3/20/2014
There’s a plausible case to be made that Russia’s reabsorption of Crimea after 60 years of being attached to the Ukraine isn’t all that important, and the West is over-reacting. Well don’t expect to find anybody in Washington pushing that view. Today’s Washington Post features a lead editorial entitled, “A Dangerous Russian Doctrine,” and all four essays on the op-ed page explore the ominous implications of what Vladimir Putin has done. The persistent drumbeat of disquieting coverage and commentary about Ukraine reminds me of a term I used often when I taught nuclear strategy at Georgetown — overkill.
The North Atlantic Alliance isn’t likely to do anything direct or meaningful about Putin’s fait accompli, but the wheels are already turning within defense ministries and military think tanks about what indirect steps might be taken to deter further adventurism by Moscow. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where this debate will end up in Washington: the delicate balance of terror — the nuclear balance — is back on the table as an active concern. Why? Because the White House was already reorienting (no pun intended) America’s military posture to East Asia, where both of our prospective adversaries possess atomic weapons, and now the world’s other nuclear superpower, Russia, has muscled its way back into U.S. military calculations.
As chance would have it, this strategic shift occurs at precisely the moment when modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has become a major issue among military planners. Washington hasn’t done much to renew its deterrent since the Cold War ended a quarter-century ago. Plans to build 132 stealthy B-2 bombers capable of chasing down Russian mobile launchers in a nuclear war were pared to a mere 20 planes when the Berlin Wall fell, the number of ballistic-missile submarines has been reduced, and so has the number of Minuteman III ballistic missiles sitting in silos across the upper Midwest. The Obama Administration has not built a single new nuclear warhead since it entered office, and has retired more warheads than China has in its entire arsenal.
The U.S. can’t stay on this vector indefinitely without seeing its deterrent whither, because most of the nuclear bombers were built during the Kennedy Administration, the subs are due to start retiring around 2027, and the Minuteman missiles aren’t certified for operation beyond 2030. And then there’s the fact that tritium, the hydrogen isotope that boosts fission reactions to thermonuclear scale, has a radioactive half-life of only a dozen years (unlike plutonium, which pretty much lasts forever). The Pentagon has plans for developing new subs and bombers before the current arsenal has to be retired, but funding is problematic — particularly with spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.
Although President Obama has not interfered with these plans, he has been more focused on arms control as a solution to the nation’s nuclear security. Obama first began advocating a world free of nuclear weapons when he was in college, and he carried that theme into his presidency. An arms agreement concluded during his first term would reduce the number of strategic warheads — warheads readily deliverable over long distances — to 1,550 by 2018, and he subsequently elicited support from the military for a further reduction to 1,000 warheads. The administration’s 2010 nuclear posture review called for reducing reliance on such weapons and endorsed “a multilateral effort to limit, reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide.”
With the U.S. facing nuclear-equipped rivals in Asia and Europe, the delicate balance of terror — the nuclear balance — has reentered U.S. strategic calculations. (Photo credit: The Official CTBTO Photostream)
However, the same posture review stated that Washington needed to “strengthen deterrence of regional aggression and reassure allies and partners of U.S. commitment to their defense.” That goal looks a bit more demanding now that Moscow has accomplished the first forcible change in European borders since World War Two, and it is inevitable that Pentagon officials will use the Ukraine crisis to build political support for their nuclear plans. Providing better air and missile defenses for Eastern European partners is a start, but when it comes to deterring nuclear attack, there is no substitute for possessing a secure capacity to respond in kind. Survivable second-strike forces have been the centerpiece of U.S. nuclear strategy since the 1950s.
What that means for the Navy is winning White House support of special appropriations to begin building a dozen new ballistic-missile submarines in the next decade. The subs are already being designed by the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics, which has been constructing undersea warships since 1900. The Navy wants to commence building the first replacement of current Ohio-class missile subs in 2021 and then buy one per year starting in 2026, but it hasn’t figured out how to fit the $5 billion boats into a shipbuilding plan that only averages $15 billion annually. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert warned the House Armed Services Committee last week that without some sort of special funding mechanism, his service would have to choose between nuclear deterrence and its myriad conventional missions.
(Disclosure: General Dynamics and other builders of U.S. strategic systems contribute to my think tank; some are consulting clients.)
What it means for the Air Force is keeping a secret “long-range strike bomber” on track, and perhaps accelerating the pace at which that airframe is equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. The Air Force wants to begin operating 80-100 of the stealthy bombers in 2025, but had hoped to avoid the cost of equipping them for nuclear operations until the venerable B-52 cruise-missile launcher starts retiring in 2040; if concern about a resurgent Russian threat persists, though, it may move up the date when the new bomber can contribute to nuclear deterrence. The Air Force also needs to decide how it can maintain its silo-based Minuteman missiles beyond 2030. The U.S. arm of British military behemoth BAE Systems recently won a long-term contract to sustain the Minuteman force, but major investment in upgrades or new missiles will be needed to keep the force ready and reliable beyond 2030.
Collectively, these three types of nuclear systems — long-range bombers, land-based ballistic missiles and sea-based ballistic missiles — comprise what U.S. military planners call the strategic “triad.” The different characteristics of the three weapons types are thought to assure a secure retaliatory force because it is too difficult for any adversary to wipe out all three in a surprise attack; knowing that, a rational adversary will be deterred from attacking in the first place. But preserving a credible deterrent requires funding a number of other costly items too, like airborne command-and-and control aircraft, and industrial complexes for refurbishing warheads. The Congressional Budget Office pegs the cost of sustaining the nuclear deterrent at $355 billion over the next ten years.
The most important military consideration that Vladimir Putin overlooked in mounting his annexation of Crimea is how it would bolster the resolve of western nations to maintain their defenses. At a crucial moment in deliberations over the future of the U.S. nuclear force, Putin has reminded Washington that Moscow’s future behavior toward its neighbors cannot be predicted, and that it may take more than “boots on the ground” to deter an aggressor possessing thousands of atomic weapons (not just long-range ones, but also tactical systems stored near Ukraine). Many people in Washington might have been prepared to forego spending money on a new generation of nuclear weapons before Putin made his move, but he has now changed the strategic calculation.
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