Attempting counterforce virtually guarantees nuclear war. Only one step has to go wrong to reach Armageddon.

A counterforce posture, especially when paired with a “launch on warning” policy, necessarily requires high launch readiness, imposing decision windows of perhaps 15–30 minutes upon receipt of satellite and radar warning of an incoming attack. The risk of a premature or mistaken launch under this model is self-evidently higher than under one designed to ride out a nuclear attack and retaliate with secondstrike forces. Nor is the potential for miscalculation limited to a splendid counterforce attack. Consider a scenario presented by Austin Long and Brendan Green in which the United States enters into a limited conventional conflict with a nuclear adversary. In this circumstance, the enemy “would have strong incentives to try and secure their nuclear forces by dispersing them, delegating launch authority, or otherwise increasing readiness.” If the United States were decisively winning, these authors suggest, “signs of [its adversary’s] increasing readiness or weapons dispersal . . . would create dangerous windows of opportunity on the US side, as American troop concentrations, American allies, or even the American homeland could be potential hostages.” Given such high stakes, they argue, “counterforce will likely have advocates in high circles during a crisis.”59

Far from endorsing these capabilities, this scenario illustrates that US counterforce systems would be the principal driver of the enemy’s anxiety about losing its weapons in the first place. Further, movements to secure one’s nuclear forces from attack may be mistaken for launch preparations, prompting a counterforce strike and transforming what had been a limited conventional war into a nuclear one. Moreover, the possibility that enemy weapons may prove elusive is no less relevant in this circumstance than in the case of a bolt-from-the-blue attack. As Michael Gerson notes of such a scenario, “In the end, if an attempted disarming first strike leaves some of the adversary’s weapons intact, the United States may have started the nuclear war that it had hoped to prevent.”60

Implications for the United States

Ultimately, this analysis rests on inferences about the true risk tolerance of US leaders and the confidence of their adversaries in both resisting nuclear coercion and retaliating after a nuclear strike. Because neither of these variables can be established conclusively before a crisis occurs, there is room for disagreement about their potential implications. What should be uncontroversial, however, is that widely divergent perceptions of capability and resolve in a crisis may lead to catastrophic misjudgments.61 Additionally, there should be no doubt that such divergences exist.

Consider the multiple levels of perception that would be operative if the United States attempted nuclear coercion—much less a first strike. First would be US leaders’ confidence in their counterforce capabilities, followed by the enemy’s estimation of them. Next would be the enemy’s confidence in its ability to retaliate after absorbing a counterforce strike and the United States’ assessment of this probability. Beneath these firstorder judgments are even more subjective evaluations: American leaders’ perception of the enemy’s perception of US first-strike capabilities, the enemy’s perception of US leaders’ perception of its retaliatory capability, and so on. Mistaken assumptions in any one of these dimensions could result in grave errors. For example, if US leaders are so enamored of their first-strike capabilities that they perceive little risk of retaliation, the threshold for launching a preemptive attack—or merely engaging in nuclear coercion—might be dangerously low. Indeed, this prospect has not escaped foreign strategists. Chinese analysts Li Bin and Nie Hongyi have noted that the limitations of US offensive forces are “not clear enough” to American leaders, creating the possibility that they “may think they have” the capability to neutralize China’s retaliatory forces. According to Li and Nie, the Americans’ “blind confidence” might give rise to attempts at nuclear saber rattling or worse.62 Compounding this danger is the possibility that a state subjected to American coercion may believe just as strongly in its own capacity to retaliate. Moreover, if either side believes that the other privately shares its own assessment, they may fatally misjudge the robustness of deterrence. In particular, foreign leaders may take at face value US rhetoric on nuclear terrorism and conclude that the ability to deliver a single bomb is sufficient to deter the United States. In this circumstance, they may discount the gravity of American threats even if they are quite sincere.