Deterring an Attack on the U.S. Trumps Non-Proliferation?

The nuclear risk reduction community is having a rough go of it lately.

Some claim that the United States is in large part to blame for the stalling out of global nonproliferation efforts, due to America’s nuclear modernization program. Some suggest that the current discussion in Washington over whether the U.S. should reverse its 35-year effort of reducing its nuclear stockpile and instead expand the number of operationally deployed nuclear weapons will cause adversaries to field additional weapons.

All of this is being offered while China is the fastest-growing nuclear power on the planet, North Korea regularly threatens to turn the United States, Japan, and South Korea into a “sea of fire,” and Russia has a 10-to-one advantage in non-strategic nuclear weapons over the United States and regularly threatens to use nuclear weapons on our allies in Europe.

One can understand being upset at Russia—which has lied and cheated at multiple nuclear arms control treaties and agreements over the last 10 years—and China—which refuses to engage in any form of arms control discussions, but frustration at the United States is odd.

The United States tried for years to get Russia and China to get to the negotiating table, with no success. President Obama famously tried—and failed—to get to a world without nuclear weapons.

In short, the United States for 40 years has tried to get to a world without nuclear weapons—but no one has followed.

Indeed, Russia’s behavior and its ongoing military threat to NATO has caused some countries in Europe to question whether they need their own nuclear capabilities. Meanwhile, allies such as Korea and Japan increasingly are discussing openly whether they should field their own independent nuclear arsenals as well.

Indeed, the growth of the Chinese and Russian nuclear threats are such that the United States may need to not only field additional strategic warheads on existing ballistic missiles in order to deter two nuclear peers simultaneously, but also deploy additional non-strategic nuclear weapons to Europe and reintroduce theater-range nuclear weapons to the Western Pacific.

In fact, the United States putting theater-range, non-strategic nuclear systems into Europe and Asia may be the only thing that assures those countries about the efficacy of the American nuclear umbrella and prevents European and Asian them from seeking their own indigenous nuclear capabilities.

This raises important questions then for the nuclear risk reduction community:

Is it willing to accept vertical proliferation (the United States fielding more nuclear weapons) in order to prevent other states from becoming nuclear powers? Or is it so focused on reducing total numbers of nuclear weapons that it is willing to risk horizontal proliferation (more nuclear weapons states) so long as the United States does not deploy more nuclear weapons?

Is it so tied to “Article VI commitments” that it is willing to condemn the United States for not disarming according to their own timelines and demand that the United States forgo any additional nuclear deployments that they run the risk of the Nonproliferation Treaty itself becoming irrelevant or ignored?

There are no easy answers.

Those who advocate for nuclear risk reduction instead should maintain a credible nuclear deterrent, limit damage should nuclear war erupt and provide extended deterrence to prevent allied proliferation. These objectives have the happy coincidence of producing the conditions in which arms control is most feasible: that is when the United States is secure in the knowledge that it can accomplish the aforementioned objectives,  which then incentivizes adversaries to come to the negotiating table because they recognize that trying to gain an advantage over the United States will be too costly, be unlikely to work, or would require too many resources that could go to other priority areas. 

And at a certain point, those in the nuclear risk reduction community should understand that for national security professionals, the NPT is a useful tool, but it is not a core national interest of the United States. Deterring a strategic attack on the American homeland or the homeland of an ally, however, is.

And if preventing a strategic attack on the U.S. homeland requires more nuclear weapons, then most national security professionals may be willing to—reluctantly—watch the nonproliferation regime slide into irrelevancy.

Robert Peters is a Senior Research Fellow for Strategic Deterrence in the Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for National Security.