If you’re worried that the clashing horns of Kim and Trump might lead to a nuclear exchange, then you won’t want to hear Debra MacKenzie’s report on the breakdown of the MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) doctrine in NewScientist (23 September 2017, paywall):
But beyond that headline news lies a less well-known, but potentially more disturbing, story. A series of seemingly minor technological upgrades have been destabilising the foundations of deterrence, sparking a new nuclear arms race with unforeseeable consequences. “The danger of an accident leading to nuclear war is as high now as it was during periods of peak crisis during the cold war,” says Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
The rules of deterrence as formulated in the cold war depend on guaranteed retaliation to any nuclear strike. If an enemy can knock out your ability to retaliate by launching a surprise first strike on your nuclear missiles – called a counterforce attack – deterrence fails (see “Will they, won’t they?”). …
Just because the US may now be more able to take out another country’s nuclear deterrent doesn’t mean it plans to, of course. But in the game of deterrence, what matters is perceptions. James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank in Washington DC, thinks the US would be very unlikely to try a first strike. It would not find and destroy all of Russia or China’s mobile land-based or submarine missiles, and those that survived would be used to retaliate. “But many experts [in Russia and China] are deeply, genuinely worried about the survivability of their nuclear deterrent, and even if such fears are exaggerated they can drive escalation.”
The growth in US missile defence systems is also stoking these fears. These undermine deterrence by, in theory, allowing a country to launch a first attack safe in the knowledge that it can intercept any retaliatory strikes. In May this year, apparently in response to accelerated nuclear missile development by North Korea, the US conducted the first successful test – against a simulated ICBM – of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system it has been developing since 1999.
In response, China made angry accusations that this would “start a new arms race”. Last year the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, made the same charge, naming US “high precision weapons” – an apparent reference to the super-fuse – plus missile defence as the reason.
I’m not a military historian, but the perpetual arms race can often lead to destabilization when some countries fall too far behind the leaders. Of course, considering these facts in isolation is a mistake; it’s feasible to make the argument that America’s vulnerability in the cyberwarfare sector balances the nuclear weapons advantage -except cyberwarfare only has an outside chance of destroying the world.
So against this backdrop, reports that President Trump thinks the United States has fallen behind in the nuclear weapons department are particularly startling.
President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest-ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.
Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve. [NBC News]
I suppose it’s a graphic example of taking data out of context. I don’t know what was on the slide mentioned above, but here’s a graph from the Arms Control Association:
And here’s some context, same source:
What this doesn’t measure, of course, are relative technological achievements. If that were factored in, apparently the United States would be towering over Russia and China.
And while Trump would consider that good, I’d have to wonder if that tends to destabilize world peace.
