The New York Times “An Arsenal We Can All Live With” (May 21, 2010)
By Gary Shaub Jr. and James Forshyth Jr.
Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.
THE Pentagon has now told the public, for the first time, precisely how many nuclear weapons the United States has in its arsenal: 5,113. That is exactly 4,802 more than we need.
Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the Senate to advocate approval of the so-called New Start treaty, signed by President Obama and President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia last month. The treaty’s ceiling of 1,550 warheads deployed on 700 missiles and bombers will leave us with fewer warheads than at any time since John F. Kennedy was president. Yet the United States could further reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons without sacrificing security. Indeed, we have calculated that the country could address its conceivable national defense and military concerns with only 311 strategic nuclear weapons. (While we are civilian Air Force employees, we speak only for ourselves and not the Pentagon.)
This may seem a trifling number compared with the arsenals built up in the cold war, but 311 warheads would provide the equivalent of 1,900 megatons of explosive power, or nine-and-a-half times the amount that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara argued in 1965 could incapacitate the Soviet Union by destroying “one-quarter to one-third of its population and about two-thirds of its industrial capacity.”
Considering that we face no threat today similar to that of the Soviet Union 45 years ago, this should be more than adequate firepower for any defensive measure or, if need be, an offensive strike. And this would be true even if, against all expectations, our capacity was halved by an enemy’s surprise first strike. In addition, should we want to hit an enemy without destroying its society, the 311 weapons would be adequate for taking out a wide range of “hardened targets” like missile silos or command-and-control bunkers.
The key to shrinking our nuclear arsenal so radically would be dispersing the 311 weapons on land, at sea and on airplanes to get the maximum flexibility and survivability.
Ideally, 100 would be placed on single-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles, like the Minuteman III systems now in service. These missiles, which have pinpoint accuracy, are scattered around the country in such a way that only one potential enemy, Russia, would have any chance of rendering the arsenal impotent with a surprise strike. (And it is likely that our unilateral cuts would entice Moscow, which has been retiring its systems at a fast clip in recent years, to follow suit.) Equally important, these missile sites are easily detected and monitored, which would reassure our friends and provide a credible threat to our enemies.
The sea leg of the plan would involve placing 24 Trident D-5 missiles, each with a single nuclear warhead, on each of our Ohio-class submarines. Today’s fleet of 14 can be cut to 12, with eight on patrol at a given time, together carrying 192 missiles ready to launch. The Tridents are extremely effective, as they can be moved around the globe on the submarines, cannot be easily detected, and present a risk to even hardened targets. And should any of our allies feel that our cuts in seaborne missiles are worrisome, we can remind them that the British and French will keep their complementary nuclear capabilities in the Atlantic.
Finally, for maximum flexibility in our nuclear arsenal, each of our B-2 stealth bombers could carry one air-launched nuclear cruise missile. While we have 20 such bombers, we assume that one would be undergoing repairs at any given time, giving us the final 19 warheads in our 331-missile plan. Our B-2 fleet is more than adequate for nuclear escalation control and political signaling, and giving it an exclusive role in our nuclear strategy would allow us to convert all our B-52H bombers to a conventional role, which is far more likely to be of use in our post-cold-war world.
While 311 is a radical cut from current levels, it is not the same as zero, nor is it a steppingstone to abandoning our nuclear deterrent. The idea of a nuclear-weapon-free world is not an option for the foreseeable future. Nuclear weapons make leaders vigilant and risk-averse. That their use is to be avoided does not render them useless. Quite the opposite: nuclear weapons might be the most politically useful weapons a state can possess. They deter adversaries from threatening with weapons of mass destruction the American homeland, United States forces abroad and our allies and friends. They also remove the incentive for our allies to acquire nuclear weapons for their own protection.
We need a nuclear arsenal. But we certainly don’t need one that is as big, expensive and unnecessarily threatening to much of the world as the one we have now.
According to a Reuters article (May 3, 2010), the Pentagon recently pronounced that the U.S. presently has “a total of 5,113 warheads in its nuclear stockpile at the end of September, down 84 percent from a peak of 31,225 in 1967. The arsenal stood at 22,217 warheads when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.” And according to a book coauthored by an undergraduate professor of mine (Hope in Troubled Times) the U.S. spends about $100 million per day to maintain its nuclear arsenal (2007). Furthermore, the book states that even by 1970 one nuclear armed U.S. submarine had the capability to destroy 160 Soviet cities, simultaneously. I just wanted to give some stats to preface my response.
ReplyDeleteThe authors make both a moral and a strategic argument. First, their moral argument is very brief and mostly implicit. In a few words, “[Nuclear weapons] deter adversaries from threatening with weapons of mass destruction the American homeland, United States forces abroad and our allies and friends.” Implicitly, they argue that it is right for the U.S. to protect itself and its allies against aggressive states that threaten the use of weapons of mass destruction, and a sufficient nuclear deterrent is the only way to achieve this valid goal in our present world. Second, their strategic argument basically states that the U.S. can and should reduce its nuclear arsenal by 4,802 to a total of 311 warheads, dispersing these “weapons on land, at sea and on airplanes to get the maximum flexibility and survivability.” Nuclear deterrence theory basically says that as long as one nation can absorb a nuclear first-strike from an adversary and still be able to launch a devastating second-strike, then that adversary will be deterred from launching a first-strike. The authors simply argue that a properly dispersed nuclear arsenal of 311 warheads would be more than adequate.
Too few Christians, in our institutional and individual voices, have shown proper concern about the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, even if it is a shadow of what it once was. I’ll make three points. First, the fewer nuclear weapons the U.S. has to secure, the less of a chance of an accidental launch. Second, fewer nuclear weapons would further limit the U.S. to only use nuclear weapons for deterrence. Third, politics is about tradeoffs between “goods” and “bads” and between “greater goods” and “lesser goods.” Public resources not spent on such a large nuclear arsenal could be redirected to other more important and more just priorities.
When it comes to the use of force Christians should always be the ones who emphasize the limits of war. Christians should always be the ones who remind our leaders that the burden of justification for maintaining a nuclear arsenal of whatever size falls on them. It is not primarily on us to explain why such an arsenal should be so limited, though we should explain it. Because nuclear weapons have very little, if any, battlefield applications (without being indiscriminate toward civilians) Christians should advocate for their most limited use. That use is the deterrence of a nuclear attack. The two Pentagon professors who wrote the article make the case that deterrence only requires 311 warheads. Even though this kind of reduction is politically impossible at this time, Christians should be a strong voice now for drastic reduction based on our firm conviction that deterrence is the only just purpose for such destructive weapons.