On 1 August Dr Vipin Narang, an Acting Assistant Secretary at the US Department of Defence, speaking at the CSIS in Washington D.C., warned that “Absent a change in the nuclear trajectories of the PRC, Russia, and North Korea, we may reach a point where a change in the size or posture of our current deployed forces is necessary. There is no need to grow the stockpile yet, but adjustments to the number of deployed capabilities may be necessary if our adversaries continue down their current paths.”
Since “the reality is that the size of the current U.S. nuclear arsenal is more than enough to deter enemy nuclear attacks even if adversary arsenals grow”, as the Executive Director of the US Arms Control Association wrote on 24 August, it seems possible that the idea lying behind Dr Narang’s warning is that it would be desirable for the United States to have the option of using its nuclear weapons in a counterforce role against the PRC, Russia and North Korea.
This is a possibility to which Dr James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace alluded in a contribution to the September issue of Arms Control Today:
“Fuelled by a growing bipartisan consensus that the United States must augment its nuclear force in response to China’s nuclear buildup and the possibility that Beijing may forge some kind of alliance with Moscow, a Chinese-U.S. arms race now seems virtually certain….Even if averting a new arms race will be extremely difficult, the next president … should require… a realistic assessment of the feasibility of effective nuclear “counterforce” operations … If China can ensure that U.S. counterforce attacks would not limit meaningfully the damage that the United States would suffer in a nuclear war, arms racing would be an exercise in pure futility.”
In the following interview Professor Nick Ritchie (University of York) explains the essential features of counterforce strategies and alludes to the dangers that they pose to US allies and the international community at large.
Q: “Counterforce” implies that the goal of such an operation is to destroy an adversary’s nuclear forces. If so, is it only silo-based and mobile-launcher-based ICBMs that would be the target, or also submarine and aerial launch platforms, command and control centres, satellites and radars?
A: The capacity for an enemy to launch nuclear weapons at the US and its allies is the central focus of counter-force nuclear targeting. This includes all aspects of a ‘nuclear weapons delivery complex’, but especially those assets that can target the continental United States: long-range nuclear weapons and the nuclear C3 infrastructure that underpins it, but also major conventional military forces, political and military leadership sites and core and defence industries.
Q: To be effective, must a counterforce attack anticipate a nuclear strike by an adversary? In other words, must it involve a pre-emptive nuclear first strike?
A: No. A counter-force nuclear posture and associated weapons, targeting and doctrine enables a pre-emptive nuclear first strike but the concept doesn’t require it. The central concept of counter-force nuclear strategy is ‘damage limitation’, i.e. if a nuclear war is to be fought, then the United States must configure its nuclear forces to target and assuredly destroy as many of the enemy’s nuclear weapons and as much of its enabling infrastructure quickly and assuredly as possible. This logic requires the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons early in a conflict to reduce the extent of nuclear violence visited upon the United States. In certain circumstances, this could incentivise a nuclear first strike or launch on warning of attack. Again, a counter-force posture does not compel a president to launch nuclear weapons either pre-emptively or on warning of an attack, though the very decision timescales and the options presented to a president at the moment of choice could lead to either.
Q: How long would an adversary need, after detecting that a counterforce operation was underway, to get a retaliatory operation underway?
A: It depends on 1) the efficacy of its early warning system; 2) the alert level of its nuclear forces; 3) the robustness of its nuclear C3 system and 4) its nuclear doctrine.
A state with a high fidelity early warning system, nuclear forces on high alert, a robust nuclear C3 architecture and a nuclear doctrine that includes planning and exercising a launch on warning strategy would be able to respond very quickly.
Q: Does it seem to you realistic for nuclear planners to suppose that all of an adversary’s nuclear-missile submarines, mobile land-based launchers and nuclear-armed aircraft could be detected and destroyed before they could be used to carry out a retaliatory attack?
