The New Nuclear Disorder

Challenges to Deterrence and Strategy

Stephen J. Cimbala

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317022718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Peace & Global Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the twenty-first century, the United States confronts an international system of great complexity and shifting security challenges. Among these challenges are those posed by nuclear weapons. Instead of becoming obsolete or being marginalized by the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons have become more important to present and future international stability and peace but the relationship is paradoxical. On one hand, the spread of nuclear weapons to additional states with unsettled grievances or hegemonic ambitions threatens to destabilize local balances of power and set off regional arms races. In addition, the possible acquisition by terrorists of nuclear weapons or fissile materials creates a threat that may be 'beyond deterrence' according to hitherto accepted concepts. On the other hand, nuclear weapons in the hands of other states can contribute to stable deterrence and help to prevent nuclear proliferation to international miscreants. Certain cases loom large in the short run that highlight this book's relevance, including the possible acquisition and deployment of nuclear weapons by Iran and the continuing tensions created by North Korea's nuclear arsenal. The Obama 'pivot' of national security and defense emphasis to Asia reflects not only the growing economic importance of that region, but also the growing number of security dilemmas in a region that is already awash in nuclear forces. The management of nuclear crises and even the possible need to terminate nuclear wars before they expand beyond a single region are among the possible challenges facing future U.S. and allied policy makers and military leaders.

Chapter 1
Geography and Nuclear Arms Control

Geography and nuclear arms control might seem an odd match in subject matter. But there are a number of aspects of nuclear arms control, including proliferation, arms reductions, and missile defenses, that are embedded in geostrategic assumptions and perspectives. The following discussion identifies some of the geostrategic contexts within which nuclear deterrence, war planning and arms control must take place. As Professor Colin Gray has noted: “The influence of geography upon the character of conflict is pervasive at all levels of analysis: policy, grand strategy, military strategy, tactics, and technological choices and performance.”¹

Geography, including geopolitics and geostrategy, is among the fundamental contexts within which strategy making takes place: political, social-cultural, economic, technological, military–strategic, geopolitical and geostrategic, and historical.² One might, in deference to Sun Tzu, add moral-psychological to the list of important contexts for military affairs, although aspects of both are included in the political, historical and socio-cultural milieus.³ It follows that the relationship between geopolitics and geostrategy, on the one hand, and nuclear weapons or nuclear arms control, on the other, is also embedded in these various contexts for strategy.

The Nuclear Revolution Cannot Escape Geography and Vice Versa

At the most basic level, geography and its evident facts, including distance, topography, weather and climate, and terrain, cannot be escaped. Some geopolitical theorists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries may have overstated a good case for the relevancy of geostrategy. Nevertheless, real military planners must plan against the obdurate facts of the moment, and these facts include geography. For example, geography, including climate, is among the reasons for Russia’s history of resisting conquest successfully. Any state territory that can resist the predations of Charles XII, Napoleon and Hitler must present formidable natural barriers, apart from the fighting power of its armed forces or the skill of its commanders. On the other hand, medieval Russia was less successful in warding off invaders from the East—including Mongols. One reason for the greater success of easterly moving invaders against Russian defenders, compared to Western ones, was, of course, the comparatively underdeveloped character of the Russian “state” in the former case. Another factor favoring the Mongols was their art of war and experience in waging fast moving, cavalry-centered battle over unprecedented distances. No other force, from medieval times to the present, has mastered strategic movement over terrain, endurance of weather and climate, and the ability to strike from several main directions under coordinated command-control, as the hordes of Genghis Khan and several of his immediate successors.

Geography defines the various media in which war takes place or might do so. Ancient and medieval warriors had to plan for war on land or at sea. Modern warfare takes place in, or is supported by, military activities on land, at sea, and in the air, space and cyberspace. The last of these, cyberspace, is not strictly speaking a “geographical” expression. But activities that the United States and other countries carry out in cyberspace have military import, perhaps decisively under propitious conditions of war. Therefore cyberspace is a fifth dimension for warfare, and perhaps a trans-geographical one. But not so fast. Traditionalists would warn that armies, fleets and air forces cannot move through cyberspace. Killing zones require kinetic action that must take place in natural land, sea or airborne environments—and, perhaps within the present century, in space as well.

The traditionalists’ caution is well intended, but cyber-enthusiasts would argue that the behavior space within which geography influences war has changed. The arrival of the information age means that geography has become mated to “infography” in compelling ways. Electrons that carry the vital information necessary for military forces to operate, including everything from C4ISTAR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, targeting and reconnaissance) to logistics, do travel in cyberspace. An opponent who could disrupt this flow could conceivably shut down a military operation by turning its brain and central nervous system into sand. Indeed, in information age warfare, disruption is every bit as important as destruction. The ability to disrupt one state’s art of war by denying it vital information in good time, compared to the performance of its opponent, is to bring the first state to the very threshold of defeat if not all the way over it. The preceding point was demonstrated by the Germans in 1940 against France, and by the US and allied armed forces against Iraq in 1991.

Even with regard to computers and other aspects of military cyber operations, however, geography still matters. Hackers, like terrorists, must have safe havens from which to operate. Physical destruction of their locations may put them out of business temporarily or permanently. The challenge is to identify exactly who is hacking and from where. If hackers are located within a powerful state, such as China or Russia, kinetic responses are ruled out. Instead, cyber attackers may be vulnerable to cyber counter-attacks. But even for that, we must know their GPS coordinates. Hackers, like other regular or irregular forces, require food, water, sleep and other necessities—and likely as not, they are on somebody’s payroll. Nor is it necessary to counterattack them all—a few exemplary disappearances or lives lost might suffice to send object lessons. But, given the ease of Internet-enabled cyber attacks and the numbers of persons attracted to this amusement, the defenders will always be outnumbered and forced to rely on considerable measures of self-defense (e.g., firewalls, encryption) apart from the possibility of counterattack.

If the dimensions of future warfare include land, sea, air, space and cyberspace, nuclear weapons can be said to have a geographical aspect with respect to the first four, at least. Nuclear forces are based in certain locations, they are targeted on other locations, and they pose threats of intended and collateral damage that are considerable and unique. Nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare, if that threshold is ever crossed in the twenty-first century, are geographical, and therefore, geostrategic animals. From launchers based on land, at sea or airborne, nuclear weapons can be fired through the air and/or space, over land and sea, across distances that range tens of kilometers to thousands of miles. The United States, with the world’s largest number of deployed, long range nuclear weapons, can in theory hit any location on earth with some kind of nuclear charge, should it choose to do so. In practice, neither the US nor any other nuclear armed state has an unlimited supply of ready weapons, so target plans must specify a finite menu of plausible options. These options must take into account many variables, including the exact locations of targets, topography (in the case of missile silos), weather (for enemy submarines tracking nuclear ballistic missile firing submarines), physical locations of vital military targets and infrastructure (bases, airfields, military manufacturing plants), and other location-dependent activities.

With respect to the construction of nuclear war plans for the purpose of deterrence, the sizes of notional countries of interest, in addition to other aspects of their geography, matter considerably. During the Cold War at various times, both the United States and Russia considered whether nuclear weapons would enable either side to deliver a knockout blow against the opponent’s military forces and/or society. Planners faced the fact that America and Russia, geographically speaking, were actually continents or continental-sized civilizations as much as they were countries or nation-states. The scale of nuclear destruction required to destroy the Soviet or American armed forces during the high Cold War, under the most optimistic of assumptions about the performance of military systems, would also have rendered their societies, and those of their allies, as radioactive deserts. What drove this lesson home for the United States was the Cuban missile crisis, although US and Soviet forces were smaller then than they would later become in the 1970s and 1980s. What drove the point home for the Soviet leadership was Chernobyl and its aftermath. Gorbachev, if not some of his more hidebound military advisors, got the point that the costs of “victory” in a US–Soviet nuclear war would be unacceptable to the American and Soviet people and a crime against humanity—including socialist humanity.

It took the US and the Soviet Union a long time to recognize that, beyond a certain point, the accumulation of more weapons did not lead to an equivalent increase in security. One reason for this is geography, both human and natural. There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, but only so much that can be meaningful to military accomplishment. Some US, and no doubt Soviet, plans for nuclear war required such redundancy in the destruction of military and other targets that the expenditure of ammunition and the firing of rockets would have represented a macabre triptych of Wagnerian opera more than a sensible war plan. On the other hand, it has to be said that planners did the best they could, under the exigent circumstances of their political tasking and in the face of the limitations of available technology and geography.

For example, it soon became clear to US and Soviet planners that firing transcontinental or transoceanic ballistic missiles over the North Pole toward targets in Siberia or North Dakota made more sense than it did to fire them across the Atlantic or Pacific. On the other hand, nuclear war might begin in Europe or Asia as a conventional war, escalating to nuclear first use. So some significant portion of American and allied NATO nuclear ordnance and delivery systems had to be reserved for use in European or other theater operations. The Soviet Union, on its side, had to be concerned with its eastern flank, facing a nuclear armed China and an American-protected Japan. “Theater” or “local” nuclear war planning required, for the Americans and for the Soviets, nuanced political and military guidance beyond the singular war plan for all cases and all out destruction.

Whether tasked for local or global thermonuclear war, American, allied NATO and Soviet military planners faced geographical and geostrategic speed bumps. In the early years of the nuclear age, for example, US targeting of the Soviet Union was done largely by intuition and osmosis. Maps of the interior of the USSR available in the latter 1940s and early 1950s were often based on World War II German intelligence sources or Soviet defectors’ memories. Military overflights of Soviet territory by hostile aircraft were always dangerous, and it is a reasonable inference that more intelligence missions crashed and burned inside Russia than US government officials have acknowledged. The Soviet shoot down of the U-2 flown by Francis Gary Powers created a large political embarrassment for the Eisenhower administration. It was not until the development of space reconnaissance satellites that the United States could establish with confidence the size and character of Soviet long range missile and aircraft deployments. And when it did, it created a political firestorm in the Kremlin, leading to Khrushchev’s dangerous Cuban missile gambit as a short cut to reversing the sudden appearance of American nuclear superiority.

Imaging satellites and other telltales, including satellites and other instruments for collecting signals intelligence, provided an abundance of data for US and Soviet intelligence to pore over during the Cold War. However, geography still imposed limits. Overhead reconnaissance could not be conducted with equal vigilance over all locations of interest—there were simply not enough space borne or other platforms available. This meant, in the US case at least, that interagency controversies over the tasking of photo-reconnaissance satellites resulted in the creation of an interdepartmental referee for the purpose of setting priorities. In addition, satellites and other above-ground observations could not determine some important parameters of interest to nuclear target planners. For example, the single shot kill probability of an American land or sea based strategic missile (ICBM or SLBM) against a Soviet missile silo would have depended upon the hardness of the missile silo, the kind of soil in which it was embedded, whether the attacking warheads were ground or air burst, and other factors. In addition, Soviet ICBMs were not randomly located within its state territory, but purposely distributed across the breadth of the USSR in order to minimize the likelihood of any successful US first strike or, in the event of a Soviet first strike, US counterforce retaliation.

If land based missiles posed targeting problems partly on account of geography and the limits of technology related to geography, submarine launched ballistic missiles were even more demanding. One could observe the locations of ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) when in port or departing from port for patrol destinations. But once at sea, “boomers” defied detection by overhead reconnaissance and locating them, if possible at all, required sophisticated anti-submarine warfare forces (primarily state of the art attack submarines, or SSNs). From public sources, it appears that the US boomers, at least, were virtually undetectable by hostile forces during the Cold War.

After the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, US ballistic missile submarines faced no peer competitor and no ASW force capable of global operations stalked them. However, the boomers were potentially vulnerable when in port, during the Cold War and afterward, which is why a certain percentage of them were always kept at sea. Conversely, the Russian fleet ballistic missile submarine force fell into hard times with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia’s economic problems in the 1990s impacted on defense spending, with the nuclear navy taking an especially hard hit. Plans to modernize the force were announced but not followed through. By the time Putin assumed the office of President in 2000, the sea based leg of the Russian nuclear “triad” was in serious trouble, relative to Russia’s force of strategic land based missiles. During Putin’s presidential term, the Russian economy improved over the preceding decade, and additional funds were devoted to military modernization. Russia has begun to deploy a new class (Borey) of ballistic missile submarines and is testing a new SLBM (Bulava) for eventual deployment with those boats. Russia recognizes that the SSBNs constitute a uniquely survivable deterrent that is required for even the appearance of nuclear-strategic parity with the United States, let alone the reality of survivable forces.

In the case of ballistic missile submarines, compared to land based forces, geography imposes challenges relative to reliable command and control. Submarines, like other maritime forces, must operate with a certain degree of tactical and operational flexibility, compared to forces that are land based. Admittedly modern communications deny captains at sea the autonomy that great “ships of the line” used to have in the heyday of sail. Still it would be self-defeating for submarine commanders not to have the wherewithal for timely and prompt decisions about maneuver and, if necessary, firing their weapons without prior clearance from regional or higher headquarters.

Submarines capable of firing nuclear armed ballistic or cruise missiles require much of the same tactical and operational flexibility as do those equipped with only conventional weapons. But no head of state or chief of the general staff wants to leave the decision for nuclear first use or retaliation, especially the decision to launch transoceanic ballistic missiles, to a tactical commander. Therefore the chain of command will impose certain constraints on nuclear capable SSBN and SSN commanders, including the need for redundancy in the clarification of launch orders, careful screening of personnel for reliability, and specialized message systems from higher headquarters to the submarines on patrol. In the case of the Soviet Union, its Cold War nuclear firing attack or ballistic missile submarines were undoubtedly staffed with political commissars whose approval was also required before launch orders could be authenticated and implemented.

