The New Nuclear Gap

By Rich Lowry

Thursday, April 28, 2022

 

Less than a year before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine the first time, President Barack Obama gave a speech in Berlin declaring that as long as nuclear weapons exist “we are not truly safe.” In the June 2013 address at the Brandenburg Gate, he said that he’d determined that we could reduce our nuclear arsenal by a third without any negative consequences. He pledged to negotiate more cuts with Russia and “seek bold reductions in U.S. and Russian tactical weapons in Europe.” All of this was in furtherance of his objective, announced at the outset of his administration, of creating a “world without nuclear weapons” — which announcement helped win him one of the least-deserved Nobel Peace Prizes in history.

 

Obama made no mention in Berlin of Russia’s massive increase in tactical nuclear weapons or of its extensive nuclear-modernization program. He skipped over Russia’s doctrine of “escalate to win” with nuclear weapons. He didn’t acknowledge Russia’s extensive, ongoing history of cheating on arms-control agreements. He gave no sign that it had occurred to him that the U.S. might need again to think about great-power competition with countries led by less deluded and much more dangerous men.

 

And he left all of this out, astonishingly enough, while warning of “a complacency among our Western democracies.”

 

Well, at least there’s a little less complacency now, although not nearly enough urgency.

 

Between the post–Cold War peace dividend, the focus on the War on Terror to the exclusion of attention to great-power rivalry, Obama’s delusions, the sequestration of the defense budget, a misbegotten worry about “provoking” our enemies, and a generalized neglect of our nuclear weapons and missile defenses, we’ve gotten behind the curve.

 

Our nuclear arsenal is aging and needs to be bigger, with new, different weapons. Our modernization of the triad (sea, land, and air delivery systems) is proceeding at a glacial pace. Our defense-industrial base has been allowed to seriously atrophy. Our hypersonic-weapons program is lagging those of Russia and China. Our missile defenses are much too limited.

 

Nearly everyone realizes that the holiday from history is over — the Russian invasion of Ukraine has put a punctuation mark on it, if anyone had any doubt. Yet an unwillingness to spend the necessary resources, an ideological hostility to nukes and missile defense among Democrats, and continued soft-headedness are preventing an effort commensurate to the stakes.

 

Recent decisions by Washington and Moscow around ICBM tests illustrate divergent approaches. In early March, the Biden administration canceled a scheduled test launch of a Minuteman III in order to supposedly diminish tensions with Russia, then in the process of trying to occupy Kyiv. In mid April, Putin went ahead and tested for the first time a Sarmat missile, a beast of an ICBM with massive throw weight. If that wasn’t message enough, Putin commented that the missile will “provide food for thought for those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country.”

 

Russia has been making nuclear threats going back to 2007, and has been making them more explicitly since the Ukraine war. As Keith Payne of the National Institute for Public Policy points out, these threats are different from those that undergirded the dynamic of classic deterrence during the Cold War, the so-called balance of terror. Russia has been using the prospect of its first use of nuclear weapons to warn the West off from interfering too directly with its expansionist designs in Europe.

 

It is easy to forget that deterrence isn’t just about a country preventing a nuclear attack on its territory — again, the Cold War model. It is about constraining the actions of the other side more broadly. This has been brought home in the Ukraine war. The Russians, for instance, deterred us from giving Ukraine the MiG-29 jets that Poland had offered to transfer to the Ukrainians via Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

 

Indeed, Russia’s nuclear capability and its potential willingness to use it has been top of mind for NATO throughout the conflict. It’s behind the constant warnings that a misstep could cause World War III. Reports suggest that China has noticed and feels an even greater incentive to put itself in a similar position of being able to deter the U.S. in a war over Taiwan.

 

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So, for the U.S., reacting appropriately to the new strategic environment is about maintaining its freedom from undue constraint in the international arena, as well as deterring a nuclear attack.

 

Russia has matched its nuclear saber-rattling with a long-running, determined program to build up and modernize its arsenal. Mark Schneider, a Russia expert with the National Institute for Public Policy, believes that Russia has two to four times the number of warheads that the United States has, and more than 5,000 tactical nuclear warheads, many of them low-yield. These smaller weapons aren’t covered by the New START treaty, which applies only to U.S. and Russian strategic weapons, and suit the Russian “escalate to win” doctrine of using small nukes to make an adversary stand down in an otherwise conventional conflict.

 

The Russians have been modernizing their nuclear force since 1997 and upgrading every aspect of their triad. Admiral Chas Richard, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, said in congressional testimony, “It is easier to describe what they’re not modernizing, pretty much nothing, than what they are, which is pretty much everything, including several never-before-seen capabilities.”

 

China has been as active. Admiral Richard calls its buildup “breathtaking” and refers to it as “a strategic breakout.” The latest Pentagon estimate is that China will quadruple its force by 2030, reaching 1,000 warheads.

 

Beijing isn’t stinting on anything related to its program — it conducted 250 ballistic-missile tests in 2020, more than every other nation combined; it has been building more than 200 missile silos in Gansu Province and the Xinjiang region, both in its west; it has gone from 120 sensor and reconnaissance satellites in space not too long ago to more than 200. The U.S. believes that China has achieved its own triad and has the ability to “launch under warning,” or before enemy missiles strike its territory, a capability that only the U.S. and Russia have had previously.

 

Dean Cheng, an expert on the Chinese military at the Heritage Foundation, believes that China’s posture is beginning to look less like those of France and the U.K., which have relied on so-called minimum deterrence — the ability only to exact some price from an attacker, not to fight a nuclear war — and more like those of the United States and Russia.

 

The U.S. could, in effect, be up against two major nuclear powers, not just one.

