The U.S. general who commanded America’s nuclear forces and a few other notable American national security leaders have forged an alliance of sorts with a number of European, Russian, and Asian military officers and national security experts over a most explosive issue. The Global Zero Commission on Nuclear Risk Reduction, chaired by retired Gen. James Cartwright, is calling for the end of U.S. and Russian nuclear “hair-trigger” attack readiness as well as a series of agreements among the “nuclear club” that would end alert status for nuclear forces. Their report concludes that nuclear forces on alert make a nuclear exchange — accidental or deliberate — more likely because of escalating tensions between the United States and Russia. The effort to reduce the readiness level of nuclear forces is, in reality, a stepping stone for the Global Zero movement to continue its push for total nuclear disarmament. This effort, led by Gen. Cartwright, unfortunately misses the strategic importance of maintaining an alerted nuclear force and uses hyperbole and misinformation to advance a flawed argument.
The report makes the amazing statement that basic deterrence and operational cohesion can be preserved even as these radical “risk reduction” measures are implemented. The report offers an expansive view of what “de-alerting” entails, which includes taking warheads out of the land-based and sea-based ballistic missiles, locking down the ballistic missiles so they can’t be launched within 72 hours, taking targeting data off-line, restricting ballistic submarine patrols, removing all non-strategic nuclear weapons from Europe, pulling back on theater missile defense capabilities, and eventually eliminating all land-based ballistic missiles. The report claims that these steps would increase strategic stability and reduce the chance of a terrorist group obtaining a nuclear warhead. Sure, verifying that Russia, China, and the United States are all complying with these proposed steps would be impossible, since no nation will let inspectors go into launch centers or ballistic submarines to see if these measures have in fact been taken. But these are simply minor details to be overcome through other confidence-building measures. What this report really demonstrates is Global Zero’s deliberate distortion of general deterrence theory. The report does nothing to address the rationale as to why we keep nuclear forces on alert.
Alerted nuclear forces are actually a stabilizing force in international relations because they force diplomats and national leaders to carefully consider their next escalatory step. There has to be a credible belief that a nation cannot avoid a violent response if it attacks the United States (deterrence by punishment), or that its goals will not be met even if it attacks the United States (deterrence by denial). If the U.S. nuclear posture is to deter a nuclear or WMD attack by a peer nation-state, there is no better asset position for that mission than the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on alert.
There are two necessary conditions for nuclear deterrence. First, the weapons must raise the cost of an adversary contemplating an attack on the United States. With 450 launch silos serviced by 45 launch control centers, an adversary must have and be able to launch an arsenal of over 500 weapons to wipe out the ICBM force. An adversarial nuclear state that cannot take out the entire ICBM infrastructure has to consider that a retaliatory strike could be inbound within 30 minutes of an attack. This secured strike capability is the basis of assured destruction and deterrence.
Second, the nuclear assets must be positioned and postured to affect the decision calculus of the adversary. If the ICBMs are taken off-line and the warheads for submarine ballistic missiles are not mated, an adversary who didn’t de-alert its forces could easily take out America’s three strategic bomber bases and two submarine bases, thus putting the United States in jeopardy. Without this alerted force, the entire U.S. nuclear infrastructure could be taken out with a force of a few nuclear weapons. Alerted weapons let the adversary know that any preemptive strategic attack against the United States will not work because it will be impossible to take out the entire nuclear force. The inability to preemptively strike another nation requires alerted, responsive forces, dispersal of forces, and positioning forces so that they cannot be located at any time.
Advocates for taking America’s ICBMs off alert fail to put the concept of nuclear alert in perspective. Alert became a feature of nuclear operations since the advent of the ICBM. In fact, Strategic Air Command assumed its first alert tour on 1 October 1957, three days before the Russians launched Sputnik. The missile age reduced the time for leaders to make a nuclear strike decision from days to hours to minutes. These early alerted forces were nuclear-armed strategic bombers capable of reaching their targets within a matter of hours. The main purpose of the alert force, at that time, was to make sure the United States could get its forces airborne to preserve its secured second strike in case of a preemptive attack. While bombers served as the primary alert force in the early years of the Cold War, the ICBM force slowly grew in capability until 1964 when the number of missiles on alert outnumbered the number of bombers. In 1991, the bombers were removed from an alert posture by order of President George H. W. Bush. Since that time, ICBMs on alert served as the primary deterrent force in the U.S. arsenal.
