Hans Kristensen on the FAS Strategic Security Blog points at an excellent report by the EastWest Institute on Reframing Nuclear De-Alert. The occasion for Kristensen’s post is a diplomatic effort by the Obama administration to prevent a UN General Assembly Resolution urging de-alert from coming to the floor. The resolution has been passed before, but evidently Obama is angling to delay the vote until the end of the ongoing Nuclear Posture Review so as to keep from abstaining, or voting against.
What’s the story with nuclear de-alert? Currently, the United States keeps roughly 900 warheads at sufficiently high levels of alert that the half atop ICBMs could be launched within four minutes and the half aboard submarines within twelve minutes. Narrower margins are thought to provide stronger deterrent effects—margins this thin allow the United States to adhere to a policy called Launch Under Attack (that is, before incoming missiles find their targets) as well as Launch On Warning (when the threat of an imminent attack is confirmed). But, as the EW report points out,
Even during the Cold War, alert levels were not static and moved up or down depending on the security environments. But alert levels since then (after some degree of de-alerting, especially of bomber forces, in the early post-Cold War period) have remained immune to major changes in the later post-Cold War era.
Nuclear de-alert involves taking physical but reversible steps to widen these margins artificially in order to provide policymakers with more time to consider the situation. It also has the effect of lowering the possibility accidental launch (however small this already is). In short, it seems like an appropriate doctrine for the status of nuclear forces after the end of the cold war. Possible steps include covering the silos with earth, removing the nose cones of missiles, removing tritium bottles from thermonuclear weapons, and, lastly, storing warheads and delivery systems separately. These and other scenarios mean that a reasonable measure of granularity is possible in selecting just which steps to take.
The EastWest Institute also makes this helpful point—
There are no fundamental obstacles to many useful measures of decreasing operational readiness of nuclear weapons, provided the issue is not framed narrowly. De-alert has to be seen not only as a technical fix but also as a strategic step in deemphasizing the military role of nuclear weapons, in other words, moving to retaliatory strike postures and doctrines instead of legacy preemptive or “launch on warning” postures.
—namely because the problem de-alert would attempt to solve is better addressed through permissive action links and other safeguard mechanisms. Rather, the question of de-alert can’t be decoupled from broader questions of nuclear doctrine; de-alert is only a viable option if we are willing to shift away from LOW and LUA to a doctrine based on a more delayed retaliation.
But all this goes to show what a strange place nuclear disarmament is in more generally. There is no good justification for maintaing high levels of alert after the end of the cold war. Sophisticated set-piece counterforce retaliation plans are obsolete in the absence of a U.S.-Russia exchange—if retaliation could ever be contemplated under any scenario at all. Our divorce from the harried times of the Cold War means that cooler heads are likely to insert political and moral calculations into any crisis more readily than thirty years ago. In the post-Cold War world, no nuclear power gains any appreciable advantage from a nuclear doctrine that maintains forces on high alert. It is expensive, more dangerous, and less useful in crisis situations, given that the re-alerting of nuclear warheads could constitute a useful bellicose signal in crisis bargaining. Given this, there is ample reason for a country to give up its nuclear alert doctrine simply as a matter of course—but why do it unilaterally when you can elicit reciprocal behavior from other nuclear weapon states? As a result of this sort of logic, nuclear disarmament is caught in this odd position where rational behavior for any one state is not seen as such if taken unilaterally. The funny thing is that this is true regardless of the security effects. De-alerting nuclear forces would not make either Russia nor the United States less secure vis-a-vis one another, because the possibility of any retaliation should be sufficient to deter any attack, regardless of whether this occurs in four minutes, twelve minutes, an hour, a day, or a week. This calculus does not change. But for reasons explicable but nevertheless passing understanding, either the United States or Russia would be unwilling to take this step without promises of reciprocity.
It makes you respect the China’s and the Great Britain’s of the world who don’t allow themselves to be caught up in this kind of paranoid nonsense. How long will it take for us to get over the Cold War?
a.j.m.