The Logic of American Nuclear Strategy

I think we're gonna have a fun conversation about an important new book Matt cranek is an associate professor in the department of government in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University he's also a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council he spent some time at the CIA and the Secretary of Defense he's also served as a foreign policy adviser on Mitt Romney's presidential campaign as well as Marco Rubio's presidential campaign so is the author or editor of six books including the one that we're here to discuss this morning which is the logic of American nuclear strategy why strategic superiority matters that's just recently out this past couple weeks from Oxford University Press just for logistical reasons you know we don't expect any issues but for any reason we have to depart the building just look to me will direct you to the back there's stairs back here but then also of course the stairs that you came in we have to do that for safety reasons so just if anything happens and it won't look just look to me so we want to do this really just as a conversation and so this is uh this is a new book about about nuclear weapons this is obviously very salient right now having said that I think let me just throw a a big question to you which is why do we need one more book about nuclear weapons I mean there's this nuclear strategy and nuclear theory has been around for a long time how do you see this fitting into the larger literature and and what what kind of purpose or is this book trying to serve well first Tom thank you very much for hosting this event thanks to CSIS and and thanks to all of you for coming out this morning you know it's a good question there are there's been a lot of writing about nuclear weapons over the past 70 years a lot of theories of nuclear weapons the problem is our existing theories aren't very good so you know we know this kind of second strike theory mutually assured destruction anybody who's taken a course in international relations kind of knows this theory says the United States needs the ability to absorb a nuclear attack from an enemy retain enough surviving warheads to retaliate with the devastating second strike and once we can do that nuclear did we'll hold the problem is we look out into the real world and the United States has never been content with just a secure second strike capability we have thousands of nuclear warheads missile defenses counter force targeting and capabilities and so I think that raises an important puzzle which is why does the United States do what it does and so scholars have have recognized this gap between theory and the real world and they've said well you know we're going to dismiss the facts essentially and stick with our theories and in fact robert service at columbia leading ir theorists wrote an entire book called the illogic of american nuclear strategy which said my theory is right the real real world is wrong and so I take a different approach and try to explain why the United States has always had this interest in a more robust nuclear posture and so what is what is the theory here and I think you talked about nuclear superiority but what do you mean by that and so what is the what is the theoretical contribution that you felt hadn't been done before it is I guess important to explain what the United States has been doing so their encounter force all these other things but also prospectively how we ought to think about it in the future yeah so these traditional theories of nuclear deterrence kind of mutually assured destruction and you know assume that you know we target the other side's cities threatened to kill a lot of people they've threatened to kill a lot of people here and then neither side wants to fight a nuclear war and deterrence holds but the United States hasn't done countervalue targeting in decades it does counter force targeting we plan to use our nuclear weapons to destroy the enemy's nuclear weapons before they can be used and and the purpose of that is is damage limitation to try to limit damage there's also a moral and legal reason you know we don't intentionally target innocent civilians other countries do it differently but but we don't do it but there's a strategic reason as well which we do that to limit damage to ourselves and to our allies and and that contributes to deterrence I think it strengthens American resolve strengthens the resolve of our allies and and ultimately contributes to deterrence and so kind of the bumper sticker of the argument is scholars going all the way back to Thomas Schelling who's kind of leading nuclear deterrence theorists in the 60s said that nuclear deterrence is kind of like a game of chicken and so the argument of my book essentially is that if you're one sides driving a Hummer and the other side's driving a Prius the Prius on average is going to swerve first and you know the United States is another thing that's unique about the United States is we don't just try to deter attacks against ourselves we try to deter attacks against the entire free world we have these extended nuclear deterrent commitments to 30 other countries the 27 members NATO Japan South Korea Australia and so essentially you at US nuclear strategy is promising to play these games of nuclear chicken or potentially promising to play these games of nuclear chicken every day on behalf of Estonia against Russia on behalf of Japan against China on behalf of South Korea against North Korea and again if you're playing these potentially playing games of nuclear chicken every day you you prefer to drive a Hummer and not a Prius and of course the question is whether someone doesn't swerve both the Hummer and the Prius are going to end up totaled and so you know the logic of having enough of a threat to the other guy is in the interest of having you know no no racing at each other in the first place so maybe only contextualizes us a little bit by saying is what you're putting out there how does it differ from I guess past attempts to think about and getting at strategic stability which is to say or just simply put getting it not not having that's that swerve situation in the first place how would you differ from all that yeah well you know so I think what our theorists have argued and strategists argued before is that leaders in the nuclear era faced a dilemma you know on one hand they don't want to intentionally fight a nuclear war with a nuclear-armed adversary because the cost would be catastrophic on the other hand international politics doesn't end they still have serious conflicts of interest with other nuclear-armed States I mean we see that now with the conflict crises between the United States and North Korea the United States and Russia and so they don't just want to give in to their adversary because they have nuclear weapons because they're afraid of nuclear attack and so the space