The U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy

The U.S. Quest for Nuclear Primacy: The Counterforce Doctrine and the Ideology of Moral Asymmetry

Monthly Review, by John Bellamy Foster, February 2024

The demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 resulted in Washington declaring at that very moment that a new unipolar world order was being ushered in, with the United States now the sole superpower.

 The United States, supported by its NATO allies, immediately initiated a grand strategy of regime change or “naked imperialism” in the Balkans, the Middle East, northern Africa, and along the entire perimeter of the former Soviet Union. This was accompanied by the rapid expansion of NATO itself eastward into the former Warsaw Pact countries and regions previously part of the USSR.

The pivotal goal in this expansion, as explained by former U.S. National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard, was to incorporate Ukraine into NATO, which would create the geopolitical and geostrategic conditions for the final overpowering and forced breakup of the Russian Federation.³

Underlying this imperial design for the formation of a unipolar world order was Washington’s effort to reestablish its absolute nuclear dominance of the early Cold War years, when it had a nuclear monopoly (1945–49), followed by a period of quantitative nuclear superiority (1949–53)—prior to the Soviet Union achieving effective nuclear parity with the United States.⁴…………………………….. Ironically, the demise of the Soviet Union led in the United States (and NATO) to the triumph of the maximum deterrence posture, despite various strategic arms agreements, and to the seeming final defeat of those who had long argued for a minimal deterrence posture.⁶

Counterforce has as its objective nuclear primacy or first-strike capability, that is, the use of nuclear weapons for “decapitating” the enemy’s nuclear weapons before they can be launched (sometimes referred to as a “true first strike”).⁷ Moreover, counterforce also lends itself to the idea of limited nuclear war and can therefore be seen as operating within a continuum that also includes nonstrategic or tactical nuclear weapons and conventional weapons, thus representing the full integration of nuclear weapons into military strategy at every level…………………………………………………………

The coincidence of declining U.S. hegemony in the world economy with the U.S. attempt to secure unipolar dominance through military means, in line with its current policy of maximal deterrence by means of counterforce and nuclear primacy, has all come to a head in the current proxy war in Ukraine between the United States/NATO and Russia, and in the increasing tensions over Taiwan between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

The ongoing conflicts over Ukraine and Taiwan constitute the main hot spots in the New Cold War emanating from Washington, involving actual and potential proxy war on the very borders of superpowers. This has enormously increased the likelihood of global thermonuclear war. This in turn poses the threat of global omnicide with the onset of nuclear winter, as smoke and soot from all-encompassing fires in one hundred or more cities would block out solar radiation, drastically lowering global temperatures and resulting, within a couple of years, in the effective annihilation of the global population.¹²

The Critique of Maximum Deterrence………………………………………………………………………………………………..

In Fear, War and the Bomb, Blackett dealt with the U.S. decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here it was argued for the first time that “the dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the Second World War, as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.” The Japanese had already offered to negotiate peace terms, while a U.S. invasion of Japan was still in the planning stage and was not to take place for some time. Rather than a result of the need “to save American lives,” as is commonly claimed, the haste in dropping the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and then a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later, had to do with the fact that the Soviet Union was preparing to enter the war against Japan on August 8, commencing their offensive in Manchuria on August 9. The U.S. objective, Blackett explained, was thus to force an unconditional Japanese surrender before the Soviets could advance very far into Manchuria, and to ensure that the Japanese surrender was to the United States alone.²⁰

……………………………………………………………………………….Blackett showed in Fear, War and the Bomb that there was strong sentiment initially in strategic circles in the United States for using the atomic bomb on Soviet cities in a first strike, since the USSR did not at that time have the bomb and was not expected to develop it and have a stockpile until 1953. In 1948, Winston Churchill had argued for threatening the Soviet Union with a preventative nuclear war. 

…………………………………………………………………………… Despite his enormous prestige as a Nobel laureate in physics and as the founder of military operational research, Blackett’s attempt to promote a rational, minimalist deterrence strategy downplaying or even removing nuclear weapons resulted in Cold War-style attacks on him as a Communist fellow traveler…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The U.S. Pursuit of Nuclear Primacy: From 1991 to Now

It is one of the great ironies of our time that the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War led to the immediate triumph of the maximum deterrence doctrine in Washington and the pursuit of nuclear primacy through the development of counterforce capabilities. Despite nuclear arms agreements initially put into place and reductions in nuclear warheads, the basic structure of nuclear forces was left intact, while Washington saw this as a chance to secure global nuclear primacy or true first-strike capability, and thus absolute nuclear dominance. 

