuclear arsenal therefore needed and needs a new way of thought, and Kroenig’s theorization is what fits that bill.

Indeed, nuclear superiority is what states make of it: the weapons industry has made money in US self-impressions that this superiority has put it on ‘the top of the pack’ (Kroenig, 2018: 199, citing Donald Trump), and it has made the world more dangerous for humanity (Vuori, 2010; 2016b; 2018), and accidents more likely (Schlosser, 2013). Indeed, in regard to the last point, the renewed testing in Russia has already cost lives. As such, nuclear weapons are often presented as weapons of deterrence, and states claim to make them for this purpose (Kroenig, 2018; Vuori, 2016a). Still, they are also used to compensate for lacks in other departments: by NATO for its conventional inferiority during the Cold War, by Russia for its conventional and economic inferiority after the Cold War, by Tony Blair for the United Kingdom’s otherwise increasingly downgraded status as a nation (Government of the UK, 2015), by Mao for China not being counted (Liu, 1999), and by Trump for perhaps the size of red buttons (Ramzy, 2018). Kissinger famously pondered, ‘What in the name of God is strategic superiority?…What do you do with it?’ (Kroenig, 2018: 194). Another crucial question would be, what does ‘superiority talk’ (Kroenig, 2018) do politically (like with what does deterrence talk, or deterrentification, do; Vuori, 2016a)? While Kissinger has voiced varying views here, it seems that his final conclusion is that the reliance on nuclear weapons for security is ‘becoming increasingly hazardous and decreasingly effective’ and that ‘with every passing year they make our security more precarious’ (Schultz et al., 2007; 2008).

Superiority can be maintained while going down or growing shorter

When you are in the rabbit hole, you lose all sense of size. You may think that procuring this type of missile will make you great while decommissioning that class of weapon will make you small. But what size does the United States want its nuclear forces to be; is it content now?

Kroenig’s theory also appears to lose proportions: he argues that policymakers are concerned about the reduction of casualties in a nuclear war but not with the tens or hundreds of millions that have died to save a few million in the initial blasts. Saving lives at the cost of more lives than are saved is a poor bargain – and irrational in the light of deterrence at lower levels saving many more lives. Indeed, reality appears to show us that a much smaller arsenal size is sufficient to deter the United States, as it did not annihilate China even in the early 2000s as its nuclear modernization programme was coming to fruition. Or perhaps there is a taboo against first use after all (Tannenwald, 2007), as even Kroenig (2018: 135, 195) finds it nearly impossible to imagine the United States conducting a nuclear attack against most nuclear states.

But perhaps it is the fear of reprisal that has kept the United States from wiping out China’s ability to put the United States at risk. This may be as it appears that the real tolerance for casualties through warfare is quite low. While the United States has the stomach to endure nearly 40,000 small arms casualties yearly in the form of gun related suicides, murders and mass shootings (Gramlich, 2019), 58,000 casualties in the Vietnam War were too much for it to bear. At the same time, its recovery from hurricanes and other natural calamities has also taken a very long time in the 2000s, even though the emergency response agencies were operating at full capacity without the crippling effects of nuclear destruction like electromagnetic pulse (EMPs), fallout, mass and individual psychological trauma, infrastructural collapse and social disorder. Taken together, Kroenig’s vision of a quick recovery from even devastating nuclear attacks is highly optimistic and more reminiscent of the ‘positive propaganda’ of the Civil Defense Administration (Oakes, 1994) than the more sober assessments done in confidence, where, for example, the United Kingdom estimated that merely five nuclear blasts would mean that its society would never recover (Davis, 2007: 118). Deterrence therefore may be achieved at a much lower threshold than Kroenig assumes.

