Nuclear war assumptions created the INF

Detailed consideration of the likelihood and consequences of nuclear war is not usually explicit in developing national security strategy. Yet implicit assumptions on these questions have a strong influence on nuclear policy, and explicit generalizations of them have been invoked to justify major new directions in policy. The entire nuclear arms control enterprise—from the “hotline” memorandum of understanding through the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT), and the current New START Treaty—was motivated principally by fear of nuclear war. In the 1950s the dominant theoretical concern involved a disarming surprise attack, but fear of nuclear war was made all too tangible by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and has been reinforced throughout the Cold War by the nuclear arms race and nuclear posturing. Similarly, arguments for national missile defenses depend in no small part on the judgment that deterrence is unreliable. As expressed by President Reagan in his oft-quoted Strategic Defense Initiative speech

of 1983:5 Tonight . . . I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. This could pave the way for arms control measures to eliminate the weapons themselves.We seek neither military superiority nor political advantage.Our only purpose—one all people share—is to search for ways to reduce the danger of nuclear war. [Emphasis added.]President George W. Bush invoked the inadequacy of deterrence and the consequences of nuclear use by “rogue” states and terrorists to justifypreemptive attack as a critical element of national security strategy:6 It has taken almost a decade for us to comprehend the true nature of this new threat. Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. [Emphasis added.] The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today’s threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.More recently, the prospect of nuclear use motivated President Obama’s call for a nuclear-free world:7 Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up . . . So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.Clearly, quite different policies have been motivated by the concern that deterrence might fail. However, assertions that deterrence cannot be relied on are based on intuition and limited perspectives rather than syntheses of the broadest expertise and most appropriate analytic methods that can be brought to bear.