A: No. Whilst the idea of a ‘splendid first strike’ that completely eliminates an enemy’s ability to deliver nuclear weapons might be an ideal in nuclear planning, and might be possible in best-case scenarios, a state with a large, diverse and difficult to detect and track nuclear arsenal, such as Russia’s, with a political and military leadership determined to retaliate in a crisis (perhaps by devolving launch authority to nuclear commanders in a crisis) would very likely be able to detonate multiple nuclear warheads on US territory.
There is also a gulf between the logics of deterrence, retaliation and nuclear war planning of nuclear planners and those of political leaders. McGeorge Bundy summed this up in 1969 (‘To Cap the Volcano’, Foreign Affairs, 48:1): “Think-tank analysts can set levels of ‘acceptable’ damage well up in the tens of millions of lives. They can assume that the loss of dozens of great cities is somehow a real choice for sane men. They are in an unreal world. In the real world of real political leaders – whether here or in the Soviet Union – a decision that would bring even one hydrogen bomb on one city of one’s own country would be recognized in advance as a catastrophic blunder; ten bombs on ten cities would be a disaster beyond history; and a hundred bombs on a hundred cities are unthinkable”.
Q: What about the related concept of “damage limitation”? Even if a counterforce operation were largely successful, would the initiator be wise to expect severe losses of life and destruction of civil and military infrastructure as a result of a retaliatory operation, especially if that included targeting major cities and the detonation of one or more electro-magnetic pulses?
A: Yes, because the probability of a ‘splendid first strike’ would in all likelihood be extremely low. But the logic at work in counter-force planning is one of relative rather than absolute levels of destruction. For example, if the US can configure its nuclear forces to reduce the level of nuclear violence visited upon it in a nuclear war such that ‘only’ 100 million people in the US are killed rather than 200 million, then this is a judged better outcome for the US.
Similarly, if the US can visit near-total nuclear destruction on its adversary whilst limiting the level of nuclear destruction it experiences, then it has a better chance of ‘recovering’ more quickly. This is how ‘winning’ was conceptualised in the US nuclear strategy debate in the late 1970s on configuring US nuclear forces to be able to ‘fight and win’ a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
This logic of relative nuclear destruction contrasts sharply with the idea of absolute destruction and realistic recovery capacity. In fact, the ability to recover from even a ‘small’ nuclear war would be limited, and the global climatic consequences of a large scale nuclear war would be devastating and long-lasting for the belligerents and much of the global population.
Q: If the initiator of a counterforce operation were the United States and the adversary Russia, is it likely that the former would stop short of targeting short or intermediate range nuclear-armed missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave, to avoid collateral deaths in neighbouring NATO countries? If so, would it be reasonable to suppose a high probability that those short and medium-range systems would be used by Russia against European NATO targets in the course of a retaliatory operation?
A: I don’t know. I think it would depend on the escalation dynamics of the conflict and the extent to which nuclear weapons were being used (i.e., a small number of relatively low-yield nuclear weapons against non-urban and non-strategic targets). If Russia interpreted a conflict to be at the stage whereby it had to use nuclear weapons stationed in Kaliningrad or lose the ability to fire them at all, then the political and military leadership could obviously conclude that now was the time to use them.
Q: Would a large-scale counterforce operation and whatever retaliation proved possible be likely to result in atmospheric conditions that would produce crop failure and famine in many countries (“nuclear winter”)?
A: All the research strongly suggests yes.
Q: Would it be fair to say that nuclear deterrence theory aims at discouraging the initiation of a nuclear war, whereas counterforce theory aims at winning a nuclear war by initiating one?
A: Not necessarily. The problem for nuclear deterrence in theory and in practice is the credibility of such an incredible threat to use nuclear weapons because of the risk of mutual nuclear suicide. Proponents of nuclear counter-force strategies argue that such a posture and associated nuclear capabilities maximise the credibility of the threat and therefore maximise the efficacy of the deterrent threat.
Conversely, critics of counter-force strategy argue that such a strategy and the types, numbers and configuration of nuclear forces it entails induces fears of a nuclear first strike that could plausibly and dangerously incentivise a state to attack first in a crisis – not out of belligerence but out of fear – because using nuclear weapons first comes to be understood as the least worst option available in an escalating confrontation.