The next step in arms control: Eliminate the counterforce mission

Abstract

US–Russian nuclear arms control efforts should seek to limit not just numbers of weapons but nuclear missions as well, the most dangerous being “counterforce,” or an attack on enemy nuclear weapons before they can be launched. Giving up the counterforce mission means giving up the capability and all its dangerous requirements, including high alert rates. To eliminate counterforce, the United States and Russia will have to reduce both the capability and the vulnerability of their nuclear weapons. Once nuclear weapons are essentially invulnerable to attack, a small number will be enough to deter any potential attacker.

The ABC tele-movie The Day After vividly portrayed the obscene calamity that a breakdown of nuclear deterrence would bring. Set in the 1980s, the movie begins with rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, and small military tit-for-tat attacks in Europe quickly ratchet upward into the unthinkable: the unleashing of both sides’ full nuclear arsenals, launched “on warning” that the other side was preparing for nuclear attack. The vision of that “day”—the contrails of intercontinental ballistic missiles arcing out of a Kansas prairie toward Russia shortly before nuclear blasts incinerate Kansas cities and evaporate Americans before the eyes of stunned viewers—is not simply a television fantasy.

Despite the end of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, the United States and Russia retain the numbers and types of nuclear weapons needed to launch first strikes against the nuclear arsenal of the other. That is to say, even though arms control treaties have reduced the size of arsenals, both countries, but especially the United States, still place “counterforce”—the supposed ability to launch a massive “damage limitation” strike that destroys enemy nuclear forces on the ground before they can be used—at the center of their nuclear doctrines and capabilities. Indeed, the only missions that justify keeping the bulk of US weapons on high alert are to attack Russian forces before they are launched or, if the Russians attempt the same against US forces, launching US weapons before incoming Russian weapons arrive (a tactical move called “launch under attack”).

Past arms control treaties have focused on numbers of nuclear weapons and launchers. New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) is a straightforward extrapolation of SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and START agreements that reach back to the Cold War, and though important, New START may be about as far as nuclear arms control can go down that well-beaten path. To make real progress on further reductions—and to help ensure the “day after” never arrives—nuclear missions have to be shed, along with the weapons. Indeed, if missions were given up, then reductions in numbers of weapons would follow naturally.

The counterforce mission will become negotiable only if the parties come to understand that giving it up is to their advantage. Indeed, it is. If the United States and Russian nuclear arsenals were not capable of targeting one another, then the number of weapons that each side needs merely for deterrence would be generally independent of the number on the other side. Such a decoupling of arsenals would simplify further arms reductions, make verification easier, and help bring the second rank of nuclear powers into a formal arms control framework. It would even address many of the complications missile defense introduces into arms control negotiations. And, of course, giving up counterforce could save both countries huge amounts of money on future weapons systems that are now under consideration but could be scrapped or greatly modified in a counterforce-free world.

But to wean themselves from the counterforce mission, US and Russian leaders will have to take a counterintuitive leap, agreeing to eliminate or greatly constrain the capabilities of their weapons and to actually help make the enemy’s remaining, less-capable nuclear forces invulnerable.

The counterforce mission

Nuclear weapons were first aimed at cities, the centers of population and industrial production. This targeting strategy was, in part, a natural extrapolation of the mass city bombing tactics of World War II. But cities also became nuclear targets by default; with the very inaccurate early missiles, cities were the only targets big enough to hit. As accuracy, weapon numbers, and intelligence on enemy-weapon location increased, it was irresistible for both sides to target the enemy’s nuclear weapons. These were the weapons that could destroy them utterly. How could any military and political leadership not try to reduce the threat of the other side’s nuclear arsenal?

The targeting of weapons inevitably led to an arms race. If cities were the only targets, then neither side needed more weapons than the other side had cities to shoot at. But once nuclear weapons became targets, each side had to have as many weapons as the other side for counterforce attacks, plus more to shoot at “value” targets like cities. When each side needed just a few more than the other, an arms race without end was on.

Today, maintaining counterforce capability is responsible for the most dangerous instabilities of the nuclear standoff, starting with the need to constantly keep nuclear weapons ready to launch on a moment’s notice.

Deterrence: The remaining mission

If the United States and Russia could agree to eliminate the most challenging mission for nuclear weapons—that is, the comprehensive attack of one another’s nuclear arsenals—the remaining missions could be accomplished with far fewer weapons at lower levels of alert. In fact, if counterforce could be eliminated, all the missions assigned to nuclear weapons would be open to debate, except for one: deterrence. There is near universal agreement that deterrence is what nuclear weapons are all about, yet the term is so overused and abused it hardly has any specific meaning left.