 

Russia and China have also made concerted pushes on hypersonic missiles and are ahead of the U.S., which — in a common theme — took a long pause in investing in the technology.

 

The cliché is that hypersonics combine the attributes of ballistic missiles (speed and long range) with those of cruise missiles (maneuverability and low-altitude flight path). They provide more options to attack with a missile that is fast, precise, and able to complicate tracking and targeting. ICBMs were good enough during the Cold War because there were no defenses to speak of and the targeting didn’t have to be particularly exact given that the size of their nuclear payloads would make up for near-misses. Now there’s a desire to have the capability to hit the same sort of targets and do it with conventional munitions as well as nuclear.

 

A conventionally armed hypersonic missile could hit highly mobile targets from a distance on the battlefield, and a nuclear-armed hypersonic missile could target a nation’s political leadership, again with diminished response time.

 

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What to do about all of this? First of all, the U.S. simply needs more nuclear weapons. The New START Treaty limits us to 1,550 strategic warheads, which isn’t enough. “Since effective deterrence requires targeting what potential enemy leaders value,” former arms-control official Franklin Miller writes in the Wall Street Journal, “we must be able to threaten, separately and in combination, both Russia’s and China’s key assets — including their leaders’ ability to command and control the state, their military forces, and the industrial potential to sustain war. New START constrains U.S. forces below the levels needed in the near future to accomplish this.”

 

We should get out of New START, which President Biden foolishly extended for another five years immediately upon taking office. The old arms-control logic that we can’t build new nukes because it will provoke our adversaries into acquiring more nukes obviously doesn’t apply, if it ever did — Russia and China are building apace regardless. Plus, arms-control treaties make little sense if China — our chief adversary and a growing nuclear threat — isn’t joining them. And it won’t.

 

We also need different kinds of nuclear weapons, especially low-yield warheads to counter the Russian threat. It’s not enough to have city-busting weapons and tell ourselves that if Russia goes nuclear in a battlefield setting, we will wipe out its population centers in retaliation in what would become a civilizational apocalypse. That’s simply not credible.

 

And we need to catch up as quickly as we can with our modernization. The Minuteman, the Cold War–era missile that is a pillar of our force, is very long in the tooth. No one, according to Admiral Richard, makes the technologically obsolete launch switches that go into every launch command center. He compared making the inside of these switches to asking a company to make a dial-up modem, and said that “the Air Force has been consistently pulling rabbits out of the hat to solve these problems.”

 

Holding together a key missile system with baling wire and duct tape is not exactly the approach one would expect of a superpower entering a period of heightened nuclear threat.

 

Moreover, our defenses are not nearly what they should be. As a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report authored by Tom Karako and Masao Dahlgren notes, the small number of surface-based radars we use for ballistic-missile defense is inadequate to defend against hypersonic missiles. The radars can’t see over the horizon. This means that they can only track hypersonic missiles late in their trajectory, giving us very little time to muster a defense.

 

We need a much greater presence in space. With space sensors, we can track a hypersonic missile all along its trajectory. We’ll need large numbers in different orbits to make it harder for Russia or China to take them out in a conflict. Space-sensor constellations were part of Ronald Reagan’s vision of the Strategic Defense Initiative. In the ensuing decades, launch costs have declined and the associated technology has improved, yet very little progress has been made.

 

And we have to acquire a new, hypersonic interceptor. Our current so-called midcourse interceptors are supposed to destroy ballistic missiles in the relatively forgiving (for a missile, that is) environment of space. Fixing and hitting a high-speed maneuverable object within the atmosphere is an entirely different task.

 

We don’t have the luxury of defending against only part of the missile threat. If we don’t have a defense against a certain missile, it puts a premium on our adversaries’ acquiring exactly those missiles. If we can’t stop hypersonic missiles, it creates the opening in, say, a war with the U.S. over Taiwan for the Chinese to use hypersonic weapons to knock out our radar at a base and then follow up with ballistic missiles. They’d also use hypersonic missiles to push our forward military presence back as far as possible.

 

Our challenges in the area of hypersonic missiles bring home how we have let our defense-industrial base erode. It’s hard to keep engineers with expertise in hypersonic technology if the funding isn’t reliable, and it hasn’t been. We don’t have enough wind tunnels for testing. “The shortage of facilities to model surface chemical reactions, conduct material screening, verify thermal protection system design, and support scramjet engine testing has bottlenecked the development of more advanced models,” the CSIS report notes.

 

We can’t afford ever again to so neglect our ability to research, design, and manufacture high-end weapons technology essential to our safety.

 

Finally, there’s the issue of missile defense more generally, which in the future has to be in space. To this point, we have limited our defenses to try to take out a one-off rogue-state attack or an accidental launch by Russia or China. Our ground-based system provides some cushion here. But we have refused even to try to widen the net to defend against a major Russian or Chinese attack — in part to avoid provoking Russia or China, in part because of the deep animus from Democratic administrations toward missile defense.

 

The fact is that we will never build enough ground-based interceptors to deal with a larger threat. But a space-based defense, relying on speed-of-light, high-energy lasers, opens the vista of potentially defeating or significantly diminishing a Russian or Chinese attack. This may seem fantastical, but we live in an age of technological wonders. Certainly, it makes no sense for President Biden to warn so forcefully of a potential World War III with Russia and not undertake the effort to protect ourselves to the maximum extent possible if the worst comes. If the U.S. government won’t make this effort, someone should tweet @elonmusk that we need defensive space lasers as soon as possible for the good of humanity.

 

No doubt, taking all of this on is a heavy and expensive lift, as one would expect after 30 years of neglect. Reasonable people can disagree about what particular systems we should prioritize, the best tactics, and exact levels of funding.

 

What no one can deny is that the era of delusion is over. Now, we need to act like it.