Compared to land based forces and submarines, it might seem that strategic nuclear bomber forces appear to have fewer constraints imposed by geography or geostrategy. That impression is misleading. Bombers require basing, and the operation of bomber bases for planes capable of delivering nuclear weapons over transoceanic or transcontinental distances is actually quite complicated. The first constraint imposed by geography, combined with technology, is that bombers cannot themselves carry enough fuel for intercontinental missions. They therefore require aerial refueling, a technique that is challenging even for the United States. Few states have succeeded in mastering this skill, and none on the scale that the United States is able to do. The reason for this is that, during the Cold War and even afterward, no other state even attempted to field a long range bomber force of the size and complexity of the United States airborne fleet. Modernization of the US bomber force has been sporadic over the decades of Cold War and subsequently. Periods of high thrust in research, development and deployment have alternated with slow rolls. Nevertheless, old platforms endure: the redoubtable B-52 was still flying as a component of the US nuclear-strategic triad into the twenty-first century.

The command and control of bomber forces is also more complicated than it appears to be. This is, ironically, because bombers have one “advantage” over missiles: they can be sent aloft, flown partway toward their targets and then recalled if crisis conditions change. During much of the Cold War, a certain percentage of the US strategic bomber force was always kept on ready or strip alert so that they could be scrambled out of harm’s way in case of Soviet first strike. If, however, a nuclear crisis were protracted, bombers would have had to return to base: they could not stay aloft indefinitely, or even as long as ballistic missile submarines could be kept dispersed and hidden at sea. Bombers could move from one location to another during a crisis as a signal to the other side of US seriousness about the stakes. This use of bombers for political signaling happened more than once during the Cold War, including in contretemps with both the Soviet Union and China. Forward basing of nuclear capable bombers, say in Guam, did not commit the US to irrevocable nuclear conflict, but it did create a greater capability for delivery of munitions of choice noted by potential adversaries and others.

Another geographical or geostrategic aspect of bombers was their slow rate of flying, compared to missiles. This made missiles the preferred weapons for nuclear first strikes, once they were available in sufficient numbers, and bombers more appropriate for delayed as opposed to prompt missions. In addition, the technical capability for MIRVing long range ballistic missiles (placing multiple warheads on a single missile and allowing each warhead to be directed to a separate target) increased the destructive capability of US and Soviet ballistic missiles by a significant factor—especially if either force was employed in a first strike. MIRV was also attractive to military planners and defense budget managers because it enabled more “bang for the buck”: each single ballistic missile could delivery ordnance against as many as 10 targets, as in the case of the largest Soviet intercontinental land based missile (the SS-18). As a result, MIRVed ballistic missiles took on the aspect of the “bad guys” that threatened deterrence and crisis stability, compared to the bomber “good guys” whose platforms were now almost certainly confined to retaliation after attack. In addition, mistaken launches of bombers could, as noted above, be recalled before Armageddon ensued: ballistic missiles lacked this option (some scientists proposed the addition of a “command destruct” option for ballistic missiles, but policy makers and military commanders found the temptation resistible).

Another asymmetry between Cold War bomber and missile forces, related to the overlap between geostrategy and technology, was the problem of defense against nuclear attack. As is well known, during the latter 1940s and much of the 1950s, the US and the Soviet Union anticipated that a third world war would involve large scale attacks by nuclear bomber forces. It was thought that air defenses could pose a credible threat of mitigation against bomber forces, protecting both military targets as well as civilian populations from mass destruction. However, once the intercontinental ballistic missile forces superseded long range bombers as weapons of choice for prompt attacks, this relationship between the prospective attacker and defender changed. Air defenses might have promised some meaningful attrition against bombers, but no antimissile defenses worthy of the name were available or on the drawing boards. Admittedly the Americans and Soviets both tried hard—both states fielded more than one generation of strategic antimissile defenses from the 1960s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Geography and Nuclear Arms Control
• 2 Anticipatory Attacks and Nuclear Weapons: Challenges to Deterrence and Crisis Stability
• 3 Nuclear Crisis Management in a Digital
• 4 Ending a Nuclear War: Deterring and Controlling Escalation
• 5 Cyber War and Nuclear Weapons
• 6 Tsar Wars and Star Wars: Missile Defense, Nuclear Arms Control and Putin
• 7 Nuclear Weapons in Asia: Perils and Promises
• 8 Nuclear Proliferation: Theory and Reality
• 9 Deterrence and Intelligence in Nuclear History: The 1983 “War Scare”
• 10 Armed Persuasion and Arms Control: Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, February 21–March 18, 2014
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index