and in the middle is what scholars have called a nuclear brinkmanship you know leaders do things to raise the risk of nuclear war to try to force adversaries to back down and so we've seen this in a dozens of times in the nuclear era and I have a number of case studies in the book but Cuban Missile Crisis sino-soviet border war Kargil crisis again current crises today and so one of the questions people have wrestled with is what determines the outcome in these games of chicken and so previous strategist' have said well it's all about resolve it's all about how much do you care about the issue now so they've looked at a situation like the Cuban Missile Crisis and said well we just cared more it was a few miles off the off the coast of Florida for the Soviet Union it was a distant interest so we cared more we were willing to run the greater risk of nuclear war they backed down in the end and and so I agree with almost all of that but what I add is is that nuclear balance of power matters too and in the Cuban Missile Crisis go through and there's just a lot of evidence that leaders on both side were paying attention to the nuclear balance of power you know Secretary of State Dean Rusk said to President Kennedy in the meeting in the XCOM quote we have a substantial nuclear superiority one thing mr. Khrushchev may know is that we don't live under the fear of his nuclear weapons to the same extent that he lives under the fear of our nuclear weapons Maxwell Taylor chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote a memo to Secretary of Defense McNamara saying quote now is not the time to run scared we have an advantage in our general war capabilities general war being a euphemism for nuclear war at the time so that's essentially the logic of the argument that the leaders do play these games of chicken and and the capabilities matter for that well let me let me unpack a couple concepts really kind of get you to define what you mean by superiority and then we will get to the brinksmanship part a little or I think in the book you you say that nuclear superiority is a military nuclear advantage over an opponent but that's of course pretty pretty broad I take it you're arguing for the principle that the United States should acquire nuclear superiority but what does that mean and is it ever quite so clear-cut we've come a long way Russia has come a long way since the days of being Rusk is it is it possible that in this sort of bifurcated black-and-white way that the United States or others would have such such a stark superiority so what kind of what do you mean by that yeah well I have a chapter in the book where I go through and do kind of nuclear exchange calculations god forbid if there were a nuclear war between the United States and China and United States and Russia United States in North Korea what would it look like both if the United States went first with one of these damage limiting strikes and what if the adversary goes first and hits us with everything we've got and so one of the things that becomes very clear is is that the nuclear balance of power matters quite a bit for what that outcome looks like so the United States does likely today have a first strike capability against North Korea if we were willing to go first and try to limit blunt North Korea's nuclear capabilities to the greatest extent possible and protect ourselves with missile defenses I think it's unlikely that North Korea would be able to get nuclear weapons to the United States with China we likely do not have a first strike capability with China but there we do have significant damage limitation capabilities if there were a nuclear war between the United States and China it's clear that it would turn out much much worse for China such as so maybe walk through that what kind of damage limitation things are you talking about when you when you discuss that yeah when I should say - again this is about the logic of American nuclear strategy and so this is what you know the United States military the Department of Defense has thought about for decades counter force nuclear targeting using our weapons to destroy theirs and so you know if you look at China's arsenal it has some fixed ICBMs and fixed silos so those are fairly easy military targets they're stationary targets China has tried to go to sea it's been interested in developing a submarine-launched ballistic missile capability for some time this is one of the ways the United States ensures the survivability of its arsenal but China's struggle to do that is still not doing regular deterrence patrols so one of the the other ways that China has tried to guarantee its survivability is by going to these mobile missiles and so they have mobile missiles but the United States likely could or may try to track and target those missiles in the event of a nuclear exchange and so we may not be able to get everything but we could get a lot and this is something that the Chinese and the Russians are worried about they're worried that we have a first strike capability that we destroy most of their nuclear forces and a first strike and then use our missile defenses to mop up the rest and and so that's what I mean by by damage limitation and by superiority you know can we reduce the damage to ourselves and to our allies and god forbid if there's a nuclear war does it look worse for for the enemy than it does for us so are you in this in this and the Sprint of this theory are you are you basically endorsing kind of a first strike capability or at least approximating it because to the extent possible as a as a goal of US policy well I think one of the things I'm arguing against is often in Washington or in these theoretical debates about nuclear deterrence people say well the goal is mutually assured destruction the goals mutual vulnerability that will lead to stability and I think there are cases where you know the United States and Russia that the height of the Cold War where we really had no choice we were both vulnerable even even there though both sides were looking for advantage you know the United States looked for qualitative advantage even though there were quantitative warhead caps but but there would have been very hard but I think what I'm pointing out is that that's not the goal that's maybe a unfortunate the second-best outcome but but the goal really is and and has been and should be superiority I mean the superiority we had over Japan at the end of World War two you for example thank God we had that thank God they didn't have a survivable nuclear force thank God we have nuclear superiority over Iran North Korea you know do we really think we would be better off if they had survivable nuclear forces that could reach the United States if we were in a situation of mutual vulnerability so maybe it's it's an obvious point at some level but I think many people start thinking about nuclear deterrence and often go to this mutually assured