Since the U.S. nuclear strategy is based on counterforce, building the capability for a first strike arriving as a “bolt from the blue,” with antimissile systems picking off the few weapons that survive, it requires the unification of “offensive” and “defensive” nuclear weapons.⁵¹ The overall goal is ensuring the non-survivability of command-and-control centers and nuclear weapons systems on the other side. Antiballistic missile systems, which are regarded as practically useless in defending against a full-scale first strike, are not mainly defensive weapons, but are meant to ensure that the few nuclear weapons in the country attacked that manage to survive in the face of a first strike are picked off before they can reach their targets. Hence, nuclear missile defense systems are chiefly intended to enhance first-strike capability.⁵²……………………………………………………………………………………………….

Washington’s reductions in the number of nuclear warheads, in line with parallel reductions by Moscow, appear to have been aimed at cooling nuclear tensions. However, this policy conformed to its overall counterforce strategy, as redundancy in the sheer numbers of such weapons is one of the main means of ensuring the survival of a nuclear deterrent. Coupled with the modernization of its nuclear weapons systems for greater accuracy and enhanced means of detection of nuclear submarines and mobile ground-based missiles, the United States was able to move rapidly toward its goal of nuclear primacy…………………………………………………………..

The United States, through NATO, has always relied on a first-strike strategy based on both nonstrategic and strategic nuclear weapons, forming the core of NATO’s defense, first against the Soviet Union’s conventional forces, and then against those of Russia, under the umbrella of U.S. “extended deterrence.”⁶⁵ Although the Soviet Union, like China today, had a no-first-strike policy—while post-Soviet Russia has declared that it will only use nuclear weapons in a first strike if the Russian state/territory is directly threatened—all U.S. presidents down to the present office-holder have reconfirmed U.S. first-strike policy.⁶⁶

 For Washington, nuclear weapons (both strategic and tactical) are “on the table” all over the world, even in some cases against non-nuclear powers, a policy reinforced by the imperial outreach of the United States, which maintains at least eight hundred military bases abroad.⁶⁷ ……………………………………………………………………..

In 2014, the United States backed the Maidan color revolution/coup in Ukraine, which removed the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych. This led to a civil war in Ukraine between the government in Kyiv controlled by NATO-backed Ukrainian nationalists, on the one hand, and Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbass region, supported by Russia, on the other. In 2022, Russia, after NATO continually ignored its red lines, firmly intervened on the side of the separatists. Faced with a U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine, Russia put its nuclear forces on alert.⁷⁰ Suddenly, a global thermonuclear exchange endangering the entire global population with annihilation (via nuclear winter) became an imminent threat……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

U.S. Hegemonic Decline and the Threat of Nuclear Armageddon

U.S. nuclear strategists and military planners, nearly all of whom today are maximalists, do not, as a rule, refer in any of their analyses to the full effects of global thermonuclear exchange, even when a full-scale nuclear war is contemplated. Thus, there is no mention of nuclear winter, which would annihilate almost the entire global human population, even though this has been affirmed over and over in scientific studies.⁸³

 More often, U.S. military planners today contend that a first-strike counterforce strategy with relatively “low-yield” strategic nuclear weapons (though generally greater in yield than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) can decapitate the second-strike capability of the other side, through a bolt from the blue, eliminating the possibility of a massive retaliation. Accompanying this are plans for limited nuclear war that presume that the country being attacked will be able to distinguish between a partial attack and a true first strike and can be counted on to respond in a similarly “limited” manner, without a threat of escalation.

. Again and again, however, these assumptions, though governing U.S. nuclear strategy, have been shown to be false and irrational…………………………………………………………..

Today, the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine on the Russian border and Washington’s threatening behavior toward Beijing over Taiwan (recognized by the entire world as part of China, but with a different government) have brought the issue of a general thermonuclear exchange to the forefront of world concern.

…………………………………. the U.S. maximalist nuclear strategy, ………., is justified today in nuclear deterrence circles in terms of a supposed moral asymmetry that places the United States uniquely above other nations……………………………………………………………………

The U.S. maximalist nuclear strategy, rooted in the assumption that the United States can dominate at all stages of conventional and nuclear escalation and even win a nuclear war, is a major factor in inducing a false sense of power on the part of decision-makers, leading to Washington’s aggressiveness toward Beijing and Moscow in the present New Cold War. The most likely result of the current Western view that nuclear weapons can be used to achieve political and military ends is that they will indeed end up being used, with the destruction of virtually all of humanity.⁸⁹ ……………………………

Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://monthlyreview.org/2024/02/01/the-u-s-quest-for-nuclear-primacy/

February 5, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized