Thinking Beyond Russia: Can America Succeed in the New Nuclear Age?

October 28, 2015 Topic: Security Blog Brand: The Buzz Tags: RussiaChinaNuclear WeaponsMilitaryDefense

Thinking Beyond Russia: Can America Succeed in the New Nuclear Age?

For all its apparent dangers, though, Russia remains but one nuclear power. It is a far more complex nuclear environment that U.S. nuclear planners and strategists now must also prepare for...

Yet a position first adopted by Mao Zedong and faithfully carried through by his successors may not fit China’s changing security environment. A China that now has a global presence must consider how most effectively and efficiently to protect its interests that are far removed from the homeland. Beijing has so far avoided nuclear coercion or saber-rattling of the kind favored by Vladimir Putin. But with a plethora of worsening tensions with smaller nations over territorial disputes, could China resort to such tactics out of frustration and a sense of being overwhelmed?

Just as importantly, now that China has expanded its territory to include manmade islands in the South China Sea, will Beijing’s nuclear doctrine change from its focus on the homeland to extending a nuclear umbrella to vulnerable Chinese territory offshore? What if Chinese forces are attacked at foreign bases, such as in Pakistan; would the employment of nuclear weapons be seen as a legitimate response to the inability to strike back at an enemy who might not be operating near Chinese waters?

Similarly, Chinese leaders may perceive that their military modernization efforts are resulting in a conventional arms race in Asia, with other nations building aircraft carriers (like Japan), deploying more submarines, and fielding anti-ship missiles, that threatens their conventional forces. If Beijing is not assured of maintaining regional conventional dominance, could it at some point begin to rely on nuclear weapons as elements of a warfighting strategy and not merely for retaliatory purposes? Similarly, U.S. nuclear strategists need to think about the potential implications of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s plan to put the nation’s armed services under one unified joint command. Could that type of reorganization result in the 2nd Artillery Corps, China’s nuclear force, being considered as part of more traditional military operations?

Non-military pressures could also result in changes to China’s nuclear doctrine. For example, should China’s economic slowdown prove to be more severe than initially anticipated, thereby causing budgetary pressure on the PLA, could Beijing shift its military doctrine in part to rely more on nuclear weapons as a cost-saving measure, just as the United States did during the 1950s? Given the depth and number of contentious issues between the United States and China, combined with America’s treaty commitments to nations with their own disputes with Beijing, will nuclear weapons be seen as a uniquely effective means of intimidating Washington, not to mention other powers, or preventing a conventional war from breaking out in the first place?

Other threats are even less understood. Compared to what we know about China, North Korea remains a black box, and no one has even really begun to think about the operational implications of a nuclear-armed Iran. One might assume that Pyongyang sees its nuclear weapons not unlike the Chinese supposedly do, as a means of assured retaliation for any attack on its territory. But given our almost unbroken track record of being caught by surprise by North Korea, it would be foolhardy to assume we understand anything of Pyongyang’s nuclear doctrine or operational policies, especially as they relate to the question of the survival of the Kim family regime. As for Iran, the world has never dealt with the specter of a theological regime bolstered by nuclear weapons. Not merely questions of what kind of understandable doctrine Iran might adopt, but the issue of command and control raises nightmarish possibilities.

And none of this discussion, it should be noted, even attempts to fit the question of non-state actors such as terrorist groups getting their hands on nuclear weapons, whether through proxy relationships with nuclear powers or through A.Q. Khan-style illicit nuclear activities.

This new nuclear future requires an all-hands-on-deck approach to rebuild our intellectual infrastructure. Some of what is needed is to revive Cold War-era activities, but geared to a more complex environment, focused on multiple nation-state actors. Game theorists will be needed to run endless new scenarios with several players, while historians and cultural specialists will need to undertake the kind of research that can provide nuance and depth about a broad cast of nuclear states. From a more narrow military perspective, understanding how nuclear weapons fit into hybrid and limited war will have to inform operational planning and doctrine in the West. Even more importantly, the theory of extended deterrence will likely require a complete overhaul, as will assumptions about alliances.

U.S. policymakers will have to ask searing questions that they have avoided for a quarter-century. How do we respond to nuclear blackmail? What risks are we willing to incur by ignoring direct nuclear threats designed to forestall U.S. military activities abroad? Are we really willing to trade Seoul for Pyongyang, or Los Angeles for Tokyo? The Congress will have a major role in ensuring that such public discussions occur within the full context of U.S. foreign policy debates. The questions themselves seem like the return of creatures from a black lagoon of the global past, but not preparing for them may assure a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

Nourishing a new strategic culture is the only way to ensure the consistent and steady analysis of political, security, economic, social, and cultural facets of statecraft and warfighting in this new nuclear age. Asking the questions above, and many others, cannot be done during times of crisis or when faced with the need to make quick decisions. The risks are far too high to adopt our usual approach of dealing with problems only when they manifest themselves. In 1945, American policymakers understood that Alamogordo and Hiroshima had changed every assumption they held, and they committed to trying to understand what it all meant. Today we can do no less.

Michael Auslin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., is the author of The Asia Bubble (forthcoming, Yale).

This piece first appeared in RealClearDefense here.

Image: Creative Commons.