The most telling aspect of Kroenig’s presentation is that he has no explicit explanation for why the United States has reduced its nuclear arsenal from the high levels of the Cold War. If supremacy is good and cheap, why give any of it up, especially as decommissioning has financial costs too? While not flagged as such by him, we may assume that the answer can be found in this sentence: ‘America’s nuclear posture…should continue to be a direct function of enemy nuclear arsenal size’ (Kroenig, 2018: 202). The cherry flavoured omission here is in that he does not play out scenarios where both Russian and US forces would be greatly reduced, and only presents the idea that the United States would do deep cuts unilaterally. This goes against the United States’ past behaviour, and also what the nuclear states have stated about going down in nuclear numbers: ‘We continue to believe that an incremental, step-by-step approach is the only practical option for making progress towards nuclear disarmament, while upholding global strategic security and stability’ (P5, 2015). Kroenig’s policy advice is similarly skewed in that he does not even hypothesize about the possibility of reducing nuclear numbers with Russia, or even with a greater number of nuclear powers still. Yet, we can use Kroenig’s own logic and his theory to produce radical disarmament suggestions that still abide by his theory, and are in accordance with the nuclear powers’ statement.

While it would go against the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), we could categorize real nuclear powers into three categories: non-NPT nuclear powers, small nuclear powers and MAD nuclear powers. Theoretically, we could give each category a number that represents its nuclear capacity: 1, 2 and 16, respectively. With this, Russia could double tap European nuclear powers with a rank of 8, and by going to 16, the United States could double tap Russia’s double tapping capacity while Russia would come to parity with the United States. The United States could be granted a rank of 17 so that it could still feel superior and Russia would remain in more or less a position of parity (we may as well stop at these numbers, as if the United States wants to keep double tapping Russia, the numbers will rise ad infinitum given that Russia would want to maintain parity, which is irrational if the purpose is to produce deterrence, and shows the folly of only viewing the security of one state without taking the relationality of security into account; Buzan, 1991).

It is possible to go down incrementally in nuclear numbers while retaining the current proportions in them. Indeed, this is what the NPT nuclear states have committed themselves to do. To follow this line would eventually lead to the lowest possible figuration of nuclear forces with the current proportions: India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan would have one nuclear weapon each, and the United Kingdom, France and China would be at five, while Russia would have 35 and the United States 36. Such numbers would still keep the biggest cities and the arsenals of the nuclear states at risk, but much of the world would indeed remain intact should deterrence fail. The NPT requires that nuclear states reduce their arsenals already, but it is also good to note that non-nuclear states have put the nuclear powers on notice through the nuclear ban treaty for failing to do so (Vuori, 2016b; 2018). The United States should heed its NPT commitments and view the voice of non-nuclear states on this issue seriously, particularly as Kroenig (2018: 203) suggests that law and morality play some part in US nuclear weapon policy.

To conclude

Arnold Wolfers (1952: 500) noted that national security is rarely taken as ‘an absolute good to which all other values must be subordinated’, as this means to be subscribed ‘to a nationalistic ethics’ of such an ‘extreme type’ that it goes ‘beyond security – the mere preservation of values – and insist[s] that the nation is justified in conquering whatever it can use as Lebensraum or otherwise’. The capacity to kill hundreds of millions of people would not allow for conquest, yet is even worse than that. For Eisenhower too, ‘the theory of defense against aggressive threat’ needed to be ‘far more constructive than mere survival’ or ‘self-preservation’ (1970: 488); indeed, it included ‘moral leadership’, and ‘the defense of a way of life’ (Ferrell, 1981: 210; see also Dulles, 1950: 16).

Yet, when your arsenal and destructive capacity to end states and civilizations grow very large, you may lose the sense of whom you are. As such, the use of nuclear weapons to only kill perhaps as few as 8 million people, hardly counts as moral leadership, or a tenable way of life. It seems though that Kroenig and proponents of the nuclear superiority policy would like the US nuclear capacities to be a little larger than they currently are. Others might suggest that the current or even a lower level is a good size indeed. The proponents, though, might retort that we are not used to it, and wish that the others would not get so easily upset about it.