nuclear-news

Nuclear Roulette: The U.S. Nuclear Employment Guideline

CounterPunch, by Mark Muhich, 6 Sept 24

The U.S. Nuclear Employment Guideline Report, according to Department of Defense websites, appears to be a detailed target menu in the event the president orders a nuclear attack. It is required of the executive by Congress, Section 491, when the president alters the nuclear weapons strategy of the U.S. As alluded to by top-ranking administration leaders and reported in the New York Times, the revised Nuclear Employment Guideline signed by President Biden reflects China’s expanding nuclear arsenal.

The president sets the nation’s nuclear strategy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff develop the tactical plans to achieve the president’s strategy, according to DOD literature.

As China, People’s Republic of China, has increased its manufacture of nuclear weapons in the past five years much faster than defense analysts had predicted, the U.S. has turned the focus of its nuclear guideline toward the PRC.  China now possesses around 500 nuclear warheads. And while the U.S. and Russia each currently deploy around 1,700 nuclear warheads each, China is on pace to equal that number by 2035.

Similarly threatening to the U.S. is the prospect of China coordinating its nuclear capability with that of Russia, and even with North Korea, now harboring around 60 nuclear warheads and a growing fleet of intercontinental missiles to deliver them.

China has also made aggressive territorial claims to the South China Sea and vows to gain control of Taiwan by any means necessary, definitively by 2049. This July China suspended nuclear weapons control talks with the U.S. citing increased military arms sales to Taiwan by the U.S.

Yet, China has recently dissuaded Russia from threatening the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine, or against western states that might deploy soldiers to Ukraine. And China repeated its call for the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula in joint meetings with Japan and South Korea in May of this year.

Significantly, China maintains its posture of No First Use of nuclear weapons and repeated calls last week for the other leading nuclear-armed nations, Russia, France, U.K and the U.S. to adopt a No First Use nuclear policy. India and China are the only nuclear-armed nations to affirm NFU.

One of the architects of the revised U.S. Nuclear Employment Guidelines is Vipin Narang, Acting Assistant Director of Department of Defense Space Agency. During his retirement speech from DOD this August, Narang blamed China and Russia for failed arms control talks. Before returning to lecture at M.I.T. Narang said China’s expansion of its nuclear arsenal was threatening, and that moving its nuclear-armed missiles to “launch on warning” status was provocative.

Narang did not share that the U.S. possesses more than ten times the number of nuclear warheads, 5,580, as China has. Nor that the entire fleet of U.S. Air Force  Minuteman missiles has been on “launch on alert” status for sixty years.

Failing arms control negotiations with Russia result from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s announced withdrawal from the NewSTART nuclear weapons treaty in 2026, according to Narang. NewSTART is the only remaining arms control treaty now in effect between Russia and the U.S. It successfully decommissioned thousands of nuclear warhead and missile launchers from each arsenal since its ratification in 2010.  For the deteriorating state of U.S. Russia talks, Narang did not cite the failure of the U.S. to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1996, the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Treaty in 2001 or withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, INF in 2019.

Narang’s bleak address to his DOD colleagues warned them to “prepare for a world where constraints on nuclear weapons arsenals disappear entirely”……………………………………………………………….

Missing from Narang’s calculus, is the decision many countries have already made to forgo nuclear arsenal all together. Indeed, the majority of nation-states, pursuant of their own security, have rejected the deployment of nuclear weapons on their soil. The majority of humankind regard nuclear weapons as inherently destabilizing and dangerous and of no military value.

When 193 countries voted for the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty, NPT, in 1970, they agreed not only to halt the spread of nuclear weapons but to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles, and “cease the nuclear arms race”. The NPT places the onus on the nuclear powers to eliminate all nuclear weapons at an “early date”. All nuclear weapons would eventually come under the control of an international agency as agreed in the NPT’s Article VI.

The international control of military arms and especially nuclear weapons was the lifelong goal of Albert Einstein…………………………………………………………………………..

Even more consequential is the growing effort begun in the United Nations General Assembly to outlaw nuclear weapons, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, TPNW. Endorsed by 122 countries in the United Nations General Assembly in 2017 is now ratified or acceded to by 70 countries, banning nuclear weapons from their jurisdictions.

As the U.S. and the other nuclear powers drift further and further from the goal of nuclear disarmament, they double down on their nuclear arsenals and invest in new platforms to deliver their nuclear payloads. Is it too late to build credible assurances that these awful weapons will never be used? It will never be too late to eschew these horrible weapons, unless or until some brilliant leader orders a nuclear attack.

……………………………………………………………………………………………… “Nuclear weapons are totally irrational”, said Ronald Reagan, they are “totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing people, possible destruction of life on Earth and civilization.” There is no theory that will change the brutal absurdity of nuclear weapons nor transform them into logical agents of peace and security.

In Thomas Schelling’s application of game theory to nuclear weapons the object of deterrence is to convince the adversary not to use their weapons and vice versa. If nuclear deterrence is the stated goal of the U.S. nuclear posture, then adopting a No First Use of nuclear weapon either by treaty or unilaterally is the clear choice. China and India have done so for decades. No First Use makes perfect sense. Repelling conventional assaults should not be part of the nuclear employment equation. Nuclear weapons are not just more powerful conventional weapons. If they are ever used in war again the consequences are unpredictable and beyond any risk assessment.

