global_zero_commission_on_nuclear_risk_reduction_report

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GLOBAL ZERO COMMISSION ON NUCLEAR RISK REDUCTION REPORTDE-ALERTING AND STABILIZING THE WORLD’S NUCLEAR FORCE POSTURESfor this unfortunate truth. It multiplies the odds of a crisis,incident, or conflict that escalates to a nuclear confrontationwith the United States. Nor can U.S. leaders ignore anumber of other contingencies that may fall within the ambitof nuclear planning, ranging from chemical, biological,and cyber warfare threats to conventional technologies anddelivery capabilities, particularly short and medium-rangeballistic missiles, all of which enable more states to inflictmore harm in many new ways and places. Concern extendseven to non-state actors who may acquire the wherewithalto inflict great harm on a grand scale in a short periodof time. Nuclear terrorism is the obvious example. In thecase of biological agents, too, a single individual potentiallycould cause harm of historic proportions.Although U.S. nuclear weapons generally lack efficacy indealing with such contingencies, their rapid speed of deliverysets them apart. In many situations the United Stateslacks a timely conventional alternative. A hypothetical casein point is a situation in which a terrorist cache of biologicalweapons located at a distant and remote geographic redoubtis being loaded onto vehicles and cannot be struck in a timelyfashion by conventional weapons. With time running outbefore the deadly cargo is spirited off to be smuggled intoa densely populated target city, a leader may feel pressureto reach for nuclear weapons as a last resort if that is theonly choice available to quickly destroy the redoubt. Whileordering up a nuclear weapon to be delivered to the targetin 30 minutes by a strategic missile is an obviously difficult –indeed, virtually impossible – choice for any leader to make,this genre of threat scenario is what persuaded PresidentObama to retain a nuclear option to deal with biologicalthreats, and not to declare that the sole purpose of nuclearweapons is to deter their use by others.Another example of the questionable utility of conventionalweapons in dealing with certain contingencies was the situationof Syria’s chemical weapons prior to their recent eliminationby an international task force led by Russian and theUnited States. Diplomacy settled the issue in this case. Buthad it not succeeded, conventional operations alone wouldnot likely have managed to disarm Syria’s chemical arsenal.The weapons could have been loaded onto Syrian aircraftand taken airborne or handed out to artillery units withina few short hours after giving the order. If the United Statesdetected this distribution in near-real time and had fullyprepared in advance to intervene – perhaps using pre-positionedfighter aircraft, quick reaction and special operationsforces and armed unmanned vehicles – a disruptive strikemight possibly have been executed in time. A decisive quickconventional intervention was not available, however. (Anintervention force of approximately 75,000 troops on theground could have been required to take physical custodyor destroy comprehensively the Syrian chemical weaponsstockpile.) This is why Syria had not been scrubbed fromU.S. nuclear war plans.Even if the United States could anticipate where military interventionwill be needed, which it almost never does (sincethe Vietnam War the U.S. security establishment has a perfectrecord of not once predicting the nature and location ofthe next military engagement), 11 the United States could notafford to deploy well-honed conventional tools to confrontevery adversary challenge. Such a <strong>global</strong> contest would beprohibitively costly. And cost aside, the U.S. military has itslimitations; its adversaries are deploying weapons which areincreasingly out of range, deeply buried or otherwise hardenedagainst attack, and deployed in prolific numbers. Thetask is becoming harder in part because of domestic pressuresin countries like Saudi Arabia to minimize the Americanmilitary presence (“occupation” in the eyes of localcitizenry) on the grounds that it infringes on their sovereignty.(This is less problematic for the forward-deploymentof defensive systems such as U.S. missile defenses because,irrespective of their effectiveness, they are seen as “shields”to the local population.) Nuclear weapons continue to fillsome of these gaps.These U.S.-centric illustrations generalize to the entire populationof nuclear weapons countries, which have even widergaps to fill. Their non-nuclear capabilities are not nearlyas robust and therefore nuclear weapons, despite their generallydeclining military utility, remain relevant to their mil-11 No one had any idea a year in advance of the U.S. missions to Grenada,Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, thatU.S. military forces would be dispatched to these destinations.18