During the Cold War, nuclear weapons were, in part, intended to support very broad deterrence objectives, so claims of a deterrence role were at least partially justified, even if the weapons were fast, multi-warhead, hard-target-killing, first-strike weapons like the Peacekeeper missile. Tactical nuclear weapons in Europe were meant to deter a conventional attack on NATO by the Warsaw Pact. US central nuclear forces needed to threaten Soviet central nuclear forces to deter a Warsaw Pact use of tactical nuclear weapons. Little wonder that nuclear missions could be cast in the seemingly benign role of deterrence while a requirement for tens of thousands of offensive weapons developed.

The concept of deterrence by retaliation is simple: I possess something that you want to steal; to deter you, I have to be able to threaten to inflict enough pain on you to make the prize not worthwhile. Deterrent threats have to be proportional to the stakes involved, and the stakes are much smaller now that the ideological contest of the Cold War is over.

Today, there are certainly potential areas of conflict between Russia and the United States, perhaps in Georgia or the Arctic or the Baltics. But one has to ask, in the context of any imaginable conflict, what number of nuclear weapons would have to go back and forth before both sides said that the costs and risks are simply out of proportion to the stakes involved. That number is certainly smaller than the tens of thousands available during the Cold War or the thousands of weapons available today. Indeed, in most cases, that number almost certainly falls somewhere between zero and one.

Deterrent forces do not need to be as fast or ready-to-launch as counterforce weapons, if they are invulnerable. There may be some subtle arguments about the details of deterrence, but any proposal should be tested by asking whether the deterrent calculation hinges on a retaliatory nuclear bomb arriving an hour from now or a day from now. Even if nuclear weapons are intended to be used on a tactical battlefield to sway the outcome of a conventional conflict, there is no need to have them on ready-to-launch status for years beforehand. Few discussions address what retaliatory targets ought to be. But if the goal is to inflict pain, not fight a nuclear war, then the categories might include key industrial sites, military bases, harbors, or other targets that tend to be vulnerable, so nuclear weapons would need to be neither highly accurate nor powerful. Finally, if the threatened pain is, say, to destroy half of a nation’s oil-refining capacity, it makes little difference which half, so the current very stringent requirements of warhead reliability can be relaxed.

During the Cold War, some argued that a counterforce policy was morally superior to city attacks. (While an attractive illusion in theory, in practice counterforce always included command and control centers, political leadership, and communications and transportation centers; that is to say, targets in the hearts of cities. The purest counterforce attack would have killed many tens of millions of civilians.) Today, a similar objection is raised to eliminating counterforce and nuclear war-fighting, with the suggestion that the only alternative is to return to attacks on cities and the slaughter of civilians.

But the point of deterrence is to impose enough pain to dissuade an adversary from taking action. There is a great deal of latitude regarding what that pain might be. With modern weapons, targets could include conventional military bases, electric power generation, oil production or transportation nodes, or any number of other remote industrial targets. Make no mistake, nuclear weapons are immensely powerful, and attacks that minimized civilian deaths would still kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Indeed, many of these attacks could better be carried out with conventional weapons, calling into question any need for nuclear weapons at all. But minimal nuclear deterrence does not imply mindless attacks on population centers aimed at the slaughter of innocents.

The big trade and the future of nuclear weapons

Counterforce capabilities still link the world’s two most deadly arsenals with potential consequences that include, literally, the destruction of civilization. Russian (and perhaps Chinese) nuclear weapons are the only threat facing the United States that could destroy it as a nation and society. Is it really plausible to ask the United States to voluntarily relinquish a counter to this threat, to give up the chance to reduce potentially catastrophic damage that might be suffered in the event of a nuclear war? If not, further progress in arms control will be impossible.

But a great trade—each side giving up deadly quick-strike weapons for a smaller and slower but invulnerable deterrent force—is not just plausible. It is a very rational next step in arms control that would give the major powers greater security at far less cost while vastly reducing the odds of a “day after.”

Giving up counterforce capability becomes easier politically when there is nothing to shoot. Whether realized as formal treaties or not, arms control agreements should, therefore, set as an explicit goal the reduction of vulnerability of nuclear arsenals. Less vulnerability will result from actions both the shooting and the target nation take, and coordinating these efforts could be the organizing principle of future arms control negotiations.

Both sides in the nuclear face-off are responsible for vulnerability. One side builds fast-flying, accurate, high-yield weapons that can attack nuclear forces on the other side; that other side does not pay enough attention to invulnerable basing systems, in part because they believe that, as a last resort, they can launch weapons, which are on alert anyway, before they are destroyed on the ground. Some approaches to the basing of nuclear weapons could reduce vulnerability, but they would also reduce launch readiness, hence first-strike capability. When confronted with this choice to date, both nuclear superpowers have chosen to accept vulnerability in order to be able to maintain the ready-to-launch status of their weapons. For example, both Russia and the United States keep a significant number of their nuclear weapons on missiles in underground silos, which are vulnerable to attack by the other side.

