The end of the nuclear intermission
We now find ourselves in nothing short of a new nuclear age,” said Vipin Narang, a senior Pentagon official, in a speech on August 1st.
Thanks to arms-control treaties, the world’s nuclear stockpile shrank from more than 70,000 warheads in 1986 to about 12,000 today. In 2009 Barack Obama spoke of seeking “a world without nuclear weapons”. As recently as October 2022 the Biden administration’s nuclear posture review clung to the notion of “reducing the role of nuclear weapons in us strategy”.
Now Mr Narang says the quarter-century of “nuclear intermission” is over. Russia has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. America says Russia also plans to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit, designed to destroy satellites, in breach of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. China’s arsenal, meanwhile, is expanding rapidly. The Pentagon estimates it could grow from a few hundred warheads to perhaps 1,500 by 2035. North Korea has intensified tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles (icbms) to carry its nukes. In June it signed a mutual-defence treaty with Russia. North Korea has supplied Russia with artillery shells. What is Russia giving in return? America fears it could be missile and other weapons technology.
Russia does not seem interested in resuming arms-control talks; China, wanting something closer to parity with its peers, has never much cared for them. … the Pentagon and Strategic Command, which would oversee any nuclear war, “are increasingly convinced that they need more nukes” and are winning the bureaucratic battle. The fate of the nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile (slcm-n) highlights the new mindset. The system was proposed in 2018 by the Trump administration to provide “low-yield” or “tactical” nuclear weapons, to be fired from ships or submarines in potential regional conflicts. The Biden administration tried to cancel slcm-n, arguing it would “divert resources” from an already ambitious programme to modernise all three legs of America’s “triad” of land-, sea- and air-launched nuclear weapons. The upgrade includes new icbms (Sentinel missiles replacing Minuteman IIIs), new ballistic-missile submarines (Columbia-class boats succeeding Ohio-class ones) and new bombers (b-21 jets superseding b-2s and b-52s), as well as new nuclear command-and-control systems. Congress, however, has preserved slcm-n. Now Mr Narang extols its virtues. Using tactical nuclear weapons in a regional crisis, he argued, would free strategic ones to strike at the growing number of strategic targets (eg, China’s large new icbm silo fields which, officials say, are already straining the capacity of America’s nuclear force). He said slcm-n would also reduce the “risk of miscalculation”, ie, that a foe could mistake a limited nuclear exchange for an all-out nuclear attack. … To comply with New start, America disabled some launch tubes on submarines, tipped long-range missiles with single rather than multiple warheads and converted some nuclear bombers to conventional use. America can still reverse the process by “uploading” some or all of the 1,900 warheads it holds in reserve. …cFranklin Miller, a former Pentagon official, has suggested roughly doubling the current force to 3,000-3,500 deployed warheads.
Source: Economist