Countries spend billions of dollars on defense every year, and some of that money is wasted. No one likes “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but it’s impossible to completely eliminate it when you’re spending so much money on so many military programs. A more effective effort to address this problem is worthwhile—that is, it would be great if the US Department of Defense could pass inspection always—but the most obvious way to save money on defense is not to waste money chasing unnecessary capabilities and impossible targets.
Case in point: Now that most of the major arms control agreements are in place they have expired or abolished, the United States, Russia, and China will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize and expand their businesses. nuclear weapons. Other nuclear-armed states are upgrading their militaries as well, albeit more modestly.
Countries spend billions of dollars on defense every year, and some of that money is wasted. No one likes “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but it’s impossible to completely eliminate it when you’re spending so much money on so many military programs. A more effective effort to address this problem is worthwhile—that is, it would be great if the US Department of Defense could pass inspection always—but the most obvious way to save money on defense is not to waste money chasing unnecessary capabilities and impossible targets.
Case in point: Now that most of the major arms control agreements are in place they have expired or abolished, the United States, Russia, and China will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize and expand their businesses. nuclear weapons. Other nuclear-armed states are upgrading their militaries as well, albeit more modestly.
In this case, however, “modernization” does not only mean replacing aging or outdated systems with more reliable versions: It also means making one’s forces more dangerous, accurate, stealthy, faster, etc., and significantly increasing the number of warheads in the arsenal. And the primary purpose of all this spending is not just to preserve the power of each state in a second strike, because that is easy for the big nations to do. Instead, the United States (and perhaps others) will spend a lot of money trying to acquire a credible capability to fight a nuclear war without torture. unacceptable damage.
Here’s the problem: From the very beginning of the nuclear age, it has been clear that the nature of these weapons makes it extremely difficult to achieve true invulnerability against any capable adversary. Modern nuclear weapons are small, light, easily concealed, and extremely dangerous. For any country, having five or 10 atomic or hydrogen bombs land on its major cities would be a disaster of terrifying proportions, far outweighing any political benefits. Just try to imagine what would be the benefits for the United States to lose New York City, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, or Washington, or for China to lose Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong and Guangzhou.
Unless the country’s leaders are confident that they can completely avoid a second strike by an adversary, they will not press the button, except perhaps to signal a solution through a protest strike against unoccupied territory or because they are convinced that war is inevitable and hope to strike first. But as critics have warned for decades, getting a worse first-strike capability makes the second strike worse and reduces the resilience of the crisis.
If you only need to prevent an opponent from attacking you or threatening your freedom is an acceptable ability to retaliate with a small number of weapons, then it does not make sense to spend a lot of money trying to get the ability to completely disarm the enemy.
The logic of this position—known as “existential deterrence” by former US National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy—has never been firmly disproved, but neither the United States nor the former Soviet Union ever accepted it as a policy basis. Instead, during the Cold War, each spent a lot of money to develop more accurate missiles, better reconnaissance and anti-submarine capabilities, missile defense, and so on, either because they believed that it would be possible to avoid the logic of mutual annihilation, because they believed that the threat of total nuclear annihilation would be enough to prevent an attack by the enemy, the three political allies, because the other three defense contractors.
These efforts have long been justified by outdated arguments about the need for and alleged benefits of “nuclear supremacy.” To begin with, many experts believe that a much higher nuclear war potential is necessary to make “long-term deterrence” credible. To convince an enemy that the United States can use nuclear weapons to defend a non-nuclear ally, Washington must be able to inflict more damage on the enemy than it can inflict on the United States. If the United States had an “escalating regime,” so the argument goes, the other side would be deterred from using force knowing that it would end up worse off no matter what the escalation was.
This argument was never very persuasive, however, as it assumed that the United States would be willing to escalate and incur more damage as long as it knew that the other side would suffer more, and that our allies and adversaries believed the same.
But like the American economist Thomas Schelling and others he said many decades ago, the resolution of a conflict is not determined solely by the balance of power or which side will suffer more, especially when the outcome will be bad for both. The real issue is which party cares more about the issues at hand and is willing to take the greater risk or bear the greater cost.