 It is past time to end the U.S.’ “nuclear ambiguity”. Take the nuclear option off the table. Abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty; refuse to renew the nuclear arms race.  We cannot win security or freedom in a game of nuclear roulette. But we can and will lose everything if we continue to bet on nuclear weapons. What folly.  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/06/nuclear-roulette-the-u-s-nuclear-employment-guideline/

September 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

A Looming Nuclear Catastrophe

Unfortunately, we’re in an election season with both candidates battling over who would create a more lethal military force and increase military spending,  The campaign thus far has featured no reference to arms control and disarmament. 

by Melvin Goodman, 30 Aug 24,  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/08/30/a-looming-nuclear-catastrophe-2/
“Escalation dominance defines a situation in which a nation has the military capabilities that can contain or defeat an adversary at all levels of violence with the possible exception of the highest.”

– Reagan Administration’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, “Discriminate Deterrence,” 1988.

There is no greater strategic madness than the belief that nuclear superiority must be maintained at each rung of the nuclear ladder in order to maintain deterrence.  U.S. weapons technology was a major driver of escalation dominance throughout the 1950s and 1960s along with the belief that the Soviet Union would move to a level of nuclear conflict that the United States could not counter.  “Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb” parodied these fears, and the arms control and disarmament developments of the 1970s and 1980s helped to defuse them.  Sadly, the Biden administration has taken a step that suggests a return to escalation dominance, which will spiral a Pentagon budget that will soon reach $1 trillion per year.

“Dr. Strangelove” remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of two saber-rattling superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation.  Now we have a third superpower—China—that is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and the Biden administration has approved a highly classified nuclear strategic plan—the Nuclear Employment Guidance—that seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from Russia, China, and North Korea.  According to David Sanger in the New York Times, the document is so highly classified that “there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.

The importance of escalation dominance in the Cold War was driven by such Cold Warriors as Paul Nitze, who argued that a Soviet nuclear attack would enable the Kremlin to hold the American population hostage and to dictate the terms of peace.  Nitze added that the Soviet Union’s “effective civil defense program” would keep Soviet casualties to two to four percent of their population, a cost that Moscow would be willing to pay to achieve “dominance.”  These absurd notions encouraged the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s to advise U.S. families to build bomb shelters as protection from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.  President John F. Kennedy said the government would provide such protection for every American; in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan guaranteed protection in the form of his Star Wars missile defense.

Only the United States has spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of a missile defense shield over the entire country.  I wrote about this 25 years ago in a book titled “The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion.”  Now, European leaders are talking about a “European Air Shield,” and the Heritage Foundation—Donald Trump’s think tank—favors a missile defense system that would destroy over 100 incoming missiles.  Trump’s flawed reference to the success of Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system is also illusory because it intercepts small short-range rockets fired by militants in the region and not ballistic missiles.

The next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the dangers of the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.  China is expanding its nuclear arsenal; Russia is threatening the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and warning about World War III; Iran’s nuclear program is expanding rapidly in size and sophistication; and North Korea reportedly has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear states that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty: Israel, India, and Pakistan.

The close ties between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are feeding Washington’s nuclear paranoia.  Washington’s failure to hold substantive discussions with these four countries makes the potential for conflict more real.  Our obsession with terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons adds to the exaggeration of the threat and our distorted strategic spending. The fact that Donald Trump may return to the White House, where he once boasted about the size of his nuclear button and promised to return America’s nuclear arsenal to the “top of the pack,” adds to nuclear uncertainty

Russia and China are willing to enter discussions on nuclear matters with the United States, but only as part of a larger strategic discussion on the tensions and challenges that confront Washington’s bilateral policies with both Moscow and Beijing.  President Biden’s administration has refused to enter such an expanded dialogue, which is a major failure in its national security strategy.  It is essential for the three major nuclear powers to discuss arms control, risk reduction, and the importance of nonproliferation; the United States is primarily responsible for the failure to begin a dialogue.  Instead, Biden and his national security team have been preoccupied with ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia relationship, which has never been stronger.  In fact, it has been Washington’s opposition to Sino-Russian relations that has led Moscow and Beijing to bolster their ties.

The United States has been lacking serious disarmament specialists at the highest levels of the government since the Obama administration when John Kerry was secretary of state and Rose Gottemoeller was undersecretary for arms control and international security and assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation.  Kerry and Gottemoeller were fighting an uphill battle because of President Bill Clinton’s decision in 1997 to abolish the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which seriously weakened the entire arms control community in the United States.  ACDA’s demise as an independent voice for arms control weakened national security by narrowing arms control options for presidential decision making.

Unfortunately, we’re in an election season with both candidates battling over who would create a more lethal military force and increase military spending,  The campaign thus far has featured no reference to arms control and disarmament.  The United States is already responsible for half of the global spending on the military, and is the world’s only country that has power projection capabilities that involve every corner of the globe.  Our nuclear inventory contains more warheads than there are strategic targets, and this is certainly true for the other nuclear powers around the world.  There is no greater shared irresponsibility in the international community than the secret decisions that led to the overkill capabilities in the nuclear inventories of the nine nuclear powers.  It will take a serious act of statesmanship to stop the fear-mongering delusions that could once again shape our nuclear weapons policy.

Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.  A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

September 3, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment