L6: nuclear weapons and deterrence

Doomsday weapon

• Doomsday weapon is supposed to deter, if you don’t tell anyone, it wont deter anyone

• Technologically possible to build one, why hasn’t any nation built one?

  • No politician would agree to build one even if there is the tiniest chance something could go wrong —> not worth the risk

  • If everyone has one it loses its deterrence

  • Not credible to build one 

If nuclear weapons are so small that they can cause little civilian damage, why haven’t they been used?

Nuclear taboo

• Keeps people from using them, shamed internationally for using them

• If start using them, they might become normalized

 

There are certain weapons that have been deemed unacceptable → bio, chemical, nuclear

Nuclear peace theory

→ nuclear powers will not go to war with each other

• Giving more countries nuclear weapons might be good for peace bc no one will want to attack them

• are nuclear weapons ethical?

the nuclear powers

• US (1945)

• Soviet Union (1949)

• Great Britain (1952)

• France (1960)

• China (1964)

• India (1974)

• Pakistan (1998)

• North Korea (2006)

• Israel?

• South Africa?

  •  → developed some in 80s, destroyed with the end of apartheid

Why don’t more countries have nuclear weapons?

Need the scientific infrastructure in order to build the weapons —> takes a long time to build up

• Might be able to build the actual bomb but building a missile that will actually be able to deliver the bomb takes longer to develop

nuclear warhead inventories through time

• After Cold War: numbers went down

• Now: going up again

• Around 2000 the assumption was that the nuclear weapons would continue to decline, however they have started to go up agin

Deterrence: a short history

• From Adam and Eve to early Cold War

  • Adam and Eve: first deterrence failure (by God)

    • don’t eat the apple, they ate the apple

• Cold War 'coming of age', 'key concept for the understanding of the strategy and diplomacy' of the period

• Post-Cold War 'semi-retirement'

• Post-Crimea: back in fashion

Deterrence

1. "the persuasion of one's opponent that the costs and/or risks of a given course of action he might take outweigh its benefits"

2. "the prevention of action by the existence of a credible threat of unacceptable counteraction and/or belief that the cost of action outweighs the perceived benefits"

List of types of deterrence

General vs immediate deterrence

• General: conveys a somewhat vague, broad, continuous threat of retaliation for any future attack (e.g. NATO Article 5)

  • Peace time deterrence

• Immediate: threatening retaliation when an attack looms, or as already occurred and the victim wants to deter its continuation

  • Threat/aggression time deterrence

  • Post war immediate = try to deter certain things within the war, like deter the use of specific types of weapons

Punishment

threats to impost costs through retaliation that may be unrelated to the aggression itself. Rather than focusing on the denial of local objectives, it seeks to raise the cost of aggression- even if successful - by threatening other consequences

Denial

strategies that seek to deter an action by making it infeasible or unlikely to succeed, thus denying a potential aggressor confidence in attaining its objectives - deploying sufficient local military forces to defeat an invasion, for example

Direct vs Extended

• Direct: trying to deter an attack on homeland/ yourself (US during Cold War)

• Extend: to allies → US to NATO allies

3 types

Type 1: Direct attack (US vs USSR)

Type 2: Extended deterrence challenge (NATO vs

Warsaw Pact)

Type 3: Peripheral conflict (Korea, Vietnam)

Deterrence success

• What constitutes a successful case?

  • Difficult to prove

  • NATO in Europe kept Eastern Europe from soviet → nuclear deterrence worked (hard to prove)

• Problem of explaining a non-event

• How to measure whether a threat had an effect on an adversary's behavior?

• To measure deterrence:

  • Evidence that illustrates challengers intent and defenders deterrent attempt

  • BUT challengers intent difficult to discern

  • Are attacks that do not occur every day examples of deterrence success?

  • What about countless reasons other than threats (self-deterrence)?

Credibility

• Problem of incomplete information

• Interests at stake

  • Ex. Is Ukraine enough?

