The U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Can Deter Both China and Russia By Charles L. Glaser, James M. Acton, and Steve Fetter
In a speech this June, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan drew attention to China’s nuclear buildup, Russia’s development of new nuclear capabilities, and the United States’ planned response. His remarks signaled the Biden administration’s assessment that nuclear risks are growing, particularly in the wake of Russia’s suspension of New START, the last U.S.-Russian treaty governing the two states’ nuclear arms, in February. What was most notable about his speech, however, was what he promised President Joe Biden would not do: launch a countervailing U.S. nuclear buildup. On this point, Sullivan was emphatic: “I want to be clear here—the United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them.”
Sullivan’s statement was a direct response to various calls for such a buildup. Advocates of nuclear expansion are motivated by a new national security problem: for the first time, the United States faces two nuclear peers, China and Russia. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal rapidly and improving its forces, including by adding multiple warheads to its intercontinental range ballistic missiles and deploying a new longer-range missile on submarines. The result is a nuclear force that promises to provide China with a massive nuclear retaliatory capability, known as an “assured destruction capability” in the lingo of nuclear strategy. Russia, too, maintains a large and diverse nuclear force that it is currently modernizing, including through the development of novel delivery systems, such as a nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed underwater drone.
To complicate matters further, for over 60 years, the United States had viewed deterring China and Russia as largely independent problems. Today, however, their growing closeness, as well as the danger of opportunistic aggression by one in a war between the United States and the other, has elevated the challenge of deterring both simultaneously.
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Analysts thinking through the implications of the two nuclear peer problem have argued that the United States will face new and worrisome risks and must take urgent actions to mitigate them. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Andrew Krepinevich held that “China is heralding a paradigm shift to something much less stable: a tripolar nuclear system.” Others have characterized U.S.-China-Russia relations as a three-body problem, drawing an analogy from physics in which the interactions between two bodies are familiar and regular but the interactions of three bodies are chaotic and unpredictable. Earlier this year, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory released a report written by high-profile nuclear experts, many with extensive U.S. government experience, who concluded that adequate deterrence when facing two nuclear peers requires the United States to deploy a much larger nuclear force. One retired, long-serving U.S. national security official, Franklin Miller, has argued that this force should comprise between 3,000 and 3,500 deployed warheads, up from about 1,550 today.
But the dangers posed by the existence of two nuclear peers are being greatly exaggerated. Although the United States’ efforts to modernize its nuclear forces are a sensible investment, augmenting the total size of its nuclear arsenal or developing new nuclear capabilities would not be. Such moves would not enhance the country’s ability to deter both Russia and China under even the most demanding scenarios. Even if Russia and China launched simultaneous large-scale nuclear strikes on U.S. nuclear forces, the United States would be able to use its surviving nuclear weapons to inflict massive damage on both countries; each would suffer essentially as much damage as if it had been the United States’ only adversary. China’s acquisition of a large, highly capable nuclear force could create new geopolitical dangers, but none of these will be ameliorated by expanding the U.S. nuclear force.
Rather than enhancing the United States’ security, expanding U.S. nuclear forces in response to the challenge of two nuclear peers would likely decrease it. Currently, U.S. nuclear strategy includes the option of preemptively striking an adversary’s nuclear forces before they can be launched and inflict damage on the United States. This approach generates much larger force requirements when facing two nuclear peers rather than just one. In fact, it would almost certainly lead to a three-way arms race that would divert resources away from other defense needs and exacerbate tensions with China and Russia, increasing the risk of a crisis or conflict that might turn nuclear. In that scenario, Beijing or Moscow might cross the nuclear threshold out of fear that the United States was planning to attack its forces.
Disagreement about nuclear strategy lies at the root of disagreement over the dangers posed by two nuclear peers. Unlike a strategy that focuses on targeting the adversary’s nuclear forces, a strategy that understands deterrence in terms of the ability to inflict damage against an adversary’s society leads to the conclusion that two nuclear peers do not pose a greater challenge than one. As long as the United States maintains a survivable nuclear force that is large enough to inflict catastrophic damage against both China and Russia, it will not need to augment that force. Sullivan was correct to forswear a U.S. nuclear buildup, which would prove an ultimately futile attempt to maintain counterforce and damage-limitation capabilities against two nuclear peers. But if the Biden administration is to achieve its stated goal of preventing a new arms race, it will need to rethink U.S. nuclear strategy and implement fundamental changes—or raise the odds of an arms race and even the catastrophe of a nuclear war.
