How Should We Respond to Russia's Violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty?

From the low readership on my last post on Russia's violation of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, there is not a great deal of interest here about this issue.  Too bad!  this is important!  Eat your national security spinach!

Michael Krepon of the Simpson Center has a very useful and thoughtful post on the issue.  He concludes that Russia is in material breach of the Treaty, that the violation is not militarily significant, that it would be a mistake for the U.S. to either pull out of the Treaty or to increase its deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, but that there are steps that we can take (and by and large, are taking) to reassure our allies.  Here is a small portion of this thoughtful analysis:

The SSC-8 is a minor accessory to the nuclear wardrobe of the Russian Federation. The United States possesses more than enough nuclear firepower to make the rubble bounce in Russia in the event of a nuclear war. The rationale behind the SSC-8’s deployment does not seem to be linked to war-fighting requirements. Instead, Moscow appears intent to soften up NATO, demonstrate opposition to U.S. forward-deployed missile defenses, and drive a wedge between the United States and allied or friendly states in Europe. The best rejoinders are those that shore up these ties while demanding the removal and destruction of existing SSC-8s as well as the re-imposition of the INF Treaty’s monitoring at production facilities where these missiles have been built.

.  .  .

The smartest moves are to double down on the European Reassurance Initiative and to open up a diplomatic track alongside the military preparedness track – which is how the INF Treaty came about. The smart 21st-century counters to Cold War-era nuclear posturing involve precision-guided, stealthy, standoff conventional weapons. The United States holds these high cards, and can share more of them — including extended range, air-launched cruise missiles that are not covered by the INF Treaty — with NATO allies if the Kremlin continues to deploy Euro-missiles. This prospect, along with the prospect of more theater missile defense deployments in Europe, might persuade Vladimir Putin to return to compliance with the INF Treaty.

The entire piece is well worth reading.  Perhaps its greatest value for the non-expert, is that it displays the sophisticated and layered analysis that is essential  to a na analysis of a national security problem.

Trump's Statements About Needing More Nukes Is Wrong and Dangerous

In an interview with Reuters yesterday, President Trump made some stunning comments about nuclear weapons.  He suggested (and not for the first time) that he wanted to increase the U.S. nuclear arsenal.  As Reuters reports, "he wants to ensure the U.S. nuclear arsenal is at the "top of the pack," saying the United States has fallen behind in its weapons capacity." In addition, he called the New Start Agreement with Russia "a one-sided deal," and elaborated that it was "[j]ust another bad deal that the country made, whether it's START, whether it's the Iran deal ... We're going to start making good deals."

This is so wrong, and misinformed, that I hardly know where to begin.  Perhaps I should start with this fact:  in my five years as Air Force General, I never once hear any military leader suggest that we needed more nuclear weapons.  Mind you, I heard Air Force Generals complain about other parts of our force structure:  I heard plenty about the need for more aircraft used in conventional warfare, but not even a hint that we needed more nukes.  Even more remarkably, I served on the Air Force Nuclear Enterprise Board, and was part of the discussions about how the Air Force would comply with the New Start Agreement (which required a reduction in our ICBMs), and did not hear even a hint that the New Start reductions were a problem.  To the contrary, the New Start Treaty was endorsed by the entire membership of the Joint Chiefs of Staff , the Commander of Strategic Command, which is the command that is responsible for the military arsenal, and seven former Strategic Command Commanders.  This should have been no surprise because the limits in the Treat were based on the rigorous analysis conducted by Department of Defense planners in support of the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review.

The New Start Treaty placed equal limits on Both Russia and the U.S., but gave each side a great deal of flexibility in how they used these limits.  The limits are:

• 700 deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), deployed submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments;
• 1,550 nuclear warheads on deployed ICBMs, deployed SLBMs, and deployed heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments (each such heavy bomber is counted as one warhead toward this limit);
• 800 deployed and non-deployed ICBM launchers, SLBM launchers, and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments.

Our nuclear forces have two main purposes--to deter a nuclear attack against the United States and to provide a deterrent "nuclear umbrella" for our allies as well.  Our military experts ar confident that the current nuclear forces are more than adequate to achieve these objectives.  The suggestion that we should jettison the New Start Treaty, which would allow Russia to increase its nuclear capabilities without limit, is just madness.

