[In fact, it was far more dangerous, with ever-growing stockpiles merely reflecting complex tit-for-tat advances. For instance, one country might develop weapons that could deliver warheads more rapidly, which would require the other to shorten its response time and build redundant, retaliatory weapons.]
By Max Fisher
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President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia could loosen restrictions on the use of
nuclear weapons in
response to a new arms race. Credit Natalia
Kolesnikova/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
|
If President-elect Donald J. Trump meant what
he said, then the world may one day look back to recall that the first
superpower nuclear arms race since the Cold War was announced by two
pajama-clad talk show hosts.
“Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch
them at every pass and outlast them all,” Mika Brzezinski, of MSNBC’s “Morning
Joe” program, said on Friday. She and her co-host, curled up in holiday-themed
nightwear in front of a fake fireplace, said the quote was a statement from Mr.
Trump, elaborating on a Twitter message on nuclear weapons.
Mr. Trump has a history of bluster and his
declarations may turn out to be bluffs. But should he follow through on
instigating a nuclear arms race, the consequences could be severe. Best
estimates of likely Russian and Chinese responses offer a concerning guide. So
do lessons from the Cold War arms race, which brought the world so close to the
brink that once-hostile American and Soviet adversaries worked to reverse the
competition they had once seen as essential.
What
is the aim of an arms race?
Nuclear arms races are not usually something
that states set out to provoke, but are pulled into against their wills.
In the Cold War, the United States and the
Soviet Union saw themselves as reacting to one another, straining to maintain a
strategic balance that would deter war or at least make it survivable.
Winston Churchill remarked in 1954 that more
warheads could accomplish little more than to “make the rubble bounce.”
But this quote reflects a long-held
misunderstanding: that the arms race was a simple matter of accruing warheads.
In fact, it was far more dangerous, with
ever-growing stockpiles merely reflecting complex tit-for-tat advances. For
instance, one country might develop weapons that could deliver warheads more
rapidly, which would require the other to shorten its response time and build
redundant, retaliatory weapons.
While “arms race” describes the sets of
policies that helped make the Cold War so dangerous, arms racing was not in
itself policy. Rather, it was a much-lamented — and much-feared — byproduct of
American and Soviet aims. Leaders on both sides wanted to avoid losing, but
none saw the race as desirable.
The exception, Ronald Reagan, entered office
in 1981 determined to win the Cold War in part by outstripping the Soviet Union
on nuclear arms. But after a few years of tightening response times and
near-miss incidents, he became the most enthusiastic proponent of nuclear
disarmament to occupy the Oval Office.
Though some Americans believe the arms race
won the Cold War, as Mr. Reagan had initially hoped, the two sides ended their
competition willingly — and a few years before internal political and economic
forces would pull down the Soviet Union from within.
Mr. Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail
Gorbachev, sought total disarmament at a 1986 summit meeting. Unable to agree
on terms, they settled for an ongoing drawdown of nuclear forces, reversing the
arms race.
Such reductions have continued since,
codified in treaties such as the 2010 New Start agreement, which Mr. Trump’s
policy would likely undo.
In his Twitter post on Thursday announcing
that policy, Mr. Trump said his goal was that “the world comes to its senses
regarding nukes.”
It is not clear what that means. But whatever
his intention, analysts say that Mr. Trump’s stated desire to provoke an arms
race does have a foreseeable range of outcomes.
Russia:
Trading safety for parity
The two countries most likely to respond are
Russia, whose nuclear arsenal is comparable to that of the United States, and
China, which has a far smaller program.
Though each has a slightly different goal,
both design their programs to counterbalance the United States, and will
therefore calibrate to keep pace with any American advances.
But analysts warn that, in part because the
United States is already so much more powerful in conventional terms, Russia
and China may feel forced to take actions that are destabilizing and put all
parties at risk.
Since the end of the Cold War, Moscow has
seen nuclear parity with the United States as its last — perhaps only —
guarantee of survival against a far stronger Western alliance it perceives as
an existential threat. Falling behind would, in Moscow’s view, invite Russia’s
destruction.
Though Russia’s economy is a fraction the
size of America’s, it has kept up. Should it find parity too costly, Moscow
would likely compensate by expending another kind of currency: its willingness
to accept nuclear risk.
This would be aimed at strengthening Russian
deterrence against any American threat. For instance, Russia might deploy more
nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave located
between Poland and Lithuania. Such missiles can reach European capitals in a
matter of minutes and, because they are fired from special vehicles, can be
difficult to knock out.
Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president,
could also loosen restrictions on the use of nuclear weapons. Some analysts
already believe that Russian military doctrine allows for the use of a single
“de-escalatory” nuclear strike, in case of a conventional war, to force the
other side to stand down. Such policies put a greater onus on the United States
to reduce risk, compensating for any relative Russian weakness.
China:
‘It’s a scary new world’
Beijing’s nuclear aims are less ambitious: to
retain just enough ability that, should the United States attack first, it can
fire a few nuclear weapons in retaliation.
Should Mr. Trump advance American nuclear
abilities — even if this is aimed principally at Russia — China will fear that
an American first strike could wipe out its warheads. This would render China’s
nuclear deterrent effectively obsolete, all but forcing it to compensate.
Vipin Narang, a nuclear weapons expert at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said China would build up its own
abilities, but worried that it would seek a quicker fix as well.
China might preload nuclear warheads onto
missiles to shorten its response time, Mr. Narang suggested. Or it could hide
missiles in hardened locations, like tunnels. It might consider adopting
Pakistan’s practice of putting warheads in unmarked vans and driving them
around the country, in a never-ending road trip, to keep them safe from attack.
China could also decide to abandon its policy
against the first use of nuclear weapons in any conflict “because they could
not afford to go second,” Mr. Narang said.
Mr. Narang emphasized that such steps would
increase the risk of an accident or miscalculation that, while remote, could be
catastrophic.
Of Mr. Trump’s intentions and their likely
impact in Beijing and Moscow, Mr. Narang said, “It’s a scary new world if he’s
serious about, and trying to trigger, an arms race with either or both.”
A
game with no victory
Paul C. Warnke, a senior Pentagon official in
the Cold War’s early years, concluded that their mutual buildups were less like
a race than two runners on adjacent treadmills. “The only victory the arms race
has to offer,” he wrote in 1975, was to “be first off the treadmill.”
Mr. Warnke’s view was controversial at the
time, but later became accepted even by many dedicated Cold Warriors. The early
1980s had seen near misses that had brought the world intolerably close to the
edge.
In 1983, for instance, a Soviet early-warning
system detected an incoming American nuclear attack. It happened to be a moment
of high tension in which the Kremlin had feared a pre-emptive strike.
Because of missile advances that had come as
part of the arms race, the Soviets had only 23 minutes to respond before the
missiles would land — not enough time to double-check equipment, much less
negotiate with Washington. The arms race also dictated that the Soviet Union
respond with overwhelming retaliation against the United States, to quickly
neutralize any further threat.
The Soviet officer in charge of the
early-warning station could see no evidence of a false alarm, but told his
superiors that it was. His guess, proved correct, may have saved the world.
Though the episode would not become public
for years, Mr. Reagan wrote in his memoirs that another war scare, which
occurred that same month when Soviet forces shot down a South Korean airliner
that had wandered into Soviet airspace, “demonstrated how close the world had
come to the precipice and how much we needed nuclear arms control.”
Mr. Reagan principally turned against the
arms race because of its dangers, but others came to oppose it for the simple
reason that, after decades and billions or perhaps trillions of dollars, it had
failed to accomplish victory.
“Building nukes to get others to stop
historically has had the same effect as telling everyone in an email storm to
cease using ‘Reply All,’ ” Joshua H. Pollack, an expert at the James Martin
Center for Nonproliferation Studies, joked on Twitter.
Mr. Pollack added, “There is no last, winning
move when it comes to arms racing.”
The first response came from Cheryl Rofer, a
retired nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos National Research Laboratory: “But
there is a last move.”