Deterrence doesn’t necessitate use, but it does save billions of lives.

Deterrence does NOT require the US to go up the nuclear escalation ladder and thus “win” a nuclear conflict. The goal is to deny any benefit to Moscow from the employment of nuclear weapons so we maintain what Michael Krepon called “no use” of nuclear weapons.

Proposals to render to second-tier status all nuclear modernization, but instead strengthen conventional forces, does not increase the chances that the US would prevail in a conventional fight.

Russian threats to use nuclear weapons early in a conventional conflict are precisely because Russia fears America’s conventional superiority. Compounding that Russian insecurity makes Russian use of nukes more likely.

And remember, our prevailing military conventional strategy assumes we win but only if there is NO use of nuclear weapons. Putin knows that. His strategy is precisely to mess that up.

Putin has beefed up his theater nuclear capability precisely because he sees a gap in US nuclear capability which he can exploit— our current theater capability is too limited.

Conclusion

In October 1962 Castro wanted to launch Soviet missiles at Washington from Cuba and urged Khrushchev to do so. Khrushchev told Castro such a launch would result in Cuba being destroyed. Castro replied he didn’t care: Cuba might be incinerated but “socialism wins” because the center of “capitalism” would be destroyed.

The year previously, at the 1961 Vienna summit, the Soviets threatened to kick the US military out of Berlin. Kennedy told Khrushchev that would mean nuclear war.

Late in 1982, Kennedy visited LLNL and declared the small warhead on top of the Polaris missile and the parallel development of the MM missiles, allowed the US to stare down the Soviets over Berlin and Cuba. The Soviet military stayed in garrison. And the ships turned back.

Kenndy remarked “Minuteman was my ace in the hole” 14 such missiles went on alert the very October 14th day that the US discovered the Soviet missiles in Cuba. MM was solid fueled, ready to launch, and invulnerable to Soviet missiles. Two new technologies—MM and Polaris—kept the Soviets deterred.

So where are we today some 60 years later?

The guts of the problem with abolition is that China, Russia, North Korea and Iran all believe nuclear weapons are tools of aggression and terror—not tools to deter war but as instruments that make war possible. They are definitely not abolitionists.

To conclude:

I. War is real and not abolished. It is not the end of history. Here Ward and I agree.

II. Some nuclear states believe nuclear weapons are instruments of warfighting. The US does not.

III. No nuclear armed state has agreed to adopt a strategy that eventually gets us to abolition.

IV. While yes, the NPT calls for eventual disarmament, there is nothing “imperative” about “eventually.”

V. To get to abolition, one requires transparency—how do you verify that weapons have been eliminated if you cannot count how many weapons a nuclear power has in the first place? Trust but verify.

VI. Deterrence may indeed break down, but the strongest deterrent is conventional, nuclear, missile, cyber and space defenses—especially against the small, highly accurate, limited strike options Putin now seeks.

VII. If you assume nuclear deterrence cannot work for the long term, because no nuclear weapon is useable, and any exchange will create nuclear winter and billions dead, then deterrence is a bluff—the logical thing to do is for the US unilaterally get rid of all our nuclear weapons.

VIII. Assume we are back to July 1945. It is a nuclear free world. Abolition prevails. No atomic bomb has been tested. There is no Manhattan project.

IX. Knowing what actually occurred from 1945-2022, would you back in 1945 forgo our nuclear shield and trust our enemies to do the same?

And finally, some thoughts of whether our adversaries are as risk adverse as the US.

If we think Putin’s nuclear threats are credible, and it appears we do, and if we believe the estimates that between 20-40 million dead Americans would result from even a limited nuclear exchange with Russia, doesn’t it stand to reason that Russia accepts those odds for its own population?