Making those last weapons invulnerable will come from a combination of each side giving up some attack capability while also working hard to make its weapons tougher targets. For example, Russia has some mobile land-based missiles and seems to be moving more in that direction. When dispersed, the missiles are hard to attack, but for some combination of reasons—probably cost, security, and control—Russian mobile missiles are not routinely roaming the countryside but concentrated in garrisons, where they are tempting targets. Changes in US weapons could increase Russian confidence in the survival of its weapons by, for example, making US weapons impossible to launch faster than Russian mobile missiles can be dispersed.

Simple and straightforward suggestions for visibly extending launch times include heaping concrete missile silo covers with boulders that would take a day or two to remove (Gompert et al., 1977). Nuclear warheads could be removed from missiles and stored some distance away. Russian observers, perhaps human but more likely automated sensors, could be allowed to monitor the warhead and missile storage sites to confirm that bombs are not being reloaded. If the stream of all-clear reports back to Russia ever stopped, it would be the warning that reload could be underway and the Russians should disperse their mobile missiles. Of course, US missiles must also be invulnerable, so the Russians are not tempted to launch their missiles during what they see as a fleeting opportunity.

It will be far harder to reduce the dangerously high readiness of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs). The US D-5 SLBM can quickly deliver multiple warheads of very high-yield and accuracy. Designing submarines to carry only long-range, slow-flying, air-breathing missiles—based on modifications of existing cruise-missile technology—would be one way to reduce their first-strike threat while maintaining their invulnerability.

In any case, the greatest challenge will not be technical but doctrinal—that is, getting to a consensus that giving up the ability to attack potentially devastating weapons, in concert with dramatic reductions in the numbers of those weapons, is a good deal for both sides.

There are two common objections to taking missiles off alert, a requirement if counterforce capabilities are to be eliminated. The first is that some targets require prompt response. If North Korea or Iran were preparing a nuclear missile for launch, a response of minutes, not days, might be required. When pursued in detail, these contrived scenarios are rarely even remotely plausible, and if one did come to pass, the strike against the missile could be accomplished with non-nuclear weapons. But even accepting the need for some quick nuclear response capability, these missions never require that all of the US nuclear weapons be on alert; a tiny slice of the arsenal can deal with some hypothetical requirement for prompt response.

A second argument contends that taking weapons off alert creates opportunities for a highly unstable and dangerous race to re-alert. Once one side suspects the other, it will start to activate its weapons, causing the other side to respond, and so on, back and forth in a spiraling escalation. Because this action–reaction cycle takes both sides back to where they already are now 24 hours a day, it is not clear why it should cause more alarm than the current state of affairs. But worries about a race presume that there is some urgency to re-alert. With largely invulnerable forces, both sides could afford to be very deliberate about raising alert levels.

The USA’s pursuit of missile defenses is an ongoing source of friction between the United States and Russia. Russia continues to insist on some formal constraint on US missile defense developments, which is a political impossibility in the United States. Russia claims that failure on a defense agreement could derail all future progress in nuclear arms control.

Almost all independent US analysts—that is, those outside the government and the defense industry—are deeply skeptical of the feasibility of missile defenses, especially against a technically sophisticated country like Russia. To these skeptics, therefore, Russia’s position seems frustratingly irrational: Russia is letting the potential for mutually beneficial arrangements be undermined by the USA’s politically motivated pursuit of a system that will never work.

Whether rational or not, Russia’s concerns about US missile defenses arise in a context of formidable US offensive capabilities that could substantially reduce the Russian retaliatory force to the point that a US defense system might be able to handle it. So Russia should welcome agreements that eliminate the counterforce mission and greatly reduce US offensive nuclear forces. This is not to say that defenses are irrelevant if counterforce capability disappears; defenses still introduce an important asymmetry. But missile defense would be far less important in a counterforce-free world than it is with the current US nuclear posture.

Moving toward a safer future

The next step in nuclear arms control has to be in a direction that changes fundamentally the mission and capability of nuclear weapons by removing their ability to shoot at each other. Cooperation in achieving invulnerable forces is the goal. Steps in this direction would go a long way toward actually turning nuclear forces into what they are typically claimed to be: deterrent forces. They would be sufficient to inflict unacceptable damage on an enemy, but they could not disarm that enemy in a first strike.

If agreement on eliminating counterforce capability can be reached, nuclear forces can then be sized to meet the deterrent need. This elimination of counterforce reduces the importance of the relative size of nuclear arsenals, and that change is a necessary first step to including the smaller arsenals of France, Britain, China, and others in following rounds of global reductions in nuclear weapons. Whether or not the path ends with zero nuclear weapons, this transformation in mission will make the world, but especially the two nuclear great powers, safer.