GLOBAL ZERO COMMISSION ON NUCLEAR RISK REDUCTION REPORTDE-ALERTING AND STABILIZING THE WORLD’S NUCLEAR FORCE POSTURESitary strategies and to the defense of their sovereigntyb. DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES, ZERO-SUMGAMES, AND NUCLEAR ESCALATIONThat military competition between potential adversaries is“<strong>zero</strong>-sum” also creates escalatory updrafts in a crisis. Theclassic security dilemma applies in which action-reactionarms competition begets security for one side at the expenseof security on the other. If Side A acquires an effective newnon-nuclear tool and gains the upper hand over Side B, thenSide B’s non-nuclear options shrink and its nuclear optionsrise to the surface by default. With the players pitted in a <strong>zero</strong>-sumgame in a <strong>global</strong> competition over “disruptive” technologies,the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons ebbsand flows – often unpredictably. When the Soviet Union’sconventional military forces became hollowed out and itsWarsaw Pact allies aligned with the West as the Cold Warwound down, the United States and NATO ascended overnightto a position of conventional superiority, and so Russiaabandoned its no-first-use doctrine in 1993 and turnedto its nuclear arsenal to offset this superiority. But Russiafound scant utility in them, and was spurred to innovatenew non-nuclear tools such as so-called “hybrid” warfarethat features special operations, information warfare, andenergy manipulation, among other tactics designed forlow-level asymmetric operations.As an illustration of how double-edged disruptive technologiesmay spawn volatility in crisis interactions, consider thecase of U.S. ballistic missile defenses. From a U.S. perspective,such defenses would have a positive, stabilizing edge ifthey eventually perform well enough to offer a credible strategicalternative to offensive nuclear firepower. In a regionalconflict, the goal of missile defenses is to convince a potentialadversary that it cannot count on succeeding with an initialstrike, and to prevent success if the persuasion fails. Suchdefenses would also buy decision time for leaders, and buytime to generate (or “re-alert”) nuclear capabilities if needed.If missile defenses could provide a temporary buffer, U.S.decision-makers could consider their nuclear options at amore leisurely pace in a crisis than is currently the situation.U.S. allies would be actively defended, and then protected byother generating U.S. forces. Nuclear risk would be reduced.But Russian or Chinese decision-makers would find themselveson the other side of the fence. From their perspective,effective U.S. missile defenses would force their hand earlierthan before. In the worst case, such defenses could possiblythreaten to neutralize the ragged retaliation of Russianor Chinese strategic forces that survive a U.S. strategic firststrike. In this scenario pressure would mount on them toinitiate a strike against the United States while Russian orChinese strategic forces (and command systems) were stillintact. Such a preemptive strike might entail either conventionalstrikes against U.S. missile defense sites in order todegrade them, or nuclear strikes meant to beat the UnitedStates to the punch and gain a wartime advantage. In eithercase, U.S. missile defenses introduce instabilities. Nuclearrisk would increase.Disruptive technologies may thus prove to be counterproductiveeven to the innovator if they fan the flames of escalationand compel the opposing side to race cross the nuclearthreshold. In introducing such tools as missile defenses andprecision-guided munitions, leaders may gain for themselvesadditional time for diplomacy, conflict resolution, andwar termination before having to face the difficult choice ofresorting to nuclear weapons – thus raising their own nuclearthreshold. But the opposing decision-makers may losetime as a consequence and may be pressed for an earlier decisionon nuclear use than previously required. The overalleffect of these countervailing forces on stability is not intuitivelyobvious. It may or may not be destabilizing. Nuclearrisk may shrink, or grow. To the extent that the impact of anew disruptive technology is unpredictable, caution wouldrecommend putting it on the negative side of the risk ledger.One of the most revolutionary of these double-edged technologieshas been the advances in information processing:<strong>global</strong> intelligence collection, fusion and computer filtering.This was first demonstrated in the data feed into precision-guidedmunitions strikes. It is now finding such applicationsas the tracking of opposing mobile nuclear forces onland. Again, such tools support conventional alternatives tonuclear weapons and thus work to raise the nuclear thresholdon one side, and at the same time they may create real19
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