Michael Ramirez Guest Essay: Putin Channels Khrushchev 02-27-24

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Buried—Michael

Guest Essay: Nuclear Alarm Bells 

By Peter Huessy

The chance of a conventional military conflict going nuclear is growing. Can the US and its allies turn back that threat and effectively strengthen deterrence? Yes, if as urgently recommended by the report of the Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United, the US adds new nuclear deterrent capability, including a prompt and survivable theater nuclear strike technology.

What worried the Commission? Two major developments. 

First was the  Russian “escalate to win” nuclear strategy. Russia seeks to threaten limited nuclear strikes during a conventional conflict, hoping to force the US and its allies to standdown. And as US military leaders have explained to Congress, US conventional warfare exercises end very badly when the adversary introduces nuclear weapons into the battlespace. Russia’s Putin knows this. Thu the numerous threats to use limited regional nuclear escalatory strikes over Ukraine. Especially if the US and Ukraine escalate the conflict to where Russian territory is regularly attacked

Second, the Posture Commission highlighted what then Commander of US Strategic Forces Admiral Charles Richard described as a “breathtaking” large buildup of China’s nuclear forces. China is projected to become a nuclear armed peer competitor to the United States by 2030-5. According to the US Strategic Command, China now has 500 warheads but for the first time more ICBM launchers than the US. With a 2030-5 projected force of 1500 warheads, a China attack on Taiwan looks more likely, and could draw the US into an overt nuclear armed conflict. 

For the disarmament community, these twin developments are dismissed as emerging threats to the United States. For example, Daniel Post for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists argues an escalate to win strategy won’t work so the US has no need to match such a capability. And he further notes the United States has no moral standing to be against such a strategy as it was adopted by the United States during the Cold War. Unable to match Soviet tank armies “tank for tank,” the US relied on the deterrent threat to escalate to nuclear retaliation should the USSR conventional forces invade Western Europe. 

Daniel Post says history reveals escalation doesn’t always win. He references an unpublished dissertation on non-nuclear battlefield escalatory attacks between Iraq and Iran in the 1979 “Marsh War”; the 1972 United States bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail and the North Vietnamese response; Hungary’s response to attacks by the Ottoman empire in the 16th century; and Japanese attacks on the Chiang forces in China during World War II.   

He concludes only two cases resulted in the escalating power winning, while in the other cases the attacked military forces either continued fighting or counter-attacked. Thus, the professor concludes escalatory threats including nuclear ones, are not likely to succeed.

Michael Klare of the Nation takes on the question of how to deal with China’s growing nuclear force in similar fashion. He blames the United States for deciding without justification that China was a serious security threat to the United States. Klare points to the 2018 national security strategy as having unnecessarily scared China. The leadership concluded China’s small nuclear force could not withstand a likely US nuclear first strike. 

Thus, Klare explains, Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping initiated a nuclear military build-up to deter the aggressive United States, despite wanting to sustain a preferred policy of a no-first use, small or “minimum” deterrent force. The implication being the 2023 Strategic Posture Commission used the Chinese counter-buildup as the basis for asserting China would be a near-peer nuclear armed competitor by 2030-5, but without acknowledging the US “started the arms race.”  

Daniel Post forgets that the description of escalate to win strategies by Dr. Brad Roberts and General John Hyten were of Russia as an aggressor nation, which initiated military conflict in the hopes of winning. The concern of the Commission is for the US to be able to prevent the use of escalate to win strategies, not to adopt such a policy. The challenge is when faced with the possible loss of a conventional fight, Moscow might seek to or threaten to escalate the conflict with limited nuclear strikes in order to get the US and its allies to “stand down.” 

The coercive nuclear strike threat identified by the 2023 Posture Commission originated with President Yeltsin of Russia who in April 1999 explicitly called for the development of very accurate, low yield nuclear weapons for the battlefield. Some experts believe this was in reaction to the US conventional bombing of Serbia. More likely, senior Russian nuclear officials were convinced the large nuclear warheads in the Russian deployed forces were simply practically unusable on the battlefield, and only useful for massive Armageddon type attacks.

Thus, the Russians not the United States developed such battlefield weapons by the thousands, while the United States has remained with a small stockpile of theater gravity bombs, hardly the “vast” stockpiles of US theater weapons described by Mr. Klare. In addition, it is Moscow not the United States that thinks such weapons are useful battlefield weapons, and that is what we have to deter. Russia sees nuclear weapons as instruments with which to pursue aggression, while the US sees nuclear forces as a deterrent to stop or prevent aggression. Mr. Post misses this critical distinction. 