• How to communicate commitment to fight?

• Reputation/'cumulative deterrence'

• Doomsday device —> not credible to build one

  • don’t want to commit suicide

• How do you make deterrence credible?

  • How do you convince Russia that the US would go and defend their allies if Russia invaded

•  Is Putin interest of Ukraine enough to stake nuclear war?

Madman Theory

does it pay to act crazy?

• The game of chicken

  • What if one of the guys is seen drinking before getting in the car → he isn’t control of his senses, he wont swerve

• Changing/altering a variable like that can effect how credible your threat is → angry/crazy

Don’t let the genie out of the bottle

• Keep nuclear weapons in bottle

  • Korea ex.

    • Used nuclear weapons against japan a few years ago, don’t want to use nuclear weapons against Asian people again

    • Bad publicity

    • Once you start using them, soviets are going to start using them

  • Whatever your goal is, using nuclear weapons to reach them just isn’t worth it

Nuclear deterrence options

• Maximum / 'overkill' - Counterforce + Countervalue

  • US, Russia will attack cities and military targets→ counterforce + counter value

  • Counterforce = military

• Minimum - Countervalue only

  • UK, France will only attack cities → only counter value

  • Counter value = civilian

• Triad?

• No first use

  • China and India are the only ones that have this

• Mini-nukes
  

Need to have redundancy —> have enough left in order to deter them to attack back

Nuclear Triad

• Nuclear submarines are the most likely to survive a strike by another country, guaranteeing the United States the ability to strike back.

  • Build certain nuclear weapons for certain things → give you an edge

    • Are able to strike back in different ways

• ICBMs can be launched quickly if necessary.

• Strategic bombers armed with penetrating cruise missiles can be deployed and recalled more easily.

• Bombers, Missiles, Submarines

  • Tends to be the order when we think of how a nuclear war would be waged

Single Integrated Operation Plan 1969

• Ban all communist countries into a block

  • If Russia attacked western Germany, the plan would be to not only strike Russia, but also China and the whole of Eastern Europe

Cold War: ethnic nuclear war plan

just kill the Russians, try and leave the rest of Eastern Europe alone

Oplan 8010-08

Strategic Deterrence and Global Strike

• Directed against six adversaries.

  • Probably Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Syria and 9/11-type WMD scenario

• Half do not have nuclear weapons and four of them are NPT members

• Includes four types of nuclear attack options:

  • Basic Attack Options (BAOs)

  • Selective Attack Options (SAOs)

  • Emergency Response Options (EROs)

  • Directed/Adaptive Planning Capability Options

• There are no longer Major Attack Options (MAOs) in the strategic war plan

NATO nuclear deterrence timeline

• 1949: First Strategic Concept: to use all weapons against overwhelming Soviet conventional superiority

• 1952: Lisbon Force Goals: 96 NATO divisions ready in 90 days

  • by 1954 (actual peacetime total in 1954: 16)

• 1953: "New Look"

• 1954: MC 48: tactical atomic use to "prevent rapid overrunning"

• 1955: FRG joins NATO, US atomic weapons in FRG

• 1957: MC 14/2 massive retaliation w/ caveats

• 1962: Athens Guidelines, Cuban Missile Crisis

• 1968: MC 14/3 Flexible Response

• 1969 to end of Cold War: how to implement flexible response

• 1970s: NATO nuclear warheads in W. Europe reach maximum of 7k

• 1991 to present:

  • no clear articulation of NATO nuclear policy

  • NATO nuclear policy in limbo despite 2014/2022

  • reduction in warhead numbers (200? in 2010,
    100? in 2025)

  • focus on warhead and delivery capability modernization

India-Pakistan crisis - elements of restraint

Tit for tat conflicts

• 1999

• 2001-2002

• 2008

• 2016

• 2019

The next nuclear powers?

• Iran, not quite crossed nuclear threshold —> will the cross it

• If Iran goes, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will follow

The future of nuclear weapons