CONCESSIONS TO THE LIMITED POWERS: Considerations of Low-Yield Nuclear Weapons, Asymmetrical Capability, and Extended Deterrence
Authors: Bob Williams (Georgetown University) & Dr. James Giordano (Georgetown University Medical Center)
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Quite recently, nuclear strategy scholars Kier Lieber and Daryl Press posited that arms’ tables have turned, citing the asymmetry of limited nuclear powers as a reboot of the United States (US)-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) tactical nuclear playbook during the Cold War. Their key message—that “The United States must take seriously the nuclear capabilities and resolve of its foes”—isn’t lost on us: we previously called for the need to begin serious counter-weapons of mass destruction (WMD) planning for adversarial use of nuclear weapons below the threshold of Armageddon. We must raise an objection, however, to the assertion that states with limited nuclear capabilities are reprising the US’ 20th century strategy of coercion and dissuasion with their handfuls of weapons. Instead, we see a world wherein not only Russia and China, but militarily asymmetrical nuclear aspirants, such as North Korea and Iran, increase their resolve to employ nuclear threats to gain concessions outside previously conceived escalation ladders.
American adversaries—and the foes of US allies under the nuclear umbrella—cannot rationally threaten a massive nuclear strike and expect to benefit militarily after certain retaliation. This classic model of deterring behavior through assured failure, if not complete destruction, was emblematic of the
dyadic US-Soviet relationship that endured for the Cold War. As Lieber and Press describe in their most recent article, The Return of Nuclear Escalation, the US-NATO strategy for so-called “tactical” nuclear weapons in Europe was spawned from a desire to avoid direct intercontinental exchanges, and
either dissuade any territorial aggression toward NATO or at least coerce Moscow into halting a conventional campaign. Per that theory, a few short-range, lower-yield weapons would be
enough to demonstrate American resolve to alliance commitments without immediately escalating to mutual destruction.
We posit that more so today than in the last century, the rise of the nuclear taboo, at least among Western democracies, and fear of retaliation from even singular nuclear use reinforces the dissuasion of first strike doctrine. The desire to avoid any nuclear attacks on one’s homeland was determined early in the nuclear age to underpin the fruitlessness inherent in nuclear exchange. At least among those states on parity to exchange volumes of nuclear weapons, certain resort to conventional war was the only rational choice. So arose the Atomic Age mantra of nuclear war as unwinnable from the start, as Bernard
Brodie suggested as early as 1946,8 and a clamoring chorus that “the ever-diminishing plausibility of the nuclear threat and ever bolder challenges to make good on it,” as Morgenthau wrote in 1964,9 itself voids the proposed value of deterrence.
James Giordano’s work is supported in part by federal funds from Award UL1TR001409 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), National Institutes of Health, through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program (CTSA), a trademark of the Department of Health and Human Services, part of the Roadmap Initiative, “Re-Engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise”; National
Sciences Foundation Award 2113811 – Amendment ID 001; the Henry Jackson Foundation for Military Medicine; the Strategic Multilayer Assessment Branch of the Joint Staff, J-39, and US Strategic Command, Pentagon; the Institute for Biodefense Research; the Simon Center for the Professional Military Ethic, United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, USA, and Leadership Initiatives
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