The Obama administration is now rolling out
the results of its "Nuclear Posture Review," and presenting it as a significant
if not quite revolutionary rethinking of U.S. nuclear strategy. I haven't seen the full text of the document
and have only excerpts and press reports to go by, but the basic idea is to
narrow the range of scenarios in which the United States would threaten a
nuclear response.
To be a bit more specific, instead of reserving the option of nuclear
strikes in response to a nuclear attack, an attack by other forms of WMD (such
as biological weapons) or even a large-scale conventional invasion, the review
declares that the "fundamental role" of the U.S. arsenal is to deter nuclear
attacks on the U.S., its allies, or partners." Accordingly, as a matter of declaratory policy, the
Review declares that "the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons
against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation
obligations."
The exceptions to this narrower focus would be
non-nuclear attacks by any nuclear-armed state, or states that the United
States deems to be in violation of the NPT. Translation: We still reserve the option of first nuclear use
against Iran and North Korea.
Lots of ink will no doubt be spilled analyzing this shift in
declaratory policy, and nuclear theologians will spend time at
conferences and workshops parsing the fine-grained implications of the
change. And stay tuned for assorted hawkish windbags and right-wing
think-tankers declaring that this new language has somehow imperiled
U.S. security, even though we still have thousands of nuclear weaspons
in our arsenal and the strongest conventional forces in the world.
I'll concede that this new statement may
have some public relations value -- i.e, it lowers the priority
given to nuclear weapons in U.S. strategic thinking, consistent
with Obama's commitment to eventually reduce global
nuclear arsenals. But from a
purely strategic perspective, this new statement is largely meaningless. To the extent that it does matter,
it may even be counter-productive.
Here's why. No
matter what the U.S. government says
about its nuclear strategy, no potential adversary can confidently assume that
the U.S. would stick to its declared policy in the event of a crisis or
war. If
you were a world leader thinking
about launching a major conventional attack on an important U.S. ally
or interest, or contemplating the use of chemical or biological weapons
in a situation
where the United States was involved, would you conclude that it was safe to do
so simply because Barack Obama said back in 2010 that the U.S. wasn't going
to use nuclear weapons in that situation?
Of course you wouldn't, because there is absolutely nothing
to stop the United States from changing its mind. You'd worry that the United States might conclude that
the interests at stake were worth issuing a nuclear threat, and maybe even using
a nuclear weapon, and that it really didn't matter what anyone had said in a
posture review or an interview with a few journalists. And you'd also have to worry that the
situation might escalate in unpredictable or unintended ways -- what Thomas Schelling
famously termed the "threat that leaves something to chance -- and thereby ruin your whole day.
To the extent that nuclear weapons deter -- and I happen to
think they do -- it is the mere fact of their existence and not the specific
words we use when we speak about them. In short, nobody can know for certain if, when or how a
nuclear state might actually use its arsenal to protect its interests, and that
goes for any potential aggressor too. Because the prospect of nuclear use is so awful, no minimally rational
aggressor is going to run that risk solely because of some words typed in a posture statement.
Furthermore, the decision to exclude nuclear weapons states, non-signatories
of the NPT, or states we deem in violation of it (e.g., Iran) strikes me as both too
clever by half and maybe counterproductive. The purpose seems to be to give these states an additional
incentive to sign the NPT or to conform to it, but it's hard to believe that
this statement will have that effect on anyone.
India, Pakistan and Israel are all non-signatories, but surely they
aren't worried about U.S. "first use" against them and so this statement
will be irrelevant to their nuclear calculations.
The real target of this exception is Iran (and
conceivably North Korea and Syria). At best, this new statement will have little or no effect, for the
reasons noted above (i.e., no one know what we might do in a crisis or war, so
pledges of no-first-use are essentially meaningless). At
worst, however,
excluding Iran in this fashion -- which amounts to saying that Iran is
still a nuclear target even when it has no weapons its own -- merely
gives them additional incentives to pursue a
nuclear weapons option. In
particular, declaring that we reserve the right of "first use" against Iran now (when it has no weapons at
all), sounds like a good way to convince them that their own deterrent might be a pretty nice thing to have.
Remarkably, U.S. policymakers never seem to realize that the same
arguments they use to justify our own nuclear arsenal apply even more
powerfully to states whose security is a lot more precarious than
America's. If the U.S. government believes that "the
fundamental role" of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter nuclear attacks on the
United States, and the United States is now proclaiming that it still reserves
the option of using nuclear weapons first
against non-nuclear Iran (under some admittedly extreme circumstances),
then wouldn't a sensible Iranian leadership conclude that it could use a
nuclear arsenal of its own, whose "fundamental role" would be to deter us from
doing just that?
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