The commission’s report suggests that sole reliance on the U.S. ballistic missile submarine fleet to provide what we call “assured second strike” will maintain U.S. deterrence capability against a first strike scenario. It notes that nuclear bombers could be armed within 48 hours in times of crisis, but might not survive a first strike. While the submarine fleet is survivable due to its stealth, it is not as responsive to national crises as land-based ballistic missiles or bombers, and there would be fewer delivery systems for an enemy to monitor. Also, this recommendation puts all of the risk into one option. If an adversary develops a technology to detect ballistic missile submarines at sea or dedicates more reconnaissance assets to watch the few missile boats move from home base to sea, then our one option to deter a strategic nuclear exchange is in peril. Furthermore, the U.S. triad works because the various legs serve as a hedge in case of a technical or mechanical problem in the other legs. No president or Congress is going to accept that calculus.
While nuclear-alerted missiles provide strategic stability, the argument against them continues to rest on deliberate falsehoods. The first involves the false notion of a “hair-trigger.” The second is that a high-alert status opens the door to a nuclear accident or incident. And the third is that high-alert makes it far more likely that a misinterpretation between world leaders or military forces could lead to a nuclear exchange. All three arguments are full of holes. There is no “hair-trigger” alert. The U.S. military has maintained an unblemished safety record for 25 years.* And constant communications between the United States and Russia dramatically reduce the possibility of such misinterpretations.
What Hair-Trigger?
One of the arguments presented against alert is that these missiles are on a “hair-trigger” — a term used seven times in the Global Zero report. This gives the impression that missiles stand at the ready and all a launch officer has to do is press some red button and nuclear Armageddon occurs. As Gen. Cartwright understands better than almost anyone, this is utterly ridiculous. First, the president is the only person authorized to order the release of a nuclear weapon. The suggestion that the president has less than a few minutes to make a decision for a full-out strategic response based on a tenuous launch warning is a straw man. There is no demand for the president to make a decision within minutes — if there is any doubt, the decision could be to wait until there is clear evidence prior to any retaliation. Secondly, no one individual can launch a nuclear missile. As with all things in nuclear operations, two people must give consent (aside from, of course, the president) before an action can occur. No one person has knowledge of all nuclear codes; therefore, an insider threat is mitigated. Furthermore, crews are directed by relatively short encrypted messages. While the notion of hacking into the nuclear command and control system would make for a great Hollywood movie, the truth is that all messages go through sophisticated levels of encryption so it would be impossible to duplicate an actual message. While the ICBM force has had some bad press recently, none of the infractions ever compromised the integrity of the launch codes or the nuclear command structure.
The Global Zero report states that the risk of the outbreak of nuclear conflict has not decreased proportionally with the significant reductions of nuclear weapons since the height of the Cold War. They insist that a “hair-trigger” alert could result in a nuclear exchange during this period of high acrimony on the international stage. By doing so, they ignore geopolitical context. While tensions between the United States and Russia are undoubtedly higher than we’d like, we are not facing anything approaching the massive competition for global dominance that was the Cold War and the tensions that came along with it. This argument and the others advanced by Global Zero commission reveal their effort as just another excuse for taking nuclear weapon systems offline.
The Accident Red Herring
Another Global Zero argument for eliminating the ICBMs and returning non-strategic nuclear weapons to the United States is that it would reduce nuclear incidents or accidents. (An accident would be an unexpected error due to a failure of procedures such as an unauthorized launch or the loss of a nuclear weapon. An incident would be an intentional hostile event involving a nuclear weapon, facility, or component.) This is a red herring. There have been 32 known “broken arrows” (accidents involving nuclear weapons) in the history of nuclear operations. The majority of these accidents involved aircraft carrying nuclear weapons, and a majority of those occurred in the 1960s when Strategic Air Command was flying airborne alert. A significant accident happened in 1980 when a dropped wrench socket hit a fuel line that eventually caused a liquid-fueled rocket to explode and jettison the nuclear warhead some 600 feet downrange. Today’s nuclear weapons are much more safe and secure than during the Cold War. The U.S. nuclear arsenal has no liquid-fueled rockets (they are all solid fuel) and no bombers flying on alert loaded with nuclear bombs.