THE NUCLEAR STRATEGY DEBATE
The debate over whether the United States should plan to target its adversary’s nuclear forces and their command-and-control infrastructure—an approach known as counterforce targeting—is almost as old as the nuclear age itself. Hundreds of books and articles have advocated or critiqued this strategy. Although officials have often framed U.S. nuclear strategy as being designed to deter an adversary by threatening to destroy it—an approach known as countervalue targeting—the United States has long aimed to limit the damage it would incur in a nuclear war by devoting most of its available nuclear warheads to such counterforce targeting. For much of the post–Cold War era, the United States did not openly acknowledge this element of its nuclear strategy. In 2013, however, the Defense Department officially stated that the United States would “maintain significant counterforce capabilities against potential adversaries.” More recently, a series of Defense Department reports declared openly that the United States would aim “to end any conflict at the lowest level of damage possible.” Understanding the challenge posed by the existence of two nuclear peers requires revisiting this classic debate over the wisdom of damage limitation and, hence, counterforce targeting.
In many ways, the logic of a counterforce strategy parallels the logic of traditional military strategy. A state targets its adversary’s nuclear forces to try to win the war and protect itself. Advocates of a counterforce approach also argue that in addition to protecting the state in an all-out war, it would enhance the state’s deterrent in peacetime, during a conventional war, and during a limited nuclear exchange because the adversary would believe a state confident in its ability to protect itself would be more willing to risk escalation.
The fundamental problem with a counterforce strategy is feasibility: preemptive U.S. attacks on an adversary’s nuclear forces would likely not be effective enough to meaningfully limit the damage that could be inflicted by a nuclear peer. An adversary that could detonate 50 to 100 warheads on U.S. cities and infrastructure could do more than enough damage to destroy the United States as a functioning society. China’s nuclear modernization, including increases in the size and survivability of its forces and advances in the sophistication of its nuclear command-and-control system, will ensure that Beijing has this capability even following a full-scale U.S. counterforce attack. Russia has long possessed such a capability.
In recent years, various analysts have disputed this pessimistic conclusion about the feasibility of a counterforce strategy, arguing that technological developments are making nuclear arsenals around the world far more vulnerable and holding that China’s response will not be effective enough to offset U.S. damage-limitation capabilities. This critique is not persuasive. It is true that certain technological advances are improving the ability of highly capable states to find and target opposing nuclear forces. For example, small satellites and machine-learning algorithms are creating the possibility of using a large network of space-based radars to detect and track mobile missiles. Adversaries, however, are likely to respond to such developments. In this action-reaction competition, those adversaries will almost certainly defeat counterforce-enabling technologies by fielding missile decoys, stealthy missiles that can evade radar detection, and counterspace equipment such as satellite jammers and antisatellite weapons. Such innovations have a long history; when the Soviet Union became concerned in the 1980s about the possibility that the United States could track its mobile missiles, for instance, it developed a missile launcher that was virtually indistinguishable from a ubiquitous commercial truck. Moreover, a well-resourced state concerned for the survivability of its nuclear arsenal always has a simple option at its disposal: build more nuclear weapons. Given China’s commitment to acquiring an assured destruction capability, the United States should expect China to respond effectively. Russia may be poorer than China, but precisely because its nuclear forces are likely to play a greater role in compensating for its conventional weakness in the future, Moscow, too, can and will ensure their survivability.
For the first time, the United States faces two nuclear peers, China and Russia.
Given the infeasibility of a counterforce approach, the logical alternative is a deterrence strategy designed to convince adversaries not to attack the United States or its allies by threatening to damage or totally destroy an adversary’s society and infrastructure. Under this policy, Washington would not plan to attack an adversary’s nuclear forces because doing so would not meaningfully protect the United States. Instead, Washington would target its adversary’s economic and industrial infrastructure, including energy and communication systems, ports, and transportation nodes. This strategy need not and should not be composed of a singular threat of all-out attack. The United States could threaten a spectrum of nuclear options, ranging from demonstration explosions to small attacks against isolated infrastructure targets that would result in limited civilian casualties to large attacks that would result in societal destruction.
According to this alternative logic, the relative size of countries’ nuclear forces is irrelevant; all that matters for deterrence is the absolute size of their retaliatory capabilities and their ability to inflict damage. Parity—equal-size forces—is unnecessary. Once adversaries each have an assured destruction capability, expanding their nuclear forces or acquiring new capabilities will not lead to more effective deterrence. Parity may play a political role by making arms control agreements appear fair or implying the adequacy of a state’s forces, but there is no strategic or deterrent logic to it.
Proponents of counterforce strategies offer a host of responses to this argument. Today, the most common critique is that infrastructure targeting, in contrast to counterforce targeting, is immoral and violates the law of armed conflict, which aims to minimize human suffering and the loss of civilian life. This argument fails for two reasons.
First, in practice, counterforce strikes would likewise lead to massive civilian casualties, not only because the fallout from nuclear attacks against missile silos and command bunkers would spread widely but also because some bases for nuclear forces sit near large population centers. In fact, some command-and-control and leadership facilities are in large cities; Russia’s National Defense Control Center, for example, is located in the center of Moscow, not far from the Kremlin. Indeed, when making the case for counterforce targeting, four former U.S. government officials recently argued that the United States must be able to deprive an adversary’s leaders of “their military power, political control and possibly their own lives”—a goal that could not be achieved without launching nuclear weapons against numerous targets located in and around cities. Moreover, as recently as 2009, U.S. nuclear targets were known to include an adversary’s so-called war-supporting infrastructure, which presumably includes industrial facilities such as power plants and ports. The United States probably continues to target such infrastructure; current U.S. doctrine allows for attacks on objects that are indirectly “war-supporting” or “war-sustaining,” and influential supporters of U.S. nuclear expansion have argued for the need to threaten an adversary’s “industrial potential to sustain war.”
In short, the societal damage that would be inflicted by a comprehensive counterforce strike would not be significantly less destructive than that wrought by attacks aimed at infrastructure. The labels “counterforce” and “countervalue”—which are the terms in which the nuclear strategy debate has been carried out—may therefore imply a far larger difference in nuclear war outcomes than would actually occur.
Second, allowing international humanitarian law to guide U.S. nuclear strategy could in fact make a nuclear war more likely. Counterforce attacks intended to save the lives of a state’s own civilians are one of the few kinds of nuclear operations potentially consistent with international humanitarian law. Under such a strategy, however, an adversary would be far more likely to believe that the United States would launch preemptive strikes. In anticipation, the adversary might use nuclear weapons first—perhaps, in the case of Russia, as part of a large-scale strike intended to degrade U.S. nuclear forces but more likely in a limited way to try to coerce the United States into backing down. Once a nuclear war was underway, however, there could be no guarantee that it would remain limited. The most ethical and moral policy, therefore, is not a counterforce strategy but one that minimizes the probability of nuclear war, as well as the probability and extent of escalation if war occurs.
Another argument in favor of counterforce targeting is that it could save U.S. lives. Even though the adversary has an assured destruction capability, with a damaged force it could not destroy everything; U.S. counterforce attacks could therefore cut casualties despite the truly catastrophic damage the United States would surely suffer. But even if counterforce attacks did spare some people, these survivors, who would live in a smoking radiating ruin, would likely envy the dead. Moreover, because counterforce targeting would increase the probability of nuclear war, its net effect would be negative—lives lost, not saved.
Yet another influential argument is that, without counterforce targeting, the United States would have a narrower range of nuclear options at its disposal. A wide range of options is intended to enhance the credibility of U.S. nuclear threats and preserve the adversary’s incentives for restraint, as the United States could always up the nuclear ante. Indeed, the United States should have the option to launch limited strikes, but they should not include counterforce strikes. A small attack against an isolated industrial target would, like a small counterforce attack, inflict relatively little damage, but it would send a clearer signal by emphasizing that the use of nuclear weapons is about bargaining by inflicting costs, not destroying opposing forces in order to limit damage and thereby win the war. As such, it would reduce the pressures felt by an adversary to escalate out of fear that it was about to be disarmed. The United States could have a full spectrum of coercive nuclear options without targeting the adversary’s nuclear forces or command-and-control systems.
HOW TO AVOID A THREE-WAY ARMS RACE
The challenge posed by the existence of two nuclear peers is partly political. If relations between China and Russia become as good as some U.S. observers fear they might, it is possible that Washington may have to fight the two countries simultaneously. And there are other, equally concerning possibilities, including a nuclear war involving one of these adversaries that is then followed by a nuclear war with the other.
Whether planning for these possibilities generates new nuclear requirements for the United States depends on its choice of nuclear strategy. A counterforce approach would require significant increases in U.S. forces. The current U.S. nuclear force, which is sized to cover strategic nuclear targets in Russia, would fall far short in a single attack of being able to also cover a comparable number of strategic nuclear targets in China. A much larger U.S. nuclear force would be required to target both Russia’s and China’s silos, mobile missiles, strategic air bases, submarine ports, command-and-control systems, and facilities that could shelter their top leaders. The advent of mobile missiles has compounded this problem. Unlike targeting a missile silo, targeting a single mobile missile could require many U.S. warheads: even if the United States were able to locate the missile (which might not be possible), it would still need to barrage the surrounding area because the missile might have moved after being detected. Calls for an increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal—by deploying the reserve warheads currently in storage onto active delivery systems—are based on this type of thinking.