And because nations are usually more concerned with defending what they have than taking something from others, the logic of nuclear deterrence strongly favors the side that defends the status quo, even if its forces are somewhat less powerful than those of its opponent.
Recently, some scholars they have claimed that states with advanced nuclear capabilities are more likely to win in conflicts, but these studies are clouded by large assumptions and methods. problems and should not be used as a policy basis. After all, if nuclear supremacy was a powerful weapon of coercion, then why can’t Russia get Ukraine. surrender Donbas by showing its nuclear weapons, and why can’t the US use the threat of nuclear use to impose its will on Iran?
One can see how limited/existent deterrence still is by considering how hard the US has worked. block some countries from getting even a few nuclear weapons, although Washington has thousands. Why? Because US leaders know that confronting even a country with nuclear weapons is dangerous. Note also that the US has not been deterred from attacking countries that do not have nuclear weapons such as Libya, Iraq or Iran but has not used force against North Korea, which only has rebels. a few dozen weapons and volume-though improve-the delivery capacity. The US has a “massive nuclear superiority” against Pyongyang, but that doesn’t seem to give Washington leverage (any?) over Kim Jong Un’s decisions or make US presidents willing to go to war with him. Washington’s weapons prevent him from threatening vital US interests, but that’s about it.
The case for America’s founding has also been strengthened by scholars argue that technological improvements are life threatening of existing nuclear arsenals and bring the United States (and perhaps some others in the future) to unprecedented first-strike capability. They maintain that improvements in missile accuracy, surveillance, deterrence, ballistic missile defense, and anti-submarine warfare will enable the United States to disarm even a well-armed enemy in the first strike, leaving them with fewer weapons that would be deterred by American missile defenses.
Together, the twins claim that “nuclear superiority” both offers great strategic advantages and can be achieved, seemingly creating a compelling case for a round of modern nuclear costs, and for building American forces so that the country can fight and “win” nuclear wars against Russia and China at the same time.
Unfortunately, the claim that the United States has or can achieve a reliable first-strike capability is based on dubious, even dangerous, assumptions. It assumes, for example, that a large-scale attack on another country’s nuclear arsenal—which in Russia’s case would require hitting hundreds of targets more or less simultaneously—could be pulled off the first time it was attempted in real life, without much practice and without tipping off the enemy in advance. Anyone familiar with complex military operations knows how likely this is: Even the most successful surprise attacks in history still involved an unusual number of hacks, missed targets, and other errors.
Unless you think the US would launch a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack involving hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons. time of peacewithout any warning, then we are talking about a crisis situation where both sides are already in a state of alert and there is a possibility of launching with a warning if they detect signs of attack. In a nuclear reality, as opposed to theoretical models or even war games, every human error or more optimistic planning assumption means more nuclear warheads returning to the US homeland.
It continues to assume that the enemy concerned about the possibility of a first attack has not managed to hide a certain number of weapons and has thought carefully about unconventional ways of delivering them. What would stop North Korea, Russia, China, or some other people from retaliating by sending bombs into Boston Harbor on what appeared to be a fishing boat or pleasure craft? If smugglers can get tons of drugs into the United States every month, one suspects that foreign adversaries could devise similar ways to get a bomb on American soil if they believed it was necessary or if they just wanted revenge. Indeed, no sane American president should assume otherwise.
In short, some of the trillions of dollars that the United States could spend over the next few years are unnecessary and amount to a full employment policy for weapons labs and aerospace contractors. Saying this does not mean that the United States should not update its nuclear arsenal as existing weapons age, or that it should not keep tabs on developments that could threaten the survival of America’s deterrent. Clearly, Washington should do both.
The real issue is whether the United States should build up its strike and missile defense forces in ways clearly intended to threaten the nuclear deterrents of Russia and China, which will inevitably lead them to build up their own forces in response. Can you say “arms race”?
Alternatively, is Washington willing to make the necessary concessions to lure them into some kind of negotiated blockade that will preserve the US’s own deterrence at minimal cost and risk? If the United States is unwilling to do so, then Americans, Russians, Chinese, and others will all be poorer, resources will be diverted from the most important aspects of national power, and the risk of nuclear war will increase.
