Inconvenient Facts for the Disarmament Community

Since its release in October of last year, President Joseph Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) has garnered significant criticism from the arms control community because it did not include the desired nuclear arms reductions or changes to nuclear use policy. Disarmament advocates are suggesting that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and nuclear threats against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are evidence that deterrence is not possible. They criticize the President for not doing enough to disarm the United States.

While disarmament advocates are entitled to their own opinions, they are not entitled to their own facts. The following are eight inconvenient facts the nuclear disarmament community fails to address.

In real terms, disarmament advocates were wrong about the peace nuclear arms reductions were said to bring. The world is more dangerous today than at any point in the past three decades and getting worse. If the United States reduces or eliminates any element of the nuclear arsenal, future administrations will grapple with the implications of the increased threat with a diminished timeline, especially as China and Russia continue to cooperate in their efforts to overturn the liberal international order created by the United States.

It is worth noting that Russia and China are not modernizing and growing their nuclear forces to match American nuclear capabilities. They are seeking to mitigate American conventional military superiority. Thus, when nuclear disarmament advocates suggest we can offset nuclear weapons with conventional weapons to deter adversaries, their advice drives further Russian and Chinese increases to their nuclear capabilities, not diminish them, as history has shown.

Second, the United States modernization program is not increasing the size of the nuclear force, contrary to the claims of nuclear disarmament advocate Tom Collina. The United States is merely recapitalizing its strategic triad, swapping one-for-one and replacing weapon systems that are between thirty and fifty years old and well beyond their planned service life. The 1960s- and 1970s-era technology upon which most of our nuclear delivery platforms are based are now well out of date.  

The use of modern methods for engineering and design actually provides for a more reliable, sustainable, and safer nuclear arsenal, decreasing the inventory needed to ensure needed operational effects. Moreover, the current recapitalization plan contains two fewer Columbia-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) than the current Ohio-class SSBN.

In short, criticism of the Biden administration’s nuclear policy is unwarranted. The United States is already becoming less capable against its adversaries. There is no need to weaken the nation further.  

Third, cancelling the nuclear-armed submarine-launched cruise missile (SLCM-N) results in a capability gap between the US and its adversaries. It does not decrease tension between the superpowers who already possess sea-based theater nuclear weapons. It may actually increase tension since the United States must respond to a Russian or Chinese theater nuclear strike with a strategic weapon.

China, North Korea, and Russia are all expanding their arsenal of low-yield and shorter-ranged nuclear weapons. Canceling the SLCM-N allows Russia, in particular, to use the coercive threat of low-yield nuclear weapon employment in Europe without the fear of a proportional American response. NATO’s B61 nuclear gravity bombs are political, not operational, weapons, making them of limited deterrence value. Any American response to a low-yield theater nuclear weapon with an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), or low-yield SLBM will be regarded as escalation, not an in-kind response.

Fourth, China’s “No First Use” policy means something very different to them than it does to Americans. China’s “Active Defense” strategy allows for preemptive attack while describing it as defensive. “No First Use” is similarly applied. Thus, when nuclear disarmament advocates claim that China is not a nuclear threat, they are fundamentally wrong.

China has openly threatened Japan, a non-nuclear state, with a first strike should they aid Taiwan during a conflict. Russia renounced a No First Use policy in 1993, but as we now know, the Soviet military plan for war against NATO included opening nuclear strikes against major West German cities—in direct violation of the Soviet No First Use policy.

Fifth, America’s adversaries have no interest in following the West’s example because their goals and ambitions are hegemonic and revanchist. As such they are fundamentally seeking to topple the liberal international order. China and Russia want a world that allows them to bully their neighbors, seize territory, and create vassal states around them.

Any belief that Russia and China will follow the American example and move to a more peaceful and cooperative approach is naïve and the height of folly. It is also ahistorical. The current human rights records of China and Russia are well known. When considering the twentieth-century cost of Chinese and Russian communism, almost 60,000,000 lives, it is hard to comprehend how anyone would see any altruism in Putin or Xi.

Sixth, the world is not on an inevitable path to nuclear disarmament. In their ahistorical optimism following the Cold War, disarmament advocates viewed two decades of nuclear arms reduction treaties as the inevitable product of the “peace dividend.” They assumed the world would continue negotiating away the only weapons that can guarantee a state’s sovereignty.

America’s conventional wars for regime change led the nation’s adversaries to substantially increase their nuclear capabilities as a means of deterring American conventional superiority. With North Korea dramatically increasing its arsenal to forestall regime change and Iran on the verge of joining the “nuclear club,” the world may soon see a dramatic expansion of the number of nuclear weapons states as Saudi Arabia and other gulf states proliferate for their own security.

The ongoing events in Russia and China prove that shuttering American nuclear weapon production capabilities was a serious mistake. As expected, international affairs is returning to the norm, where great powers wage war against one another by varying means. The idealism of the disarmament community was flat wrong.

Seventh, assertions that American nuclear policy is similar to Russian nuclear policy is disingenuous and untrue. The difference is nowhere more relevant than in President Biden’s Nuclear Posture Review. The US posture is aimed at providing peace and the status quo in international affairs through a retaliatory threat that is withheld. Russia’s deterrence posture and language is focused on coercing adversaries from becoming obstacles to their revanchist goals.

Eighth, history shows that a world free of nuclear weapons is not a safer world, but one that is more dangerous. At least 100,000,000 people died in World War I and II. These wars also brought communism and misery to about half of the world’s population. The world has not suffered a war between great powers since 1945.

This means millions of lives were saved during the “long peace.” Since 1945, no human has been killed by a nuclear weapon. Eliminating nuclear weapons will, without question, make it safe to wage world war again. Americans should never create the conditions for that to happen. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “There are monuments to the failure of conventional deterrence in every village in Europe.”

The rosy picture painted by nuclear disarmament advocates may sound appealing because Americans simply want to go to work, raise their children, and live in peace. However, the last of these desires, peace, only comes at the cost of ensuring that any adversary is unwilling to wage war.

The naivete of the nuclear disarmament community only leads to a world where wars are more likely, more frequent, and far more deadly. In reality, peace is achieved when the fear of the consequences outweighs any perceived benefits. History shows that nuclear weapons—and only nuclear weapons—create such fear.

James Petrosky, Curtis McGiffin, and Adam Lowther are on the staff of the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. They have a century of combined experience in nuclear deterrence.