destruction model when really the goal should be superiority now in some cases it may be impossible to get or difficult to get and so there are countervailing conditions but but you know it's we're better off if we have an advantage over over our adversaries right so let me now move to the other part of the thesis and that spring semester you know whether I guess the United States or someone else's in your category is superior what does what are you suggesting about the importance of of engaging in brinksmanship or of not backing down in brinksmanship and what are the risks as well for that kind of that kind of recipe yeah well you know so games of nuclear chicken are dangerous we saw that in the Cuban Missile Crisis John Kennedy said the risk of nuclear war was somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 you know cargo crisis we've come close to nuclear exchange all the time but but again you know leaders face these gut-wrenching decisions on one hand they don't want to run a risk of a nuclear war on the other hand they don't just want to give their adversary a free pass so they play these games of nuclear brinkmanship reluctantly and I'd argue that this brinksmanship framework I think is a good way of understanding what we've been doing with North Korea over the past six months and and some other more more recent crises as well but the basic thesis of the argument is that you know in these games of chicken the superior state is going to be well the inferior States going to be more likely to swerve and I'm less likely to play in the first place whoo I play a game of nuclear chicken if you're going to lose so I have a lot of evidence in the book go through a lot of these case studies now but also some quantitative evidence and one piece of quantitative evidence I think really stands out so some colleagues of mine Todd sexer at the University of Virginia Matt Fuhrman at Texas A&M have a good book from your so go out with Cambridge University Press and they argue that nuclear weapons don't matter for international coercion and so they collect a quantitative data set of what they say as every military Compellent threat issued in international politics from 1918 to the present and they look at the success rates of nuclear-armed States when they issue these threats and they compare that to the success rate of non-nuclear States when they issue these these threats and they say well the success rate is about 20% about 20% of the time when they issue these threats the adversary gets in so that gives them so they say the success rate is the same therefore you know nuclear weapons don't seem to matter so I was interested in this because it's contrary to what I was arguing so I dug into the data a little bit and and essentially what they have is a lot of cases of non-nuclear States threatening non-nuclear States since 1918 and so that's not really what I was interested in so I said look let's look at the cases of nuclear States threatening nuclear States so according to their data nuclear states have issued these kind of threats 49 times since 1945 guess how many of those threats were against countries with fewer nuclear weapons and guess how many of those were against countries with more nuclear weapons according to their data 49 to 0 according to their data never in the history of the world has a nuclear-armed state with fewer nuclear weapons threaten a nuclear-armed state with more nuclear weapons so I think that's pretty compelling evidence that again the inferior state prefers not to even play these games of nuclear chicken but are there I don't know the data set but are there meaningful cases of interactions between the US Russia and China that would in a way it kind of more significantly inform the question of stability between the major nuclear power or these smaller things in other words how applicable is that well so a broader point for a DC audiences you know this book really does try to bridge the gap between kind of academic theories of deterrence and kind of real world nuclear strategy and policy so I'm trying to engage with in several debates at once but you know so on the more academic side you know there's kind of question how do you get evidence about the real world how do we know if our theories are right or not and you know a decade or so ago there were big debates of you know is quantitative analysis better is qualitative analysis better and I think the conventional wisdom now is that you really need both you know this isn't physics it's it's social science it's fuzzy yep data is not great and and so you know the more pieces of evidence you can get pointing in a certain direction the more confidence you have that you're onto something and so in the book I do have a quantitative evidence but I do have the qualitative case studies looking at some high stakes crises between the United States and and Russia so I look at the Cuban Missile Crisis I look at the 1973 arab-israeli war where the Soviet Union threatened to intervene the United States Henry Kissinger made some nuclear threats put our nuclear weapons on high alert in the in the Soviet Union decided not to intervene look at the sino-soviet border war in 1969 the Soviet Union and China came very close to war and there you again see a lot of support for this idea of the nuclear superior state gets its way the nuclear superior States more willing to kind of run the risk of nuclear war to force the other state to back down and leaders in both states are paying attention to the nuclear balance of power and arguing that it matters and so again for you know the kind of conventional wisdom mutually assured destruction if if nuclear superiority doesn't matter then why are our leaders why are Maxwell Taylor and Dean Ross talking about it well theorists who have looked at this before I've said well they were wrong they shouldn't have paid attention to this they don't get our theories and so as a rhetorical defense maybe maybe that works but you know if you want to understand the world as it actually played out if you want to and the cases as they developed I think you have to look at what the leaders themselves said said mattering so you know listening to this I it occurs to me that you know the I think the recommendation to to continually pursue superiority to the extent possible is this kind of a way of responding to but kind of maybe not really intellectual but also kind of programmatic laziness about a over confidence about frankly the security of our second strike and perhaps an overconfidence about where under confidence rather about the willingness of other folks to play the brinksmanship game better than we do and so I'm thinking for instance about the Nuclear Posture review and you seem to be suggesting that in order for for our our ultimate guarantee to be secured we have to be constantly attentive to the little details to make sure that it is in fact secure but you know there's always this this this kind of perpetual disavowing in Washington about pursuing a war fighting capability and the Nuclear Posture review does that - do you have a thought on that you know should we perhaps be talking about the credible war fighting capability in a positive way as opposed to apologizing that would no we would never pursue that what's your take on that well so when it comes to nuclear deterrence and nuclear strategy for whatever reason you're right people have this dichotomy between you know is it a deterrent strategy or is it a war fighting strategy and I reject that dichotomy I mean in no other area of life do we think that deterring something is it's fundamentally divorced from what happens if deterrence fails you know so if you think about bars on on windows yeah the point is to deter crime but it's also to physically stop the crime if necessary if it takes place and I think nuclear deterrence theory is no different if you're trying to deter an adversary from challenging you and your interest and your allies then that's fundamentally related to what happens if they do challenge you and what is the next step and so yeah the purpose of course is to deter the war to not have to fight the nuclear war but you know in order to do that you have to look just over the the step and say well what happens if deterrence does fails does fail what comes next and so I see these things as fundamentally linked not somehow different different spheres you talk about this in your in your book but I mean you know right at the very beginning of the nuclear age Bernard Brody says that the purpose of our military establishments from now on is not to fight wars but to prevent them is your take on this different is Brody wrong no I think he's right that the the purpose is to to prevent nuclear war the question is how best to do that and I think a minimum deterrent you know because if the United States were content with just a minimum deterrent or a secure second strike we could have a few dozen nuclear weapons on submarines and that would probably do it but again the United States has never been interested in that and there is a bipartisan consensus on this you know I talk in the book John Kennedy in 1963 was the first to say that the United States needs a nuclear arsenal quote second to none Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State in 2010 said the United States will be quote stronger than everybody else as we've always been with way more nuclear weapons than are needed many times over and Trump last year said the United States will have a nuclear arsenal quote top of the pack so again we have this puzzle what why have US leaders been so interested in superiority when the theories say they shouldn't be and my answer is these theories are not that Brody's wrong but but they're incomplete they really do need to take into account the nuclear balance of power in a way that they haven't in the past yeah now you mentioned missile defense a couple times I guess I would point out that where we are in that field is so dramatically under where we might need to be to have any meaningful impact on the calculations of of a Russia or China which I mean I mean I know it's mentioned a little bit in the book but what's your view of how how active defenses are for that matter passive defenses that can contribute to our security and to the calculus of others I guess in this brinkmanship theory well the central argument of the book is that is really centers around damage limitation that the United States willingness and resolve to defend allies to defend our interest depends on our vulnerability nuclear war and so the more we can limit that vulnerability to ourselves the more we can limit our adversary vulnerability the firmer we're going to stand in these conflicts of interest with other nuclear-armed States and so that raises the question then or what are the ways you can limit damage to yourself and your allies and the answer is offense and defense so so part of it is offense having the nuclear capabilities to conduct counter for strikes and and blunt your adversaries capability which again is something the United States is always or at least for decades been interested in but the second part is is defenses whatever survives from the adversary's force you want to be able to to protect yourself and to protect your allies so yeah you know in sports you've got to play offense and defense I think in a nuclear strategy you have to play offense and defense and yet of course I mean this is a preamble of the ABM Treaty from 1972 said you know recognizing or on the assumption that the defenses for strategic weapons would contribute to instability so is this wouldn't this be a recipe for strategic instability are you wouldn't this recommendation be a recipe for for arms race if we were to pursue that more actively well I'm glad you asked so the first part of the book talks about the possible advantages of these nuclear advantages so it lays out the argument talks about the advantages for war fighting for coercion for deterrence for extended deterrence but an argument that's been made by those in the kind of mutually assured destruction school is not only that nuclear superiority doesn't matter but that pursuing it has real risks undermine stability leads to arms races it causes nuclear proliferation it's just too expensive we can't afford a robust nuclear posture so the second half of the book then looks at these possible costs of a large nuclear our so I have a chapter on stability arms races non-proliferation the defense budget and what I've shown in those chapters is that that there are cost in some case cases but that they're often exaggerated by these kind of opponents of US nuclear strategy and often they're they're even non-existent so again looking at unbalanced it makes sense that the United States has done what is what it's done there their advantages to having this robust nuclear posture and the costs are either non-existent or or reasonable you know because again if there were if there were cost to doing what we're doing then again the US nuclear strategy is easy illogical that we've been doing crazy stuff for decades we should have just followed the the academic theorists advice and I was I was skeptical of that and and the show in the book why the United States can pursue this robust nuclear posture without incurring major cost in terms of stability arms races etc so I mean a lot of the conversation over the past six weeks has been around the modest supplements that the new NPR recommends but you know you look at it this from a little more theoretical perspective but also with familiar with the policy what are some other things that we ought to be thinking about as a country to to get at the superiority that you're recommending and I'm lead you a little bit with this with the suggestion that what are the counter force capabilities that we ought to be thinking about you know in a perhaps a less less reluctant manner to they would get us to where you want us to go yeah well I think we're already starting to think about some of those things you know so one possibility would be the hypersonic glide vehicles which the United States Russia and China are pursuing another would be a modernized ICBM you know one of the things that's kind of strange about US Nuclear Posture now is that our SLBMs are actually more accurate than our ICBMs just because the SLBMs were the submarine launched ballistic missiles were modernized at the end of the Cold War we get around to modernizing the ICBMs are a little bit older but the particular mission or utility of those things would be what well the more accurate missile is then the better it can be used for for counter force targeting you know if you're trying to destroy a hardened ballistic missile silo the more accurate the strike the more likely you are to kill that target so accuracy contributes to counter force as the United States is and will continue I think to take steps to increase the accuracy of its defenses you know another thing is that conducting a counter force strike again from the United States because we care about international law we we care about moral and legal concerns we don't want to target population centers we don't allow one a lot of collateral damage so I think the move to lower yield warheads is another thing combined with accuracy that will allow the United States to destroy an enemy's nuclear forces without killing large large amounts of people and where does the escalation control fit into this and maybe the kind of builds on the last thing you said you know it's not merely about the the academic calculations of the use in general war but it's much the smaller stuff that really seems to be the attention right now and so how do you see nuclear superiority or military posture broadly or declaratory policy fitting into you know frankly within a crisis getting someone to back down communicating resolve all that kind of thing and frankly just de-escalating a situation right well so again the argument is that the country in the inferior position is going to be more likely to to back down and I think show a lot of evidence for that in the book that that's exactly the way it plays out in the crisis that it's the country that's out gun that's looking for off-ramps and this is something conjugal bit contrary to the way some other people and in town or a nuclear theorists talk about it because you know you raise the stability concern one argument that people make is well if the United States has kind of superiority if we have counter force targeting if we have missile defenses then the country that's out guned is going to feel use them or lose them pressures you know maybe North Korea rather than wait to have its nuclear arsenal wiped out is going to use nuclear weapons early in a conflict and so I go through the logic of the argument in the book but the you know at a superficial level that kind of use them or lose em argument makes sense but a more fundamental level it really doesn't you are essentially arguing that North Korea is going to choose to intentionally launch a nuclear war against the United States to ward off the the nuclear war it's afraid of you know the United States yes might have a first strike capability against North Korea but it also has a second strike so that would be a way for Kim jong-un to essentially guarantee the end of his country the the end of his regime so these use them or lose them arguments I think logically don't really make much sense and if you look at the evidence again a lot of the evidence in the book that the inferior State backs down not that it intentionally launches a nuclear war is looking to escalate the crisis so I think that's how it leads to escalation control if you have a superior Nuclear Posture you convince the adversary that it's not worth running the risk of nuclear war so just to you know open up the discussion from the from the audience here but just in very simple terms the concepts of deterrence and defense and defeat it kind of sounds like what you're suggesting is that superiority requires that more attention on on defeat capability and more attention on defense can contribute to deterrence of inferior power exactly assuming that everybody's clear on who's inferior is that is that right that's exactly right and you know this may sound controversial or provocative given the way we usually think about nuclear deterrence the way it's taught in the classroom but again if you know your classroom I hope well I teach I teach all sides of the debate but you know if you look at the way nuclear strategy is actually done again we don't do mutually assured destruction we've always been interested in damage limitation the new Nuclear Posture review lays out damage limitation as one of the roles of u.s. nuclear weapons going all the way back to Jimmy Carter Secretary of Defense Harold Brown said we've always considered it important to target the forces that can do damage to us and our allies in the event of nuclear war so again on one hand I think the arguments controversial because it's very different from our usual models on the other hand it explains the real world this is the way the United States thinks about nuclear deterrence good well while we open up for some questions about the book or about more current policy issues and wait for the microphone if you can this gentleman right here wait for microphone if you could just give your name and affiliation and then Michael acetic PBS online Newshour I haven't read the book yet but congratulations on all the great blurbs I want to burrow a bit more into the cost issue because with the Soviet Union there was never a question that they were going to be richer than we we are China is potentially richer than we are and they also hold trillions of dollars of our debt how is that going to factor in well thank you very much for coming Mike great to see you yes so I have a chapter in the book on on the cost of building a nuclear posture but and then also on arms races because that's an argument that people will will often make that the United States shouldn't pursue superiority because it'll just lead to arms races Russia China others will try to get similar capabilities to close the gap you know so first on cost the United States is modernizing its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years the Congressional Budget Office estimates that this will cost about 1.3 trillion dollars so some people have looked at that number and said this is just unaffordable but if you actually put it in in context this comes to depending on the year five to seven percent of the Department of Defense budget so is five to seven percent of the defense budget too much to spend on nuclear weapons you know I guess reasonable people can disagree but Secretary of Defense mattis has said this is the most important mission of the Department of Defense so if it's a most important mission of the Department of Defense five to seven percent seems quite reasonable reasonable maybe even good value not to me on the arms race part you know it's interesting the United States and and Russia I think have been at rough parity since the mid to light late 1970s you look at our other nuclear-armed adversaries China North Korea the United States has always had a clear superiority so focusing on China which you mentioned I think there are a number of reasons for that you know one I think China's economy has been booming over the past several decades but that wasn't always the case and so I think part of it was financial restrictions that prevented China from building a superpower type Arsenal second I think is Chinese thinking about nuclear deterrence Mao Zedong and and Dunc Xiao ping it did have kind of a mutually assured destruction model in mind they said once you've got a few nuclear weapons that's essentially enough to deter any adversary and so China today says what they're aiming for is a quote lean and effective nuclear deterrent I talked to my Chinese colleagues and you know us experts and officials for some time have been afraid that China was going to try to sprint to parity to try to build a nuclear arsenal to match ours my Chinese colleagues continually say they have no interest in doing that which i think is good news for us and our allies but the final thing is I think China's also had some organizational problems that's prevented them from developing a robust nuclear arsenal so I think part of the reason they haven't done deterrence patrols I'm told is is that they don't fully trust sending nuclear weapons to see with their military commanders that for a long time China has had its nuclear weapons stored in kind of central depots and the idea was that in the event of a nuclear conflict then they'd have to get the warheads out and get them out onto the missiles and the submarines and other things you know so they're it's difficult to do what the United States has done over the past several decades with its nuclear posture it's it's difficult to build this type of superpower posture and I think that's part of the reason why China and North Korea haven't haven't done that like we have up here in the front as well and then over here next thanks Erik Hirschorn I'm a senior advisor here at CSIS although non-resident to follow up on the cost issue I think it was you spoke about President Kennedy I think his father called him during the primaries in 1960 and said what are all these bills I'm not paying for a landslide the question is whether we are paying for a landslide not just a Hummer but a Hummer with but a stretch Hummer with a bar and a floor show and what have you and how much that in fact takes away from troops on the ground because every action since 1945 has been a non-nuclear one there have been a lot of them and you know you can only spend a dollar once now it's a it's a good question so and you know kind of a related argument that some people would make is that you know we actually use our conventional weapons we haven't used nuclear weapons and so let's put our money into the more usable conventional weapons that can affect things on the battlefield and I would actually argue we use both everyday I think we use nuclear weapons every day so Paul Nitze who is a nuclear strategist and in the Cold War used the analogy of a chessboard and he said in a game of chess you may never use the Queen but she still can have a decisive influence on the game because she can help a pawn advance the fact that she could be used is you know affecting where the other guy moves and doesn't move move and I think nuclear weapons are the same that that even if they're not used their shadow hangs over any conflict involving the United States and its adversaries and so I think it has contributed to deterrence over the past 70 years so in short I think both are important and you know so then you get into a question of what is the relative importance and and and where should the resources be devoted so again I think maybe reasonable people could disagree and say five to seven percent is too much but you know maybe we can have have the argument after but I again I think it's it's a reasonable price ninety-six percent of the budget is going to other things five to seven percent for the for a nuclear and I think is reasonable I think we have this gentleman here and then we'll go up here sturgeon and a Johns Hopkins I want to start off by saying that the Nuclear Posture review curtly stated that times have changed and that it's no more today's even ten years ago or during the Cold War and we need to face these threats first and foremost so I thank you for your book of taking that attitude and moving ahead with it in a positive light but I want to go more in particular with superiority and what the Nuclear Posture review has recommended particularly with the C launch cruise missiles and will that actually give superiority in sense of critically dealing with China because the Pacific Ocean is a lot bigger than the Atlantic Ocean to be frank and on other hand is the confidence on the SL CMS overblown or is it realistic thank you well so some of you might know that the Nuclear Posture review came out a couple of weeks ago one of the more controversial elements was the call to bring to create two supplemental nuclear capabilities so the Obama administration put in plan a play put in place a plan to modernize the US nuclear arsenal over the course of the next 30 years the Trump administration endorsed that and then in addition suggested two supplemental capabilities so as submarine-launched cruise missile and then a low-yield submarine launched ballistic missile and so some have said this is controversial it lowers the threshold of nuclear war etc the reason I think those capabilities were recommended is because of Russia's nuclear strategy today which is quite frightening so Russia has this concept of de-escalatory nuclear strikes so basically the ideas if we get into a war or with Russia and especially if they're losing rather than lose Russia might use one or two or a small number of nuclear weapons on the assumption that Western leaders aren't going to be willing to run a risk of nuclear war over Estonia so they can pop off a couple of nukes and we're going to back down and I think there are a number of reasons Putin may think he can get away with that but I think part of it is the gap in capabilities that he has a lot of tactile tactical battlefield nuclear capabilities low-yield nuclear weapons that could be used on the battlefield and we really don't and so what I see these two new supplements doing is filling that gap to some degree giving the United States a low-yield capability not because we want to use it but the opposite to deter Putin to convince him from going