Misinterpreting Misinterpretations
Finally, those who would de-alert the nuclear force claim that the slightest misinterpretation could lead to a nuclear exchange. History refutes this claim as well. During the Cold War, bomber and reconnaissance aircraft routinely penetrated the airspace of both sides. This was a commonly-accepted practice to test resolve, prod air defenses, and to signal displeasure with current policy or practices. Even today, Russian bombers enter U.S. and European airspace and U.S. reconnaissance planes loiter on the boundaries of Russia. The United States sends its B-2 Spirit bombers to Europe and Southeast Asia to demonstrate political resolve. It did not lead to nuclear war in the past and it will not in the future, because political and military leaders recognize this for what it is — strategic messaging, not acts of war.
During the early days of George W. Bush’s administration, a Chinese fighter aircraft ran into a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft forcing it to land on Hainan Island. While this was an international incident between two nuclear-weapon states, it did not lead to nuclear war or even a change in the nuclear posture of both countries. Additionally, previous misinterpretations of launches did not lead to a nuclear exchange because both sides understand the importance of strategic context. Some like to claim a false target on a radar screen, a fly landing on the scope, or some other fanciful scenario might happen that could cause an unauthorized nuclear first strike. The Dr. Strangelove scenario of a Gen. Jack Ripper launching the nuclear fleet on an attack to preserve the United States’ “purity of essence” makes for great entertainment but is hardly based on fact. As noted above, the president is the only person who can authorize a U.S. nuclear release and constant communications between the United States and Russia (through the White House “hot line,” the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center, the State Department, and the United Nations) work to prevent such scenarios.
While the Cold War is over and tensions between the two sides have recently increased, there is no current strategic context under which either side would launch a bolt out of the blue. So does this mean nuclear weapons should be pulled off alert? Absolutely not. No one can forecast the future security environment of Russia and China. We are in a multipolar world in which nuclear weapon states other than Russia also pose an existential threat. It is because our nuclear forces are on alert that the United States remains free from the threat of nuclear or WMD attack. If there are people who cannot get out of the Cold War mentality of “Dr. Strangelove,” it is the Global Zero community and not the Air Force.
*The flight of the B-52 bomber from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base in 2007 while carrying six nuclear cruise missiles was an unauthorized movement. However, the nuclear weapons were not armed and never left the custody of the U.S. Air Force. As a result, this is not considered a nuclear accident, as opposed to the 1966 Palomares incident or 1968 Greenland crash (both of which involved B-52 bombers).
Dr. Mel Deaile and Al Mauroni work at the U.S. Air Force Center for Unconventional Weapons Studies. The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Air University, U.S. Air Force, or Department of Defense.
Photo credit: AF GlobalStrike
Keith 
bobbymike 
Mark T 
Alan Wolfe 
Jacob 
ParatrooperJJ 
This reminds me of a scene from the old TV series, ‘That 70s Show’ when the characters Eric and Donna were having an argument, and each had decided to ‘cut the other off from affection.’ They finally came to the conclusion that their standoff was causing each to be tense, making them prone to rash actions, and their efforts to punish each other were backfiring. When you’re staring down a gun barrel at the other guy, so to speak, the temptation to pull the trigger has to be great.
That is the kind of situation that gets created by de-alerting nuclear forces since whoever shoots first wins.
By maintain a robust and credible Triad that ensures no single attack can eliminate our entire nuclear force you remove any temptation for the other person to shoot because they know that even if they kill you with the first shot you will still live long enough to shoot back and kill them as well. We have over 60 years of evidence that mutually assured destruction works and prevents not only nuclear exchange but also direct conflicts between the great powers — why would we trade that all away for nothing but a handful of magic beans?
Great write up and a good explanation of the actual facts – rather than just hand waving nonsense and wishes.
Gen Cartwright continues to do all he can to damage our National Security through reports like this and unauthorized disclosures of classified information. Luckily for him he is a democrat so his name hasn’t been dragged through the media like Petraeus but at least Petraeus only gave the information to his mistress – not the press like Cartwright!
Regardless – good piece. It won’t get the attention it deserves but it is a great rebuttal to the band of fools who would trade the bedrock of our security for a handful of magic beans.
This article is well written and cover the issues very well.
First the whole idea of ‘nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert’ is misleading and deceptive. It is, intended in my view, to give the impression of weapons that could be launched without any C2 or oversight of any kind. The language used is to scare the uninformed public.
It is like my other pet peeve about the arms control community constant portrayal of today’s nukes as a “Cold War” arsenal again intentionally implying we have the same inventory as in the 1980’s. We have reduced arsenals from roughly 13,000 deployed strategic warheads to 1,600 today a reduction of 88%. Interestingly, I have had comments deleted at some arms control sites when I criticize them for their hyperbole.
When arms controllers came out with the study that nuclear modernization would cost $1 trillion over 30 years I simply would post comments indicating that total government spending over that same time period is estimated to be around $190 trillion making the cost of the Triad and nuke labs, etc. only 1/2 of 1% of spending and therefore, in fact, a HUGE bargain.
Could Russia actually be loosing it’s Nuclear Defense Capability?
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/04/is-russia-losing-its-nuclear-defense.html
Could Putler (Al Sharpton with nukes) be threatening to use nuclear weapons precisely because he knows he is in a use them or loose them scenario?
The last generation of fully and adequately trained Russian engineers and technicians is now 50 years old and has been decimated through ‘brain drain’ emigration. In the Soviet Union one completed an apprenticeship under a senior engineer or technician AFTER finishing their university training. So the youngest ones they’ve got who went through the system before it was destroyed in the hyperinflation of the 90’s is 50+.
Younger ones than that may be able to write code for software, but they can’t tackle problems like precision machining and tooling to manufacture spare parts let alone building entirely new manufacturing facilities for the future without bringing outside help from other countries. Right now they can barely keep the clunky stuff from the 60’s and 70’s that they depend on operable.
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Did anyone attend the Symposium in Warrensburg MO (USA) 4-6 May 2015 (ended today) called, “Strategic Deterrence in the 21st Century”? I did. It was very well presented and received.
I’ll post a podcast review of my experiences in a day or so.
Tim Williamson
1-660-362-1377 (o) 1-205-765-6090 (c)
tim@thinkingstrategically.net
Before I begin, I want to be clear about one thing: I don’t agree with all of Global Zero’s findings. I do not believe that the complete elimination of nuclear weapons is a viable course of action, at least in the near term. That said, this article’s arguments are far more flawed.
First, let’s start with the most obvious problem. This article posits that the current triad exists to “deter a nuclear or WMD attack”. In truth this is a tenant of our official nuclear strategy that has been around for a long time and exists to this day. The threat nuclear response to a like attack I will grant. But the argument that our nuclear force can deter chemical or biological attacks is extremely flimsy. The political blowback globally alone for retaliating to a chemical attack on US troops or civilians would be so total and so decisive as to irrevocably end our political, economic, and military access to the rest of the world. Our use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still thrown in the US face to this day, and those strikes occurred during a time when slaughtering several hundred thousand people in a night was normal. But this isn’t a recent argument. The DoD readily admitted that it wasn’t viable back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was that admission that served as the justification for the expansion and modernization of the US chemical weapons arsenal. Threatening nuclear weapons employment against Warsaw Pact forces in the event of chemical employment was viewed as toothless because the Soviet Union made it clear that nuclear employments would be met in kind. And the Soviet Union was a nuclear peer. Imagine a strike against a non-nuclear armed opponent, amplified by global information systems.
Second, this article attempts to diminish the threat associated with misinterpretations made by decision makers. In doing so, the article uses the example of the Hainan Island EP-3 incident from April of 2001. This is an incredibly disingenuous example to use, for two reasons. First, this incident (like many of the incidents that occurred during the Cold War) took place during a period when tensions between China and the United States were low. Second, and more importantly, the PRC does not keep its missile forces on alert! It’s not an applicable example.
That said, since the authors brought up air space penetrations, what about when said penetrations occur when tensions are high? During the Cuban Missile Crisis a U2 strayed into Soviet airspace, leading to a dynamic response by the Soviet’s air defense command, the VPO. As the U2 was fleeing back to base in Alaska, NORAD scrambled interceptors to intercept the MiGs and to protect the U2. These interceptors were armed with nuclear weapons. (https://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/dobbs/maultsby.htm) This incident had the very high probability of escalating should the interceptors have opted to engage the MiGs. Even “small” nuclear explosions like the missiles they were carrying would have easily been perceived incorrectly, and with the “tit-for-tat” mentality prevailing on the part of both sides its easy to see how an escalation spiral could have begun.
This last point brings up another. Throughout this article the authors take a very clinical “line-and-block” chart approach to decision making. In their vision, nuclear weapons reduce tensions because it forces rational decision makers to consider costs that are far too high to stomach. The Cold War, rather than validating this view, demonstrates its flaws. Why? Because decision makers are human, and while they make rational decisions based on cost-benefit analysis and using the evidence at hand are still humans. Competing demands for attention, a lack of information, institutional inertia, and a myriad of other factors make perfect cost-benefit analysis nearly impossible. As such, decision makers are force to approximate as best they can.
