Worrying
By lex, on March 1st, 2010
When I first read the NYT headline, “White House Is Rethinking Nuclear Policy,” I had the vague hope that the president was considering broader use of domestic nuclear power plants for green power generation that would limit our reliance upon hydrocarbons and foreign oil. But, no, the best minds in Washington are considering fundamentally altering the status of the strategic deterrence arsenal and policies that served to protect America from annihilation throughout the long, dark nights of the Cold War:
Mr. Obama’s new strategy — which would annul or reverse several initiatives by the Bush administration — will be contained in a nearly completed document called the Nuclear Posture Review, which all presidents undertake. Aides said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will present Mr. Obama with several options on Monday to address unresolved issues in that document, which have been hotly debated within the administration.
First among them is the question of whether, and how, to narrow the circumstances under which the United States will declare it might use nuclear weapons — a key element of nuclear deterrence since the cold war.
It doesn’t help in my mind that Diane Feinstein has her fingers in the porridge here, or that the best minds in Washington clearly don’t understand the game theory applications of strategic ambiguity. By redlining what actions might or might not trip a strategic response, you encourage adventurers to walk right up to the line, where – pushing and shoving – some of them are bound, in time, to stumble across.
Like here:
Mr. Obama’s decisions on nuclear weapons come as conflicting pressures in his defense policy are intensifying. His critics argue that his embrace of a new movement to eliminate nuclear weapons around the world is naïve and dangerous, especially at a time of new nuclear threats, particularly from Iran and North Korea. But many of his supporters fear that over the past year he has moved too cautiously, and worry that he will retain the existing American policy by leaving open the possibility that the United States might use nuclear weapons in response to a biological or chemical attack, perhaps against a nation that does not possess a nuclear arsenal.
Existing US policy has always held that WMD – whether nuclear, chemical or biological – are of a class, their destructive characteristics having distinctions without differences. Since the US does not stockpile deterrent chemical or biological weapons, leaving a nuclear counter-stroke to a chemical or biological attack on the strategically ambiguous table actually helps prevent massive loss of life on all sides. Removing that ambiguity offers the world’s nut cases the opportunity to threaten massive destruction on the US without a proportionate response. Do you invade North Korea, for example, after a biological attack on Los Angeles?
No, you don’t. No sane country wants to occupy and pacify a gulag, and since the Norks are believed to have at least a few nuclear weapons, you run the risk of meltdown on the Korean peninsula.
Joe “Smarter than You” Biden also has his fingerprints on the emerging strategy:
As described by those officials, the new strategy commits the United States to developing no new nuclear weapons, including the nuclear bunker-busters advocated by the Bush administration. But Mr. Obama has already announced that he will spend billions of dollars more on updating America’s weapons laboratories to assure the reliability of what he intends to be a much smaller arsenal. Increased confidence in the reliability of American weapons, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said in a speech in February, would make elimination of “redundant” nuclear weapons possible.
Reliability of the existing arsenal has never been at issue; redundancy doesn’t exist because you’re concerned about damp squibs, but because you’re concerned about having retaliatory capability in case of a devastating first attack. If you draw down unilaterally and have to afterward rebuild a nuclear arsenal in response to an escalating threat or changed geopolitical environment you’ll find yourself in a position that is inherently escalatory, with rapidly changing geopolitical calculi. And to the degree that you consolidate your strategic weapons, you make them more vulnerable rather than less, which can also encourage adventurism.
It’s not bad enough that the best minds in Washington are noodling over making the homeland itself less secure, they’re also talking about weakening foreign alliances:
Other officials, not officially allowed to speak on the issue, say that in back-channel discussions with allies, the administration has also been quietly broaching the question of whether to withdraw American tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, where they provide more political reassurance than actual defense. Those weapons are now believed to be in Germany, Italy, Belgium, Turkey and the Netherlands.
Keeping the Atlantic Alliance together has been, for better or worse, US national strategy since the guns went silent in 1945. The Russian bear, although racing towards demographic decline, is feeling frisky, and might just decide to lash out before it slips into history’s footnotes. Now we are offering to do what the Soviet Union could not – remove a capability that bonded like-minded democracies and trading partners together in the face of a common threat. It’s not MAD, it’s madness.
It would help if the Paper of Record had a single mind on its editorial board that understood how carefully calibrated US strategic policy has been over the decades:
Some leading Democrats, led by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have asked Mr. Obama to declare that the “sole purpose” of the country’s nuclear arsenal is to deter nuclear attack. “We’re under considerable pressure on this one within our own party,” one of Mr. Obama’s national security advisers said recently.
But inside the Pentagon and among many officials in the White House, Mr. Obama has been urged to retain more ambiguous wording — declaring that deterring nuclear attack is the primary purpose of the American arsenal, not the only one. That would leave open the option of using nuclear weapons against foes that might threaten the United States with biological or chemical weapons or transfer nuclear material to terrorists.
Any compromise wording that leaves in place elements of the Bush-era pre-emption policy, or suggests the United States could use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear adversary, would disappoint many on the left wing of his party, and some arms control advocates.
“Bush-era” is a slur designed to make the Times readers recoil in horror, memories of Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, the Patriot Act and foreign military adventures still fresh in their minds (not least because all of them are on-going). But to the degree that there’s a shred of truth in the accusation, it refers to George H.W. Bush’s strategic ambiguity in the First Gulf War, not to any policy enunciated by George W. Bush. And the refusal to announce a “no first use” policy goes back to the Reagan Era defense of the Fulda Gap, when the Soviets – hoping for both a propaganda victory and the opportunity for a fait accompli mechanized assault through Western Europe announced their own “no first use” intentions.
They achieved the first, as greasy haired Belgian university students waved moronic placards at US military bases in Brussels even as the Soviet SS-20s threatened from just across the border, but not the second, as Reagan refused to back down, deploying Pershing II missiles to counter them. Next came Star Wars, the defense build up of the 80s, and soon the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.
Which doleful tale is no undoubtedly a painful memory for those currently accessing the levers of power.
Fool around if you must, Washington, with the painful levels of domestic spending and inevitable taxation that will follow, experiment if you have to with running 1/7th of the domestic economy, run GM and Chrysler into the ground if that’s what gets your rocks off. But leave your hands off the strategic deterrence which safeguarded our nation for 60 years.
This isn’t amateur hour.