Abstract
As president, Barack Obama could fundamentally alter U.S. nuclear weapons policy, but only if he devotes the necessary political capital to the effort and rethinks timeworn assumptions.
It would be easy to be overly optimistic about the prospects for dramatic improvement in U.S. nuclear weapons policies when President-elect Barack Obama takes office on January 20. During the last eight years, the United States has laid out a series of destabilizing policies regarding the use of nuclear weapons and demonstrated an arrogant attitude toward resolving international conflicts. Correcting these missteps should be as easy as installing a new leader and resetting policies, right? Wrong. Many of the country's nuclear weapon policies share a lineage with U.S. policies going back decades. Rerooting them will require more than just new leadership; it will require fundamental shifts in thinking and a sustained commitment to change.
Early in 2008 the Bulletin published “The Bureaucracy of Deterrence,” by scholars Janne Nolan and James Holmes, which details the failures and foibles of President Bill Clinton's attempt to remake the U.S. nuclear posture. As Obama prepares to take office, he and his national security team would be wise to review this account as a first step in revising U.S. nuclear policy. Nolan and Holmes refer to potential pitfalls facing presidents, none of which presents bigger challenges than the discrepancies between “declaratory” and “operational” doctrine–in other words, how U.S. leaders describe the role of U.S. nuclear weapons and how the weapons would actually be used.
U.S. officials often say that the nation's nuclear weapons are meant to deter aggressors, yet they have concluded that deterrence only works if matched by the demonstrated ability and willingness to wage nuclear war, according to Nolan and Holmes. As such, they conclude: “Despite countless changes in nuclear doctrine devised by political leaders over successive administrations, there has been a negligible impact on the configuration and operational objectives of U.S. nuclear forces. As a country, we have never had a real debate about how much deterrence is enough.”
Reconciling U.S. declaratory and operational nuclear doctrine will be challenging, but the Obama administration should not shy away from taking it on. If the role of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter aggression, then Obama should have the courage to ask how few weapons need to be maintained and on what alert status should they be kept? Most other nuclear weapon countries, with the exception of Russia, whose nuclear stockpile exceeds the approximately 3,500 U.S. operational weapons, maintain nuclear arsenals numbering in the hundreds, and several have publicly issued “no first-use” policies. China, for instance, feels sufficiently secure deterring aggressors with approximately 200 nuclear weapons (many of which are not mated to their missiles or kept on alert). So why do the United States and Russia require so many more weapons to meet their deterrence demands?
Arguments against a posture of minimum deterrence similar to China's suggest that if deterrence fails, a large nuclear force would limit damage. But this points to consistent weaknesses in any deterrence strategy: You can always argue for more nuclear weapons, as both the United States and the Soviet Union did during the Cold War, but at what cost–in both dollars and in terms of the risk of an accidental launch or misplaced fissile materials? The more salient argument is that the United States needs enough nuclear weapons to protect other nations under its nuclear umbrella. But as analyst Jeffrey Lewis questioned in a July/August 2008 Bulletin article on minimum deterrence, can or should nuclear weapons bear the burden of maintaining the credibility of any alliance?
On the presidential campaign trail, Obama committed to work toward a nuclear-weapon-free world. No one expects this to happen overnight, least of all the government officials and bureaucrats around the world who currently set and maintain nuclear weapons policies. Yet, if Obama administration officials take a fresh look at U.S. operational needs and Obama himself commits political capital to righting current doctrinal discrepancies, U.S. policies can change over the course of his years in office in ways that reduce the risk of a deliberate or accidental nuclear exchange.
Many of these changes can be made unilaterally. The United States can declare that the only mission of nuclear weapons is to prevent the use of nuclear weapons; it can decrease the number of weapons in its operational stockpile (for example, eliminating its entire force of intercontinental ballistic missiles); reduce the readiness of its remaining weapons; and dismantle all retired weapons.
These actions would pave the way for further bilateral and multilateral nuclear reductions and for the mechanisms that can help to verify national commitments. But first Obama and other heads of state need to publicly acknowledge nuclear weapons' lack of military utility and the dangers presented by their very existence. This type of bold thinking would ensure that nuclear weapons exist only as long as it takes to destroy every last one of them.