Introduction
The Biden-Harris Administration comes into office facing a myriad of unprecedented domestic and international challenges. None of these challenges, however, can be resolved or mitigated by more nuclear weapons. Though the national security establishment continues to argue that a modernization of a previously critical component of the nuclear triad is essential, that position remains highly questionable.
The United States is set to construct a new weapon of mass destruction able to travel several thousand miles and carry a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. In September of last year, the Air Force gave Northrop Grumman an initial contract of over $13 billion to begin engineering and manufacturing 600 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as part of a nuclear triad modernization program supported by both the Obama and Trump Administrations. In total, the construction project could add up to $100 billion for the weapon, which will become ready for use by 2029. Operation and support costs could include another $164 billion. The plan is to replace the 450 Minutemen III ICBMs in active service or reserve with 600 Ground-Base Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) missiles, a more modern ICBM.
ICBMs are strategic weapons systems dispersed in hardened silos throughout the American Great Plains and Southwest to protect against attack. They are connected to an underground launch control center and typically have a minimum range of 5,000 kilometers (hence intercontinental). U.S. nuclear-armed ICBMS are on high alert, meaning they can be launched within mere minutes of a president’s command. The Air Force currently has 400 ICBMs deployed in the American West. Along with submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and nuclear bomber planes, ICBMs are one of the components of the nuclear triad. According to the Trump Administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, “The triad’ s synergy and overlapping attributes help ensure the enduring survivability of our deterrence capabilities against attack and our capacity to hold at risk a range of adversary targets throughout a crisis or conflict. Eliminating any leg of the triad would greatly ease adversary attack planning and allow an adversary to concentrate resources and attention on defeating the remaining two legs.” President Obama’s Secretary of Defense Ash Carter called the triad “a bedrock of our security” and “foundational” to U.S. policy. Is it really though?
Has the Triad Outlived its Necessity?
Traditionally, the ICBM has been understood as the most responsive element of the triad. It is a byproduct of the Cold War and the assumption that the U.S. would need to deter a surprise attack through the promise of rapid, overwhelming force and destruction. During the Cold War, ICBMs provided accuracy that was not achievable at the time from the other components of the triad. Furthermore, ICBMs served as an insurance policy in the event that the U.S.’s nuclear submarines were disabled. The basis underlying all of this was the strategic doctrine of deterrence as elucidated by Bernard Brodie in “The Anatomy of Deterrence,” who noted the paradox of deterrence: “We are...expecting the system to be constantly perfected while going permanently unused.”
This logic no longer holds. First, America’s ICBMs provide no unique nuclear strike capability not already provided by the other legs and the absence of any immediate threat to U.S. nuclear submarines means no adversary can “preempt massive retaliation” by the U.S. According to President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry, “Today, the United States’ submarine and bomber forces are highly accurate, and we have enough confidence in their security that we do not need an additional insurance policy — especially one that is so expensive and open to error.”
Furthermore, being on high alert, ICBMs pose a unique risk of accidentally starting a nuclear war. If American sensors determine that an adversary’s missiles are en route to the U.S., the president would be forced to make a decision on whether to launch ICBMs before the enemy missile would destroy them, a period as short as a few dozen minutes. Once launched, the decision is final and they cannot be recalled.
The risk of an accidental launch may seem trivial, but mistakes can always occur as long as the program exists. In 1979, computer errors at North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), Strategic Air Command’s command post, the Pentagon, and the Alternative National Military Command Center led U.S. defense officials to believe the Soviet Union had launched more than 2,000 missiles at the U.S. Nuclear bombers were prepared to take off when, a few minutes later, it was declared to be a false alarm. It turned out that according to an investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a training video had accidentally been loaded into an operational computer at the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado Springs, home to NORAD.
In September 1983, a Soviet early warning system warned that an American ICBM was incoming before the report was altered to five missiles. Soviet Air Defence Forces Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov refused to report the incoming ICBMs to his superiors, dismissing it as a false alarm (he thought that if the U.S. was going to launch a strike, it would have included more missiles). Ultimately, Petrov’s intuition was confirmed by ground radar, as the alarm was caused by a rare sunlight alignment on high-altitude clouds.
The world historical and world-ending stakes of a launch combined with the preciously little time afforded to make that monumental decision makes an accidental nuclear ICBM launch a serious possibility no matter the odds. This is where deterrence theory falls apart, in its assumption of rational actors in control of their situation.
Will Ending the Modernization Put the U.S. at a Strategic Disadvantage?
Supporters of ICBM modernization would argue that abandoning the ICBM program will leave the U.S. exposed to nuclear adversaries. Air Force Major Shane Praiswater, a visiting military analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, argues that Russia and China’s ambitious nuclear modernization programs seek to “equal, if not surpass” U.S. nuclear capabilities, and a U.S. failure to modernize its ICBMs would leave the U.S. at a comparative strategic disadvantage. Again, however, with U.S. ICBMs on high alert, the U.S. instead runs the risk of accidentally igniting a nuclear war, which is statistically speaking much more likely to happen than a state deciding consciously to strike the U.S. Secondly, despite hawkish fearmongering about China’s nuclear arsenal, there are currently more nuclear weapons stored in Albuquerque, New Mexico than in China- by a factor of seven and a half.
Instead of an ill-defined, open-ended nuclear competition with Russia and China bound to increase the odds of an accidental nuclear holocaust, the U.S. could help prevent a global arms race simply by renouncing the ICBM, the least accurate and easiest component of the nuclear triad for adversaries to target. Moscow pursues its modernization out of the pursuit for nuclear parity with the U.S. and views the U.S. modernization as threatening, fomenting a security dilemma.
And this is for good reason. As Brent J. Talbot, a professor of military and security studies at the Air Force Academy, notes, the Minuteman force and the proposed GBSD force ICBMs would have to fly over Russia to strike any other emerging nuclear power (like North Korea) because they are based in the northern part of the U.S. When launched from that region, “The ballistic trajectories of the missiles require polar flight paths to reach most destinations around the globe. Thus, if the United States were to retaliate against a North Korean or Iranian attack, use of ICBMs would require overflight of Russian airspace en route to their targets, perhaps causing the Russians to think that the United States had initiated an attack against them.” In Talbot’s words, “Preserving 400 of 700 launchers to strike only one adversary is, once again, evidence of Cold War logic.” Because the ICBM can only plausibly be used against Russia, it does preciously little to deter potentially rogue actors, as North Korea is often characterized by some of these same hawks. In short, it does not even do the one thing its most ardent proponents believe it does.
America’s alliances, international institutions, and arms control agreements like New START and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, Iran Deal) work perfectly fine to deter its competitors from obtaining nuclear weapons, much less using them. The idea that only more spending on nuclear weapons will provide deterrence assumes fatalism in diplomacy when in reality diplomacy is what has prevented the world from descending into President John F. Kennedy’s prediction of a world awash in nuclear weapons (he feared famously in 1963 that by 1975 there would be 20 nations with nuclear weapons; today there are nine). Rather than the outdated Cold War mindset that America must match Moscow missile for missile, American nuclear policy ought to be decided on the basis of how many nuclear weapons America actually needs.
Cost Savings
Finally, ending the ICBM modernization will save the U.S. billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars that are urgently needed at home and in the diplomatic sphere. The coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis have laid bare that the most severe and serious national security threats to the U.S. are transnational and non-military. National security, in other words, has to start with human security. Ending the ICBM program, along with concurrent defense spending cuts, could save the country enough money to put a down payment on a Green New Deal, foreign aid to vulnerable populations like the Palestinians or people in Central America and the Caribbean beset by natural disasters and human rights abusing governments, or a universal coronavirus vaccine, as the bills introduced by Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) call for. The stakes of such a decision are clear: we can either destroy the world three and a half to four times over in a fit of hubristic superpower rage or we can save it once and for all.
Conclusion
The world survived one arms race, but barely and not without numerous close calls. Modernizing the ICBM program and swearing undying, unconditional fealty to the nuclear triad long after it has served its purpose risks igniting another one. What we have today is a policy-procurement gap, whereby contractors like Northrop Grumman’s interests are served instead of the national interest. As Joe Cirincione, the former head of the Ploughshares Fund writes, “Contracts race ahead of policy…[Continuing the triad] will lock us into building weapons we do not need at a price we cannot afford.” Nuclear weapons could not possibly be more irrelevant or ill-suited for the primary security threats the U.S. faces today in the form of the pandemic and climate change. The Biden Administration has to blow up this modernization plan before it blows everyone up.