Right now the Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals far exceed (by a factor of four) the number of nuclear weapons of the other countries.  There may well come a time when another country's arsenal (such as China) becomes significant enough that the U.S. arsenal does not provide a deterrent.  At that point, we will either need to include China in a three-way agreement, or once again add to our arsenal.  Until then, building more nuclear weapons (and thereby abrogate New START) is unnecessary and unwise.

Are Nuclear Weapons Useful for Coercive Diplomacy?

The conventional wisdom in national security circles has been that in addition to their use as a deterrent, nuclear weapons can also be used as a tool of coercive diplomacy.  In other words, nations with nuclear weapons are able to achieve land, concessions or power that they otherwise would not be able to obtain without nuclear weapons.  A new book by Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy, uses a careful historical and statistical approach to cast serious doubt on this conventional wisdom.  

Andrew Bast of the Los Angeles Review of Books summarizes the conclusions of the book:

In Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy, scholars Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann want to answer the question, “What has [the United States] been able to do with nuclear weapons that it could not have done without them?” Sechser and Fuhrmann challenge the notion that nuclear-armed countries are more threatening on the world stage, that nukes help win negotiations, take territory, and generally bend the will of other states to their own. “An emerging wisdom in international relations scholarship,” they write, “says that countries with large nuclear arsenals can bully other states into submission.” Then they slowly dismantle that notion with a deep academic dive into a range of international conflicts over the last seven decades and conclude that “nuclear weapons have far less utility for coercive diplomacy than many people believe.”

Why is that? Sechser and Fuhrmann make a point that Trump would be wise to review in light of his comments about possibly battling ISIS with nukes. “The military utility of nuclear weapons is limited,” they write, “and often redundant to the capabilities of conventional weapons.” In addition, the international norms that have emerged over the last seven decades of the nuclear age dictate that any use of nuclear weapons would spark a fierce international backlash, one so powerful from other states and the broader public, they suggest, that would threaten the “security, prosperity, and the political fortunes” of any country and its leaders who actually launched the nuclear attack.

As the CATO Institute suggests, these conclusions raise significant issues:

 This has significant implications for U.S. foreign policy. What do these findings suggest we should expect from our nuclear-armed rivals, like Russia and China? Does it make sense to undertake preventive military action against nascent nuclear weapons programs in countries like North Korea? If Iran were to get nuclear weapons once the time-limited restrictions in the JCPOA expire (as critics of the deal suggest), how would that influence its behavior in the region?

Of course, the issue is far more complex that CATO suggests.  Iranian nuclear weapons, for example, would likely lead to other nations in the region (such as Saudi Arabia seeking their own nuclear weapons), which would destabilize the region.  Moreover, a country with otherwise weaker conventional forces can deter threats if they have nuclear weapons.  This, in turn, can allow them to engage in aggressive activity without threat of retaliation.  For example, would the US and its allies have come to Kuwait's defense if Iraq had nuclear weapons and threatened to use them?

What do you think?

A Primer on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces ("INF") Treaty

With the resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and the reports of several FBI investigations of alleged Trump campaign contacts with Russian intelligence officers, there is heightened interest in all aspects of our relationship with Russia.  I previously discussed concerns about a Russian spy boat off the coast of the United States.  This post will focus on reports of Russian violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, also known to cool people in the know as the "INF" Treaty.

First some background on the treaty itself.  During the 1970's, the USSR began  to develop and deploy an intermediate  nuclear armed missile known as the SS-20, which improved the Soviet's ability to reach European targets.  In response, NATO began to deploy is own intermediate nuclear missiles (ground-based cruise missiles and the Pershing II missiles.  NATO also sought to reach an agreement with the Soviets, but the Soviets were not receptive until Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet General Secretary. The US and NATO had several non-negotiable demands: that the Treaty be global in scope (and not just apply to missiles in Europe) and that it not apply to British and French missiles.Ultimately, the USSR and the US agreed to a worldwide elimination of all ground-launched intermediate missiles (defined as missiles with a range of 300-3400 miles).  This resulted in the elimination of existing missiles on both the US and USSR sides, but did not effect the French or British arsenals.