down this path in the first place and of course the submarine launched cruise missiles not an unrealistic capability the United States had it during the Cold War we actually had it up through 2010 when President Obama decided to retire it and so essentially this is kind of resurrecting capability we've had in the past and the Russians have a similar capability so it's not going to lead to some kind of arms race the Russia already has a lot of again a lot of nuclear weapons in this space in terms of how it fits into the to the theory you know I think that these limited nuclear strikes are is essentially another way of kind of raising the risk in these games of nuclear brinkmanship you know the Russian strategy is not that using one or two nuclear weapons is going to be so devastating they win the war but rather it's a signal that there could be more to come you know essentially asking Western leaders do you really want to run the risk that things could spin out of control and and I do think the United States has an interest in defending our allies in NATO defending our allies in Eastern Europe and so we need to have a serious defense strategy for that and so we need to be able to to have a response kind of on the escalation letter to to Russia if we're going to continue to play that game of nuclear brinkmanship and so I think that's what those new capabilities provide us let me interject here because I think this might be a really good moment to ask how your endorsement of superiority maps to the actions of Russia you know is it the case that all these innovative things that Bouton's doing is trying to get a kind of superiority and I can a kind of ability to get us to back down so in a way Putin seems to be following this theory perhaps better than we are but then let me also say to what extent does your theory really map to the new recommendations of the NPR because and I think you kind of alluded to this it's not so much about getting superiority to defeat Russia as much as it is to get a few more things a few more options to frankly communicate our resolve and the credibility of our resolve and responding to to that kind of a scenario so so that's sort of the two parts questions how well does your endorsement map to kind of what Putin is doing and getting a kind of superiority and getting us to back down and getting us to swerve and a NATO kind of environment and then how you know are we actually pursuing superiority or are we actually just trying to improve our resolve and communicate our resolve in this way yeah so I think the I think the Russians have often thought about nuclear weapons in a more similar way as the way that well to the United States and they haven't had the same kind of theories of mutual vulnerability and you know we now know that Soviet plans during the Cold War called for kind of an immediate use of nuclear weapons in Europe and you know so in the United States I think that at least the theorist and the strategist have had this kind of distinction between conventional warfare operates according to a certain logic and nuclear warfare operates according to a different logic and I argue I think that they're they're more similar than we often imagined and I think we don't need to tell Putin that I think you know he thinks of visas as usable weapons in terms of how the recommendations of the MPR match onto the argument and this is kind of what I was trying to say before but these games of nuclear brinkmanship again leaders don't want to fight nuclear wars but they don't want to back down and so the space in the middle or the these games of nuclear chicken but but if you want to you know keep pressing the the pedal in the game of chicken going out your adversary you have to have gas in the tank you know you have to have the ability to keep going so you don't want big gaps in your in the escalation lighter so this is something Henry Kissinger recognized early in the Cold War Kissinger feared that the United States would face a choice between quote suicide or surrender that we'd have a choice of either you know backing down or of fighting a full-scale nuclear war and he argued we need to have these options in between and I think that's what these new supplements in the NPR do they provide these supplements in between to prevent us from choosing between suicide or surrender you know so that we can Russia invades the Baltic if Russia uses nuclear weapons to try to defend its position that that we can keep escalating the crisis without going to a full-scale nuclear exchange which would be catastrophic okay great right here and then right here Peter Rogers retiree corporate executive interest in military affairs how do we factor NATO into the practical reality of our defense nuclear defense posture today so it's a it's a good question I so I think part of the reason the United States has been interested in this robust nuclear posture for decades is is because of extended deterrence you know if the United States decided tomorrow we're gonna pull back we're gonna have a more isolationist foreign policy our nuclear weapons are only to deter attacks against ourselves then I think we could get away with a kind of minimum nuclear deterrent I think we could have a posture that looks more like China's but we ask a lot more of our nuclear weapons than any other country on earth you know we asked our nuclear weapons to defend attacks on the entire free world so as I kind of said before we're promising to play a game of potential game of nuclear chicken you know today if Russia decides to challenge us on behalf of Estonia on behalf of of Latvia and so I think that's part of the reason we have this large robust nuclear force is is to credibly extend deterrence to to allies in Europe you know yet the other way the allies come in though is we have these nuclear sharing of arrangements in NATO so in addition to America's strategic forces we have 200 or so gravity bombs for deployed on territory of NATO allies some of the NATO allies have dual capable aircraft so aircraft that can be used to deliver either conventional or nuclear weapons so the idea would be that if we got into a major war with Russian this was the policy during the Cold War two that the Allies could deliver these forward deployed nuclear weapons and so that was there a number of purposes of that one it was thought to increase the credibility of deterrence to make the Russians understand that it's not just the US president who might decide to use nuclear weapons but maybe the European allies have some independent ability to deliver US nuclear weapons but also there's an important burden-sharing component that the NATO allies are participating in the nuclear mission and so I think that will likely continue going forward the Allies now are in the early stages of acquiring new dual capable aircraft to replace the kind of aging f-15s and f-16s and tornados and other things you know where this gets