Okay, sounds fair. Indeed, this trade-off is more-or-less stable during normal conditions, but what about during abnormal conditions? In 1983 we assumed that the Soviet Union would see the ABLE ARCHER 83 nuclear C2 exercise as exactly that, an exercise. The NATO powers don’t start wars and act entirely defensively. Civil society was continuing as normal. And yet the Soviet leadership was so convinced that a nuclear strike was coming that they pushed their forces to extremely high levels of readiness. The result was that the world very nearly saw a Soviet nuclear launch. Our alerted forces, in fact, added an incentive for the Soviet leadership to pre-empt, since they viewed an attack by NATO increasingly likely, and that our alerted forces meant a launch could occur with little to no warning. This was only exacerbated by the systemic flaws that existed within the Soviet nuclear command and control system.
My third and final point is perhaps the most important. Nuclear posture decisions do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, these decisions must occur in the context of competing national budgetary requirements as well as budget priorities within the Department of Defense. Minuteman missile refurbishment alone will cost $7 billion USD, with a requirement for a new replacement to be designed after. That replacement program will cost at least $10 billion, with more costs for further acquisition. Trident SLBM modernization will likely cost an incredible $100 billion. Contrast this with ongoing cuts in conventional capability across the DoD, occurring so as to preserve funds for only the most pressing modernization programs. The US Army just eliminated 8 full brigade combat teams. The Air Force is gutting its close air support capability to compensate for the growing costs associated with the F-35 program. The Navy is looking to reduce their carrier forces. And while conventional and nuclear modernization and entertainment are not mutually exclusive, hard choices need to be made. And continuing to atrophy the United States’ qualitative conventional edge will do far more to endanger US security than eliminating missile fields.
In short, to maintain what the authors readily admit are essentially overgrown missile sponges they propose to spend massive amounts of money replacing missiles and warheads during a time when the US struggles to maintain its conventional superiority. Tell me, what is more likely to provoke a nuclear exchange: removing our land-based ICBMs, or reducing our conventional forces to such a degree that we’re not able to respond to global crisis? One assumes we’re not going to leave our allies out to dry in the face of conventional aggression (or at the very least we’ll attempt to signal as such). How credible will that be when all you can bring to the table is a rump conventional force and a nuclear force that you can’t use for fear of enemy retaliation in kind? This is setting up 1950’s Massive Retaliation all over again. Do we want to be faced with the choice being made by the United Kingdom? Maintain a Cold War-era nuclear force at the expense of their ability to project force in any meaningful numbers or actually tailor a force that is cost effective, credible, and that permits the MoD to remain conventionally relevant?
Again, I grant there are many serious problems with Global Zero’s proposals. But there are far greater problems in our current nuclear establishment’s facile justifications for maintaining the nuclear status quo. Hard decisions aren’t just for our conventional forces, and maintaining our current nuclear posture won’t create long-term security. It will tether the DoD to a massive white elephant, and in doing so will ironically do what the authors claim: make the US more vulnerable.
Just a few notes. You may disagree with the rationale of using nukes to retaliate against a cbem-bio attack, but it has been presidential policy for more than 20 years. So DoD isn’t prone to telling the president that he’s wrong. I don’t find it likely either but it’s policy.
Re: Cuban Missile crisis and Able Archer. Okay, that’s ancient history. How about referencing post-Cold War crises? Point being that the “hair trigger” argument in the Global Zero report was a poor strawman meant for Cold War situations, not today.
Re: budget. The reason why DoD is losing conventional capability is a decade-plus war, poor acquisition practices, and sequestration. Nuclear ops and modernization still costs less than 2% of the total budget for the next 20 years, and nuclear warfare is the one existential threat to the US. You need to look elsewhere for your “white elephants.”
1) Use of nuclear weapons against WMDs has been a presidential policy for 20 years because the DoD and academic decision makers have done an absolutely lousy job articulating what a terrible idea it is to threaten a nuclear release in retaliation to a CW or BW attack. I don’t think this failure is inadvertent; it provides an excuse to maintain a large nuclear stockpile and the money that goes along with that. Indeed, this article claims to be giving an opinion that is distinct from those of the Air Force, which in theory gives the authors a chance to be intellectually honest about this. Either they actually believe that our nuclear force is credible in preventing CW/BW attacks or they’re deliverable avoiding that problem to strengthen their argument. That makes them either absurdly wrong or blatantly dishonest.