Russia is not subject to the Treaty as a successor State to the USSR, and it has shown some signs of buyers remorse.  It has noted its concern that nations around it--such as France, the UK and China, are not subject to these restrictions.  It has also argued that the development of a missile defense system in Europe has changed the strategic balance, and this might make termination of the INF Treaty inevitable.  Nonetheless, Russia has not taken steps to terminate the Treaty.

The recent controversy about alleged Russian violations of the INF Treaty have been years in the making.  In July 2014, the United States first officially declared that Russia was in violation of the Treaty by testing a new cruise missile.  The Russians denied that this was the case, and alleged that the U.S. itself was in violation of the INF Treaty (by the missiles it uses as targets for the missile defense system, among others).  The US formally initiated the dispute mechanisms in the Treaty (the first time this was done), and the parties met to discuss the violations in November 2016.  The New York Times has now reported that officials believe that Russia has gone beyond mere development of the missile and has begun to produce enough cruise missiles to deploy them.

Almost all that is occurring is highly classified and is happening behind closed doors.  We don't even know the Russian explanation about why the new missile does not violate the Treaty.  Nonetheless, this issue is raising several sets of questions?

First, what is Russia attempting to accomplish by developing a cruise missile capable of hitting targets in Europe?  I can only offer speculation, but there are some obvious possibilities.  We know that Russia is very concerned about the development of even a modest missile defense system in Europe.  Russia is also concerned about the fighter-aircraft-based nuclear weapons in the NATO arsenal.  It may well be that Russia is developing the missile as a bargaining chip to be used in a negotiation to get rid of both the aircraft-based nuclear weapons and the missile defense system.  Alternatively, the missile system may be part of its strategic efforts to put a wedge between US and European countries on a security issues.

Second, what are the possible US responses?  One option, of course, would be to terminate the agreement, and build a new cruise missile system to counter the Russian systems.  The downside to this option is that it will require the costly development of a missile not even on the drawing board, with little apparent strategic advantage.  I can think of much ways to speed our defense dollars.  Because the treaty only applies to ground-launched systems, the US could also deploy air and ship based systems.  Finally, of course, the US could use this dispute to negotiate a broader agreement that could, for example, place limits on tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

The real question on everyone's mind, of course, is what President Trump will do on this issue.  To be fair to President Trump, the Russia-U.S. meeting on this issue only took place in November, and both the department of Defense and the Department of State may still be developing recommendations for the President.  In light of the swirling taint of scandal regarding his campaigns relationship with Russia, however, it needs to develop a response soon.

It is in the interest of the United States to keep the INF Treaty in place.  The elimination of an entire type of weapon system was a huge accomplishment, and a new arms race concerning nuclear weapons in Europe would hardly be to our advantage.  Still, the Treaty violations, if verified, cannot go unanswered.

A good resource on this issue, by the way is an Issue Paper issued by the Arms Control Association.

Could America Really Win a Limited Nuclear War?

Geoff Wilson and Will Saetren have an interesting  post at National Interest that asks several interesting questions:  could the U.S. win a limited nuclear war? Should we spending more energy planning for a scenario?  They offer an emphatic (and persuasive) NO.  The question is not an academic one:  the Defense Science Board has recommended that the Trump Administration make the U.S. nuclear arsenal more capable of fighting a limited nuclear war.  In addition, the U.S. still has tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.  Finally, Russia's apparent violation of the Intermediate Ballistic Missile Treaty could result in the U.S. itself adding new intermediate missiles in Europe.

 Against this backdrop, Wilson and Saetren argue that trying to win a limited nuclear war is misguided.  The whole piece is worth reading, but this example was particular chilling:

That belief is a fantasy. The real problem with this proposal is that any use of nuclear weapon, limited or not, could lead to escalation.

In fact, the Reagan administration launched a wargame in 1983 to test the Madman Theory and analyze the viability of U.S. nuclear warfighting plans. Codenamed Proud Prophet, the exercise had NATO launch limited nuclear strikes against Soviet targets in response to conventional provocation. But instead of backing down, the Soviet team doubled down, launching a massive nuclear counterattack at the United States, to which the U.S. responded in kind.

Wargame over.

When the dust settled half a billion people had been annihilated. NATO was gone. The results were reportedly such a shock to Reagan that his schedule had to be cleared for the rest of the day. The blowback was swift.

Read it all here.