interesting though is is that what will the United States decide to do something similar in Asia so during the Cold War we also had nuclear weapons for deployed in South Korea we took them out in the early 1990s with the North Korean nuclear threat heating up the debate in South Korea is changing and many South Korean experts and some leaders are saying the United States needs to return its forward deployed nuclear weapons to Korean territory and if not that South Korea will consider building an independent nuclear deterrent so my own view is that right now there are some things we can do to increase the credibility of extended deterrence in Asia short of forward deploying nuclear weapons there but I suspect this is an issue that's not going to go away anytime soon especially if North Korea's nuclear missile program continues to advance right here Highmark Bucknam with the National War College I find your argument that nuclear superiority leads to stability makes sense but but only if the nuclear superior power is a status quo power and not a revisionist power there have been some articles lately about the potential for Russia to build up to over 8,000 nuclear warheads and I don't see any signs that the u.s. is looking to do that so let's just project forward and say what if Russia remains sort of a revisionist power and builds up an arsenal that size what what are the implications for your theory and and what should the US response be yeah it's a great point you know it's a book about the logic of American nuclear strategy so when I was talking about the stability part it was you know what if the United States has the first strike capability is that destabilizing or not in my argument is essentially that it's not but I think you're right if the shoe was on the other foot if Russia China or North Korea had come clear strategic superiority over the United States or allies given their revisionist goals I suspect that they would try to use that for offensive purposes and I think to some degree that's what we see in Russian strategy today they're using their tactical nuclear advantage for these course and purposes you know making explicit nuclear threats during the crisis in Ukraine and other things so I think it's important that the United States continue to maintain at least strategic parity if not superiority over Russia and I share some of your concerns right now where do the New START treaty we're locked in at parity with no more than 1550 strategic deployed warheads you know by the way for people who don't follow this closely the peak for the United States was 1967 we had thirty one thousand two hundred and fifty five nuclear warheads so we've come bound down quite a bit the New START treaty has us locked in at 1550 each but what if the New START treaty is not extended what if Russia decides to cheat on the New START treaty like it's done with a lot of its other arms control agreements what if they decide to rapidly expand their nuclear capabilities my assessment is that their interest sure wasn't really shut down and during at the end of the Cold War they've just kept going we saw that with Putin's announcements last week with these new nuclear capabilities so I worry about that and I think the United States does need to be prepared you know let's let's hope in my view anyway I think the New START treaty is in our interest but we have to be prepared for what happens if Russia decides it's no longer in its interest it pulls out and ramps up its nuclear capability and I'm afraid right now that our infrastructure has deteriorated to some degree and that needs to be a priority the new Nuclear Posture review recognizes it as such and so I hope the resources are there to do something about it well let me I think close out with this one that kind of builds on the question of numbers let me go back again to your definition of nuclear superiority is as having a nuclear military advantage over someone else and you know listening to this I'm thinking especially in terms of the NPR here I wonder if it doesn't if there isn't an element rather of not have the military superiority but the kind of a political superiority and a superiority in terms of resolve and especially given the emphasis that you put on brinksmanship because you can have the the stretch Hummer you know with all the bells and whistles but if the person driving the stretch Hummer doesn't really believe in it and furthermore thinks that the guy in the Prius is just nuts that Hummer might might swerve and so no way doesn't it awfully come down to resolve which is you know Herman Kahn said the best way to to look willing is to be willing and isn't so much of our conversation today about trying to kind of reinvigorate the serious thinking about the no kidding technical capability use these things in response to some other aggression say by Russia yes so at the end of the day I think what matters it is resolved you know how resolved are we to to defend our interest to defend our allies how resolved our enemies toward challenging that and so the question is what contributes to resolve and so these traditional theories in a mutually assured destruction kind of second strike theory did recognize the countries would play games of nuclear chicken but they said the crash is bad for both sides so the capabilities don't matter what matters is your stakes you know how much do you care about whatever it is you're you're fighting over that's all that matters and so what I'm arguing is the right stakes matter but it's not all the matters that the capabilities matter to and capabilities affect resolve I mean after all I'd be more resolute in a game of chicken if I were driving the Hummer than the Prius I don't know about you but I think most of us would be and the stakes underlying the crisis are not something that the United States can easily control and to some degree the one one characteristic of extended deterrence is arguably the stakes always favor our adversary at least arguably I mean I think Russia has a story it can tell itself about why it cares more about Estonia than Washington does I think China has a story can tell itself about why it cares more about East Asia than Washington does Kim jong-un can tell himself a story about why he cares more about South Korea than the United States does and so for always operating from an arguable stakes deficit then we have this capabilities surfeit to make up for that and to some degree that's that's the logic of American nuclear strategy good well I think where I'll leave it there thank you Matt I'm sure we're gonna have a lot more conversations about this and please join me in congratulating him on his new book [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

Views: 3,485

Rating: 4.018868 out of 5

Keywords: csis, international, politics, diplomacy, washington

Id: ixT5aWo8eTQ

Length: 56min 35sec (3395 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018