Repeat a Lie Often Enough and it Becomes the Truth

In an article for Defense One, nuclear disarmament advocate Tom Z. Collina chides the Biden administration’s recently released Nuclear Posture Review for maintaining the “status quo” and lacking any new ideas for addressing the Russia challenge. He goes as far as to suggest “…the Biden team has fallen back on the old Cold War playbook: when in doubt, build more nuclear bombs.”

As Collina well knows, at the height of the Cold War (1966-69), the United States deployed more than 30,000 nuclear weapons. As late as 1991, the United States deployed about 5,000 tactical nuclear weapons in Europe alone. The nation’s current arsenal is far smaller.

Today, the United States has about 1,550 operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons and fewer than 200 tactical nuclear weapons in Europe. Washington’s current nuclear arsenal is numerically constrained by New START treaty obligations. Thus, to suggest that the Biden administration is falling back on a Cold War playbook is preposterous. President Biden has about 95 percent fewer nuclear weapons to deploy than Presidents Johnson or Nixon, which requires him think very differently about the use of a much smaller nuclear arsenal.

By the 2030s the United States will face two nuclear-armed adversaries that may both have superior nuclear arsenals to the United States. The growth of China’s nuclear arsenal is already creating new challenges for American deterrence and assurance in Asia. The Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review only makes that problem worse.

For an administration that was considering implementing a policy of “no first use” to include in its Nuclear Posture Review a statement like, “it may be necessary to consider nuclear strategy and force adjustments to assure our ability to achieve deterrence and other objectives for the PRC,” the future must look very bleak. The simple fact is that nuclear weapons are becoming more important, not less.

Advocates of nuclear disarmament seem to consistently forget that both Russia and China are increasing their reliance on nuclear weapons because American conventional military power is so much better than their own. China and Russia would be modernizing regardless of American. modernization. If Russian performance signals the United States anything, it is that the abysmal performance of their conventional forces will likely push the Russians to rely even more heavily on nuclear weapons.

The dirty little secret that the disarmament community conveniently avoids is that they know Russia is happy to limit its operationally deployed strategic nuclear weapons because it has no plans to fight a civilization-ending nuclear war with the United States. It does, however, have very clear plans to use low-yield, theatre range, nuclear weapons in a conflict if it fears defeat of its conventional forces.

China is looking to match or surpass American strategic nuclear weapon capabilities because China has every intention of supplanting the United States as the world’s dominant power. Constraining American behavior through nuclear deterrence and coercion will be a key objective of Beijing’s strategy. China too understands the low probability of a strategic nuclear war but the much higher probability of low-yield, theatre range, nuclear weapons use. These are the weapons that may very well keep the United States at bay during an invasion of Taiwan.

For advocates of nuclear disarmament, like Tom Collina, reality has no bearing on their view of nuclear weapons. They are adherents to a secular religion that denies the inherent evil in human nature but imputes morality to inanimate objects. Americans should not fall for this tactic. Nuclear weapons are a tool of statecraft. They have no moral agency.

Both the Russians and Chinese understand that the decades ahead are vastly different from the half-century before 1992. They are developing the cyber, space, hypersonic, nuclear, and other capabilities needed to compete in the dramatically different world ahead. Fixating on a largely irrelevant Cold War is only something that the nuclear disarmament community can afford because their opinions often fail to reflect reality and the seriousness of challenges facing this nation.

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was correct when he reminded us that “Weakness is provocative.” That is a lesson advocates of nuclear disarmament need to pay careful attention to if they want to ensure nuclear weapons are never used again in anger.      

Dylan Land is a policy analyst at The National Institute for Deterrence Studies, where James Ragland serves as a fellow, and Dr. Adam Lowther is the Vice President for Research. He is also host of the ANWA Deterrence Center’s Nuclecast podcast.