Increasing the size of the U.S. force would likely prove self-defeating, however, as both China and Russia could—and likely would—respond by expanding their nuclear forces, thus preventing the United States from meeting its targeting requirements. The result could be an arms competition that does not reach an equilibrium. If the United States could fully target both China’s and Russia’s nuclear forces, Beijing and Moscow would each worry that its arsenal was inadequate. Each would face a greater U.S. nuclear threat than if it were the United States’ only nuclear peer. China and Russia might respond by building up their forces, which, given the logic of counterforce targeting, would create pressure on the United States to do the same. The result could be a steady expansion of all three countries’ nuclear forces and the ensuing damage to political relations that arms races typically generate.
There would be no obvious way out of a three-way arms race.
There would be no obvious way out of a three-way arms race. By the middle of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States became content to settle for parity, which contributed to their ability to end a two-way arms race and even undertake a partially negotiated build-down. But with three states involved, there would be no mutually acceptable formula for arms limitations. The United States might be willing to settle for parity with the combined Chinese and Russian nuclear arsenals; but China and Russia would likely demand that each of them had an arsenal equal in size to that of the United States. Counterforce doctrines can fuel arms races between two nuclear powers; if three nuclear powers are involved, any arms race is likely to be more intense and last longer.
In sharp contrast, a nuclear power that targets infrastructure will see little need to expand its force, even if it faces multiple nuclear-armed adversaries and even if they expand their arsenals. The United States will be able to maintain its assured retaliation capability against China and Russia, as well as targeting flexibility (including the ability to conduct limited nuclear strikes) without expanding its nuclear force, deploying new capabilities, or altering its operational practices. This is in large part because the U.S. nuclear force already contains a huge amount of survivable destructive potential. Each of the United States’ 14 Ohio-class submarines carries 20 ballistic missiles, with each missile carrying up to eight warheads, almost all of which have a yield of 90 kilotons or 455 kilotons. A typical submarine carrying an average of 90 warheads has the ability to inflict the level of damage that is required for assured destruction. And the United States usually has between eight and ten ballistic missile submarines at sea—not to mention 400 silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and up to 66 bombers available for nuclear missions.
Given these capabilities, under an infrastructure-targeting doctrine, the United States would already meet the requirements for deterring Russia and China simultaneously. Neither an expansion of its nuclear force nor the arms race it could fuel would be necessary.
The fact that two nuclear peers do not create new force requirements is not alone an argument for choosing infrastructure targeting. The United States should do so because the deterrence logic is persuasive and because the risks generated by a counterforce doctrine—including incentives to escalate to nuclear war early in a crisis and the political strains of an arms race—are larger.
OUT WITH THE OLD
The logic underpinning an infrastructure-targeting doctrine is far stronger than the logic underpinning a counterforce approach. Consequently, the emergence of two nuclear peers should not require the United States to deploy larger or more sophisticated forces, which in turn reduces pressure for an intensified nuclear arms race. This is the good news.
The bad news is that the United States is committed to a counterforce doctrine and shows no inclination to change it, the Biden administration’s goal of preventing a new arms race notwithstanding. As a result, the United States is likely to greatly exaggerate the danger posed by two nuclear peers and overreact by pursuing policies that increase these dangers.
To be sure, a world in which the United States faces two nuclear peers may bring new risks. The possibility of simultaneous crises with both Beijing and Moscow could create new opportunities for misunderstanding and undesired escalation. For example, China might believe that it was the target of actions, such as the geographic dispersal of nuclear-armed bombers to increase their survivability, taken by the United States to signal its resolve to Russia. One crisis could also ignite another: if the United States placed its nuclear forces on high alert to prepare for an intensifying conflict with China, Russia might believe the United States was preparing to attack it and respond in ways that demanded further U.S. actions. Unlikely as these possibilities may be, they nonetheless confirm that the emergence of two nuclear peers will create new complications and dangers. The important point is that the key approach for reducing these dangers will be diplomacy, including communication in times of both peace and crisis. Expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal would not ameliorate the nuclear threats posed by Russia and China—and might even exacerbate them.
Before responding to the challenge of two nuclear peers, the United States should revisit the question of which nuclear strategy can best achieve its goals of preventing nonnuclear aggression against itself and its allies, avoiding nuclear war, and avoiding catastrophic escalation if nuclear war occurs. The widespread concern generated by the arrival of two nuclear peers provides a window for this reevaluation. If past debates are any guide, the prospects for significant change are poor. But now, maybe more than ever, the United States needs to change its nuclear doctrine by abandoning counterforce targeting in favor of infrastructure targeting. Doing so will enable the United States to avoid overreacting to the arrival of China as a second nuclear peer, generating an unnecessary and futile arms race, and increasing the probability of nuclear war.
Source: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/us-nuclear-arsenal-can-deter-both-china-and-russia