Nonproliferation, Deterrence, and Nuclear Strategy

The bottom line is, unless we take action, the U.S. nuclear umbrella may shrink as state after state decides that to secure a reliable deterrent they must develop their own independent nuclear weapons programs.  Thus our global security alliances will shrink, and more proliferators will join the cascade.

But that’s not the end of the bad news.  One promising U.S. response to the threatened cascade is to extend our nuclear deterrence umbrella.  There may be many creative security guarantees and alliances we could negotiate to bring newly threatened nations under our umbrella, as an alternative to their going to the expense of developing their own nuclear deterrent, in the process becoming proliferators themselves.  But this approach will not be open to us if our credibility continues to decline and we start losing states which once depended on us.

America must take two actions:

• Recognize that nonproliferation  requires enforcement.  Act boldly, using deterrence (which saved the world for half a century) to deny North Korea and Iran a nuclear weapons capability.  This will end the cascade danger, spare the world countless future nuclear horrors, and resurrect a dying nonproliferation regime.

• Transform our nuclear strategy  to meet the threats of today’s and tomorrow’s world; design, test, and produce new nuclear weapons tailored to the new threats; recapture our military expertise through training and exercises; and bring credible nuclear deterrence back into the forefront of our foreign policy and national security strategy.

Deterring Cascades of Proliferation

It’s not too late for the U.S. to use a transformed version of deterrence to stop these two rogue states.  North Korea still hasn’t worked out the bugs or produced deliverable weapons; and Iran still has some distance to go in enrichment and weaponization.  However, since the end of the Cold War we’ve laid aside our best strategy (deterrence); and we’ve failed to design, test, and produce the relevant nuclear weapons which  would make today’s deterrent strategy as spectacularly successful as our Cold War deterrent strategy was.

The deterrence needed today is quite different from that of the Cold War.  The U.S. must transform its concept of deterrence to be effective against today’s adversaries and threats; and we must transform both our nuclear strategy and our weapons.  To date, however, the Department of Defense has failed (for several good reasons) to take the lead in this; and as a result the U.S. has been “sleepwalking” for sixteen years.

It isn’t hard to transform deterrence, but it requires clear thinking.  Deterrence is based upon fear.  You deter someone from taking an action against you by threatening them.  There are two steps to deterrence.  First, you make a declaratory statement, informing your adversary exactly what action he must take, or must not take.  Second, you embark upon a series of major reinforcing measures in preparation for carrying out your threat.  These measures must be so powerful that your threat achieves total credibility in the mind of your adversary.  These reinforcing measures are the key to deterrence!

In the Cold War we deterred the Soviet Union from launching nuclear weapons against us by threatening to destroy them in retaliation, using nuclear weapons.  To achieve the essential credibility, our reinforcing measures included creating and sustaining an immense strategic deterrent triad.  This deterrence worked flawlessly for half a century.

Today we should deter North Korea and Iran from producing nuclear weapons by threatening, in support of nonproliferation, to destroy their nuclear facilities preemptively, using military force, if they don’t completely abandon their programs.

Thus we transform deterrence by changing our thinking on four points:

Note that in today’s deterrence we do not threaten to use nuclear weapons, although our activities with nuclear weapons are major elements of our reinforcing measures.  Similarly, in the unlikely event that deterrence fails, our initial strikes should be conventional.