2) ABLE ARCHER 83 and the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred decades ago, but they’re instructive as to how decision makers operate during abnormal conditions. The world has been quite fortunate that global tensions have remained largely calm since the late 1980s. The problem with this is that such calm is neither guaranteed nor likely. We’re already seeing tensions rising within the Russian Federation, and it occurs at a time when Russia is placing a far greater emphasis on their nuclear arsenal to compete with the NATO powers.
The “Hair Trigger” argument is meant to illustrate the problems associated with nuclear weapons during periods of crisis. The counter towards the hair trigger argument forwarded by the authors, namely that it refuses to acknowledge that the President is still in the decision loop, is itself a straw man. The main problem with nuclear weapons during crisis are exactly the ones the authors themselves reference, namely that the amount of time required for the National Command Authority to make a decision is highly truncated due to how rapidly nuclear weapons can be employed. That only makes decision making during abnormal conditions that much more unpredictable and unstable. In fact, much of our nuclear posture does exactly that. The authors seem to think that our ICBMs are very hard to destroy. This point is underscored by the vast number of warheads they claim are needed to guarantee destruction of our nuclear arsenal imply this. But if they’re so invulnerable, why the need for a 24/7 alert?
3) There’s no denying that many of our budget problems have to do with flawed acquisitions and ongoing wars. Yet looking at the world today, do you really see a decline in the number of contingency operations faced by the US military? For that matter do you see the DoD managing to reform its acquisition programs any time soon? I certainly don’t, and that doesn’t bode well for cost control for deploying new land-based missiles. And while that 2% may seem small, consider what else can be done with that money. The USAF, for example, is asking for approximately $10 billion for new nuclear ALCMs and their associated warheads. Add about $20 billion for refurbished and new ICBMs and RVs to go with them to that figure. Just a half-billion dollars allows you to maintain at least one brigade combat team or regimental combat team. Or consider how many amphibious assault ships that money could buy. These are relevant capabilities that we can use now, and having the capability to respond to threats conventionally allows us to deter conventional threats against ourselves and our allies far more readily. If we are unable to use our conventional forces to either hold terrain or recapture it, a nuclear-armed adversary has an incentive to risk conventional aggression, knowing full well that they would be able to retain their gains safe in the knowledge that we’d be highly unlikely to risk a nuclear exchange that would cause unacceptable casualties to our own population. I invite you to consider just how many allies would start running for the hills as soon as that happens.
Look, I don’t deny that maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent force is potentially critical in preventing an existential threat to the United States and its allies. And yet I’m not arguing for total abolition. Maintaining an SLBM force is more than sufficient to maintain a sufficient retaliatory capability to cause unacceptable casualties to a potential aggressor state while freeing up much needed funds and helping to reduce the “use it or lose it” mentality that must exist to make the Minuteman fields to be any more useful than an overpriced missile sponge. The authors bring up the threat of an attack against a reduced number of targets. But even assuming that we’re unable to surge units from these locations during a crisis, we still have at least two SSBNs on patrol at all times who carry more than enough firepower to get the job done. They bring up the problem that relying on SSBNs would simplify the ISR challenges posed by the problem, but how much ISR is even being consumed by land-based missile silos? It’s not a hell of a lot, and the ISR challenge in targeting an SSBN operating in permissive waters is far greater than the authors are willing to acknowledge.
We can maintain a force that is sufficient to guarantee a credible second-strike capability while also doing so cheaply and in such a way as to reduce tensions during crisis. That’s a win-win, but it requires us to step away from our stale Cold War-era thinking. It appears that such a step is inconceivable by the USAF writ-large and a startlingly large number of defense academics. We pretend that the threat posed to our security are nuclear-armed opponents, but I tell you that we’ve met the enemy. And it is us.
Weren’t there still several incidents during and after the Cold War where either side mistook something for a nuclear attack (such as that Norwegian weather satellite launch) and catastrophe only narrowly averted?
In any case, if we need to hedge against a potential technical failure of our seaborne nuclear deterrent, then why not switch from silo-based ICBMs to mobile launchers instead? Shifting more of the nuclear deterrent into the second-strike category ought to alleviate the “use it or lose it” dilemma.
What is the time between a Russian SLBM launch from the 12 mile limit to detonation over DC? That’s the timeframe the NCA has to work with to devise a response.