As for the Chinese build-up, the 2018 US security strategy report simply stated the obvious. China had previously published a strategy described as “unrestricted warfare,” identifying the United States not as a competitor but an enemy. And as the former Assistant Secretary of State Tom Fingar explained February 15, 2024, the Chinese reassessment that initiated its current major nuclear buildup was initiated in 2007-8, not 2018, and was triggered by the world economic downturn, not aggressive US policy. 

The assumed “peaceful rise” and benign posture of China is belied by the facts. In January 2009, the head of the National Security Agency, USAF General Keith Aleander told a private dinner of aerospace executives at the National War College that China was annually stealing $600 billion a year in intellectual property from US industry. This was at the time the US was seeking a “reset” from what was thought to be an overly aggressive US stance toward Russia. 

For a decade or more, it is widely understood China infiltrates key government and private US data bases. And exports fentanyl through Mexico in what China calls a reverse “Opium war” against the US. While expanding unlawful island making in the South China Sea that harms freedom of navigation. And contrary to its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, assists its allies Iran and North Korea with both nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development. 

There is little doubt of its objective: to replace the US as the world’s military, economic and political hegemon by 2049, as Dr. Michael Pillsbury details in his “The Hundred Year Marathon.” 

As David Asher of the Hudson Institute has detailed, China has multiple dozens of agencies, bureaus, departments and banks that regularly assist North Korea to evade UN sanctions. In areas adjacent to Iran, Morocco, Yemen and Indonesia, China is seeking a military presence from which to exercise control over key maritime choke points through which 60% of daily oil production must pass. Finally, China is both helping to finance and arm Russia’s war against Ukraine. Add to this an unprecedented expansion of China’s nuclear force, is it any wonder the Commission sounded the alarm. 

When the United States had over ten thousand nuclear bombs, there was ostensibly a Chinese nuclear force of around 20 nuclear warheads, usually portrayed as proof positive of China’s benign intentions. Now the US force deploys roughly 1350 deployed warheads on a day-to-day basis, with no strategic bombers on alert and roughly one third to forty percent of our submarines on patrol. Somehow a markedly reduced US strategic nuclear force—reduced by 90%-- compels the Chinese to now build more ICBM launchers than are in the US inventory while adding hundreds of nuclear weapons every year to its nuclear arsenal, while seeking 1500 warheads within the next decade? 

During the post 2018 period, when supposed the US scared China into building up its nuclear force by four-fold, US conventional deployed forces have shrunk. Despite a genuine commitment to modernize the US conventional and nuclear forces, our Air Force was forced to downsize, and is now the oldest and smallest in our history. The Navy too is shrinking as legacy ships are retired. Our nuclear deterrent is aging, and it has now reached some 40-70 years of continuous deployment, while declining in size by 90% over the past 34 years. How can that be described as an “aggressive” posture?

In both cases, as the Commission detailed, Russia and China’s hegemonic ambitions seek to expand borders, compel neighboring nations to diminish their sovereignty, and predictably dominate international affairs. Key to achieving these objectives is acquiring more nuclear weapons which Chris Yeaw of the University of Nebraska projects will reach a combined Russian and Chinese nuclear force of near ten thousand by 2035-45. Especially theater or short-range systems will significantly increase, and such weapons will be aimed at the United States and its allies, while the US nuclear stockpile was planned to remain at its lowest level since the Eisenhower administration, with a theater nuclear force in Europe outnumbered by Russia by at least twenty to one. The Commission alarm bells are not some pranks; they are a serious wake-up call to the United States to get serious. 

Unfortunately, standing in the way of necessary US nuclear modernization are committed disarmament advocates, opposing new US nuclear capability. Just recently the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Ams Control Association and the Federation of American Scientists proposed killing a Navy nuclear armed cruise missile under development, a new USAF gravity bomb delivered by plane, and the entirety of the USAF land-based ICBMs. Such a strategy is worse than the 1980’s era nuclear freeze--as its takes down forces that a freeze would have left in place. Perhaps someday disarmament advocates will get serious and stop chasing the unicorn of global nuclear disarmament.  

Note: This essay was edited from its original version by the author

Mr Huessy is President and Senior Director of Strategic Deterrent Studies at GeoStrategic Analysis and his work appears at Global Security Review, a journal that focuses on nuclear deterrence and global security. We are grateful to Mr. Huessy for allowing us to share his latest thoughts.

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