Tactical Nuclear Weapons and NATO.pdf - Program on Strategic ...

Mobility. Are modern forces sufficiently mobile
as to render territorial constraints no longer appropriate?
This is an increasingly compelling question
in the case of modern conventional maneuver forces
whose mobility is fundamental to contingency missions
for which distance <strong>and</strong> duration may be hard
to predict. For NSNWs that are air-delivered, mobility
is primarily a function of the demating/storage provisions
outlined above; once reconstituted, territorial
constraints/locations of these highly mobile assets
seem to have little practical consequence, though the
signaling effect of basing schemes oriented on specific
intent <strong>and</strong> concrete threat assessment may have political
significance. Ground- <strong>and</strong> sea-launched systems
similarly oriented on updated threats <strong>and</strong> deterrence
calculations would share such import, of course, but
also add practical utility to the retaliatory threat they
would represent.
Political Issues.
Defense needs: What’s the threat? As noted above, a
central challenge to the adaptation <strong>and</strong> further elaboration
of the CFE construct has been overcoming the
bloc-to-bloc context in which it originated. A fundamental
retooling was achieved in the adapted CFE
Treaty, formulated in strict terms of individual national
<strong>and</strong> territorial constraints <strong>and</strong> flexibilities. Still,
concerns about “imbalances,” usually between Russia
<strong>and</strong> <strong>NATO</strong>, continue to be heard—most often, but by
no means exclusively, from Russian representatives.
With no similar adaptive mechanism in play, discussions
of NSNWs almost always take this cast, as
if the only measure of merit is the numerical balance
between <strong>NATO</strong> <strong>and</strong> Russia (with apologies to those
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