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stratfor.com
Warhead Storage Ensures More Than U.S. Nuclear
Superiority
24 January 2002
Summary
The White House said on Jan. 9 that it will not destroy all of the nuclear weapons that would have been decommissioned under a planned U.S.-Russian agreement. The move will ensure that Russia will lose its last vestige of superpower status and that China can never beat Washington in an arms race. But more important, the plan will help preserve the military, political and economic dominance of the United States for decades.
Analysis
The White House shocked arms-control advocates and Russian disarmament negotiators Jan. 9, when it revealed plans to store, not destroy, most of the 4,000 U.S. nuclear warheads that would have been dismantled under a developing U.S.-Russian disarmament agreement. The move complicates relations with both China and Russia, but the rationale behind it is about much more than maintaining mere numerical superiority in nuclear capacity.
The decision reveals that the United States is finally moving beyond the Cold War security policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Stockpiling the warheads will trigger an evolution in the military toward more advanced and readily deployable conventional forces. This will help safeguard U.S. military, political and economic dominance for the next century.
Since long before the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty first entered into force back in 1970, U.S.-Soviet relations were predicated on the premise of mutually assured destruction and strategic parity. With some notable exceptions, such as de-targeting agreements, much of this Cold War balance of power still remained in the post-Cold War era.
The Bush administration's decision to store the warheads instead of destroying them, particularly when combined with Washington's abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), shatters this pre-existing order. The most immediate effects will be visited upon Washington's former foe Russia -- which is also expected to dismantle around 4,000 nuclear warheads once the new treaty is signed.
After a decade of political, economic, social and military decline, Russia was left with but one fragment of its old superpower status: its nuclear parity with the United States. The White House's recent announcement thrusts forward a cold, hard fact: Russia cannot afford to maintain its nuclear arsenal on a 2002 defense budget of $9 billion while the United States -- with $379 billion penciled in -- can.
This unpleasant disconnect is not a new one for Moscow. The Russians have known for years they cannot directly compete with the United States missile for missile or dollar for dollar, but previous U.S. administrations have been willing to let Moscow save face.
Now, however, the Bush team has decided the time has come to end the illusion of strategic parity despite Russia's assistance to the United States in its recent war effort in Afghanistan. The message to Moscow is that it's great if you are willing to be an ally, but there should be no mistake about who is in charge. Even if it is just stating the obvious, for Moscow that's the diplomatic equivalent of a kick in the teeth.
For China, Washington's signal is equally clear and somewhat more ominous. Behind the wall of rhetoric, Washington and Moscow have quietly worked together on some facets of an anti-ballistic missile shield under the rubric of the RAMOS (Russian-American Observation Satellite) project. And one Russian proposal that would necessitate Moscow's cooperation, that of targeting hostile missiles while they are in their launch phase, looks to be a central tenet in Washington's developing ABM framework.
China has no chance of such involvement with the United States. This is mainly due to the fact that Beijing is an as-yet-unspoken rationale for a U.S. missile shield, which could easily guard against the threat posed by the 20 Chinese missiles currently capable of striking the United States. China will use the planned shield as its rationale for enlarging and modernizing its fleet, and the United States in turn will use China's efforts as its rationale for its own upgrades.
In the intelligence business, this is called an arms race, but the U.S. decision not to destroy the 4,000 warheads means the race is over before it has begun.
Between the ABM treaty, the economic prowess of the United States, its overwhelming technological edge and a store of ready-to-go warheads, the Bush plan ensures American nuclear superiority for at least the next century. If China attempts to keep up, it will have to surmount far greater economic hurdles than the defense-budget crunch that led to the Soviet Union's downfall in the late 1980s.
After all, even after the expected U.S.-Russian cuts, the United States will still have about a 1,500-active-warhead advantage over China, plus the 4,000 warheads stored in reserve.
That does not, however, mean a nuclear America of the 21st Century will mirror 20th Century strategies. By taking its missiles off high alert, separately storing warheads and developing a multilayered missile defense system, the United States also ends MAD as a strategic doctrine.
Although it is extremely unlikely the United States will ever publicly end its first-strike doctrine, the mothballing of most of Washington's offensive capability by its very nature makes America a reactive, not proactive, nuclear power. Warheads collecting in a warehouse certainly cannot also be on hair-trigger alert.
The change in nuclear stance will send a powerful shockwave through U.S. military capabilities.
The abandonment of MAD destabilizes the global security environment. MAD granted predictability, and it ironically gave second- and third-tier states room to maneuver. A country such as North Vietnam knew that the United States would never move too boldly against it for fear of retribution from the Soviet Union.
With MAD discarded, the United States largely is free of that concern. This opens up a diverse array of options previously denied it. Now, anyone opposing the United States must factor in the possibility of facing U.S. forces that are free to operate without hesitation or reservation. That will certainly make these states more skittish and unpredictable, increasing the United States' need to be able to project power.
To project this power will require entirely new generations of weapons systems, with modifications of regional strategic doctrines to match. The Bush administration's proposed $379 billion for defense -- a 15 percent increase over last year's and the largest increase since former President Ronald Reagan's 1981 buildup -- is only the first step in that very expensive direction.
This is an expense the United States has proven it can easily afford. At the end of the Cold War, Washington spent about 5.4 percent of its GDP on defense. After the unprecedented economic expansion in the 1990s, were the United States to ratchet up to the same level again, it would need to spend $540 billion, something the U.S. economy could easily support.
Such a military-capacity expansion will have a multitude of follow-on effects, most noticeably on American foreign policy. During the Clinton administration, capability shortage was one of the most significant restrictions on American power projection. Replacing MAD with military hegemony changes all that.
From a military standpoint, Washington will be much more capable than in years past of addressing skirmishes on multiple fronts. From a political point of view, the United States will have a far greater array of options to pursue policies.
Economically, the constant innovation and upgrading that will occur in the military sector will also flow into the civilian market. Such a spin-off phenomenon that came with the 1980s defense buildup -- which brought the Internet, civilian satellite systems and modern medical laser therapies to the United States -- is set to echo throughout the 21st Century.
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