In 1961, senior Pentagon consultants drafted a 33-page blueprint for initiating — and winning — a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. It was based on top-secret intelligence that Soviet nuclear forces were few in number and poorly defended — making them an easy target for a U.S. preemptive strike.
Convinced of U.S. superiority, the Joint Chiefs of Staff began advising President John F. Kennedy to risk nuclear war over Cuba and Vietnam — even though their own analysis conceded that if something went wrong, 75 percent of Americans might die. If JFK hadn’t rejected their advice, we might not be here today.
President Trump may soon face a similar test. With almost no public awareness, the Pentagon’s nuclear program has achieved unprecedented capabilities that once again raise the possibility that a U.S. first strike could cripple Russia’s nuclear arsenal and “decapitate” its leadership. Such capabilities all but ensure that hawks will begin lobbying for more aggressive measures toward Russia, based its growing vulnerability to U.S. nuclear weapons.
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A frightening new analysis for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — by three eminent strategic arms experts at the Federation of American Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, and MIT — provides evidence that U.S. nuclear planners have “implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal,” giving it for the first time in decades “the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”
U.S. Navy’s ‘Super-Fuse’
The concept of nuclear superiority seemed to lose its relevance in the mid-1960s when Moscow finally built a large enough nuclear arsenal to withstand attack. Subsequent arms control treaties, starting in the Nixon years, maintained reasonable parity between U.S. and Russian nuclear forces, discouraging either side from contemplating the use of atomic weapons for anything but deterring a nuclear attack.
With absolutely no fanfare, however, U.S. technology advances have once again called mutual deterrence into question. The secret is a “super-fuse” first implemented by the U.S. Navy in 2009 as part of its “life-extension” program for submarine-based nuclear missiles. By permitting more accurate timing of nuclear blasts, this flexible trigger gives America’s sub-launched missiles three times their former killing power — enough to take out even “hardened” Russian missile silos and command centers with a high probability of success.
The authors calculate that a mere 272 warheads could wipe out all of Russia’s intercontinental ballistic missiles housed in hardened silos — leaving in reserve more than 600 lethal warheads deployed on U.S. submarines, as well as hundreds more on U.S. land-based missiles.
Although U.S. war planners would still be challenged to target warheads on Russia’s submarines and mobile land-based missiles, the authors support claims by other scholars that “for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy.” Russia’s vulnerability will likely increase over time, as the Pentagon’s implements its planned trillion-dollar nuclear “modernization” program over the next 30 years.
From the standpoint of many Pentagon planners, greater war-fighting capabilities are always better because they increase U.S. military options. But there are good reasons to be worried by this stealthy advance in U.S. missile technology.
Beware the ‘Clever Briefer’
The first is the risk that a “clever briefer” — a convincing salesman for “limited” nuclear war — will persuade a president that fighting and winning such a conflict is possible. The president might then behave more rashly in a conventional conflict, triggering a series of military escalations that unintentionally lead to mass annihilation. (Imagine, for example, if President Kennedy had followed the advice of his generals and bombed Russian forces in Cuba during the 1962 Missile Crisis.)
The idea that some adviser might try to talk President Trump into a nuclear showdown would have seemed absurd until very recently. But escalating military tension between NATO and Russia has prompted some experts, like former Defense Secretary William Perry, to warn that the world is closer to a “nuclear catastrophe” than at any time during the Cold War. And Trump himself, who once called for greater cooperation with Russia, now declares that the United States needs to build up its nuclear arsenal to make it “top of the pack.”
Reflecting this harsh new environment, the Pentagon’s influential Defense Science Board in December advised the new administration to begin acquiring low-yielding nuclear weapons to give the United States more options for waging “limited” wars against other nuclear powers. The assumption behind such hotly contested advice is that enemies will back down, knowing the United States could fight and win an unlimited nuclear war with “acceptable” casualties.
